in: Publishing as Artistic Practice, ed. by Annette Gilbert (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016): 100-115. Experimental Writing in its Moment of Digital Technization: Post-Digital Literature and Print-on-Demand Publishing Hannes Bajohr '&' An unsuspecting passer-by who steps into Stephanie Syjuco’s installation Phantoms (H__RT _F D_RKN_SS)1 — a couple of stools in front of a table on which books are arranged among potted plants — might be unaware that it is an artwork. Attracted by the black, shiny covers, the visitor could pick up one of these volumes, maybe the one carrying the title http://etext.virginia.edu/ etcbin/toccer-new2?id=ConDark.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/ english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all. Leafing through, fZWdWSVWd iag^Vcg[U]^kdWS^[lW that the book contains the text of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, culled from the URL of the university website on the title; the other books in the installation, consisting of the same novel, come from other sources. Retaining the “dirty” text including all HTML formatting, links, legal disclaimers, copyright notices, and other digital peri- and epitext, Syjuco turned this online source into a printed publication. An immaterial digital ile is materialized in the shape of a book — a print on demand book, to be precise. Since the 1990s, print on demand (POD), which permits producing a single copy of a book as an immediate response to an order, has been used both by traditional independent presses as well as large publishing houses. For independent publishers, it is attractive because of its relative cheapness in small rotations; for larger houses, because it allows for a comprehensive backlist and a slender inventory.2 For both, it alleviates a vol1 Stephanie Syjuco, atile aspect of publishing: gauging how many copies need to Phantoms (H__RT _F D_RKN_SS) be printed, that is, the creation of “speculative stock.” While and related works, accessed August 10, 2015, http:// many houses use POD only for galleys, review copies, and www.stephaniesyjuco.com/ otherwise out-of-print backlist titles, some have made the p_phantoms.html. 2 Ann Haugland, “Opening switch completely.3 the Gates: Print On-Demand Yet POD is not solely the domain of commercial pubPublishing as Cultural Production,” Publishing lishing, as Syjuco’s Phantoms show. The emergence of serResearch Quarterly 22, no. 3 vices like Lulu (est. 2002 ) and Blurb (est. 2005 ) has allowed (2006): 3–16. 3 Kelly Gallagher, “Printprivate consumers to participate as well. These companies let on-Demand: New Models and anybody print bound books with minimal efort at low cost, Value Creation,” Publishing Research Quarterly 30, no. 2 and practically no inancial risk for the author.4 While it is (2014): 244–248. possible to produce just a single copy for private use, these 4 At the time of writing (Summer / Fall 2015), Lulu.com services also ofer integration into the commercial book marcharged $ 3.85 for a 200ket by allocating ISBNs and selling their customers’ titles on page paperback in US trade size (6 × 9 inches), and $ 13.13 either their own websites or those of commercial booksellers, for the hardcover equivasuch as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. lent. The royalties for the author-publisher depend on Syjuco’s Phantoms is an example of the use of POD as the selling price set by the artistic practice. But, one might further ask, is it also a work author, but far exceed those of traditional publishers. of literature? Syjuco’s books lack many of the characteristics Yet Lulu does not ofer any that determine the literary discourse to which commercial copyediting or other types of quality control, and for POD unquestionably belongs. Rather, Phantoms seems to POD providers who do, like take part in the system of art: despite the inherent reproducBarnes & Noble’s NOOK Press, prices can quickly ibility of POD, the books do not circulate, are not dissemigo up to a thousand dollars nated, and have no pretensions for finding an expansive or more. '&( Hannes Bajohr readership; they do not refer to, comment on, or interfere with the rules and practices of the system of literature. And although these books are fabricated by a technology that ensures virtually ininite print runs, they are treated as unique objects, bound to the space of the installation and the time of its exhibition. Not least, they adhere to the logic of the art market, which produces value through scarcity. It matters whether a POD book is read as an artwork or as literary text, and not only because, from the perspective of reception, the interpretative arsenal and thus the evaluation of the work difer. The artist’s arsenal of production — the methods and strategies available to them — also varies considerably depending on the system in which they decide to operate. Indeed, a whole subculture has developed that deliberately chooses the system of literature, and not art, to investigate the bond between digital and analog by employing POD. It is not through the technology’s applica5 Alessandro Ludovico, Feij#Z_]_jWbFh_dj0J^[CkjWj_ed tion in commercial publishing, but rather through consumere\FkXb_i^_d]i_dY['./* use POD providers, that a new genre of literature has consol(Eindhoven/Rotterdam: Onomatopee 77, 2012), 29. idated. Lulu and Blurb have not only provided the means of 6 Ibid., 153. production and distribution, which led to the emergence of a 7 Ibid., 70. 8 Melvin L. Alexenberg, The range of publishing platforms like Gauss PDF and Troll Future of Art in a Postdigital Thread; through the constraints of the medium of POD, they Age: From Hellenistic to also helped shape a genre that fuses elements of concepHebraic Consciousness, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Intellect, 2011), tual writing, electronic literature, and what was once, in 10; Florian Cramer, “What is Soviet formalism, called factography. This genre might be ‘Post-Digital’?” APRJA 3, no. 1 (2014), accessed June 22, called post-digital literature. Like Phantoms, it plays on the 2015, http://www.aprja.net/ strange status of POD as at once analog and digital; but un?p=1318, now also in: David M. Berry and Michael like Syjuco’s work, it scrutinizes the implications of this amDieter, eds., Postdigital biguity through decidedly literary means. Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design (Basingstoke: I propose that we view exponents of this current as Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), forging a new interchange between publishing technology, 12–26. One could argue that in this interpretation, dissemination strategy, and textual genre. This development “post-digital” describes is symptomatic of a larger cultural shift towards digital techa pervasive cultural mood of discontent with the digital, nization, and of the fact that the object produced by POD is as testified by the increasing paradigmatically post-digital in its ontology. But because the ennoblement of the thing in art, theory, and everyday meaning of these terms is not self-evident, let me start with life. The rise of thing and some basic considerations. materiality theories would then be the academic equivalent to the auratization of the post-digital, the handcrafted and artisanal, in the kind of tweed-andembossed-cowhide semiotics that rose to the epitome of futurist style in the 2013 film Her, which seems so plausible a depiction of the future precisely because it so obviously announces the longing for tangible substance. POD as Post-Digital In Post-Digital Print, Alessandro Ludovico writes that “the death of paper — in retrospect, one of the most unfortunate and embarrassing prophecies of the information age — has obviously not happened.“ 5 In his account of the development of independent and neo-avant-garde publishing, paper hasn’t been replaced by screens, and, on the contrary, the '&) Experimental Writing in its Moment of Digital Technization relationship between digital and analog turns out to be not antagonistic, but complementary: “Digital is the paradigm for content and quantity of information; analogue is the paradigm for usability and interfacing.”6 Because the book, rather than the screen, is the most user-friendly and ofers the best interface for the engagement with text, it will survive. More importantly, however, Ludovico maintains that it is increasingly the very materiality of books that gives them their cultural weight. A digital ile, or more precisely, one represented on a digital reading-device, seems leeting, cheap, and less serious than a tangible “post-digital” object. This is what makes POD so popular.7 The term “post-digital” is often employed to denote the recuperated value of materiality. Mel Alexenberg has called the post-digital a longing for the “humanization of digital technologies,” and Florian Cramer considers it the state of “disenchantment with new media,” as well as a light from the increasing hegemony of digital technology toward DIY culture.8 But it seems odd to use the term post-digital for POD, not only because it is a form of digital printing (and not something “truly analog,” like, say, silkscreen), but because its outcomes often look cheap and lack the very quality that “post-digital” seems to indicate (just look at the blindingly white paper, template typesetting, and often imperfect binding of most any recent academic book). POD is not post-digital in this sense of a nostalgia for 9 Cramer, “What is ‘PostDigital’?” materiality-as-quality. Rather, I would like to understand it 10 Hans Blumenberg, in epochal and ontological terms, and follow an observation “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der made by Cramer: “‘Post-digital’ […] refers to a state in which Phänomenologie,” in Schriften the disruption brought STagf by digital information techno zur Technik, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler logy has already occurred.”9 POD is post-digital because it (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), points to the historicity of this disruption and makes it per163–202. Translations from foreign sources mine, unless ceptible. otherwise noted. 11 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 127. Blumenberg modifies the concept of ¼life-world½ considerably. For him, it does not describe an actual state, but acts as a “limitcon# cept”(Grenzbegriff), that is, something that can only be inferred but never actually reached. Absolute life-world would be the absence of all resistance to reality. He ofers another name: “paradise.” Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Lebenswelt, ed. Manfred Sommer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 34, 50. Technization and the Post-Digital What does it mean for a technology to no longer be new? German philosopher Hans Blumenberg made a distinction between “technology” and “technization.” 10 Technology suggests itself as discrete matters of fact in the objectivity of its artifacts. Once introduced, it is there, only to be replaced by better, newer technology. Technization, on the other hand, is the ongoing process by which technology fades into the background of our everyday experience. Blumenberg called this quotidian consciousness the “life-world,” a term borrowed from Edmund Husserl, who deined it as the “realm of original self-evidences.” 11 For Blumenberg, the life-world is that which in its unquestionable obviousness (Evidenz, often translated “self- '&* Hannes Bajohr evidence”) lacks all resistance that would make it stick out as conspicuous. Similar to Heidegger’s “readiness-to-hand,” 12 but without his scorn of technology, Blumenberg described technization as the slow sinking-into-the-lifeworld of what was once artificial, unnatural, obtrusive, and novel. Any technology is, in the process of technization, “always-already” on the way toward this transparency, and becoming invisible to its users. Only a sudden event of resistance can disturb this process and make it apparent — a resistance that, as I will show, POD provides. It seems that, with the initial rise of digital technology more than a generation behind us, we are now experiencing a threshold moment of such technization. The fact that something is produced, distributed, or perceived by digital means is no longer the irst thing we notice about it, if we notice it at all. Digital technology is in the process of losing resistance to our experience of reality. Gradually, as Blumenberg writes, “The artiicial reality, the foreigner among the encountered things of nature, sinks back into the ‘universe of what is pre-given as obvious,’ the life-world.” 13 If today’s subjects of technization are digital technol12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John ogy and its practices, then the outcome of this process — their Macquarrie and Edward having become life-world — might be called “the digital.” Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 98. Thus understood, the digital is, irst, the epistemological inte13 Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt gral of digital technology; Blumenberg calls this a “concept of und Technisierung,” 190; he quotes Husserl, Crisis, 180. reality,” that is, something that conditions the experience 14 Hans Blumenberg, “The of the world without itself being apparent as a factor.14 But Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” because this process of digital technization is not complete in New Perspectives in (after all, we can still be aware of it), the digital does not yet German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, determine our life-world absolutely. The digital can therefore ed. Richard E. Amacher and also describe, second, a temporality, a threshold moment that Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, is precariously situated not between the old and the new, but 1979), 29–48. My description the “opaquely” novel and the “transparently” evident; it vacof the “concept of reality” is too abbreviated to do it illates between the no-longer and the not-yet.15 justice and it deserves more If the digital is a concept of reality or a temporality, explanation than I can provide here. My point is that increasingly transparent to scrutiny, the post-digital is what it makes sense to diferentiate performs the sudden yank that makes it apparent again. It between the transparency of technology and the transprovokes a disharmony in the structure of the obvious, thus parency of the way this drawing attention to it, and makes the process of technizafirst transparency changes our experience of reality. tion experienceable. The post-digital denotes the ontological 15 Understanding “the status of an object, S_T[Ygage^k ^aVYWV between the digital” as epistemic and temporal category might help already-evident and the still-new. As soon as it is possiblefa to restrain the term again question which category applies in a given case, the postsomewhat after its recent over-expansion, which digital ofers the resistance necessary to bring back to has threatened to wipe out consciousness the otherwise elusive process of technization for good any residue of meaning left in this already and its resulting concept of reality. highly vague YedY[fj; see What this means is that we don’t live in a post-digital, Alexander Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minnea# but very much a digital moment. The digital and the postpolis: University of Minnesota digital are not opposed terms, nor does the post-digital come Press, 2014). '&+ “after” the digital. Rather, they operate on diferent categorical planes: As a concept of reality / temporality, the digital is what is disclosed by the ambiguous ontology of the post-digital. With Vilém Flusser, one could call the postdigital object an Unding — an object suspended between ontological states.16 A book produced by POD technology has the potential to be a post-digital Unding. Its vacillating states are usually described as “analog” 16 Vilém Flusser, “Das Unding and “digital,” its forms of presence as material and immateI & II”, in Dinge und Undinge: Phänomenologische Skizzen rial. The most notable way in which it embodies its ontologi(Munich: Hanser, 1993), cal ambiguity is in fZW relation between f[le and product. 80–89; English as Vilém Flusser, “The Non-Thing I & II,” POD has an inherent connection to a digital ile; its in The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, trans. very existence relies on the creation of a digital master from Anthony Mathews (London: which the copies of the book are made. While this is true of Reaktion Books, 1999), 85–94. almost any book printed today, with POD this connection It is hard to find a suitable English equivalent for the between ile and object is especially unstable. Because of the German term Unding. While ease of production and dissemination that services like Lulu the lexical meaning is “absurdity,” it literally transand Blurb provide, it can be investigated, manipulated, and lates as “non-thing,” and this thrown into crisis by artistic and literary means (Syjuco’s is how the English version renders it. But it is a peculiarPhantoms already hint in this direction). In turn, as we shall ity of the German language see, the attributes of the ile are determined by the material to retain what is apparently negated by the prefix “un-.” constraints of POD. Any inclination to hierarchize the two Rather, it qualifies something elements — the text and the book, the immaterial and its as questionable in its essence: An Unmensch is not materialization — thus inevitably fails. “Electronic textuality a non-human but an inhuis […] locatable, even though we are not accustomed to thinkmane one, and an Unkraut is not a non-plant, but one that ing of it in physical terms,” 17 Matthew Kirschenbaum pointed is not wanted, or in the wrong out in discussing a “forensic” approach to storage media. This place: a weed. Similarly, an Unding is a thing whose idea holds for POD as Unding, too; few things illustrate “the very thing-ness is in question. heterogeneity of digital data and its embodied inscriptions” Jean-François Lyotard employed a similar ambiguity as well as this post-digital object does.18 when he used the plural for the title of his 1985 Centre Pompidou exhibition “Les Immatériaux.” Taking Lyotard as a cue, a possible translation for Unding could thus be “immatter.” 17 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 3. 18 Ibid., 6. 19 www.gauss-pdf.com; www.traumawien.at; www. trollthread.tumblr.com; www.0x0a.li (all accessed August 10, 2015). There are certainly many more platforms / publishers, like Truck Books or basbooks, but I believe that their practices are well represented by the ones discussed here. 20 Ludovico, Post-digital Print, 67. Infrathin Platforms: GaussPDF, Troll Thread, 0 n 0a, Traumawien This heterogeneity informs both the focus of investigation and the mode of production in a recent literary current that could be called post-digital literature, whose dissemination strategy combines digital publishing and POD. Notable authors include Holly Melgard, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Steve McLaughlin, and Gregor Weichbrodt; notable publishers are GaussPDF in the US and Traumawien in Europe. Sometimes, the term “publisher” is avoided in favor of designations like “publishing collective,” as in the case of Troll Thread, or Textkollektiv, as with my own project, 0j0a.19 Whatever these entities call themselves, they execute the “publishing gesture”20 that is a minimum requirement '&, Hannes Bajohr for partaking in literature as a social system. Even in the digital, this gesture remains necessary. The status of a PDF ile