"R(e)orienting Poetics through Lived Space"

#WomenTechLit Edited by María Mencía Computing Literature Morgantown, WV / Rochester, NY COMPUTING LITERATURE A book series distributed by the West Virginia University Press. Volume 1 Regards Croisés: Perspectives on Digital Literature Edited by Philippe Bootz and Sandy Baldwin Volume 2 Writing Under: Selections from the Internet Text By Alan Sondheim. Edited and Introduced by Sandy Baldwin Volume 3 Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice A Report from the HERA Joint Research Project. Edited by Scott Rettberg with Sandy Baldwin Volume 4 Po.Ex: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia Edited by Rui Torres and Sandy Baldwin Volume 5 Word Space Multiplicities, Openings, Andings By Jim Rosenberg. Edited by Sandy Baldwin Volume 6 Electronic Literature Communities Edited by Scott Rettberg, Patricia Tomaszek, and Sandy Baldwin Volume 7 Text as Ride By Janez Strehovec. Edited by Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang and Sandy Baldwin Volume 8 #WomenTechLit Edited by María Mencía Series Editors Sandy Baldwin, Rochester Institute of Technology Philippe Bootz, University of Paris VIII Editorial Board Laura Borràs Castanyer, University of Barcelona; Helen Burgess, North Carolina State University; Maria Engberg, Malmö University; Jason Nelson, Griffith University; Alexandra Saemmer, University of Paris VIII; Janez Strehovec, University of Ljubljana Published 2017 by Computing Literature, Morgantown, WV 26506 / Rochester, NY 14623 Cover design by María Mencía Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0). ISBN-13: 978-1-943665-90-7 (pb) 978-1-943665-91-4 (elec) 978-1-943665-92-1 (pdf) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book started off at one of the E-Poetry Festivals, in conversation with Giovanna di Rosario, Angelica Huizar and Maria Engberg. We all felt there were far too many male keynote speakers and “only male” panels at conferences. When I suggested editing a book, representing and celebrating the work of women in the field of electronic literature, everybody agreed it would be a great contribution to the scholarship and creativity of women’s digital writing. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their enthusiasm and encouragement in pursuing this project. I also would like to express my enormous gratitude to Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie C. Luesebrink, and Judy Malloy. They have been like three supporting rocks through this process. I have been guided by their knowledge, their helpful suggestions and comments have made the book a much more informed and rounded project. Stephanie went out of her way to send me lists of pioneer women in e-lit and together with Rita Raley revised my proposal and suggested ways to organise the different sections in the book which has given the volume a much better focus. In 2015 we had the first women panel ever presenting at an E-Poetry Festival hosted in Argentina. I would like to thank its panellists, which included some of the contributors in this volume: Claudia Kozak, Odile Farge, Laura Shackelford, Giovanna di Rosario, and Angelica Huizar. This gave us a great opportunity to discuss general issues in preparation for #WomenTechLit and some particular concerns examined in each of our individual contributions - from the point of view of creative practice, critical and historical perspectives. Thanks also to Hazel Smith for her comments and proofreading of my individual chapter, to Zuzana Husárová and Dene Grigar for discussing the title of the volume with me, and to Christine Wilks for her kind words and encouragement about the project. In addition and most importantly, this book would not have been possible without the generosity of all the contributors, their dedication and patience to bring this all together. I am also extremely grateful to Sandy Baldwin for enabling me to publish this book and his dedication to the volume in his role as series editor, including his assistance with editing, proofreading, formatting and designing such a large and arduous volume; and to N. Katherine Hayles for contributing with her insightful foreword. Finally thanks to my partner Keith, for his support and all those friends who have somehow helped to make it possible. iv #WomenTechLit CONTENTS Foreword: Why #WomenTechLit? By N. Katherine Hayles Introduction By María Mencía ix xiii I. HISTORIES OF DIGITAL WRITING PRACTICE 1 Women Innovate: Contributions to Electronic Literature (1990- 2010) By M.D. Coverley // Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink 3 Women making new media at the trAce Online Writing Community 1995-2005 by Sue Thomas 29 At The Speed Of Light: Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism and the Digital Ecology Of Bodies by Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs 41 Latin American Electronic Literature: When, Where, and Why by Claudia Kozak 55 A Kaleidoscope of Slovak and Czech Electronic Literature by Zuzana Husárová 73 A Diorama of Digital Literature in Spain by Dolores Romero López 97 Digital Poetry Evolution and the Art of Machines by Jeneen Naji 115 Digital Letterisms: Alternumeric Orders By Natalia Fedorova 131 II. DIGITAL WRITING PRACTICE: PRACTITIONERS 153 Generative Activity in Art and Literature By Kate Armstrong 155 Between Page and Screen By Amaranth Borsuk 165 v Notes on the Composition of Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl By J. R. Carpenter 177 Transient Self-Portrait: The Data-Self By María Mencía 189 The Evolution and Actualisation of #PRISOM: a Literary Anti-Surveillance Game By Mez Breeze 211 Literary and Musical Dialoguing: Sound, Voice and Screen Synergies By Hazel Smith 227 Excavating Underbelly By Christine Wilks 243 A “Rhetoric for Creative Authoring” and the Author’s Intent By Odile Farge 255 III. CRITICAL OVERVIEWS OF DIGITAL WRITING PRACTICE 265 Gender as Patterns: Unfixed Forms in Electronic Poetry By Giovanna di Rosario 267 In Search of a Female Technological Identity in Electronic Literature: Dancing with the Spanish Domestic Cyborg by María Goicoechea and Laura Sánchez 285 Surface Reading The UpsideDown Chandelier: Interface “Mastery” and Feminism by Kathi Inman Berens 303 Poetic Tweets from the Avant-Garde to Digital Literature By Angelica J. Huizar 319 R(e)orienting Poetics and Lived Spaces “Between" By Laura Shackelford 331 A Comparative Study of Shu Lea Cheang’s By Maya Zalbidea Paniagua a 355 IV. THE MIGRATION OF FORMS 365 The Legacy of Judy Malloy By Dene Grigar 367 vi #WomenTechLit its Name was Penelope, a Generative Hypertext By Judy Malloy 381 Marble Springs: A journey of an electronic work from the pre-dawn of the Internet to today’s Golden Age By Deena Larsen 397 The Making and Unmaking of Califia By M.D. Coverley // Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink 409 The Death and Re-Distribution of V By Stephanie Strickland 417 CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES 427 vii viii #WomenTechLit Foreword: Why #WomenTechLit? BY N. KATHERINE HAYLES I n the mid-1990’s I was a visitor at Stanford University, and one beautiful California afternoon I forsook my study to attend the popular computer science lecture series for a talk by Rodney Brooks on the new ideas he was incorporating into his robots. Arriving early, I amused myself by counting the women among the four or five hundred people filling the auditorium. There were no more than twenty—including me. Things have changed since then, of course, but computer science and allied disciplines remain fields dominated by men. Electronic literature is an exception to this generalization, for women have been active since its beginnings in the late 1980’s up to today, although the importance of their contributions remains under-recognized and, importantly, under-theorized. #WomenTechLit addresses both of these concerns in a global framework. M. D. Coverley’s analysis of women’s contributions over two decades, from 1990-2010, clearly shows not only the presence of women writers but also the important innovations they undertook; that Coverley ends her chapter with a “roll call” of over 200 women beyond those discussed indicates the remarkable depth and breadth of what women artists and writers have achieved. Sue Thomas’s chapter on women participating in the trAce Online Writing Community over the decade from 19952005 supplements Coverley’s by extending the purview to a British context, as does Claudia Kozak with a Latin American context, Zusáná Husarova with Slovak and Czech contributions, and Dolores Romero López with Spain. Romero López’s chapter is complemented by the edgy contribution of María Goicoechea and Laura Sánchez on how the digital divide complicates any simple account of women’s achievements, for they remind us that access remains a crucial issue and one that alienates as well as empowers. In addition to these general summaries, also valuable are the chapters analyzing individual or small groups of works, where the author has the space to explore the works in depth. When the author is writing about her own work, additional insights emerge about the conditions of production, contexts of creation, and underlying issues that catalyzed the work and guided its expressive aesthetics. For example, María Mencía’s chapter on her work articulates some fascinating thoughts about how she views the relation of her creative work to literary theory; she never intends to “apply” a theory, she recounts, but rather reads it to generate a general sense of important issues that intersect with her own concerns. The chapters collected in the “Pioneers” section address a concern central to electronic literature: obsolescence, and the writer’s frustration when a software authoring environment suddenly is discontinued or becomes ix Hayles \ Why #WomenTechLit? unplayable. M. D. Coverley’s chapter on the making of Califia, a work that remains one of the canon’s most complex and accomplished long narratives, is heart-breaking as she explains how literally years of work were rendered moot when the work would no longer play (thankfully, that work has now been resurrected with the help of a virtual machine environment). Stephanie Strickland’s astute analysis of how porting her long poem V: Vniverse from a Flash environment to an iPad affected the reader’s interactions also illuminates the challenges that writers of electronic literature face when their original platforms disappear. The issue of authoring environments is a thread running through many of the chapters, as writers comment about their choice of software, their engagement with the underlying code, and the influence of software on their creative choices, from Judy Malloy’s chapter on her pioneering works Uncle Roger and Its name was Penelope, to María Mencía’s comment about why she wanted to use the open-source programming language Processing rather than a commercial for-profit package. Odile Farge explores these issues explicitly in her chapter on the rhetorics of softwares, including the language employed by designers to entice writers to use their product as well as the rhetorical force of a software’s palette of choices, from affordances to interactive possibilities to design considerations. Among the remaining connecting threads, no doubt there are many different ones that will attract and intrigue readers; the one that calls to me is the enduring question of whether women’s writing has specific characteristics, and if so, how these manifest themselves in the digital domain. In entertaining this question, Maria Angel with Anna Gibbs, and Giovanna di Rosario, evoke the theories of French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, as well as (for Angel and Gibbs) the more recent Deleuzian-inspired writings of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, which share an affinity for fluidity, immanence, and non-static forms. Specifically, Angel, Gibbs and di Rosario reference Irigaray’s claim that women’s language is (or has the potential to be) fluid rather than rigid, intimate rather than formal, sensuous rather than masterful, as in her famous metaphor of two lips touching each other. From Cixous, they take the idea of women’s writing as untheorizable because to theorize it is immediately to enter the masculine realm of concepts imbued with phallic mastery. These ideas, which have circulated for some time in print and have called forth numerous literary experiments (including the writings of these theorists themselves), involve an interesting tension when applied to the digital realm. Underlying any screenic text, of course, is the enabling code, from the formatting instructions of html to the processing environments that execute commands. In contrast to the postulated fluidity of women’s writing, code is precise and unforgiving, requiring exact syntax and no ambiguities except for what the x #WomenTechLit code permits. Therein lurks a paradox: in order to create the impression