NO LEGACY || LITERATURA ELECTRONICA

Location: Simpson Library
1111 8th St
San Francisco, CA
Date(s): February 16, 2017 - May 05, 2017
Creator(s): CCA's exhibit was curated by Angela Berry & Lisa Conrad. The original UC Berkeley exhibit was arranged by Élika Ortega & Alex Saum-Pascual.

No Legacy || Literatura electrónica (NL||LE) originated at the Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley in spring 2016, curated by Alex Saum-Pascual, Assistant Professor of Spanish at UC Berkeley, & Élika Ortega, Assistant Professor of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies at Northeastern University.

NL||LE at CCA presents a subset of works from the original exhibition that focus on electronic literature in Spanish and English together with print works of contemporary post-digital experimentalism. Devoted to post digital issues, the works gathered here signal a nonlinear relationship between print and digital which blur the lines between them and look for instances in which they compliment each other. What is the role of print now that everything can be made digital? What are the ways digital objects are informed by print?

The exhibition showcases the use of computational and digital technologies in literary production in the networked world and its material connections with 20th-century technologized approaches to literature like futurism, concretism, creationism, stridentism, magical realism, and others. By bringing purposefully together a collection of print and electronic works in the single space of a gallery, NL||LE takes on a media archaeological perspective to create a “space of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated,” in Siegfried Zielinski’s words. NL||LE asks questions that highlight unconventional literary relationships like the look or the handling of the works as objects.

You can read and view more materials from the exhibition in the VAULT digital archive.

Gallery

Blanco (closeup)

Octavio Paz

1a. ed. México: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1967. Courtesy of Bancroft Library – not yet cataloged.

Opening Symposium (UC Berkeley)

A recording of the Opening Symposium from the original 2016 exhibit at UC Berkeley. Speakers included Alex Saum-Pascual, Dene Grigar, Élika Ortega, Roberto Cruz Arzabal, Leonardo Flores, Sandy Baldwin, and Alex Saum.

Blanco (installation shot)

Octavio Paz

Its Name Was Penelope

Judy Malloy

With simple randomizing screens and open-ended text, in this early hypertextual novel, Judy Malloy recreates the mechanisms of remembering. Browsing through photos in an album, the reader explores different parts of an artist’s life—yet the photographs in the computer are in continuous shuffle. Memories come and go in apparently effortless and natural, yet unpredictable, patterns that weave into each other in resemblance of Penelope's web.

Babel's Monkeys

Luís Sarmento

Using words from real-time streams of Twitter public feeds, this automatic generator cyclically rewrites the biblical episode of “The Tower of Babel” (Genesis 11:1-9 –King James Version). Originally, the work was presented on a wooden plinth evoking the shape of a pulpit or a reading lectern. Here the biblical generator is ripped off its pulpit, making us reflect on the religious nature of textual re-embodiment—now within the walls of a public library. Its endless reiterations evoke Borges’ “The Library of Babel.”

The 27th. El 27

Eugenio Tiselli

A massive print out of a dynamically generated digital text. "El 27 || The 27th procedurally allegorizes the slow encroachment of finance capitalism and linguistic colonialism in to Mexican political life. Ever day that the New York Stock Exchange closes with a positive percent, a section of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution is translated from Spanish into a highly distorted computer-generated English. The work is a simply yet scathing expression of the loss of Mexican culture and political autonomy in the wake of NAFTA under the excesses of computational capitalism." — ELMCIP