I’ve just received a copy of the preliminary program (pdf) for the upcoming 10 year anniversary E-Poetry Festival in Buffalo, New York and it’s little short of astonishing. With critics, poets, and performers from Canada, the U.S.A., Scandinavia, the U.K., France, and Australia (among others), it promises to be yet another field-defining event. (And you can get some sense of how far the field has come in just ten years by looking at the program from 2001 – clearly, a much broader and even more resolutely international group of writers are beginning to identify as digital workers now.) My first time participating in E-Poetry was in 2003 when it was held in Morgantown, West Virginia. I had been a PhD student at SUNY Buffalo for two years at that point and I presented my first conference paper whose title was far more intriguing than the paper itself – “Computer Kiss: Mechanical Love and the Digital Poem.” And while my paper was nothing to write home about, as the expression goes, I will always value that first defining experience as it didn’t introduce me to the mores of conference-going so much as it introduced me to a lively, intense, cutting-edge creative and critical community of like-minded people. And it’s this community that I identify as one of my homes.

This year I’ll be presenting a paper on the Archeological Media Lab – a paper which I expect will approach the pressing issue of preserving and maintaining access to early works of e-literature through a discussion of the challenges and opportunities presented by the creation of this lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I expect I will discuss how the AML is propelled equally by the need to maintain access to early works of electronic literature (and note too that, given how quickly technology changes, sometimes an “early work of electronic literature” may have been created as recent as 2001 and is similarly no longer viewable on current platforms) and by the need to archive and maintain the computers these works were created on.

Here is an example I often use to illustrate what I mean: from the perspective of a literary scholar, Canadian poet bpNichol’s First Screening – created in 1983-1984 using an Apple IIe and the Apple BASIC programming language – cannot be understood if we view it with an emulator, with Hypercard, or via a Quicktime movie version of the twelve programmed poems. First Screening is a series of poems whose meaning is actually activated through the writer/programmer’s invitation to the reader/view to type in commands; for example, in line 110 of the code for First Screening, Nichol writes: “REM   FOR THE CURIOUS VIEWER/READER THERE’S AN ‘OFF-SCREEN ROMANCE’ AT 1748. YOU JUST HAVE TO TUNE IN THE PROGRAMME.” Furthermore, even though First Screening has been preserved via emulator, hypercard and Quicktime movie on the Electronic Literature Directory, there is simply no substitute for the unique interface and physical structure of the Apple II computer; as Matthew Kirschenbaum points out in his groundbreaking 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, the Apple II computer has no hard drive; instead, “a program is loaded by inserting the disk in the external drive and booting the machine. In practical terms, this meant first retrieving the program by going to one’s collection of disks and rummaging through them…Consider the contrast in affordances to a file system mounted on a hard drive: here you located the program you wanted by reading a printed or handwritten label, browsing like you would record albums or manila file folders, not by clicking on an icon” (33). Everything about the Apple II system offers both writer and reader an utterly different set of experiences than when they read or write on, say, a MacBook or a PC or when they read/write a poem such as First Screening by way of Windows.

I will post the entirety of my e-poetry paper here sometime in mid-May. I hope to see many of you there!