of fluidity, the woman writer-programmer must first engage with the rigors of code, either through a software authoring environment, through collaborators who write the code, or directly through constructing the code herself. Moreover, the more innovative and original her vision of how the interface could or should work, the more expertise is required in coding to enact her vision as a performance with which the user can interact. None of this prevents an innovative work from reaching fulfillment. In this collection, examples include the interfaces described in Kate Armstrong’s chapter on her generative art, including Path: A Generative Bookwork in 12 Volumes, Amaranth Borsuk’s augmented reality work Between Page and Screen, María Mencía’s Data-Self, as well as the work of Aya Karpinska’s three-dimensional art analyzed in Giovanna Di Rosario’s chapter on “Unfixed Forms in Electronic Poetry.” All testify to the power of female digital literature and art in instantiating fluidity, responsiveness, and transience within a non-masterful, non-patriarchal feminist aesthetic. The tension between rigorous code and fluid interface suggests that the specificities of female writing in the new millennium are enacted not so much through fluidity and unfixed forms in themselves as in the author’s abilities to negotiate this tension, to be masterful enough with coding (through whatever means) to instantiate her dream of another kind of regime, another form of creativity that emphasizes play rather than mastery, fluidity rather than static forms, transience rather than permanence. Here we might recall the passage from Virginia Woolf quoted by di Rosario for a clue to how to express this historically specific and technologically mediated juncture. Woolf, Rosario writes, thought that because “the older forms of literature were fixed before women writers could significantly shape their conventions,” the “novel alone was young enough to be soft [in the woman writer’s] hands” (quoted in di Rosario). Whatever truth Woolf ’s comment about the novel may once have held, the comment’s status in the new millennium is undoubtedly problematic, for by now the novel itself has centuries of (male-dominated) tradition behind it. Nevertheless, one part of Woolf ’s insight here remains as vital as ever: that new forms are crucial for women’s writing, for they enable women artists and writers to escape, in part although never completely, the centuries of male-dominated tradition that, as Marx picturesquely said in another context, “lie like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Herein lies both the challenges and promises of #WomenTechLit—the negotiations this volume charts in the evolving dynamics between code and screen, tradition and innovation, women-specific writing and the common tongue, digital access and broader community, empowerment and constraint. Readers who look to this volume for some kind of final resolution will not find it here. What they—or better, we--will xi Hayles \ Why #WomenTechLit? encounter, however, are resources richer than this brief foreword can encompass. These chapters invite us to puzzle over them, speculate about them, and draw upon them. Most importantly, they promise to catalyze our thinking about the positionalities and specificities of women writing and working in technological media across the span of nearly a half-century of work documented here, and the future tendencies toward which these contributions point. xii #WomenTechLit Introduction BY MARÍA MENCÍA R eaders, writers, artists, critics, historians, scholars, students: this study of Electronic Literature (e-lit) brings together pioneering and emerging women whose work has international impact and scholarly recognition. It covers essays about practice from as early as 1986, such as Uncle Roger, the first online hyperfiction by Judy Malloy released originally on Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) and published online in 1987, and Deena Larsen’s Marble Springs published with Eastgate Systems in 1993. Although not covered in depth, it covers other early work in literary hypertext and hypermedia such as Alison Knowles’s poetry generator, The House of Dust (implemented by James Tenney); Natalie Dehn’s research on the use of artificial intelligence in authoring systems; the graphic adventure game, Mystery House, written and designed by Roberta Williams and programmed by Ken Williams; and Judith Kerman’s generative poetry system, Colloquy, programmed by Robert Chiles are cited in Judy Malloy’s contribution. The early 1990s also saw influential hypertext narratives by Martha Petry, Carolyn Guyer, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Mary-Kim Arnold, Shelley Jackson, and hypertext researcher, Cathy Marshall, published by Eastgate Systems, at a time when Mez Breeze was pioneering codeworks in an invented language, Mezangelle, which combined natural language and code and which became her trademark. The innovations new technologies bring—creative platforms, software packages (Director, Flash, Dreamweaver), programming languages (Processing, Java, HTML, CSS), new media platforms and tools (webcams, mobile technologies, HUD (HeadsUp-Display), Xbox Kinect)—continuously challenge creators and therefore contribute to the formation and evolution of different genres. In this volume an array of digital media forms is discussed by both practitioners and critics, including Augmented Reality (AR) poetry, web-based Virtual Reality, AR Net-worked multimodal and crossmedia interactive narratives, 3D games and performance and playable media fiction. Integral to this work are women practitioners writing essays about their own work that demonstrate the significance of artistic practice-based research in creative fields. I teach media practice in a department of Media, Film and TV Studies, and I struggle to find books that feature women practitioners writing about their work. This collection offers an opportunity to read about what women writers have created, the research and conceptual evolution of their projects, and how they have used technology in their works. At the same time, students and practitioners will be able to read accounts by external critics and theorists about works that are also discussed in the book by their own creators. For instance, Laura Shackelford’s “R(e)orienting Poetics xiii Mencía \ Introduction and Lived Spaces 'Between’” explores, from a feminist perspective, alternate understandings of digital literary language practice and poetics. She illustrates her thesis on writing spaces which recalibrate the predominant discourses of a masculine lived space with two works of electronic literature, “Between Page and Screen,” also discussed in this book by one of its authors, Amaranth Borsuk, and “Transient Self-Portrait,” an essay written by myself as a practice-based research project. Overall, the volume enhances the visibility of women leaders and creators of this field of electronic literature, celebrates their influence in shaping it, and extends a historical critical overview of the state of the field from the diverse perspectives of twenty-eight worldwide contributors. It illustrates the authors’ scholarly interests through discussion of creative practice as research, historical accounts documenting collections of women’s new media art and literary works, and art collectives. It also covers theoretical approaches and critical overviews, from feminist discourses to close readings and ‘close-distant-located readings’ of pertinent works in the field and includes authors from Latin America, Russia, Austria, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.A. Electronic Literature is not a new field anymore as this volume demonstrates.1 Little by little we have incorporated electronic literature in our university curricula, and it has become an established academic field of research and creative practice. There are many books, journal articles about electronic literature, and online publications of work such as the Electronic Literature Collections and The Anthology of European Literature.2 The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) presents two awards: the N. Katherine Hayles prize for best work of criticism and the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature.3 The New Media Writing Prize from Bournemouth University also promotes the best practice in new media writing.4 The Research group Hermeneia from Barcelona University, together with “Ciutat de Vinaròs" have awarded International Digital Literature Prizes since 2005. And, in 2007, the LETHI Digital Literature Award (Complutense University, Madrid) was the first award dedicated to Digital Literature written in Spanish. While the above publications and prizes present great opportunities for both theorists and practitioners to show and discuss their work, a book focusing on women writers is a vital input to feminist studies from a social and political perspective. Bring- 1 See Coverley / Luesebrink’s contribution to this volume for further information. 2 See http://collection.eliterature.org and https://anthology.elmcip.net. 3 See http://eliterature.org/2016-elo-awards 4 See http://newmediawritingprize.co.uk. xiv #WomenTechLit ing together the substantial contributions of women to the field can motivate and inspire young women to engage in computer-mediated studies and related fields, especially those with an interest in exploring new technologies and stretching the possibilities these bring for writing and producing creative work. This volume will be a useful reference for educators, practice-based researchers and scholars, not only of electronic literature but also in the adjacent areas of language art, new media art practices, digital humanities and feminist studies. Many of these authors have crossed paths at international conferences, workshops and exhibitions organized and supported by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO),5 Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP),6 the bi-annual E-Poetry Festival sponsored by the Electronic Poetry Center (Buffalo),7 and individual events organized by some of the contributors at different universities, galleries and research centres. These include the research group Hermeneia at the University of Barcelona8; the interdisciplinary Research Group LEETHI (European and Spanish Literatures from Texts to Hypermedia) from the Complutense University, Madrid, Spain9; Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group at UiB, Norway10; Laboratoire Paragraphe, EHN (Ecritures et hypermédiations numériques: digital writing and hypermediation) at University of Paris 8, France11; the group Lit e Lat (Red de Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana) ; and more recently, the Creative Computing Lab at the Jagiellonian University, Kraców, Poland12 and the Creative Process Research Unit (CPRU) at Kingston University, London, UK.13 Although this book is organized into four topic sections, many of the essays clearly traverse all four. The first section presents a general overview of e-lit world’s histories. Great effort has been put into making this first volume of women digital writers as inclusive as possible, with the list of contributors evolving through the process of compiling the book. The second contains essays on creative practice by the creators. The third focuses on critical readings of creative practice, through enquiry, exploration 5 See http://eliterature.org. 6 See https://elmcip.net. 7 http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/archive/. 8 http://www.hermeneia.net. 9 See http://www.ucm.es/leethi/. 10 See http://www.uib.no/en/rg/electronicliterature. 11 See http://paragraphe.info. 12 See http://litelat.net and https://www.facebook.com/groups/830496850381009/?ref=bookmarks. 