available on a private website changes considerably once the very same ile has been “published” on the website of a “publisher.”21 J. Gordon Faylor, the operator of gauss-pdf.com, has thus called his practice of hosting iles not only “publish21 This is contra Florian Cramer, “Post-digital ing” but also providing an “infrathin platform for the staging Writing,” in Code and of submitted works.”22 GaussPDF does little more than what Concept: Literature and the Digital, ed. Hannes Bajohr, authors could do on their own given a modicum of digital (Berlin: Frohmann, (&',): “In competence. But in a literary system largely devoid of monethe 21st century, even the primary criterion of literature tary expectations, this staging has a social rather than a comhas become obsolete: that it mercial function. It not only makes public but also publicizes; must be published. On the Internet, the classical it ofers recognizability, multiplication, and an advance of distinction between nonpublished personal writing and trust for the author. published writing is moot, and GaussPDF was founded in 2010 as an online platwith it the distinction between 23 everyday communication and form for “digitally based works.” It publishes Google docs publishing.” This position and zip iles as much as movs and mp3s. “Who’s to say that overlooks the fact that the something as miniscule or ephemeral as a JPG or hyperlink perlocutionary part of a speech act (and the publishing (i. e. an HTML ile) couldn’t be considered as much a publigesture is one) depends in its cation or circumscribed production as a 300-page book or a outcome on the identity and the status of the agent collection of MP3s?” says Faylor.24 While it still publishes performing it: It makes a diference who publishes what digital submissions, GaussPDF has followed a trend in conin which context. The temporary experimental literature aXfgd`[`Y away from purely blindness to these conditions digital publications to a post-digital form of dissemination: accounts for much of the crushed hopes of early a dual strategy of web and print-on-demand publishing. In Internet utopianism. 2013, Faylor started the imprint GPDF Editions. Each title is 22 Caleb Beckwith, “Interview with J. Gordon Faylor,” free for download as a PDF, and can be purchased as a POD accessed June 24, 2015, http:// book on Lulu.com. “With little more than a working knowltheconversant.org/?p=8426. It is important to note that the edge of the [Lulu publication] wizard, one can easily bypass “PDF” in GaussPDF is not editorial intervention, marketing strategies, and the genersupposed to refer to the file format but the Gauss probabilpublicity bullshit that bolsters most literary markets.”25 al ity distribution function in statistics — although it is clear that Faylor chose Lulu as the “most eicacious way to manage hasthe association with the file ty production at a relatively low cost. I bet TROLLTHREAD type is very much encouraged. agrees.”26 23 Kristen Gallagher, “The Gauss interview: Chris It does: Troll Thread, using a Tumblr with a simple Alexander talks to J. Gordon theme as a website, has used this model since its inception Faylor,” accessed June 24, 2015, http://jacket2.org/ in late 2010. At irst limited to a small group of authors, incommentary/gauss-interview. creasingly it publishes the work of others, too. Thus, the term 24 J. Gordon Faylor, “Lulu Kind,” in Code and Concept, “publishing collective” has been both chosen and dismissed, ed. Hannes Bajohr (Berlin: Frohmann, (&',). and Troll Thread’s exact status is unclear even among its 25 Ibid. members: 26 Tan Lin, “Gauss PDF Interview with J. Gordon Faylor,” accessed June 24, 2015, http://www.poetryfoundation. org/harriet/2014/05/gausspdf-interview-with-j-gordonfaylor/?woo. “Chris Sylvester: […] It was careless, largely sloppy. Lazy disregard for convention or standard operating procedures or whatever. Troll Thread started on a whim: publish what we wanted when we wanted. This shambling-ness still happens. That’s why Troll Thread is a tumblr and not a press and I like that. Experimental Writing in its Moment of Digital Technization '&Holly Melgard: But Chris, TT is too a press. How is it just a tumblr? TT is a press that publishes using a tumblr and Lulu Print On Demand. TT publishes each poem by uploading it onto Lulu and then linking it to tumblr in the form of both a downloadable .pdf ebook for free and a P.O.D. book for bgdUZSeW ¹$) The PDF / POD dual publishing model has since become a soft standard for experimental writing, and has even been copied by the art establishment. The 2014 Zurich exhibition Poetry Will Be Made By All, co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kenneth Goldsmith, featured books by authors born after 1989; on the accompanying website, all titles could either be downloaded or purchased on Lulu.28 German author Gregor Weichbrodt, whose output was represented in Zurich with the book On the Road for 17,527 Miles (a list of Google Maps driving instructions recreating the route of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), started his own writer’s collective, 0j0a, in 2014 (of which I am the co-founder). On its website, Weichbrodt has 27 Tan Lin, “Troll Thread re-issued the book, with a new design and 0j0a as the pubInterview,” accessed June 24, 2015, http://www. lisher, again as PDF and Lulu print.29 Such re-dressing and poetryfoundation.org/ re-contextualizing has become especially easy with POD. harriet/2014/05/troll-threadAnother inluential platform is Vienna-based Traumainterview. 28 “Poetry will be made wien. Founded, like its American peers, in 2010, Traumawien by all!” accessed is a self-described “paradoxical print publisher.” The paraAugust 10, 2015, http:// poetrywillbemadebyall.com/ dox here, as co-founder Lukas Gross wrote in a mission statelibrary. So far, the exhibition, ment, consists in “transferring late-breaking digital aesthetco-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kenneth ics into book form.”30 The form of the book means that these Goldsmith, lists 131 poets. aesthetics are not merely a conceptual feint — they are actu29 Gregor Weichbrodt, “On the Road,” accessed ally meant to be read. Traumawien’s is a decidedly literary August 10, 2015, http://0x0a. gesture, not one belonging to the visual arts. J. R. Carpenter li/en/text/on-the-road. 30 Lukas Gross, “Traumawien spells out the underlying assumptions thusly: “The vast maStatement February 2010,” jority of the text produced by computer systems — protocols, accessed August 10, 2015, http://traumawien.at/about. listings, listings [sic], logs, algorithms, binary codes — is never 31 J. R. Carpenter, “Paraseen or read by humans. This text is nonetheless internal to doxical print publishers TRAUMAWIEN,” accessed our daily thoughts and actions. As such, Traumawien considAugust 29, 2015, http:// ers these new structures to be literary.”31 jacket2.org/commentary/ paradoxical-print-publishersWhile the presentation of these entities might difer traumawien. considerably — whereas GaussPDF and Troll Thread are of32 In the case of Troll Thread, there is not even ten intentionally obscure, rarely ofering any description of a hint as to what it is; their publications, 0j0a and Traumawien tend to explain and the “about” page ofers the vaguely Fichtean equation: interpret their work32 — there are some basic similarities that “TROLL THREAD IS TROLL allow for grouping these platforms together: Apart from the THREAD.” The diference can at least somewhat be dual publishing strategy of PDF ile and POD book, they rely explained by the fact that the on the Internet as the sole medium of distribution, and comUS-based platforms are part of a literary discourse bine elements of conceptual writing and generative electronthat is more open to, and ic literature. more acquainted with, the aesthetics of conceptual poetry; more about this in the next section. Hannes Bajohr '&. “A Genre unto Itself”: Elements of Post-Digital Literature If POD is a post-digital Unding that by virtue of its inherent ontological ambiguity makes the process of technization experienceable, then any POD book should be able to carry out this destabilization, and this is certainly so. But what characterizes the post-digital literature of platforms like GaussPDF, 0j0a, Troll Thread, and Traumawien is that it highlights and exacerbates this destabilizing potential. What unites their various strategies and elevates them to the level of literary genre is that they all proceed from an acute awareness of the latent self-disclosure of post-digital objects in their structure, production, and dissemination. I would now like to look at two elements of this genre that seem to characterize it especially well: The inluence of generative and conceptual practices that play with the status of the connection between ile and object, and the turn to factography, a type of writing that takes as its topic the structural, socioeconomic, and material conditions of its production. A) The Generative and the Conceptual Element Many of the titles that these platforms ofer as POD books and PDFs are, in a way, anti-books. They are rarely intended to be read closely, but rather lipped through, or just thought about.33 Sometimes, thorough reading is discouraged by content; sometimes, by the sheer quantity of the published material. Many works exhibit an anti-expressive sentiment, and revel in the excessive, combining strategies of conceptual writing on the one hand and electronic literature on the other. Computer-generated liter33 “Joey Yearous-Algozin: […] I think people read TT in ature is based on the ability to produce large amounts of texts passing and sporadically. automatically, and has an almost natural tendency towards We know from Lulu that only a few people actually buy [`g`VSf[a`. Conceptualism, understood as letting the idea of a the physical books.” Lin, “Troll work take precedence over its material form or the experience Thread Interview.” 34 Especially for conceptualof that form, often relishes the conlict between an idea and ism, these arguments have the limits of its realizability — just think of Douglas Huebler’s become commonplace, and the backlash against them Variable Piece # 70 (In Process) Global (1971), in which he prohas already begun; see posed “to photographically document the existence of everyMarjorie Perlof, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other one alive.” Both modes of production, because of the ruleMeans in the New Century following inherent to them, have a penchant for displacing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Craig the author-subject, and giving the outcome an aesthetic auDworkin, “The Fate of Echo,” tonomy even as it devalues its status as “work.”34 in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual However, neither electronic literature nor conceptual Writing (Evanston: Northwriting seems to fully encompass post-digital literature. The western University Press, 2011), xxiii–liv. “return to print” performed by these platforms stands counter 35 N. Katherine Hayles, to the purported genealogy of electronic literature “as a conElectronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary tinuation of experimental print literature,”35 thus suggesting (Notre Dame: University of some kind of directional development. Post-digital literature Notre Dame Press, 2009), 17. '&/ Experimental Writing in its Moment of Digital Technization rejects this teleological trajectory; as I have shown, it rather highlights the connection between object and ile, insisting on the work’s status as post-digital Unding. Similarly, J. Gordon Faylor deems the association with conceptualism accidental,36 and Troll Thread member Joey Yearous-Algozin considers “this writing as coming after conceptual writing. It couldn’t have been made without that break, but in the permission it aforded us, something diferent emerged.” While both electronic literature and conceptual writing are inluences, “this work has become a genre unto itself.”37 These self-descriptions certainly must be taken with a grain of salt; they are more apt for some works than for others. For instance, Traumawien has professed a focus on “networked texts, algorithmic texts, interictions, chatlogs, codeworks, software art and visual mashup prose,”38 and published a book by Australian codeworks writer Mez Breeze, whose poetry appropriates the look and vocabulary of programming languages (Human Readable Messages, 2011). Conversely, a book like Lawrence Giin’s Ex Tempore (Troll Thread, 2011) seems to be what one could call an “old fashioned” conceptual writing project. Each of its 5000 lines contains nothing but the time of day, typed out manually by Giin, over a period of 24 hours. It begins: “It is now 12:00:00 AM on October 28, 2011,”39 and ends, 163 pages later: “It is now 11:59:59 PM on October 28, 2011.”40 Combining performance and self-constraint, it is written in the vein of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy (2001) and Day (2003), in which Goldsmith wrote down WhWdkfZ[`Y 36 “Given the accessibility ZWeS[V in the span of a week, and retyped an entire edition