Bridges between net art and e-lit
June 30, 2021
Several years ago, I presented a skeletal version of what would become my dissertation research proposal at a special symposium on artists' archives. I made the case that preservation concerns arise early in the life of artists' works and archival materials (and for many artists, there's not a firm distinction between artwork and archive in the midst of the creative process), and that artists do a great deal of archival work as part of their artistic practice. Yet, this labor is not well understood by archival practitioners and scholars -- we've talked a lot about how to care for media artworks that enter cultural heritage institutions but not much about how artists are already doing this. So I wrote a dissertation on this topic, as well as a forthcoming article that I'm very excited to share more about in the coming months.
The dissertation represents a lot of work that I'm proud of, but there were many aspects of it that I was not happy with (I suspect this is not an uncommon symptom of writing a dissertation). A conversation from that symposium where I presented the early kernel of the research, though, has stuck with me and illustrates part of what I felt was wrong with the dissertation research. I was getting lunch and catching up with a mentor who I hadn't seen since I started the PhD program at UNC-CH. As I told her about my developing dissertation research, she posed a question: "So, are you ever going to get back to researching poetry and literature?"
I felt a bit like I was being called out as an outsider -- which I was to an extent. My background is in creative writing and literary studies: writing and reading poetry have my passions since middle school, and I pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in this area before turning to a PhD in LIS. I've always been interested in the visual arts as well, and especially intersections between art and poetry. While working on my MFA in Poetry, I took several art history and studio art classes and found more of a community with the artists than with the writers. I also happened to get an art history Masters degree while completing the PhD in LIS...
My aim with the LIS PhD was to study how digital culture is preserved at the intersection of communities and memory institutions, though I focused on visual artists in the dissertation. There were a number of contingencies that contributed to this -- getting the art history MA concurrently had me engrossed in that discourse; through earlier research, I got really interested in Paper-Thin as a case study and wanted to explore that more. I didn't realize it much during the process of writing the dissertation, but I'm realizing now that I was really missing out on a deeper engagement with poetry and literary studies, which are the foundation of my intellectual training and just the cultural forms that I'm most familiar with.
I certainly benefited from charting into new territory for myself (both in terms of the questions and methods of my research) with the dissertation, though I'm now feeling the pull to return more to my intellectual roots. A couple recent experiences have really brought that even more clearly into focus. I just wrapped up teaching a summer session class on the history of the book that caused me to delve into writing and reading technologies anew. There are questions I've been considering about digital cultural heritage that resonate with longer histories of the diverse cultural practices of reading and writing. Last month, I also attended (virtually) my second Electronic Literature Organization conference. There's something really special about this community -- which brings together scholars and writers to discuss historical works alongside presentations of brand new e-lit pieces -- and I want to participate more in the important archival and documentation work happening in and around ELO.
Of course, there are crucial points of connection between the net-based art that I focused on in my art history Master's thesis and in my LIS dissertation and the e-lit that I plan to focus on in the next phase of my research. There are similar preservation issues dealing with complex, obsolescing technologies, and there's a great deal of crossover between the communities. As I move forward in my research, I hope to build bridges between the digital art history that I worked with in my recent scholarship and the histories of digital literature that I have previously engaged with as a reader and writer.
The two presentations I have given at ELO 2021 and 2018 are good emblems of the kind of connections I hope to build moving forward. In 2018, I presented examples of 90s browser artworks as alternative reading interfaces for works of e-lit on the Web. Just last month, I presented a paper discussing Brian Mackern's net art latino database as a work of hypertext literature demonstrating a particular mode of a creator acting as an archivist.
There are benefits to making these connections across domains that should probably be in conversation more, though the boundaries of academic disciplines can be tricky to navigate. I suppose I'm well positioned to build these bridges since I'm actually not housed in either of these disciplines! A great thing about being an archival studies scholar is that everybody makes records, artists and writers alike. Though there are definitely distinct histories and concerns that shape the preservation of visual arts versus literary heritage, there are significant points of overlap as well.