13 http://creativeprocessresearchunit.net/#post-45. xv Mencía \ Introduction and analysis. And the last discusses the work of early pioneers in the context of the migration of forms through archiving, recovery, preservation and evolution of work. These techniques are necessary in a field where work can become difficult to access in as little as a year if the operating system is upgraded, or the software is made redundant, as for instance in the case of Flash when in 2010 Apple decided not to support it on iOS devices. I. HISTORIES OF DIGITAL WRITING PRACTICE Section One reveals the impact of pioneering women in electronic literature. It covers a wide spectrum of Anglophone contributions (UK, USA, Australia, Canada, Ireland) in addition to geographical histories and special theoretical reflection on works from Latin America, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Spain and Russia. It examines computational and technological developments in media poetics. Among these are the re-appropriation and repurposing of media affordances; the blur of literary and art boundaries (electronic literature, digital poetry, lettrism, performance, language art); and the practice of feminist theories, xenofeminism and cyberfeminism in transnational and intercultural settings. Within these discussions, pioneering and contemporary works are critically analyzed. M.D. Coverley/ Marjorie C. Luesebrink in her essay “Women Innovate: Contributions to Electronic Literature," documents artworks from 1990 to 2010 which shaped and helped develop the field, among them Assemblage and The Progressive Dinner Party, two influential collections of women’s new media and literary work curated respectively by Carolyn Guertin and Luesebrink. Also presenting a historical review in “Women Making New Media at the trAce Online Writing Community 1995-2005,” trAce founder Sue Thomas interviews some of the women whose new media art and writing was featured on the trAce site. Literary critics María Angel and Anna Gibbs, in their essay “At the Speed of Light: Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism and the Digital Ecology of Bodies,” address how feminist thinking might consider the digital transformation of gender and corporeality through a consideration of women’s work in electronic literature and textbased digital media art. They discuss cyberfeminist practices from the 1990s, as a form of activism and as art-making process, by considering the work of the Australian feminist collective VNS Matrix (1991), both its narrative and game components and its relation to the development of xenofeminism and feminist theories of current techno- and eco-politics. Claudia Kozak considers how different contexts of economic development, interculturalism, glocalization and the use of new technologies helped shape and influence the creation of electronic literature in Latin America. She analyses, among others, Eugenio Tisselli’s and Gustavo Romano’s works using what xvi #WomenTechLit she calls a “close-distant-located reading,” although the essay also proposes to include a “collaborative reading” for works of electronic literature. Zuzana Husárová presents a historical account of works of electronic literature in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, with examples of digital literature from the 1960s to current works including her own practice. She focuses on the different approaches (remediation, re-appropriation, remixes, translations, poetic generations) used by authors to create and process the electronic text in artistic and literary forms. Dolores Romero López uses an analytical structure of stage/background/main characters (figures) to discuss main themes, trans-genders, transnational characteristics and cyberfeminism in electronic literature in Spain. Jeneen Naji discusses the evolution of digital poetry from modernism to the present day using a socio-technological approach. Exploring the idea that the relationship between humans and technology is reciprocal, that is, that we adapt to the ubiquity of technology in society and reciprocally technology adapts to our needs, she illustrates how the shape of the digital poem has evolved through the creative use of a variety of media platforms. Natalia Fedorova’s essay explores digital letterisms, the material use of unicode characters in art and experimental literature. She considers the role of letters in the era of digital writing, the qualities of their new materiality and multidimensionality, focusing on non-linguistic audial, spatial and temporal properties. Non-referential relationships of signification that can be built around standard sets of graphemes (such as the Latin alphabet, Roman numerals, the QWERTY keyboard layout, ASCII, unicode and n-grams) are studied in works by Hollis Frampton, Dmitry Prigov, John Maeda, Ivan Khimin, and Nick Montfort. II. DIGITAL WRITING PRACTICE: PRACTITIONERS Creative practice, as the leading force of electronic literature, is discussed in this section by female electronic writers whose works through the years have influenced and shaped this hybrid and interdisciplinary field creating a vibrant literary and artistic culture. We are presented with the opportunity to hear from the authors/practitioners about their creative processes and about the evolution and production of their work. In doing so, we encounter different research methodologies and creative approaches, as well as the artistic use of emerging technologies to explore concepts and themes to create new literary artistic forms resulting in a variety of genres. These include Virtual Reality (VR); multimodal, interactive, web-based, networked and generative narratives; Augmented-Reality (AR) poetry; playable media fiction; digital storytelling; literary games; conceptual poems; and forms drawing on sound, music and the spoken word. The works address key concepts and concerns characteristic of electronic literature. Among these are the intersection of print and digital, the page and screen; the xvii Mencía \ Introduction exploration of digital literacies; cross-media production; reading technologies; the role of the reader, the author, the audience; performance reading, performance writing and sonic writing. Also explored are meaning and the relationship between form, content, technology and medium; the aesthetics of engagement; interactive aesthetics/poetics; use of data and code as practice; exploration of the spoken word, sound and music in conjunction; textual materiality; semantic text, visual text, sonic text, and multimodal textualities; augmented and virtual reality narrative structures; disruption of linear systems; internet aesthetics; publication in multiple platforms; and, of course, use of programming and software practices. The works produced engage as well with a wide range of themes and issues relevant to media and cultural studies and to humanities and the arts. These include gender and identity, women’s history, female creativity, female digital literary spaces, female representations, womanhood, motherhood, landscape as body and body as landscape. One finds attention to love letters, birth, death, marriages, human trafficking and contemporary slavery, silenced voices of minority groups, cultural aspects of a mediated society, the digital self, ephemerality of technology, mediation, science fiction, sea voyages, space exploration, surveillance and anti-surveillance, psychedelic drug culture, ethics, fashion and artifice. It is extremely valuable to acknowledge the diversity of processes and methodologies used in the development and production of the selected works of electronic literature. These include practice-based research, script writing, collaboration strategies, maps and mapping, cartographic assemblages, networked image search, generative functions of images and text, digital assemblage, compositional fragmentary recombinations, online live dynamic feeds, détournement, sound sampling and processing of voice and words, spatialization of the voice and algorithmic synaesthesia, remediation of forms, remixing, collage, appropriation of cinema languages and construction of 3D environments. Focusing on the author’s individual essays, Kate Armstrong investigates, through a selection of works, the function of activity and compositional recombination in networked art in order to produce knowledge about how the artistic use of technology can create new literary forms. Amaranth Borsuk focuses on her influential collaboration with Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen. This book of augmented-reality poetry merges the book art and e-poetry traditions, trespassing the boundary between print and digital, old and new media. It enquires into the text’s material form, into reading experiences and the connection between form and content in meaning production, thereby questioning the place of books at a time when we are reading more and more on screen. J.R Carpenter reflects upon the transmutation of male-authored print-based xviii #WomenTechLit forms of narrative into female-narrated digital literary spaces through strategies of détournement employed in the composition of her web-based work Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl. María Mencía reflects on the development of her practice-based research project, Transient Self–Portrait, presenting aim, research enquiries, process and influences in the production of this interactive piece, based on two pivotal sonnets from Spanish literature of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. She investigates new literacies and poetics of engagement while exploring the concepts that emanate from these sonnets with respect to the cultural references and attitudes of our period, the twenty-first-century mediated society and the digital medium we inhabit. Mez Breeze in her essay explains how her “Literary Anti-Surveillance 3D Game #PRISOM” originated and evolved, including its focus on privacy, surveillance, and the underlying ethical associations of civil liberty encroachment. Hazel Smith brings up the sonic and abstract properties of language and the semantics of sound in electronic literature through the analysis of her collaborative performance and cross-media works. She explores the relationship between words and sound, literature and music, to argue that the meaning of writing in this multimedia context goes beyond the purely linguistic and reaches an affective intensity that perturbs categorizable emotional states. She maintains these conjunctions between words and music facilitate a wide range of cultural meanings about identity, place, gender and ethnicity. Christine Wilks discusses her work Underbelly, a playable media fiction about a woman sculptor carving on the site of a former colliery in the north of England, now landscaped into a country park. In her essay she explores the core ideas of this work within three thematic strands: mining the metaphor, mapping the obscured and re-voicing the unheard, specifically looking at how these concerns play out in this interactive multimodal narrative work. Odile Farge, although not a practitioner, is included in this section because of her interest in the author’s creative challenge through the use of different software. In her essay “A ‘Rhetoric for Creative Authoring’ and the Author’s Intent," she presents a critical overview of the relationships authors maintain with authoring tools in order to document the role of software tools in digital creation. III. CRITICAL OVERVIEWS OF DIGITAL WRITING PRACTICE In this section, critics, theorists, curators—and in the case of Kathi Inman Berens, also a maker—critically analyze works of electronic literature through methods of close reading, literary approach and feminist perspective. They investigate notions of reading and writing practice; reader engagement and the conceptualization of the poetic; artistic interfaces; writing spaces; gender and identity; sexual politics; digital environments and the role of gender in poetic writing. xix Mencía \ Introduction Giovanna Di Rosario questions whether the digital medium helps people to break with certain gender views and traditions and whether it offers women new creative possibilities for the writing of poetry. She reviews works such as Figures by Marie Bélisle, María Mencía’s Another Kind of Language and Aya Karpinska and Daniel C. Howe’s Open.ended. María Goicoechea and Laura Sanchez explore whether there is an existence of a female techno-cultural identity through the analysis of works by Hispanic female writers, among them works by Marla Jacarilla, Tina Escaja, Lara Coterón and Belén Gache. Kathi Inman Berens addresses the question of e-lit reading practices through a feminist approach to interface. She analyzes two very different publication platforms (web and installation) of the UpsideDown Chandelier, a collaborative work by four women from different countries (C. Wilks, Z. Husárová, J. Naji, M. Mencía) which consists of generative images and words in different languages simulating the voices of women factory workers from the actual place, currently a media arts centre, where the installation was hosted in Kosice, Slovakia. Angelica Huizar immerses herself in the exploration of artistic, poetic and linguistic experimentations by following a lineage from Latin American avant-garde poetics: the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, particularly his Altazor (published in 1931, with some fragments written as early as 1919); Argentinean poet Ana María Uribe’s Anipoemas (1997); and the native Venezuelan, Spanish local, and London-based María Mencía in her Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs (2001). Laura Shackelford explores alternate understandings of digital literary writing and e-poetics that emerge from a careful analysis of feminist engagements with digital media. She focuses on Borsuk’s and Bouse’s Between Page and Screen and Mencía’s Transient Self- Portrait where there is a lived space in-between and beyond the screen. Maya Zalbidea Paniagua, through a comparative analysis and close reading of Shu Lea Cheang ‘s Brandon, invites