and contemporaneity of its afect, Conceptual methof the New York Times, respectively.41 But simply by being ods have accrued a wider published in the context of Troll Thread, the fact that 8k audience since 2010, doubtless. But despite precipitatTempore was typed — and not copied and pasted, or genera ing some misleading ted by code — is alternately highlighted and called into doubt, characterizations of GPDF (e. g. that it only publishes raising the suspicion that it was not produced in the asserted Conceptual work), this has mostly been an invigorat- manual way (how to start exactly at 12 am? how to reach ing development. […] GPDF ex-actly 5000 lines?). This suspicion is enough to give it a acts merely as a feasible place for Conceptual works post-digital status, making apparent the digital as a concept to land among other types of reality, which Day did not (yet) have. of work; there is certainly An actual combination of electronic literature and no direct or overarching afiliation.” Lin, “Gauss PDF conceptual writing strategies can be found in Stephen Interview.” McLaughlin’s Puniverse (GaussPDF, 2014). “An ingenuous 37 Lin, “Troll Thread Interview,” emphasis mine. crossing of an idiom set and a rhyming dictionary” (as the 38 Gross, “Traumawien subtitle reads), Puniverse b^Ske fZdagYZ S^^ rhyming Statement.” 39 Lawrence Gifin, Ex combinafions of the elements of a given number of idioms, Tempore (Troll Thread, 2011), 5. producing a plethora of “puns.” An expression like “a bad 40 Ibid., 168. 41 It is also almost imposegg” is multiplied thusly: sible not to think of On Kawara’s ¼date paintings,½ which, however, have not been read as literature, at least not to my knowledge. 42 Steven McLaughlin, Puniverse, vol. 1 (GaussPDF, 2014), n. p. [8 in PDF]. “an ad egg / an add egg / a brad egg / a cad egg / a chad egg / a clad egg / a dad egg / a fad egg / a gad egg / a glad egg / a grad egg / a had egg / a lad egg / a mad egg / a nad egg / a pad egg / a plaid egg / a rad egg / a sad egg / a scad egg / a shad egg / a tad egg / a bad beg / a bad keg / a bad leg / a bad meg / a bad peg / a bad segue.”42 Hannes Bajohr ''& (Note that the original phrase is not included and has to be inferred.) McLaughlin achieves this output with minimal efort: All that is needed is to execute a script that checks the elements of the inite idiom set for the rhymes of their sub-elements, and returns the results; yet the outcome of this function, once printed, requires 57 volumes of Lulu books. This type of generative conceptual literature — constructed, not found; written, but by code — heightens the rupturing gesture of post-digital technization once it is put back into book form, not least through the joy of the excessive that equips the work with an inner aesthetic tension. While Puniverse can be circulated as a PDF ile — and indeed is — it still requires the possibility of being printed in order to achieve its vertiginous efect. As in much of conceptual literature, its potential, so to speak, is its potentiality, and it very well might be that actualization neutralizes the tension derived from its “wastefulness”; such an accumulation of print could be more sculptural than literary. But what is important is that it can be actualized, and Lulu will do it for a mere $ 381.90. If McLaughlin’s text achieves its expansiveness by a combinatory operation, another way to elicit such an overwhelming efect is to willingly ofer only a slice of the vastness implicit in a concept. This is what is achieved by Gregor Weichbrodt’s generative work I Don’t Know (0j0a / Frohmann Verlag, 2015). The text is created by a Python script that concatenates the titles of linked Wikipedia articles with a set of stock phrases. The result is a soliloquy in which a narrator denies knowledge of the subjects they list. It begins: “I’m not well-versed in Literature. Sensibility — what is that? What in God’s name is An Afterword? I haven’t the faintest idea. And concerning Book design, I am fully ignorant. What is ‘A Slipcase’ supposed to mean again, and what the heck is Boriswood? The Canons of page construction — I don’t know what that is. I haven’t got a clue. How am I supposed to make sense of Traditional Chinese bookbinding, and what the hell is an Initial?”43 As Julia Pelta Feldman observes, the narrator»ecgWef[a`[`Y “skews from the absurd – ‘I don’t know what people mean by ‘A Building’’[…] to the per43 Gregor Weichbrodt, fectly reasonable: ‘Vinca alkaloids are unfamiliar to me. And I Don’t Know (0x0a/Frohmann I’m sorry, did you say ‘Vinpocetine’?’”44 More often than not, Verlag, 2015), 4. For this the text undermines itself: “I’m completely ignorant of Art book, Weichbrodt cooperated with ebook publisher Deco architecture in Arkansas. Can you tell me how to get to Frohmann Verlag; while the [fkX can be purchased The Drew County Courthouse, Dual State Monument, Rison through the publisher, the POD Texaco Service Station or Chicot County Courthouse?”45 The can be ordered from Lulu. 44 Julia Pelta Feldman, reader, Feldman writes, can hardly fail to acknowledge this “Gregor Weichbrodt: incongruity: “I don’t know about you, but the narrator of No Ofense,” accessed November 5, 2015, I Don’t Know knows a hell of a lot more about Arkansas’s archihttp://0x0a.li/en/gregortectural history than I do.“46 And after having jumped, in truweichbrodt-no-ofense. 45 Weichbrodt, I Don’t ly Latourian fashion, from literature to book binding, to socKnow, 212. cer, to architecture, and a plethora of other topics that are 46 Feldman, “Gregor Weichbrodt.” only connected through Wikipedia’s internal genus-species Experimental Writing in its Moment of Digital Technization ''' relation, the book ends after 351 pages, seemingly unaware of yet another performative contradiction: “I’ve never heard of Postmodernism. What the hell is A Dystopia? I don’t know what people mean by ‘The Information Age’. Digitality — dunno. The Age of Interruption? How should I know? What is Information Overload? I don’t know.”47 That the text closes here is almost too good to be true, and again, it raises a suspicion — this time of authorial intervention: Wikipedia’s taxonomical structure could indubitably ill more pages — but how many exactly? By withholding the answer, and choosing a very deliberate point for the text to break of (“Information overload”), the text conjures a feeling of sublimity similar to Puniverse, precisely because the expanses of the unknown are unknown; it certainly adds to this efect that I Don’t Know is a long reminder of the vastness of individual ignorance in the