the reader to reflect on questions of gender, identity and sexual politics. IV. FORMATIVE PIONEERS OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE: MIGRATION OF FORMS In the field of Electronic Literature archiving, recovering and preserving works has become a crucial area of research in which Dene Grigar, curator and current president of the ELO, has been actively involved, recovering works whose delivery platforms are now difficult to access. Her essay, “The Legacy of Judy Malloy,” reminds us of the terms of this legacy through an analysis of Malloy’s ground-breaking work, Uncle Roger. Four influential female digital writers join Grigar by documenting challenges involved in reviving their work from platforms and technology that are now obsolete and by explaining how these works have evolved from floppy disk to the WWW, to CD-ROM, to xx #WomenTechLit DVD, on to laptops and mobile devices. Judy Malloy discusses its name was Penelope, A Generative Hypertext (1989); Deena Larsen engages “Marble Springs: A Journey of an Electronic Work from the Pre-dawn of the Internet to Today’s Golden Age” (1993); Coverley Luesebrink chronicles “The Making and Unmaking of Califia” (2000) and Stephanie Strickland explores “The Death and Re-Distribution of V” (2002). Related issues of the obsolescence and ephemerality of technology in connection with work produced in Flash and in the Processing Language are discussed earlier in the volume by Borsuk and Mencía respectively. This last section also serves to highlight works by pioneer writers. xxi #WomenTechLit R(e)orienting Poetics and Lived Spaces “Between" BY LAURA SHACKELFORD If orientations, as sedimented histories, are an effect of what we tend toward, then they point toward the future, to what is not yet present. And yet, orientations are shaped by what is behind us, creating a loop between what is toward and behind. In other words, we are directed by our background. —Sara Ahmed, “Orientations Matter” T his essay approaches an intriguing strain of recent digital literary writing in its largely unrecognized capacity as an emergent, practice-based mode of research into shifting spatiotemporal experiences and knowledges of lived space. Creatively engaging mobile, hand-held, reader-activated, augmented-reality, and locative digital technologies (cellular phones, tablets, GPS technology, Kinect motion-sensing, QR-codes and augmented reality software), these digital writing practices comparatively reconsider a wide range of both analog and digital practices of space-making, and the spatialized environments and interactions they lead us to habitually accept or to confront anew. Influential digital literary works such as Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen and María Mencía’s Transient Self-Portrait tactically read and write with, between, behind, beside, and across emerging digital spacetimes. They reveal that computational processes and architectures, rather than simply replacing or augmenting physical environments, embodied experiences, and other kinds of lived space, are, in fact, complexly interwoven and recombined with existing physical, material, cultural, and symbolic topographies, physical repertoires, and technological scaffolding in ways just beginning to be recognized. Contemporary senses of space and time are shaped at multiple levels, as critical geographers such as Doreen Massey (2005), Jon May and Nigel Thrift (2001), and Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (2011) stress in their various analyses of digital spacetimes. Even as everyday life becomes increasingly reliant on computation-based infrastructure, leading Kitchin and Dodge to describe emergent spatial experience and architectures as “code/space,” spatiotemporal experience and knowledge continues to be shaped by the material world156; by social disciplines of time, work, family; by our relationships to a range of technological instruments and devices; and by culturally resonant representational practices including writing, literature, visual arts, and poetics. These practices 156 I use the term “code/space” here in terms similar to those laid out by Kitchin and Dodge (2011). 331 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics both materially circumscribe and symbolically in-form spatiotemporal experience in distinctive ways. What I describe as “lived space"—extending prior phenomenological inquiries into the experiential and physiological specificity of spatiotemporal experience and action to computation-based spatial practices—emerges through the ongoing intertwining of embodied existence with its, at once, physically, affectively, symbolically, culturally, and technologically distinct relations to the world. Writing, unfolding from the hand, is oriented by, and, in turn, orients one’s physical embodiment and experience of the body and other socially legible lived spaces in multiple ways. As hand-held digital devices, sensors, GPS (global positioning system) technologies, and touch-based interfaces catalyze a circuitous “return to the hand” (Hawk, Rieder, and Oviedo 2008, xiv), key strains of digital literary writing explore these technological practices’ impact on lived space, bodily self orientations, and physical and cultural location. Perceptively, their digital writing practices reacquaint readers with writing as a performative practice key to bringing forth distinct social spaces, intersubjectivities, and lifeworlds through its co-productive, material and symbolic enframing of the world. Because spatial practices play a habitual, often unperceived role as background, shaping and symbolically informing social action and experience, it makes sense that these sedimented layers to spatial experience and lived space often remain unremarked even as they fold into and recombine in unexpected ways with more recent spatial practices and architectures. As I will illustrate in the short readings of recent electronic poetics below, these digital literary engagements with computation-based spatiotemporal experience intently reapproach mobile, sensible and locative digital media, reminding readers of literary writing’s prior status as a mode of self-inquiry, navigation—as an affectivelycharged social, cultural, and geographical “orientation device,” to use philosopher Sara Ahmed’s apt concept. The status of writing as a mode of exploration, of orientating oneself to the world, is most obvious in the case of spiritual writings and various forms of autobiography and self writing, perhaps. A consideration of regional and national literary traditions, travel narratives, atlases, and almanacs, though, underscores writing’s multidimensional—i.e., physical, geographic, topographic, and symbolic—contributions as a means of culturally-inflected spatiotemporal orientation.157 E-poetic practices by Borsuk and Bouse, Mencía, and others, I will suggest, comparatively reimagine predominant modes of digital writing, digital spacetimes, mobility, and intersubjective ‘feeling together’ in light of these ‘sedimented histories’ of 157 Intriguingly, Medieval tablet cultures imagined spiritual writing as a productive, i.e., performative individual and communal practice focused on the ‘cultivation’ of self and of its relations to a larger religious community. 332 #WomenTechLit print-based writing and visual arts practices and their habitual spatiotemporal orientations, sensorial regimes, and bodily life. Reading their e-poetic practices in light of a longer trajectory of feminist, queer, and experimental writing, I hope to catalog shared elements and aims in these writers’ experimental querying of spatial practices and their nuanced, critical reorientation of digital writing spaces, interface relations, and code/ space. As Ahmed stresses in her analysis of the unnoticed role writing and writing tables play in philosophy, as material, phenomenological, and disciplinary orientation devices, women of color, feminists, and queer subjects who are rendered “out of place” by predominant knowledges, writing practices, and their preferred or presumed bodily orientations to the world, “‘do things’ by claiming spaces that have not historically belonged to them, including the spaces worked out for writing. [They] have to secure a place that is not already given” (20). These acts involve, at once, a physical, phenomenological, and epistemological “re-orientation,” or, a tactical making of spaces for women’s practices and knowledges within the very social and technological networks and human geographies that forestall, disregard, and delegitimize them. Recent digital writers such as the ones I’ll discuss below, tactically re-engage the potential of what often remains part of an unperceived spatiotemporal, cultural, medial and linguistic background to “other” ends. Extending Ahmed’s insights to reconsider this strain of digital literary writing practices and emergent e-poetics, I intend to acknowledge key similarities between theirs and prior tactical, feminist and queer engagements with writing spaces. Rather than folding these writers back into this literary historical background, though, I will clarify how such digital literary writing practices—through their, at once, literal and symbolic reorientations of digital technologies, language, modes and media of writing and reading—generate important knowledges about the distinctly twenty-first century spacetimes and intersubjective dynamics currently defining code/ space, opening up alternative, unexplored dimensions to these. These digital literary practices encourage readers to reperceive the fundamental relays through which practices of writing and other space-making and spatiotemporal processes, as technics linking subjects and technologies in distinct ways, actively and complexly inflect culturally, and socially distinct perceptions, meanings, and experiences of lived space.158 158 Technics, in my understanding are the mutually transformative interrelations between subjects, technologies, social practices, and lifeworlds. This concept places emphasis on the ongoing, productive, social, cultural, material, and technical relations that generate what later come to be seen as selfapparent subjects, technical objects, social spaces, and spatial relations. This is in keeping with recent thinking about subject-technology relations and digital spacetimes in philosophy, feminist science studies, systems theory, and critical geographies. My conceptualization of technics here also overlap significantly with discussions of “somatechnics,” coined in 2003 by Susan Stryker, Nikki Sullivan, and others at a conference on “body modification” at Macquarie University. As Sullivan stresses, ”techné is not something we add or apply to the already constituted body (as object), nor is it a tool that the embodied self employs to its own ends. Rather, technés are the dynamic means in and through which 333 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics E-POETIC ORIENTATION DEVICES Writing, and the literary’s historical role as a means of orienting writers and readers to distinct physical, cultural, and affective geographies, is nothing new. Literary writing and reading practices from diverse cultural and historical moments register shifting understandings of self-identity and modes of address. As importantly, such writing practices both explore and help to consolidate intersubjective experience and its shifting embodiments and lifeworlds. Literary writing unfolds as a performative, reciprocal practice through which lived space is regularly informed and co-realized, not simply a secondary representational practice wholly distinct from the lived spaces, experiences, or events it engages and imagines.159 Writing not only helps to consolidate and stabilize the relative “here and now” of embodied existence, the reference point from which all other human experience unfolds, literary writing has also served as an influential means of hinging embodied subjective experience and self understanding to physical and cultural geographies, and to their socially and culturally distinct modes of spatiotemporal circulation, political economy, agency, and knowledge.160 Writing is an influential somatechnological support, to draw on Nikki Sullivan’s understanding of the heterogenous cultural, technological, material practices that in-form bodily life. Literary writing and reading orients its readers through its in-forming and shaping of the cultural meaning of lived spaces of self and their multi-leveled physical, cultural, social, and affective geographies. Notably, this occurs at the level of representation, in the “text,” and in its implicit paratextual enframing on the page or screen. It also occurs at the level of the literary system’s material practices of reading and corporealities are crafted” (187). Central to discussions of somatechnics is an attention to “operations of power, the soma-techno-logic, that constitute(s) (un)becoming-with in situated ways” (Sullivan) particularly as they are experienced and revealed through transgender and nonbinary orientations. “Transgender, like forms of bodily being commonly pre-sumed not to be technologically produced, is a heterogeneous [my ital] somatechnological construct that comes to matter in contextually specific ways and in relation to other discursive formations” (Sullivan 189). Somatechnics’ attention to the heterogeneous ways in which bodily experiences of lived space come to matter is particularly valuable. 159 While computing and computer science has moved significantly ‘beyond the screen’ since Mark Weiser’s call in 1991 for a computer of the 21st century, moving from desktop and screen to be ubiquitously integrated into the fabric of physical and urban environments, as Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla note in the introduction to their collection, Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres (2010), “digital literature,” has always been “beyond the screen” or page, even as web cams, RFID and other sensing technologies, and other hand-held and locative technologies are unquestionably generating “new combinations of physical, virtual, and symbolic spaces” (14). In light of these recent shifts, I encourage careful consideration of how literature and literary systems prior to the digital turn have already, always been ‘beyond the screen’ or ‘page’ in multiple ways worth recognizing. 160 Literary writing is, in other words, one “technology of self,” in Michel Foucault’s terms. And it is through the coordination of “new techniques of self-regulation” at the micro level with ‘flexible’ “forms of political rule and economic exploitation” at the macro level that literary writing feeds into modern biopower and its normatizing ends. See Lemke (2001), 203. 334 #WomenTechLit writing, in their unfolding as events that actively establish and reinforce the spatiotemporal parameters and social priorities of its “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991) through these very practices and their differential, delimited circulations. It is important to address these multiple, coimplicated levels to literary texts and practices of reading and writing to understand the multipotent ways in which they complexly co-inform lived space and spatiotemporal understanding today.161 The dynamic interrelations between language, representational practices, and intersubjective lived space are at the core of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: Objects Food Rooms (1914), for instance. As an influential precursor to more recent experimental feminist and queer writing, Tender Buttons complicates previous literary writing’s assumed correlation to interior, subjective space at multiple levels. Its domestic subject matter directly addresses the defining, gendered relations of inside/outside, private/ public, interior/exterior to literary writing. In this way, Tender Buttons engages with language and literary poetics’ performative power as orientation devices. It does so at the material level of the text’s spatial organization, separated into visually objectified sections and chunks of text. It also does so at the level of its hybrid generic status as a prose poem (with the relative primacy of narrative space and time, lyrical and narrative registers redistributed accordingly). Additionally, it does so at the level of its written and aural, embodied language practices and distinct usage of linguistic and interpersonal subject/object relations, in its complicated rethinking of domestic spaces and feminine concerns, as well as at the level of its writing and reading from the perspective of a lesbian and expatriate living beside proscribed heterosexist orientations and outside national, domestic space, yet writing about national identities. Recent twenty-first century digital literary writing by Borsuk and Bouse and Mencía is similarly self-reflexive and multi-leveled in its engagement with literary writing as a co-productive practice that orients readers and writers to lived space according to physical, material, linguistic, subjective, cultural, and affective registers. Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s 2012 augmented-reality poem, Between Page and Screen quite literally occupies, figures, and examines the unperceived spaces between print and digital writing practices, opened up by digital book technologies, machine-readable QR (quick-response) codes, digital interfaces, and visual poetry. Between Page and Screen is a print codex book that features black and white, machine-readable QR codes on each of its sixteen pages. Reading this print book involves accessing the book’s web site online, holding each page in front of the computer web-cam, and then reading 161 Questions of lived space have been central to discussions of tactical media practices and of locative media works. This article hopes to extend and multiply these considerations, somewhat, by illustrating multiple ways in which e-poetics go “beyond the screen” and reconceive the spatial and temporal parameters and influence of writing in, across, and between digital spacetimes. 335 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics the animated, virtual text on each page as it is projected and dynamically unfolds in the space ‘between’ one’s physical body, the hand-held book, its animated projection, and a real-time visual image of oneself reading that appears on the computer screen throughout this e-poetic process. Devising digital language practices that render the unnoticed perceptual, tactile, technological, linguistic, symbolic, and affective relays between writers, books, screens, and embodied readers more tangible, Between Page and Screen physically situates its readers in this unnoticed, multipotent space of interplay between digital computers, interfaces, book technologies, language practices, and the media-specific material practices of reading and writing that are entangled amongst these, at once, physical, virtual, and symbolic “interface relations” (Drucker 2011). Pages and screens, as “interface relations,” are understood as productive, differential practices that bring about material transformations in readers, writers, texts, code, and computers, as distinctly co-orchestrated agencies. Between Page and Screen actively engages its readers in this multiagential space of performance, reminding them that reading and writing are material, media-specific, time and context-dependent practices in space and time to which readers co-contribute in various circumscribed, though “multistable” (i.e., somewhat plastic, playful) ways (Ihde 2010, 13-14).. Reading Between Page and Screen requires significant effort on the part of its readers and some dexterity as one discovers that holding the book upside-down projects the language-based visual animations right-side up. One also quickly realizes that even with perfect alignment and poise, the textual animations (whether the text is dynamic or appears as a static image) require a remarkable, fleeting co-orchestration of hand, book, body, screen, web-camera, web site, machine-reading, animated projection, and linguistic and visual understanding that one cannot easily stabilize for more than a moment or two. In this way, Between Page and Screen momentarily opens its multimodal, at once, visual, linguistic and tactile purview onto what it suggests is an ongoing, unfolding process of writing, reading, technics, and language practices. Reading Between Page and Screen shifts emphasis away from digital and print book technologies as apparently self-contained, material objects, and towards the languages and practices of reading and writing, and the distinct bodily orientations and intersubjective relations they open up in this complexly unfolding space ‘between.’ The ongoing intertwining and interplay between the print book, with its latest page-based spatiotemporal practices and cultural meaning, and the digital screen with its computation-based, processual spacetimes are explicitly personified and examined through the poem’s boisterous series of sparring love letters between “P” and “S.” The actual format of their alternating letters initially seems to reinforce their personifica336 #WomenTechLit tion of predominant characteristics of “page” and “screen.” The letters take the pagebased format of a print letter or, alternately, the dynamic screen-based, recursive visual animations we associate with more kinetic digital writing, yet these juxtapositions slowly reveal unnoticed commonalities and entanglements in every sense of the word. Most notably, in pursuing many of the Indo-European roots of the words page and screen through its wordplay, the poem underscores how languages dynamically and transformatively enter into material practices of reading and writing. Emergent and residual practices of reading and writing, and the performative, intersubjective spatial and spatialized relations these practices enable and constrain, are embedded and disembedded by the language we use to articulate and carry out these practices, by the “metaphors we live by,” to borrow George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptualizaton of how language materially orients and cognitively enframes and expresses our thinking and acting in the world. The Indo-European root of the word, page: pag, for instance, means to fasten or join, leading to words like pax, pacify, appease, palus (to stake to the ground), pale, impale, and the Latin pagina, which is a trellis or frame onto which vines were fastened that has clear similarities to the structure of the print page and its columns of text, like vines on a trellis. Of particular interest here is how the embedded language informing the word page continues to inform our conceptualization of reading and writing the pages of a book. These concepts implicitly inform these material practices and underwrite, if you will, the associated intersubjective orientations supposed to emerge from these media-specific, reading and writing practices. Playing with the Indo-European roots of screen, for instance, the e-poem projects an image of a shield in which there are two definitions of its root, “skirm”: “to protect, to fight,” and “to fight with a sword, or to shield.” Skirm is the root of words such as scrimmage, skirmish, and Scaramouch, which also figure prominently in the e-poem. This visual depiction of a shield foregrounds the screen’s longstanding status as a literal interface, while it simultaneously underscores the intersubjective orientations the screen with its, at once, physical and phenomenological orientations, rerealizes. The next letter written by Page directly challenges this understanding of the screen’s functioning as a particularly divisive, oppositional kind of interface relation, insisting that “A screen is a shield and also a veil. It’s sheer and can be shorn.” In a later, friendly missive, S seems to concur, writing to P, “We share text’s fleshy network- your trellis and my tendency to excoriate.” Referring to the structuring of the print page as a “trellis” for its text (and, thus, directly invoking “pagina,” a garden trellis or frame for vines, the Latin offshoot of page’s root, pagus), the e-poem foregrounds the material organization of text in columns on the page, like vines on a trellis. In doing so, it reveals the centrality of embedded language to how we conceptualize print and digital practices of reading 337 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics and writing and book technologies and the ongoing linguistic, material, and cultural relays between them. P replies, “That trellis is a metaphor – it props me up.” This caddy response points to the material organization of the print page as a literal ‘prop,’ yet it also underscores the metaphorical status of this trellis or pagina as a symbolic bridging across or bringing into relation or joining, as linguistic metaphors are. The transposition of this trellis or pagina from gardening and the careful cultivation of vines to print textual practices and book technologies presages this latest bridging across or bringing into relation as language practices bring print books and digital screens into new relations. These “lines and vines that link us together,” or language practices, as P later seems to recognize, transform all participants in the process. As language, poetics, book technologies, and media-specific practices selectively carry their embedded histories with them, they also, therefore, simultaneously (if paradoxically) open onto new possibilities of perception, spatiotemporal dynamics, poetics, and interactions. Comparatively moving between the predominant languages, material practices, and spacetimes associated with print pages and digital screens, this e-poetic work restages what is often understood in oppositional, mutually exclusive terms as a contest between print books and digital screens (misperceived as distinct, self-contained