times of networked communication. McLaughlin and Weichbrodt’s texts, no matter whether they are spelled out completely or appear abridged, are inite. There is an end in sight, and this end is determined by the logic of the system employed, be it the entirety of Wikipedia, or the number of total iterations in a non-recursive function that couples list items. As soon as recursive functions — functions that call themselves — are employed, however, things change. Executed on a computer, a recursive function lacking a set breakpoint would either run forever or, more often, overlow the computer’s memory and cause it to crash. A text thus produced is potentially ininite; its initude is again an index of intervention, authorial or otherwise. This vector into ininity remains even if this recursion is done manually. In Lawrence Gii n’s Non Facit Saltus (Fda^^ FZdWSV 2014), each page is an explanation of how to reach the next. For example, page 13 reads: “If you want to go to page 14, turn to page 14.”48 It is a very basic recursive function, that of incrementation, but without an external criterion for when to stop, it could go on forever. In Giin’s case, this criterion is provided by the inite and discrete structure of the book. Because of the book’s spatiotemporal stability (as opposed to a stream of potentially ininite text, as in the case of Twitter bots), it references distinct pages that can be “called” independently (this would not work with a scrollable page or a mere text ile); because of the unambiguous imperative “turn!” they require the materialization of the object, or, as metaphorized ones, the simulated makeup of the book: a PDF. Again, we ind the structure of ile and object pointing back and forth to one another — another post-digital self-disclosure. B) The Factographic Element 47 Ibid., 352. 48 Lawrence Gifin, Non Facit Saltus (Troll Thread, 2014), 13. 49 Ludovico, Post-digital Print, 98. While relative document layouts, like Word iles or epubs, allow for a text to be “relowed” responsively for every conceivable output device,49 a PDF, just like the page of a book, is Hannes Bajohr ''( April Fools A bAndon All hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank1 near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the trafic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus2 pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him ive dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN3 , and the driver, black, not American, does so. “I’m resourceful,” Price is saying. “I’m creative, I’m young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.” Price calms down, continues to stare out the cab’s dirty window, probably at the word FEAR sprayed in red grafiti on the side of a McDonald’s on Fourth and Seventh. “I mean the fact remains that no one gives a shit about 1 Crest(r) Whitestrips Coupon, Save $10 Now on Crest(r) Whitestrips. Get Whiter Teeth for the Holidays! Coupons.3DWhite.com/Whitestrips! 2 Find Economical Cars, Find an Affordable New or Used Car Through AutoTrader. Shop Now!, AutoTrader.com 3 Wii Music Game, Dance to MJ’s Biggest Hits in Michael Jackson The Experience!, Facebook. com/MichaelJackson Fig. 1. Jason Huf and Mimi Cabell, American Psycho (Traumawien, 2012), 3. 50 See Harry Burke, “Page Break,” Texte zur Kunst 98 (2015): 118, also online: accessed August 29, 2015, https://www.textezurkunst. de/98/burke-page-break. Burke acknowledges that “PDFs […] gain authority by looking and functioning like a page.” But this is only half the story. While he highlights a leftover element of high-brow book fetishism, he overlooks that it is the commercial and technological substructure of POD itself that prescribes this format. The page%PDF relationship is dictated by current technological needs rather than by overcome values. absolute in its layout. The de-facto standard of commercial e-publishing, aimed at Kindles and iPads, is the epub format; for the experimental platforms here described, the speciications of the commercial POD providers made PDFs their standard. Thus, not only do the constraints of a service like Lulu’s (maximum number of pages, page size, etc.) inform the way the POD book is created, disseminated, and perceived, but they also have reverberations for the form of the text: the formatting of the POD book inluences the formatting of its underlying ile, and vice versa.50 A direct rif on this interplay is Joey Yearous-Algozin’s 9 / 11 911 Calls in 911 Pt. Font (Troll Thread, 2012). It contains what its title announces: nine-hundred-and-eleven characters from a New York Fire Department transcript of calls to 911 on September 11, 2001. Because they are set in a font size of 911 points, the text extends onto a little under 900 PDF pages (mostly, a single letter ills one page, but occasionally it is two). A text that would scarcely occupy the screen of a Kindle is stretched to the size of two heavy volumes. Since '') the dimensions of the PDF follow Lulu standards, the characters shown on each page are cut of, making the resulting text almost illegible.51 As soon as it is highlighted in a PDF viewer and copied, it is possible to view it in its short entirety; the text “hides” under the constraints of the printed page but is left legible in the ile. American Psycho by Jason Huf and Mimi Cabell (Traumawien, 2012) plays on the relationship between three materializations of the text: The PDF and the POD book, and also the original layout of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, on which both instantiations are based 51 The full text of the two [fig. 1]. The entirety of Ellis’s novel was sent back and forth volumes fits in a footnote: “between two GMail accounts page by page.” Huff and “FDNY 911 Calls Transcript – Fire – Part 9 9-11-01: Campbell then “saved the relational ads for each page and WORLD TRADE CENTER, 911 added them back into the text as footnotes. […] The constelFDNY TELEPHONE CALLS RECORDER: This is Fire Alarm lations of footnoted ads throughout these pages retell the Dispatcher Carlos Sanchez story of American Psycho in absence of the original text.”52 of Fire Dispatch Operations. This is a continuation of While the main aim of their work is the privacy-encroaching Citywide Job Number 5-38 advertising model that fuels the Google empire, American which was originally recorded on September 11, Psycho’s conceptual framework requires the closest possible 2001. The following will resemblance between source and outcome, book, ile, and be a series of phone alarms which were received on POD. Brooklyn Master Tape Number Works like