technological objects), as “a co-script [my ital] posthaste postface” [because]: there is no postscript.” This phrase is taken from one of S’s more conciliatory letters to P, which includes a series of animated digital letters, P and S, tumbling down into a single pile together at the bottom of the screen. Between Page and Screen restages their encounters as a “co-script” between print-based language practices and digital writing at the level of its hybrid print and digital execution, at the level of its language and multimodal, visual, textual, and kinetic black and white poetics, as well as at the level of its reading and writing. It is also a co-authored “script” in that the agency of a solitary, disembodied writer or reader alone with a writing implement or a book is clearly re-distributed as a result of these emerging technological relays for writing and reading as well as by the e-poem’s explicit co-authorship. In this way, Between Page and Screen tangibly revists and restages some of the unnoticed ways in which language, reading, and writing practices differentially enframe as well as co-realize a series of distinct assumptions about subjectivities, their authorship and other kinds of agency, and the lived space and intersubjective relations these culturally, historically, and medially distinct self (and other) regimens help realize and naturalize. Jessica Pressman directly addresses the questions raised by this “Posthuman Reader in Postprint Literature” (2010) as realized through e-poetic practices of writing such as Between Page and Screen in her recent reading of the e-poem. 338 #WomenTechLit Between Page and Screen and other e-poetic engagements with lived space actively reengage writing as a “multi-layered, distributed activity” (2010), to borrow N. Katherine Hayles’ apt terms. They locate writing amidst human, technological, medial, and other nonhuman co-agencies. Importantly, and in keeping with prior feminist and queer literary re-orientations of lived space, their e-poetics explore and evidence the complex affective dimensions to this recalibration of both desire and agency through these computational, technological, medial, and linguistic reroutings. Between Page and Screen’s love letters seem to directly ask readers, writers, and computers what kinds of interrelations, as well as what kinds of writing and reading spaces these underappreciated, language-based spaces between page and screen might open onto? Similarly to other tactical feminist and queer engagements with writing spaces by Stein, Virginia Woolf (2014), Audre Lorde( 2007), Luce Irigaray (1993), Hélène Cixous (1991), bell hooks (1999), Adrienne Rich (2002), Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (1983), Haryette Mullen (1986), and many, many others this augmented reality e-poem reconsiders how the intersubjective relations consolidated at and through such material practices of writing and reading serve to orient one’s desires and self in particular, often explicitly oppositional, as well as proprietary, masculinist, and heterosexist ways, and to foreclose other possibilities. One of Between Page and Screen’s digital poetic lines includes the phrase, “A Rose is Eros by another name,” directly invoking Stein’s “Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose” in which Stein, similarly, plays poetically and visually with the generative recursivity of language practices and their recursive, desiring orientations of desire. Figure 1: Reading in the space ‘between.’ Screenshot of Between Page and Screen. 339 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics Notably, the question of how computers and computational processes impact experiences of embodiment, lived space, and intersubjective relays of desire, affect, language, and agency (not necessarily or exclusively human) has been raised throughout the history of computing and has since been consolidated in unique fields such as Affective Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Human Computer Interaction, and Computational Linguistics, among others. In 1951 Christopher Strachey and Alan Turing used the first stored program computer, Mark I, to run a combinatory love-letter writing program written by Strachey.162 One of their computer-generated, co-authored letters, signed by M.U.C. (or Manchester University Computer) reads: Darling Sweetheart, You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy; my tender liking. Yours beautifully, M. U. C. (Strachey 1954, 26) Its playful tone, though not its recognizably hackneyed language, is reminiscent of the desiring letters between P and S. The program was simply substituting adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and nouns (selected randomly from a list compiled from Roget’s Thesaurus) into its pre-formed structure, like an automated Mad Libs game. In a journal article published at the time, Strachey acknowledges the simplicity of the program and the computer’s rote following of the program’s instructions, undercutting any illusion that the computer is “thinking,” yet he and Turing were intrigued by the combinatory potential and output of the program, some unexpected results, and clearly appreciated the letters’ strange humor. Between Page and Screen, i’d argue, like Strachey and Turing’s automated love letters sixty-five years prior, creatively engages today’s emerging relays between computer programming, writing and lived space to pursue these questions about how computation might co-inform lived space with a difference, eliciting and realizing various kinds of desire for connection and impacting the kinds of intersubjective relations and agency these writing and reading practices open onto. Their creative interventions into the potential reroutings of human language, desire, and agency through computational processes, technologies, and digital writing go well beyond projecting human attributes across an untroubled human/computational divide. Strachey’s love letter generating program, in simulating prior practices 162 Christopher Strachey published an article on this combinatory love letter writing program, “The ‘Thinking’ Machine” (1954). Andrew Hodges discusses the love letter writing program in his biography of Turing (1992. p. 478). Also, For recent critical readings of the love-letter generator see Wardrip-Fruin (2011). 340 #WomenTechLit of writing love letters (equally reliant on highly conventionalized language, modes of address, and exuberant, wistful affect) comparatively aligns and undercuts both the prior human conventions of love letter writing and the computer’s equally constrained, yet no less pleasurable, formal, rule-bound, yet variable production of desire. Biographers and literary theorists note that Strachey’s motivation to devise this love letterwriting program, in which both addressee and author remain genderless and nameless (aside from the unexplained acronym M.U.C), might have been informed by his and by Turing’s experiences living as homosexuals under strict public and legal sanction. Turing publicly acknowledged his homosexuality and, as a result, was later subjected, by the court, to hormone treatment as a “remedy.” The pleasure that Strachey and Turing took in this program according to Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, suggests that perhaps this was a subtle way of seeking out alternative ways to express this socially unsanctioned, forbidden desire between men via this early computer program and its automated writing process. Whatever playful and creative aspirations prompted these love letters, or Between Page and Screen’s e-poetic missives on the affectively-charged medial and linguistic entanglements catalyzing and transforming writing and reading practices, both works are particularly concerned with the potential reroutings of agency and desire as computational processes and digital writing practices alter prior writing practices and their implicit enframings of the human self as unique, standalone, gendered, proprietary, physically self-contained, and as occupying an absolute space and/ or time separate from these multiagential technological, literary, and reading practices. LIVED SPACES “BETWEEN" Importantly, these digital writing practices explore these lived spaces “between” in their capacity to open up culturally, historically, technically, and affectively in-formed reroutings of agency and desire, not in order to return to some more absolutely absolute human body or bodily experience that they imagine unchanged by these technics. Hand-held, more tangibly performative, bodily responsive, mobile and locative digital technologies have been heralded and pursued by cyberfeminists and designers, alike, for their potential to reprivilege and at times, it is assumed, to recapture the material, tactile, haptic dimensions of our selves, cultural practices, social action, and lifeworlds in all their dynamic agency and complexity. These are the material, spatial, embodied, affective dimensions to self experience that a Cartesian, liberal humanist understanding of subjectivity has feminized, subordinated, and opposed to a superiorly abstract, temporal, disembodied, rational cogito gendered masculine and racialized as white Euro-American. Between Page and Screen and other recent digital literary writing reveals how computation-based digital writing spaces do not, in fact, reprivilege or return 341 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics us to the material specificities of space, time, embodiment, and touch-based interaction. Instead, as dynamic, materially-realized and time-based practices, digital writing spaces and neoliberal code/space, more broadly, effectively contravene this Cartesian, oppositional understanding of space and time and its affiliated gendered, heterosexist differentiations of matter and meaning, feminine and masculine, embodiment and cognition, black and white. The e-poem’s comparative stance towards print analog and computation-based writing as technics of the human that co-produce culturally and historically distinct modes of gendered and sexualized, intersubjective relation and dynamic spacetimes, I’ll suggest, engages and operationalizes the comparative to open onto a queer space between, beside, alongside predominant computational practices and codespaces, as did Turing and Strachey’s comparative, computational writing experiment. The between or “beside,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously states in Touching Feeling, comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations” (2003, 14). Rather than a third, autonomous space, Between Page and Screen unfolds a comparative and co-scripted spacetime ‘between’ that emerges through this interplay of readers’ embodied reading, print book conventions, computer and web-based machine reading, augmented reality text and animated poetry, and generative language change. Between Page and Screen encourages readers’ self-aware engagement with the combinations of material, virtual, symbolic, linguistic, and computational that now regularly co-inform our experience and knowledges of lived space. It generates appreciation of readers’ desire and agency as it feeds into and is transformed in unexpected, still undecided ways by these relays. It elicits alternate modes and means of inhabiting and co-orchestrating lived spaces ‘between’ digital and analog spacetimes and imagining the intersubjective relations they currently and might otherwise afford. The e-poem’s attention to digital technologies’ and interface relations’ influences on lived space, to how they differentially encourage subjects to feel good and ‘feel together, enhancing (inter)subjective experiences and identifications of many sorts in rewarding, pleasurable ways is, equally, a primary concern of contemporary digital culture, the affective economies currently driving social media and computing today, neoliberal political economies, and their dynamic, processual “architectures of flow” (Knorr-Cetina). A recent series of Apple television and print ads, “Designed by Apple in California,” emphasize their defining design principles, opening with the line, “The First Thing We Ask is… How do we Want people to feel?... Delight. Surprise. Love. Connection…Then we begin to craft around our intention” (see Figure 2). Between Page and Screen’s (re)turn to the embodied, desiring reader and its awareness of how digital writing practices performatively inform lived space has to be 342 #WomenTechLit read in the context of this broadscale reprivileging of affective experience and the dynamic time and context-dependent interrelations multimodal digital writing, social media, and dynamic codespace involve us in. The web-based version of this Apple ad campaign includes images of ebullient Apple users in a variety of urban settings that change their racial, cultural, and geographic composition, depending on readers’ geographic location, as I discovered accessing this site from Puerto Rico rather than NY. What differentiates Between Page and Screen is, therefore, not its concern with desire, agency, and authorship at the interface, per se, but its multiagential understanding of these emergent relays and its efforts to creatively imagine possibilities that might orient readers and writers in unfamiliar ways. It strives to make room (excuse the overdue pun) for more complex experimentation, cross-medial play, and language practices that counter predominant conventions of self-oriented, consumption-based, superficially multicultural “feeling together,” and identity-centered control via brand identification, economic mobility, or heterosexist union in the name of (re)production. Figure 2 “Designed by Apple in California” ad series.” Between Page and Screen literally engages readers in self-reflection on how one co-reads and co-performs lived space and intersubjective relations in complex relation 343 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics to technologies of language, to poetics, to books, to screens, and to global late capitalist political economies today. In this way, it breaks readers away from the predominant subject-object relations encouraged by hegemonic practices of print and digital reading and writing, through its performative reading as a “co-script.” And this is a “co-script” that equally reapproaches the gendered, oppositional intersubjective interface relations these reading and writing practices materially and linguistically engender, rereading predominant semantics of fighting, shielding or joining and appeasing so as to recognize mutual points of entanglement and overlap that complicate and compromise these too easy, binary gender, heterosexist oppositions. The, at once, comparative and co-scripted lived spacetime between, which Borsuk and Bouse explicitly embrace in their title, evidences and tactically engages with these unperceived, nonCartesian, non-oppositional, noninstrumental dimensions to practices of reading and writing that digital writing practices catalyze, though with, as yet, unclear effects. In this way, Between Page and Screen registers emergent spatiotemporal orientations introduced by digital spacetimes and cultures that, even as they may significantly contravene former gendered and sexed oppositions and Cartesian understandings of space and time and the or material and cultural domains they segregate, do not necessarily serve feminist ends or signify more enabling spatial architectures or intersubjective relations. Between Page and Screen, among other e-poetic engagements with digital scenes of writing and their ongoing, material time and context-dependent, performative procesess are part and parcel of a much larger late capitalist reanimation of space that preoccupies itself with time and context-dependent and responsive, material and cultural specificities and frequently disregards Cartesian and Euclidean coordinates in favor of individualized, frame-specific flows. As critical geographer K. Knorr Cetina stresses, in these computation-based “architectures of flow,” “static representation becomes subordinated to flow” as a result of the computationally-based, rapid, continuous, recursive calculations. In a flow-world…the content itself is processual—a “melt” of material that is continuously in flux, and that exists only as it is being projected forward and calls forth participants’ reactions to the flux. Only “frames,” it would seem, for example, the frames that computer screens represent in a financial market, are pre-supposed in this flow-world. The content, the entire constellation of things that pass as the referential context wherein some action takes place, is not separate from the totality of ongoing activities. (2003, 4) 344 #WomenTechLit The prominence of time, context, and reader-dependent flows in computationbased digital spacetimes calls into question and actively contravenes former boundaries between subjects and objects, readers and texts, and between temporal processes and their spatial background, which were often formerly concieved as absolute, unchanging, and self-contained spaces. Between Page and Screen, and other recent e-poetics, participate in digital spacetimes’ broader reanimation of space and its reprivileging of dynamic, responsive, spatiotemporal flows, yet they also, I’d argue, tactically engage these spatiotemporal processes and screen-based parameters to quite distinct and distinctly self-reflexive and multistable ends. The “processual melt” of hegemonic “architectures of flow,” for instance, typically elicits readers’/viewers’ participation in generating and processing specific kinds of information and experiences in real time, while using those queries to generate more information about those readers/viewers and their behavior in order to tailor their processing of information and to further involve readers/viewers in these valuable networks of information retrieval, processing, feedback, and the consumption-driven sharing of experience. The intersubjective relays and circulations afforded by digital language practices, touch-based and place-based, mobile interfaces, real-time, responsive bodily interaction in predominant late capitalist codespace and social media are, thus, circumscribed to very familiar individualistic and consumerist meanings and ends, though not always used in these ways. Between Page and Screen, while similarly processual, materially self-aware, and invested in generating and enabling co-orchestrated, physically and affectively responsive context and time-dependent practices, situates and explores its visceral, yet intangible, fleeting spacetime “between” and beside these most typical objects and modes of consumerist, socially-mandated capture. It tactically opens readers to unnoticed intersubjective and perceptual possibilities as these interface relations become differently and differentially sensitive to material bodies, times, and places. Its e-poetic virtualization of the space “between” actively destabilizes the identity of the reader, the text, material and linguistic modes of address, and even one’s proprioceptive perception as one holds the book in front of the web camera and rereads one’s precarious, momentarily stabilized image and moving text on the screen. EMERGING SPACETIMES AND SUBJECTS OF DIGITAL WRITING: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A WOMAN WRITING CODE/SPACE María Mencía’s Transient Self-Portrait unfolds an equally circumspect, insightful critical engagement with digital writing as a multiagential, performative practice through which historically, culturally, linguistically, and technologically distinct subjectivities, 345 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics languages, and orientations emerge and are rerealized. Transient Self-Portrait reconsiders and, itself, reorients the famed ephemerality and dynamism of code/spaces and digital writing by reapproaching them in relation to prior linguistic, visual, and sensory-rich practices of self writing and portraiture similarly concerned to offset or momentarily capture the ephemerality of material life and the passage of time through their writing. This e-poetic work is concerned, as is Between Page and Screen, with the question of how digital writing inflects, transforms, and can creatively retrace, perhaps even reorient the most predominant intersubjective or perhaps, in this context, (inter)selfie relays consolidated through reading, writing, and digital spaces. Its title screen features a portrait of the artist that, under closer examination, is revealed to be comprised of an impressionistic array of small nonlinear, spatially distributed alphabetic letters, as opposed to the typically imperceptible, uniform square pixels that more typically make up digital images (or readable lines of digital typography, for that matter). While evoking the multimodality of digital writing spaces and their multiply encoded, visual, linguistic, aural, tactile, physically responsive capacities, the title screen introduces Transient Self-Portrait’s overall concern with writing and self writing as a palimpsest on and through which self experience is recursively figured and refigured and intersubjective relations and modes of address are visually, linguistically, aurally, physically, and affectively reoriented, as well. Reinforcing this sense of its digital writing space as a performative space of self figuring, self inquiry, and self formation, the title screen tells the reader: YOU ARE PART OF THIS POEM AS YOU READ THE POEM THIS POEM READS YOU IT SPEAKS TO YOU IT NEEDS TO BE CARESSED IT NEEDS LIGHT YOU NEED TO SPEAK TO IT YOU ARE ITS INK ITS COLOUR ITS SURFACE PLAY WITH IT This opening text invokes the reciprocal role writing spaces play, serving as a primary ‘technology of the self ’ (Foucault) that both orients writers and readers to a self “image” and, in the process, co-realizes distinct modes of relating to others. “You,” 346 #WomenTechLit as the poem’s addressee and reader, are a part of the poem in that portrayals of self and self portraiture, such as this e-poem’s, enter into their readers’ own sense of acceptable modes of digital self-presentation and self-experience. Just think of how distinct and viral recent representational practices surrounding the “selfie” have become, an integral part of self and identity formation today. In this e-poetic self-portrait, readers are “its ink,” “its colour,” “its surface” in that this e-poem will similarly render certain aspects of self experience legible and meaningful at the expense of other dimensions. Its use of all capital letters, which are used exclusively for emphasis—if not outright shouting— in digital contexts further reinforces the sense that digital self writing interpellates readers and writers in new ways worth inquiring into. On the other hand, while this poem “reads you” and “speaks to you” and, thus, “orients “you” through its linguistically, culturally, historically, and medially particular second-person addresses in three main sections, it incites its readers to “play with it,” to recognize that “you are its ink,” “its color,” “its surface,” and, thus, also not without significant agency in co-realizing what is a multiply, as well as comparatively, transient “self ” portrait to which readers of the e-poem can themselves contribute: physically, aurally, visually, and affectively in notable ways. It is a multiply comparative and transient self-portrait and poem that unfolds through its own and readers’ e-poetic rereadings. There are three main sections to the e-poem following this title page. The first section centers on the poem, “En tanto que de rosa azucena” by Garcilaso de La Vega, a Spanish poet writing in the 16th century, the second section of the poem centers on an influential rereading of this first poem by the 17th century Spanish poet, Luís de Góngora in his inventive homage to his predecessor, “Mientras por competir con tu cabello.” The third section of the poem recursively reapproaches and reembeds these prior literary portraits/self writing practices in the context of digital writing technologies and their practices of self representation, featuring a four-dimensional digital writing space that projects an image of the reader in front of their web camera and computer screen, which is manipulable in real-time, while a feminine, computer-generated voice recites what appear to be lines of the actual digital code generating the multiple poetic layers of this e-poem in real-time. Transient Self-Portrait’s comparative inquiries into writing as a literary orientation device and self portraiture/self writing as an influential palimpsest for self experience are centered on a series of “love” poems, as are Between Page and Screen’s e-poems. These 16th and 17th century poems, in spite of significant differences, are both sonnets written by a masculine writer to his feminine reader positioned as his object of desire. Sonnets are, of course, an encoded writing form, following a preset rhyme scheme and meter. Transient Self-Portrait, thus, comparatively flags the sonnet’s mathematical and 347 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics automated formal dimensions as a pre-digital convention of writing and reading.163 In addition to the sonnets’ encoding according to predetermined, culturally resonant rhyme scheme and meter, these poems’ intertextuality provides another level of transformative encoding and recoding. Góngora famously takes up La Vega’s modes of address and overarching concern with the transience of feminine beauty, masculine desire, and material life, more generally, while creatively readdressing these concerns to his present time and context of writing. Notably, both sonnets realize a distinctly gendered, oppositional, heterosexist scene of writing in which masculine writers (and masculine voices in the e-poem’s aural rereading) render the image of their reader and addressee, in language, through a gendered second-person address to her as a timebound object of (fading) beauty. Transient Self-Portrait tactically foregrounds the very question of agency at such scenes of writing by documenting this historic absence or relative silence of women and of their agency from the scenes of their own self-depiction and, relatedly, in exploring their own desires. Here the broader question of what happens to agency and desire at multiagential scenes of digital writing, mentioned above, resonates in complex ways with prior delimitations of self writing, portraiture, and authorship. This e-poem adds another layer of intertextuality to these prior two poems through its own encoding and recoding of their sonnets as differently, yet equally transient self portraits. Situating contemporary self writing and portraiture enabled by digital code/space within this wider historical, cultural, and linguistic context, Transient Self-Portrait suggests how writing, as an interface relation, is always compromised and enabled in different ways by socially and culturally hegemonic technologies of self, and allowable, mediaspecific modes of linguistic, visual, aural, tactile, and affective address and modes of interrelation. Through its comparative juxtaposition of these three sections of the poem and their distinct rereadings of these love poems, Transient Self-Portrait unfolds a portrait of the artist as a woman writing code/space that creatively rereads, reembeds, and reorients the prior, masculinist and male-authored literary portraits and their privileged modes of affectively-charged address and language from within a similarly, though differently, masculinist code/space. Situating its own digital “transient self portrait” amidst these prior sonnets written by male poets to their feminine objects of desire, the e-poem slyly intimates that these prior poems were likely more reflective of their male authors’ self images and desires than they were at registering or depicting those of 163 Oulipo writers also engaged the sonnet as a resource in the mid-twentieth century in light of these underlying similarities and useful contrasts with combinatory computation-based writing. 348 #WomenTechLit the women they were addressing. The sonnets were, in other words, self portraits that reflect an image of their masculine authors back to them. Transient Self-Portrait implicitly confronts readers with the question, “Is digital code/space, in this respect, much different in its privileged encoding of masculinist desires, agency, and self image?” Notably, the third, most contemporary, digitallyinclined section of the poem is, itself, far from unconstrained or without formal rules or conventions. Although its voice is noticeably feminine, it is computer-generated, with an unnerving, uniformity of tone and clearly automated recitation of the lines of digital code the program is in the process of executing. In this way, it conveys a continued dis-ease with present day, multimodal, digital practices of self-portraiture and writing, even or especially as they may seem to literally give “voice” to women and renewed prominence to historically “feminine” senses of aurality, touch, and spatiality in potentially promising ways. Its comparative rereading of contemporary digital writing and code/space alerts readers and writers to the constraints and affordances of digital writing, as these continue to inform and enframe intersubjective experience, in spite of significant shifts. Figure 3: “Embodied Codespace in Real Time.” Screenshot from third stage of Transient Self-Portrait. At the same time that it registers the politics and technics of self presentation, past and present, I’d suggest that Transient Self-Portrait identifies and leans its readers towards the, as yet unrealized, potential of digital writing in its comparative rendering of self-portraiture and self writing beside prior modes of self writing. All three levels 349 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics of the e-poem are equally, if differently “transient,” calling into question self writing and portraiture as mnemonic devices and practices aimed at preserving and stabilizing self experience against this very flow of time. The comparative, embedded, mutually informing and transformative levels to this writing palimpsest open onto a multileveled scene of self writing, which recasts writing as a performative, multiagential practice that reads and writes at once. Its contemporary scene of self writing and performative portraiture allows readers to enter into its reading and to self-reflexively consider how digital self writing practices and web cameras, sensing technologies such as Kinect, and voice-recognition software enter into and inform lived space. It involves its readers in a visceral, physical rereading of these prior sonnets, which generates a crucial, comparative perspective, perhaps even locating readers, in this way, strangely “between these multileveled, multisensory poetic rereadings of self writing practices. In asking readers to “play” with this fully transient, multileveled, intertextual poem and its rereadings, for instance, Transient Self-Portrait takes special advantage of the affordances of digital writing spaces to render the relays between language, media, spaces of representation, writing technologies, lived space, material embodiment, self image and their consequences more tangible, as Between Page and Screen, in its own ways, attempts to do. Its initial invitation to “play” with it is furthered in distinct ways in each of the subsequent sections of the poem, which each involve readers in distinct kinds of sensory interactions. In the first section, one’s facial and bodily movements in front of the web camera are rendered on screen as a literal palimpsest against which the written text of Garcilaso de La Vega’s poem, “En tanto que de rosa azucena,” is slowly revealed. One’s audible voice is the catalyst for the second section of the poem. As one reads aloud Luís de Góngora’s “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” from the screen, more text appears and its colors alternate in response to one’s tone, energy, and movement until the letters tumble into a heap and disappear from the screen altogether. The third section visually depicts the reader on the screen, as did the first, though this self image, generated in real time via the web camera, is now juxtaposed against a fourdimensional codespace in which one hears a computer-generated feminine voice read the text-based code underlying and co-realizing this process of self writing through the digital methods of linguistic, visual, and spatiotemporal encoding with which we are just beginning to become familiar. In this way, Transient Self-Portrait not only comments on the former, gendered poetic depictions of women as flawed, decaying, quite limited objects of masculine desire, it also underscores how self writing, itself, however paradoxically, functions as a transient, i.e., historically, culturally, cross-modal, and cross-medial spatiotemporal event that enters into our experiences of self and lived space in multiple, complex ways. Notably, these three layers to the poem are further de 350 #WomenTechLit and re encoded in the alternate versions of the e-poem: their original Spanish language, and their French translation, in addition to the English version on which this essay focuses. While none of these linguistically, culturally, historically, and technically- distinct language-based writing practices can overcome their material, cultural and historical conditions of existence or their spatiotemporal coordinates and orientations, per se, their comparative juxtaposition affords some greater awareness of their specific affordances and limits and their status as differential, though also similar encounters with and enframings of the transience of life, self experience, spatiotemporal flux, and language. Transience is, after all, a fundamental, though often unperceived ‘background’ to self experience. Transient Self-Portrait’s multilayered e-poem adeptly underscores the sensorial regimens, emphases, and spacetimes each period, poem, medium, technology, and language of self writing privileges and forgets as these inform experiences of gendered self, self experience, intersubjective interactions, and writing. They share in their encounter with “transience,” which is itself a condition of being spatially and temporally “in between,” critically reframing the digital’s exclusive claim to spatiotemporal dynamism, flux, and flow. The distinct layers of this e-poem cast into relief the individual poems’ media-specific, language-specific, culturally and historically distinct orientations to transience. In the case of La Vega and Góngora’s sonnets, literary critics note the prominence of anaphoric relations between temporal expressions through their usage of words such as “mientras” and “en tanto que.” These temporal expressions communicate a sense of temporal drift or transience, yet even more importantly, they establish an anaphoric relation between one temporal expression and its antecedent, leading times to be calculated, comparatively, by using the prior antecedent as a frame of reference. The sonnets’ poetic senses and engagements with being ‘in between’ are accomplished through these anaphoric relations, which situate readers complexly “between” unfolding processes of self expression, material decline, and technical distortion. Transient Self-Portrait’s own e-poetics play upon the prior anaphoric temporal expressions, juxtaposing all these three, media-specific spatiotemporal self-portraits so that they serve as frames of reference, modify each other, and continue to unfold in complex spatiotemporal relations to this latest poem’s contemporary digital context and vyings with transience. The third section of the e-poem, both similarly and quite differently, invokes contemporary spatiotemporal experiences of transience and being “in between.” Listening to the computer program’s processing of lines of code, reading those on screen, and manipulating the screen visually, readers experience a transience tied to being between the embodied space of reading, one’s visual interface and interac- 351 Shackelford \ R(e)orienting Poetics tions on screen, the computer program’s reading of code, and the larger computational architectures, economies, artists, and material processes co-writing this codespace. It is a complicated, or perhaps, coimplicated return to the aural, embodied, apparently feminine voice of computer-generated, digital writing spaces and their dynamic, multileveled practices of encoding spacetimes that Transient Self-Portrait involves readers in. Its tactical, e-poetic rereadings and reorientations of code/space, like Between Page and Screen’s, creatively register the challenges digital writing and computation and these “architectures of flow” pose to Cartesian understandings of absolute space and affiliated understandings of the self as an absolute, self-contained, abstract, singular, singularly gendered identity. These challenges have only increased since Strachey and Turing’s time. Rather than continuing to oscillate between the prior gendered, spatiotemporal oppositions and a Cartesian understanding of matter and absolute space outside time, their e-poetic engagements with digital spacetimes generate new practice-based knowledges of digital language, computational processes, interfaces, and intersubjective relations that find comparative, exploratory, experimental ways to self-reflexively r(e)orient these transformative relays between writing, reading, books, physical and symbolic space, processes of computation, intersubjective experience, and the language practices and poetics that join them. In doing so, they bring forth untapped potential in the spaces and relays between digital spacetime, other dimensions of lived space, and performative practices of literary self writing. Their comparative writing practices work with, against, behind, beside, and between twentyfirst century codespace, rigorously sidestepping the oppositional, critical methods of much twentieth century literature and criticism. In this way, they provide important, practice-based, immanent models for critical praxis that, because they register emergent spatiotemporal dynamics and interrelations characteristic of code/space, might open onto alternate ways to live through the lived spaces ‘between.’ WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations Matter.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham, NC and London, 2010. 234-257. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso Press, 1991. Borsuk, Amaranth. Personal website. http://www.amaranthborsuk.com/ Borsuk, Amaranth and Brad Bouse. Between Page and Screen. NY: Siglio Press, 2012. Cixous, Hélène. Coming to Writing and Other Essays, trans. 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