these become self-aware of the conditions 505. Message number 0001-B, which was received of their production and gain the lavor of what a certain curon Channel Number 4, and it commences at 0800 hours, rent in Soviet formalism called “factography.” Probably its 50 minutes and 24 seconds. best known description is Sergei Tret’iakov’s essay “The BioDISPATCHER: Fire Dispatcher graphy of the Object” (1929). Tret’iakov proposed to center 414. What’s the address? OPERATOR: There’s a plane a novel not around the psychology of the protagonist, but crashed into the World the production process of an object, thus doing away with Trade Center. I couldn’t get through to Manhattan. bourgeois subjectivity, anthropocentrism, and obliviousness DISPATCHER: Okay. We’re to socioeconomic processes. The biography of the object, “exaware P.D. 414. OPERATOR: Okay. tremely useful as a cold shower for littérateurs,” is constructRECORDER: Message Number ed like a “conveyor belt along which a unit of raw material is 0001-B concludes at 0800 hours, 50 minutes and 34 moved and transformed into a useful product through huseconds. Please stand by for man efort.” 53 Instead of The Brothers Karamazov, such factoMessage Number 0002-B. A telephone alarm received graphy could have titles like “The Forest, Bread, Coal, Iron, on Channel Number 4. Flax, Cotton, Paper, The Locomotive, and The Factory.” 54 The message commences at 0800 hours, 50 m” While Tret’iakov still had a representational, world52 Jason Huf and Mimi Campbell, “American Psycho,” depicting model in mind — a realist novel for things, not peraccessed August 11, 2015, sons — the post-digital literature considered here makes fachttp://traumawien.at/prints/ tography perform itself. Yearous-Algozin and Huf / Cabell american-psycho. 53 Sergei Tret’iakov, “The focus on the intricate and often circular relationship between Biography of the Object,” ile and object. They do not “say” anything, as one could put [1929] October 118 (2006): 57–62, 61. it with Wittgenstein,55 about digital technization but “show” 54 Ibid., 62. it by thematizing this relationship performatively; instead 55 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosoof directly writing the biography of the thing, the Unding rephicus (London: Routledge veals its story on its own. 2002), 4.1212, 31. Hannes Bajohr ''* Fig. 2. Jean Keller, The Black Book (Lulu, 2013). Photo: Hannes Bajohr. If factography here addresses the medial aspects of the underlying data structures, in some works such factographical showing extends to the socioeconomic conditions of their production. Jean Keller’s The Black Book (self published, 2013) is a good example of this type of factography-as-publishing [fig. 2] . It is a tomeaX)&"bSYWe — the maximum number allowed by Lulu — that is completely black. A gallon of ink used for POD printing costs over four thousand dollars, Keller explains on the Lulu sales page, “However, the price of a book is not calculated according to the amount of ink used in its production. For example, a Lulu book of blank pages costs an artist as much to produce as a book filled with text or large photographs. Furthermore, as the number of pages increases, the price of each page decreases. A book containing the maximum number of pages printed entirely in black ink therefore results in the lowest cost and maximum value for the artist.” 56 At irst appearing parasitic, even sabotaging, since it raises the possibility that Lulu might lose money printing it, The Black Book is a reminder that postdigital writers are enmeshed in negotiations about their productive resources just like any other artist; resorting to an act of subversion like Keller’s “hack” makes apparent that writers get the short end of the stick as they represent Lulu’s main revenue stream. 56 Jean Keller, “The Black In Reimbur$ement (Troll Thread, 2013), Holly Melgard Book,” accessed August 12, similarly exhibits the limits of post-digital writing and the 2015, http://www.lulu.com/ shop/jean-keller/the-blackprecariousness of the author’s labor conditions by focusing book/paperback/producton the dissemination, rather than the material production, 21008894.html. Experimental Writing in its Moment of Digital Technization ''+ of the work. In the introduction, she states: “Sometimes the work I do results in earning neither income, livelihood, nor play, and often I ind myself paying to work rather than being paid for work. Whenever this happens, I count my losses and take my chances gambling for alternatives.” 57 This is meant quite literally: The book is illed with scans of lottery tickets and scratch cards — six years worth of gambling for “$ for life.” Because Lulu lets its producers set the selling price at will while the costs of production remain the same, Melgard’s book is $ 329.53, the equivalent of her gambling losses, “plus whatever Lulu charges for its print on demand services.” 58 It is at once a utopian and a commonsensical project, as it demands no more than pay equivalent to labor — “Reimbursement is for the work” 59 — except the work being play, and the play being the gamble for the sustenance that makes the work possible in the irst place. Both Melgard and Keller, then, employ an internal — institutional — critique of the seemingly liberating potential of POD; in the economy of the digital, the position of the writer is as precarious as ever, and just as dependent on access to the means of production. These are only two of the elements post-digital literature employs in its strategy of self-disclosure, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that there aren’t more, nor that this disclosure is the only function it serves. However, I believe that much of post-digital literature’s relevance today derives from its unique capacity to articulate the process of digital technization — be it in its technological, epistemological, or socioeconomic form. Because of this, it is an exceptionally contemporary, or actuel, type of practice. None of the platforms I have discussed are older than e[j years, and it is anything but certain that they will exist e[j years from now — in their current form, unlikelier still. But this is a strength, not a weakness: as post-digital literature uncovers a temporality and a concept of reality that are very much our own, its works bind themselves to the moment of their production and dissemination, and can show us more about the epochal threshold we live in than any writing that merely says. 57 Holly Melgard, Reimbur$ement (Troll Thread, 2015), 4. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid.