| issue 11 digital arts and culture conference (perth) issue
Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist
Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature
Scott Rettberg
The University of Bergen
Introduction
Too often the discourse surrounding contemporary
digital art and electronic literature treats these artifacts as if the most
compelling aspects about them are their novelty, their very newness. One need
look no further than the theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference,
‘The Future of Digital Media Culture’, to see this. Because our orientation is
always forward towards the future, we are inclined toward a kind of myopia, and
reluctance to look at the new through the lens of the past. With this
orientation, there is furthermore a danger of placing too high a value on
novelty at the expense of other aesthetic and ideological criteria. We see this
in new media art discourse again and again. Turf wars regularly take place over
‘firstness’ – which designer was the first to use this technique, who was the
first to integrate this type of programming into a new media artwork, etc. We
are clearly in the midst of a global communication revolution that has changed
the practice of daily life in far-reaching ways, and it is important to
recognize, identify, and contemplate those aspects of our culture that are
changing so rapidly. In the field of electronic literature, it is important to
identify and analyze the media-specific aspects of individual works, to think
about what in their formal nature as digital objects produced on and for the
computer and/or network distinguishes them from literary objects produced in
the past. In our rush towards these new horizons however we need also to look
at electronic literature in the contexts not only of the history of computing
and digital culture, but also in the context of the art and literary movements
from which they emerge and with which they are in conversation. In this essay
and in future work, I will argue that electronic literature can be best
understood as a polyglot literary and artistic avant-garde movement that owes a
great deal technically, aesthetically, and ideologically to various avant-garde
movements of the twentieth century, beginning with Dada.
The Dada movement was a multimedia
avant-garde art practice that began in Zurich during World War I and flourished
in Berlin, Paris, and New York from 1916 until, roughly, 1920. Beginning as a
disgusted response to the war and the blithely nationalistic bourgeois
attitudes the Dadaists felt were at the root of the conflict, the Dadaists
developed and refined the notion of ‘anti-art’ as an expression of
dissatisfaction with the dominant contemporary ideology. Although the period in
which Dada was an active organized cultural movement was quite short, its
legacy is widespread and profound. Individual Dada artists including Hugo Ball,
Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and others
went on to influence many of the twentieth century's most important art
movements, such as surrealism, modernism, and conceptual art. Some important
elements of Dada art include the rejection of the dominant modes of
distribution and valorization of cultural artifacts, the elevation of the
importance of audience response to and interaction with the art object or
event, interdisciplinarity and anti-disciplinarity, the abstract use of
language and sound as material, an embrace of randomness as an aspect of
artistic practice, the use of diverse ‘at-hand’ media and found objects, and
the representation of the human body as man/machine hybrid or grotesque
deformity rather than as idealized beauty.
This essay examines new
manifestations of these elements of Dadaist practice in works of electronic
literature produced in recent years. Ninety years after the original Dada
movement, writers and artists use elements of Dadaist practice in the
production of contemporary works of electronic literature. By comparing the art
and activities of early Dada artists to the work of contemporary digital
writers, the essay advocates a critical approach to new media writing that both
accounts for the specific properties of literature produced for networked
computer environments and examine these artifacts within the contextualizing
historical framework of the avant-garde.
Decentered
Movements
To consider electronic literature as an art,
literary, or cultural ‘movement’ may simply be a heuristic or rhetorical
strategy. We see a staggering variety of approaches to creating electronic
literature in a multitude of forms and genres, produced by geographically
dispersed individuals and groups, who rarely meet in person, and swear no
allegiance to each other or any common ideology. Electronic literature is both
interdisciplinary and in effect anti-disciplinary. If we begin to think of
electronic literature as ‘a movement’, we need to consider that it is a different
type of movement than any we've seen before, unbound by common locality, art
form, or adherence to any singular manifesto, a kind of Noah's Arc of literary
forms filled with strange animals freely miscegenating and mutating at an
extremely rapid rate.
Dada, the early twentieth century
movement from which many of the other important twentieth century avant-garde
movements emerged, was similarly diverse. Dada had not one manifesto, but
dozens of them. While Dada had its origins in a specific locality during a
specific point in time–1916 Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire – it spread very
quickly from that originary moment to other widespread localities including
Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, and Paris. To be a Dadaist it wasn’t
necessary to join a particular club or live in a particular city, but rather to
identify oneself with an attitude towards the practice of art, or rather more
specifically, anti-art. Dadaists ostensibly advocated the destruction of art
practices and cultures that preceded their own. At the same time, the Dadaists
were consummate ironists, who both recognized and declaimed with great vigor
their own hypocrisy. To be Dadaist was to negate, to endorse an extreme vision
of duality. In his first ‘Dada Manifesto’ published in 1918, Tristan Tzara
writes,
In documenting art on the basis of the supreme
simplicity: novelty, we are human and true for the sake of amusement,
impulsive, vibrant to crucify boredom … I write a manifesto and I want nothing,
yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am
also against principles … I write this manifesto to show that people can
perform contrary actions together while taking one gulp of fresh air; I am
against action, for continuous contradiction, and for affirmation too, I am
neither for or against because I hate common sense. (Tzara, 2006; 1918: 3-6).
While out of context it may be difficult to ‘make
sense’ of Tzara’s hatred of ‘common sense’, it is important to realize what
common sense implied at this point in history. Europe was just emerging from
the fog of the World War I and the horrors of trench warfare. Much of a
generation had been lost and as the war wound down, the streets of Europe’s
capitals were filled with the amputated and deformed victims of those atrocities.
The casual embrace of nationalism and bourgeois ‘common sense’ were precisely
what had led Europe to its abyss. Rationality, it seemed, had led to a world
gone mad.
Tzara and the other Dadaists often
and loudly declared ‘DADA MEANS NOTHING’. In his first manifesto, Tzara runs
through a laundry list of meanings for the word in different languages, none of
which have a claim to signification greater than any of the others, ‘the Kru
Negroes call the tail of a holy cow Dada. The cube and the mother in a certain
district of Italy are called: Dada. A hobby horse, a nurse both in Russian and
Rumanian: Dada’. The word meant nothing and many things simultaneously. Tzara
points out that it ultimately makes no difference what the word Dada means: ‘Sensibility
is not constructed from a word’ (2006; 1918: 37). Emerging from Zurich, one of the few neutral centers during World War
I, Dada was intended to be as non-aligned as possible. In contrast to the
various flavors of national romanticism that had characterized much of the art
world in the years preceding the war, the Dada were self-consciously
anti-national and individualistic. Tzara writes: ‘Dada was born of a need for
independence, of distrust towards unity. Those who are with us preserve their
freedom. We recognize no theory’ (37).
Dadaists are fundamentally anti-monist.
Tzara’s manifesto argues that the
one thing binding Dadaists together was a rejection of the values of European
civilization of the day. The artistic production of the Dadaist demands to be
understood as an act of destruction as much as an act of creation: ‘there is a
great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean.
Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive
complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits, who rend one
another and destroy the centuries’ (41).
Given the general tenor of negativity in Tzara’s manifesto towards groups
generally and towards art as it was previously understood, it may be surprising
that the Dadaists produced anything at all. Wouldn’t the ultimate act of
negativity have been to simply stop producing art, or perhaps even to set about
destroying the art popular among the bourgeois by setting upon the galleries
and museums with scissors and torches? Yet ultimately the Dada were not
terrorists, they were artists, and if they were going to set about an act of
destruction, they would do so through their art, which was conceived as
anti-art. And while their impulse was towards radical individuality, by virtue
of working within a shared community of practice, in which their works were
presented in the context of and produced in conversation with one another,
certain similarities and trends in the artifacts they produced nonetheless
emerged. The Zurich Dada were among the first movements to embrace abstract
art, for instance, and their works present abstraction in forms ranging from
Hans Arp’s constructions, drawings and wood reliefs, to Marcel Janco’s
cardboard masks, to Tristan Tzara’s simultaneous poem and Hugo Ball’s sound
poetry.
In comparison to a movement such as
impressionism, the differences between the forms and techniques of the Dada
were great. Writers, dancers, painters, costume-designers, satirists, and
writers of manifestos were all presenting their work together. Hugo Ball, the
organizer of the Cabaret Voltaire, was interested in realizing Wagner’s idea of
the Gesamtkunstwerk, ‘the total work of art that would integrate various
media into a multisensory whole’ ([9] p23) but in Dadaist practice this whole would
necessarily be a noisy and contradictory one, a whole in opposition to the idea
of unities. Hans Arp describes a painting, Cabaret Voltaire (1916) by
Marcel Janco, which captures the spirit of the gatherings:
The people around us are shouting, laughing,
gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, moos and the
miaowing of medieval Brutists. Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of
an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping.
Madame Hennings with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is
banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the
piano, pale as a chalky ghost (cited in Dickerman, 2006: 25).
Amidst such cacophony, new works of visual and
written art were being presented to audiences. The charged atmosphere of the
Cabaret Voltaire was in some sense an antidote to the staid, respectful
atmosphere of art museums and galleries. High art, dance, burlesque, satire
were all thrown together into one performance in an attempt to shatter the
boundaries established by bourgeois culture. From the Dada perspective,
interesting art was just as likely to take place on the street as it was inside
the refined setting of a gallery, and art no more belonged to the bourgeois
than it did to the prostitute or drunkard in the gutter. No one could claim
that any particular context was the right one for art, and no one form of art
could claim predominance over any other.
While it would be a folly to attempt
to generalize the contexts in which electronic literature is produced and
appreciated, we can note some similarities between the milieu in which
electronic literature and Dada art are addressing their respective cultures.
Most electronic writers and digital artists do make strong claims about their
work as a way of making art, but they do so outside of conventional channels of
cultural production. While mainstream literary institutions are largely
ignorant of literary experiences made for the electronic media, authors and
digital artists distribute their work independently on websites, small journals
of their own creation, and internet mailing lists. While works of electronic
literature are finding some audiences within the academic world, the literary mainstream
largely regards electronic literature with either apathy or animosity.
Electronic literature is distributed virally. Individual works move from screen
to screen via links and mailing lists and performances. It shows no respect for
the rituals and institutions of publishing houses, and needs no publishers.
Formal boundaries between poetry and fiction, art and literature, documentary
and satire, and genres of all kind break down. While carefully established
niches such as classifications in the Dewey decimal system bound traditional
literature, electronic literature defies simple categorization. Where books are
discrete objects made for the single purpose of reading in quiet contemplation,
works of electronic literature are unruly objects, presented in the cacophonous
flow of networked communication, read alongside business correspondence, email
messages, stock quotes, newspapers, weblogs, instant messages, Flash cartoons,
and MySpace profiles, just another element in an unbroken stream of networked communications.
Electronic literature has no home base or center. Electronic literature, like
Dada, presents itself as an antidote to established literary and artistic
conventions. It is both of literature and other than literature, art and
anti-art.
Many authors of electronic
literature would laugh at me if I told them they were part of a movement. They
have made no pledges to one another, and often have radically different and
opposed ideas of the nature of what they create and its purpose in the world. They
are a diverse motley crew, who live in different parts of the world and adhere
to different values. Yet they are a form of community. They respond to each
other’s work, they gather occasionally to fervently debate esoteric matters of
art, and they correspond with each other. They borrow from established
traditions and disciplines yet work outside of them. Like Dada, electronic
literature is a movement of fierce independents, who create their work outside
the established constraints of literary cultures and economies.
Redefining Audience And
Reception
Although Marcel Duchamp was only loosely affiliated
with the Dada movement, his submission of ‘Fountain’, a urinal, under the name ‘R.
Mutt’, to the Independents Exhibition in 1917 is considered one of the archetypal
Dadaist acts. While in some respects the submission of the work, its rejection,
and the publications of The Blind Man and RongWrong were merely
an elaborate hoax, Duchamp’s act was also fundamental in establishing the basic
idea of conceptual art. The focus of the readymade was not the object itself,
but its context and the reaction of others to it.
Duchamp was one of the directors of
the Independent Artists Exhibition before he resigned in protest of the Mutt
decision in 1917. The first issue of The Blind Man, the journal he set
up with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, was largely a celebration of that
exhibition, albeit one that can also be read as the set-up of Duchamp’s
elaborate joke. Much of the rhetoric of The Blind Man, no. 1 is familiar
from contemporary discourse surrounding digital culture. The discussion of both
the exhibition and the role its publishers conceived for The Blind Man itself encourage a new form of distribution and critical commentary for art:
‘What is the use of an ‘Exhibition of Independents,’
said some. 'Under present conditions, new talent can easily gain recognition
through the picture galleries. They are many and their managers are
open-minded'.
Let us quote from the programme:
On the one hand we have the frank statement of the
established art societies that they cannot exhibit all the deserving art
because of a lack of space. On the other hand such exhibitions as take place at
private galleries must, by their nature, be formed from the ranks of artists
who are already more or less known; moreover, no one exhibition at present
gives an idea of contemporary American art in its ensemble, or permits
comparison of the various directions it is taking, but shows only the work of
one man or a homogenous group of men. The great need, then, is for an
exhibition, to be held at a given period every year, where artists of all
schools can exhibit together–certain that whatever they send will be hung and
that all will have an equal opportunity (Roché, 2006: 148).
The Blind Man no.1 praised the Exhibition of
Independents for its ‘no jury’ system, which would make it possible to remove
the official layers of mediation between the works, the artists, and their
audiences. The Blind Man itself was conceived of as a communication link
‘between the pictures and the public–and even between the painters themselves …
He will give to those who want to understand the explanations of those who
think they understand’ (Roché,
2006:150). The
Exhibition of Independents was framed by The Blind Man as an opportunity
to facilitate unmediated expression and unmediated communication between
artists and their audiences. Art criticism was understood not to be the sole
province of professional art critics, but open the response of anyone who cared
to express an opinion.
This conception of the Exhibition of
Independents has a great deal in common with the way that works of electronic
literature and digital are presented and received in contemporary digital
culture. Although there are examples of curated or juried exhibitions of
electronic literature, the majority of new works are first published on the web
and presented to their audiences before any such selection occurs. And while
critics and reviewers will occasionally sound off on these works, the first and
most direct response comes from the audience itself. It is not unusual for
electronic literature to be first presented on weblogs with open comments, or
to be the subject of chat discussions and bulletin board conversations, well
before it is reviewed in any conventional print publication. Most contemporary
artists working the web sign their work not discreetly in the corner of a
painting, but with an email address, which encourages the reader to respond to
the work, and to respond to its author. While both the print publishing
industry and the contemporary art industry have built walls around the author
and the artist, presenting them untouchable geniuses, as if they lived in an
entirely different universe from their audience, authors of electronic
literature know no such boundaries, and mix freely with their audiences. While
the author is living, why should it be otherwise?
Reuse, Reinterpret, Remix
In addition to presenting survey questions that the
audience of the Independents Exhibition could respond to, The Blind Man had ‘Suggestions’ for less conventional ways that the audience could respond to
individual artworks:
Write about the Indeps, or about any special work in
the Exhibition.
A dramatic story of less than one hundred words.
A comic story of less than one hundred words.
A dream story of less than one hundred words.
A quatrain, or a limerick.
A song (words and music) (Roché, 2006: 150)
The Blind Man suggested that rather than
constructing a dry academic treatise, one legitimate mode of responding to a
work of art is by creating a new work of art. This idea is in keeping with the
artistic practices of many of the Dada. The Dada were among the first to
embrace collage as an art form, and regularly used artworks in one medium as a
basis for a new artwork in another medium.
In many ways, the work of the Dada
presaged our current era of ‘remix culture’, in which it is common practice to
sample from, reference, and build upon previous works in the creation of a new
one. This practice is indeed virtually built into the practice of programmed
network art of various kinds on a material level. Programmers regularly share
and reuse portions of their code with each other. In the world of kinetic
poetry and other kinds of animated texts, we often see artists borrowing not
only texts and images from other artists, but also snippets of code used to
achieve a particular effect. One example of the ways that electronic literature
authors borrow from and remix different types of materials is Megan Sapnar’s Pushkin
Translation (Sapnar, 2000), published on Poems that Go. The work
presents a poem by Aleksandr Pushkin in Russian, translated by Dimitry Brill.
As the reader moves the cursor over the poem, the text is revealed in English
and read aloud in Russian. In the background, a Russian folk song recorded by
the Ospipov State Russian Folk Orchestra plays. The work includes a long titles
sequence that gives credit not only to the author, the translator, and the
musical performers, but also FreaKaZoid, a Flash programmer from whom Sapnar
got some help on the actionscript implementation. The designer Sapnar responded
to Pushkin’s work by remixing the author’s text with the work of several other
authors and performers, both remediating the original poem and creating a new
work in the process, providing a new way of reading the original.
A direct example of an audience
responding to a work of net art by creating other works of net art is Olia
Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (Lialina, 1996). Other
artists have remixed Olia Lialina’s original work, a short hypertext presented
in HTML frames that describes a reunion and confrontation between two lovers,
in a variety of forms. The audience finds links on Olia Lialina’s site to the
original and to twenty different remixes produced in the decade subsequent to
its first publication including, a VRML version, a text-only version, an
animated gif, an action alert version, a Castle Wolfenstein version,
video, RealAudio, paper and gauche, a comic version, t-shirts, a Don Quixote version, and others. The audience of Lialina’s project responded to the
original by remediating and reusing it as a framework for other works of art.
Remixing was also the guiding
principle of the Mystery House Taken Over project (Montfort et al, 2004). Mystery House is an early and rudimentary graphic interactive fiction by
Ken and Robert Williams made for the Apple II and published in 1980 by On-Line
Systems, which later became Sierra. In 1987, Mystery House was released
in the public domain, leaving others free to use and modify it as they wished.
With a 2004 Turbulence commission, Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, and Emily Short
reverse-engineered Mystery House and re-implemented it in INFORM, a free
language for interactive fiction development, and released it in a kit that
made it simple for others to modify and re-implement the game. Eight authors
were then commissioned to produce eight new works from the kit. The resulting
works are all radically different, yet each retains many aspects of the
original game. The kit remains available on the site for anyone who wants to
try his or her hand at remixing Mystery House.
From Response to
Interaction
The second issue of The Blind Man largely
served to foment the controversy surrounding the rejection of R. Mutt’s ‘Fountain’.
While Duchamp and Roché were clearly playing an elaborate joke on the art world
writ large, in their defense of ‘Fountain,’ they also provide a clear
explanation of the idea of ‘non-visual’ art that would guide Duchamp’s work for
the rest of his career and establish the idea of conceptual art. In defending ‘Fountain’, The Blind Man argues that,
Whether or not Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the
fountain or not has not importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of
life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title
and point of view–created a new thought for that object (Duchamp et al, 2006: 154).
The ‘Fountain’ event made it clear that the work of
art could not be understood as an artifact in isolation from the audience that
receives it. The artist should be understood not as a creator of well-made
objects, but rather a creator of contexts in which to see things differently.
The art of the ‘Fountain’ lay not in the appropriated object itself but in the
thought to place it in art gallery. Furthermore, The Blind Man itself
can be understood to be part of the artwork, as can the subsequent controversy.
What makes Duchamp’s readymades compelling and strange is that they are
radically re-contextualized in the gallery, and made available for us to see
them anew. The audience of ‘The Fountain’ is as much or more a part of the art
as the object itself. It is a performance in which the viewer is one of the
players. This integration of the audience into not only reception, but also
effectively the production of the experience of the artwork is a common aspect
of much electronic literature and other networked art forms. Similarly, the
reader of a work of electronic literature is not a passive consumer, but an
interacting participant in the work.
Language As Abstract Art
Hugo Ball, one of the principle organizers of the
Cabaret Voltaire, is today remembered as the originator of Lautgedichte,
or sound poetry, which he announced in his diary on June 23, 1916 (Dickerman,
2006: 27). Ball performed three sound poems ‘Seepferdchen und Flugfische’, ‘Karawane’,
and ‘Gadji beri bimba’, onstage that evening while dressed in absurd cardboard
Cubist costume. Ball’s Lautgedichte is distinguished from other forms of
poetry in that he constructed the poems not of words, but of abstract phonemes.
By removing the question of denotation from the poems, Ball’s sound poems focus
on the musicality of the human voice. From Ball’s perspective, these poems
represented a way to reject the way that language was used in contemporary
culture, and to create authentic form of expression. Ball described his
reasoning in program notes he read before he performed he performed the poems:
In these phonetic poems, we renounce the language that
journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of
the word, we even give up the word, to keep for poetry its last and holiest
refuge. We must give up writing secondhand: that is, accepting words (to say
nothing of sentences) that are not newly invented for our own uses (cited in
Dickerman, 2006: 28).
Ball’s argument here anticipates the argument of
feminist philosophers such as Cixous who argue that Western languages
themselves are so phallocentric as to contribute to oppression of women. In
Ball’s case, he was rejecting the languages that had been used to bring about
the conditions that led to World War I. Ball encouraged us to ‘Spit out the
words: the dreary, lame, empty language of men in society. Simulate gray
modesty or madness. But inwardly be in a state of tension. Reach an
incomprehensible, unconquerable sphere’ (cited in Dickerman, 2006: 29). Ball’s
theorization of sound poetry is consistent with the Dadaist impulse towards
radical individuality. It also anticipates the larger twentieth century
movement of sound poetry, and a new way of treating language as an abstract
material that can signify purely through sounds, phonemes, or shapes, in
addition to or instead of signifying through denotation. Another related experiment
conducted at the Cabaret Voltaire was Tristan Tzara’s simultaneous poem ‘L’amiral
cherche une maison à louer’, a poem in French, German, and English. While the
poem has comprehensible meaning in printed form, telling a parable about a
soldier searching for a place on the home front, when it was read by Tzara with
Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck at the Cabaret Voltaire, the three
simultaneous voices clashed, overloading the listener with multilingual input.
A number of works of recent electronic literature
similarly reject the idea that language should primarily be considered a device
for the transmission of semantic meaning. Rather, like Ball, they treat
language as debased, as an abstract material ripe for reinvention. Talan
Memmott’s recent work The Hugo Ball (Memmott, 2006a) is a direct
appropriation and interpretation of Ball’s ‘Gadji beri bimba’, made in Flash
and published in the online journal Drunken Boat. Memmott’s work
literarily presents the online reader with an ‘incomprehensible, unconquerable
sphere’. In this work, a murky face appears within a circular frame. When the
reader mouses over the face, the Hugo Ball recites the words of Ball’s poem in
a randomized order while eerie generated music plays in the background. The
face actually makes the correct movements for each sound as it says them, and
the words also appear in type on the screen. Memmott complicates the
presentation of ‘Gadji beri bimba’, providing several layers of linguistic
signification for Ball’s nonsense poem.
Jim Andrews’ work Nio (2006a)> presents the reader with a complex aesthetic experience that
makes use of phonemes and letters but not of words. Andrews’s piece is a cross
between a sound poem, kinetic visual art, and an interactive musical
instrument. In two verses, Andrews provides the reader with two different ways
of mixing clusters of letters, each of which have a musical voice track
attached to them. In the first verse, those clusters of letters then do a kind
of animated dance in the center of a circle as the voice loop they signify is
sung. The loops are layered on top of each other, allowing the interactor to
compose a shifting doo-wop melody/animation. In an accompanying essay, ‘Nio and the Art of Interactive Audio for the Web’ (Andrews, 2006b)>, Andrews explains that he’s ‘trying
to synthesize and transform image, sound, and text, not simply juxtapose them.
I seek some sort of critical mass to fuse them’. He describes the work as a ‘synthesis
of literacies’. In Nio and in much of his other work, including his
visual poetry, Andrews attempts to rethink the relationship between poetry and
language, creating interactive poetic experiences that utilize texts of various
kinds that don’t rely on words to provoke a response from the reader. Letters
in motion and the human voice alone, devoid of explicit denotation, can impart
a great of emotional and semantic content. Nio is proof of the idea that
poems needn’t be composed of words in order to be poetic and evocative.
Maria Mencia’s Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs (Mencia, 2006) >is a Flash work that presents its
interactor with twelve play and stop buttons, each of which activates an
animation of a bird presented as an animation composed of typography, spelling
out the sounds that each bird makes. The bird songs are not themselves sung by
birds, but rather by human singers. Just as in Nio, the interactor can
select different combinations of the birds. Like Hugo Ball’s ‘Karawane’, which
was intended to remind its listener of the sound of elephants in motion, Birds
Singing Other Birds’ Songs is a work that uses the human voice to invoke
nature. All three of the new media works I’ve mentioned here exemplify a trend
common to many works of electronic literature. Just as in the sound poetry of
the Dada, these artists are continuing to explore the abstract use of spoken
and written language to create aesthetic experiences that signify in
unconventional ways.
Random Acts of Creativity
Tristan Tzara famously described the recipe for a
Dadaist poem in the July/August 1920 issue of Littérature as follows:
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article in the newspaper of the length you
wish to give your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out carefully all the words that make up the
article and put them in a bag.
Shake gently.
Then remove each cutting one after the other in the
order in which they emerge from the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
You will now become ‘an infinitely original writer
with a charming sensitivity, although still misunderstood by the common people
(Tzara, 2006b).
I don’t think that Tzara wrote ‘the poem will be like
you’, entirely in jest. Rather, this cut-up poem was likely to result in a
reflection of the same sort of ‘you’ that was Time magazine’s person of
the year in 2006, the you formed from the popular consciousness, rearranged at
random. The cut-up technique is here clearly posited as an antidote to the
romantic (bourgeois) notion of the author as inspired, ‘infinitely original’
genius. Tzara offered the method as a way for absolutely anyone to become a
poet. The cut-up method has been embraced and refined by various movements and
individual writers since. To the surrealists, it represented a mystical method
of accessing the subconscious, and to William S. Burroughs a way of ‘producing
accidents’ that could lead to fruitful discoveries (Burroughs, 2003: 91).
In his Dada: Art and Anti-Art,
Hans Richter describes chance as one of the essential elements of the Dada
movement. He describes chance as ‘a magical procedure by which one could
transcend the barriers of causality and conscious volition, and by which the
inner eye and ear become more acute, so that new sequences of thoughts and
experiences made their appearances’ (Richter, 1985: 57). Richter attributes to
this attitude of embracing chance the wide variety of innovative new forms
created by the Dadaists.
One of the distinguishing aspects of
art objects made for the new media is that they are often what Lev Manovich
describes as variable media. Manovich writes ‘a new media object is not
something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different,
potentially infinite versions’ (2001: 36). A powerful way to take advantage of
the variable nature of new media objects is to introduce an element of
indeterminability into the operations of a given work. In Cybertext,
Espen Aarseth distinguishes between determinate and indeterminate texts: ‘A
text is determinate if the adjacent scriptons of every scripton are always the
same; if not, the text is indeterminate’ (1997: 63). Because computers provide
a variety of ways to easily select at random and quickly arrange material
within a random or preconceived structure, and because the global network
offers artists such a wide variety of data sources to choose from, authors of
electronic literature have embraced and refined the cut-up technique and used
randomization in a wide variety of ways.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich’s Regime
Change (2006) is described by its authors as a textual instrument. The work
initially opens up with an April 2003 news story about the bombardment of Iraq
in which George W. Bush says that Saddam Hussein may be dead or severely
injured. The reader can then select certain highlighted phrases, which are
linked to an n-gram search for similar phrases in the Warren Commission report
on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The reader can then cut and paste
phrases back and forth between the two documents. Because the n-gram search
offers a certain level of logical correspondence between the phrases from the
news article and the Warren Commission report, the result of the reader’s
cutting and pasting is a new document that mixes the two disparate documents
together in a nearly coherent fashion. This is a cut-up that uses a statistical
algorithm to offer a degree of control over what otherwise might be a
completely random process of generating a new text. While the interface of this
work is far from intuitive, Regime Change nonetheless offers a
compelling experience of the cut-up technique, and is a strong demonstration of
the power of mixing the cut-up technique with a less-random rhetorical intent.
In this case the work demonstrates the inconsistency of President George W. Bush’s
casual desire to assassinate the leader of another sovereign nation with the
revulsion with which the USA responded to the assassination of one of its
leaders.
In comparison to Regime Change,
Nanette Wylde’s Storyland (2006) uses
a far simpler mode of random text generation, though the short stories the
program generates are often quite accessible and amusing. To operate the work,
the reader presses a ‘new story’ button. Using a simple ‘mad-lib’ style
technique of selecting stock characters, situations and phrases from a database
and delivering them into a structured six-paragraph template, Storyland delivers its readers a new combinatorial story every time the button is pushed.
Jason Nelson’s This is How you
Will Die (2006) >is a Dada slot machine par excellence.
The morbid wordtoy, winner of the 2006 Drunken Boat Panliterary Award
for Web Wrt, presents its reader with a slot machine interface. The player has
demise credits which he or she may use for a ‘death SPIN’. Rather than cherries
and oranges, the spinning reels reveal five segments of unfortunate destiny,
such as ‘Driving a Kansas highway, watching hail storms whiten knee high wheat
fields/ A long dormant virus attacks your brain, and within twelve hours you
forget breathing/ and die sing pop songs you hate, because the lyrics make you
giggle/ Before your body is cremated, necrophiliacs sex your body with a
two-card canasta/ Your death is reported by tenure seeking academics as being
suspiciously modernist’ (Nelson, 2006). Certain combinations of the reels
result in bonus messages, which reward the player with extras, such as a fatal
blood disease. Nelson’s work utilizes randomness to reflect absurdly on the
arbitrary nature of human mortality.
Use of Found Materials And
Collage
Closely related to the Dadaists’ embrace of chance
and randomness was their impulse to integrate a wide variety of everyday
objects and materials, found objects, bits of newspapers, photos from
magazines, and so on into their art in the form of constructions, photomontage,
and collage. The artists of the Berlin Dada, including George Grosz, Raul
Hausman, Johannes Baader, and Hannahh Hoch, regularly integrated printed matter
into collages to both absurdist and politically motivated effects. Hannah
Hoch’s works, such as ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar
Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany’ (1919-1920) and ‘Heads of State’
(1918-1919), often recontextualized photographs of Weimar Republic leaders and
other contemporary politicians from magazines in order to parody them. Kurt
Schwitter’s various Merz assemblages often mixed a wide variety of media, often
integrating cast materials he found on around the house and on the street.
Schwitter’s Merzbau projects, which he worked on from the 1920s until 1937 (Dietrich,
2006: 173), were collages in the form of three-dimensional sculptures that he
constructed in his studios. Odd angular constructions built with a wide
variety of materials, the Merzbau sculptures were also autobiographies in
sculptural form. Dorothea Dietrich describes Schwitters’ Merz Column (circa. 1923), an installation including paper, cardboard, metal, plater, wood,
crocheted cloth, cow horn, laurel branch, and wall sconce on wood as,
… clearly autobiographical. The top documented
Schwitter’s family life with the poignant death mask of his infant son; it is
surrounded by toys and a selection of organic materials, including a twig and
dried flowers, and a small picture frame that leans against the sculpture, as
well as objects with either smooth or irregular edges that are more
three-dimensional and organic looking than the materials below on the base.
There Schwitters pasted down and affixed flyers, announcements and papers
printed with large numbers or letters–all memorabilia produced by that printing
press that document his life as a member of the international avant-garde (2006:
174).
Schwitter’s Merzbau installations were not stable
entities that could ever be understood as completed. The artist kept adding to,
building upon, pasting over, and modifying each of the three works until he was
forced by circumstances to move to another location, where he then started a
new Merzbau. Like many Dada works, the Merzbau sculptures worked against the
idea that the practice of art should result in a fixed, marketable commodity.
Rather, the ever-changing sculptures had their own lives and deaths, which
corresponded to changes in the life of the artist.
In their always-incompletedness, the
Merzbau sculptures have a great deal in common with digital textual forms, such
as weblogs, which never reach a completed state but which are always in a fluid
process of transformation. The process also calls to mind the construction of
network hypertext projects such as Mark Amerika’s Grammatron (1998),
Robert Arellano’s Sunshine ’69 (1996), and William Gillespie, Scott
Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton’s The Unknown (1998), all of which were
distributed as ongoing hypertext narratives that changed over a period of years
as their authors modified them, while they were being read by their audience.
The lack of fixity and the embrace of fluidity is one of the distinguishing
characteristics of many network narratives.
The collage technique was used for
different reasons in the hands of different Dada artists. While Hoch’s works were
explicitly political, in Schwitter’s work, the use of multimedia collage more
often results in a sense of art emerging from the materials of everyday life.
Max Ernst’s collages and photomontages were often cryptic or metaphoric,
featuring for instance human body parts merged with those of birds, or human
arms springing from the body of a biplane.
Many works of contemporary
electronic literature and digital use collage techniques of various kinds.
Collage coheres very well with the fragmented nature of discourse on the
network. Many writers such as those involved in the Flarflist collective are
trying for instance to harness Google and other search engines in the
production of texts, integrating search results with constraints of various
kinds to produce poetry, stories, and plays that are written not by any single
individual but are rather harvested from the many streams of discourse flowing
on the network. There is a sense that the seemingly infinite pool of texts on
the network, when combined with search technologies, enables artists with a way
to access and piece together dispatches from the zeitgeist. The 3by3by3 poetry blog (Newman, 2006-2007) is a collective project driven by a simple
constraint and by Google News. Authors contributing to the project select three
stories from the current day’s stories on the front page of Google News, and
using only words which appear in the first few paragraphs of each story, build
a poem of three stanzas, with three lines in each stanza. The project marries
the random and arbitrary nature of a given day’s events with the agency of the
individual poet. The poems that result are both timely and absurd. Born
Magazine’s You and We, a Collective Experiment (Chevrel et al, 2002)
is a project that pairs images contributed by users with text contributed by
users, synched to soundtrack. While the image/text combinations are completely
arbitrary, it is perhaps a symptom of the human impulse towards closure that
there often seems to be a logic and intentionality to the pairings.
One powerful effect of the collage
technique is that by splicing together different types of discourse and
re-contextualizing them, we are able to see patterns we might otherwise not
have noticed. Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as
Other(s)] (Memmott, 2006c) is a
recombinant Flash work that is based on the self-portraits and biographies of a
variety of famous artists. In one pane of the work, a mashed-up portrait
appears, borrowing elements from the faces of several different artists. On the
right, a short biography appears, also splicing together different details from
the biographies of several different artists, providing us with often-absurd
anecdotal life histories of the resulting artist(s). What’s remarkable about
the work is how these mashed-together biographies read as nearly sensible. The
work also gives us quotes about art from each of the artist’s mouths that when
we mouse over them. While the quotes are attributable to individual artists,
when reading the texts it seems as if any artist would have been as likely as
any other to have made the same observation, be it ‘Vincent Cezanne’ or ‘Paul
Monet’. In reading these textual collages of artist biographies, we begin to
understand that the making of ‘the artist’ is not so much a matter of individual
genius as it is a process of constructing a formulaic discourse around the life
of a given painter.
Bodies, Machines, and the
Grotesque
The group of artists that assembled under the Dada
banner in Berlin did so in the city that most visibly bore the scars of World
War I, the capital of the defeated Germany. The Berlin Dada, founded in 1917 by
Richard Huelsenbeck, who had returned from Berlin from Zurich, where he had
been among the crowd of the Cabaret Voltaire, was the wing of Dada that
responded most directly to the consequences of war and to the political
disorder of postwar Germany. The products of their movement are strikingly
cynical, ironic, and grotesque. In his ‘First Dada Speech’, Huelsenbeck took a
characteristically contradictory position against pacifism, ‘We were for the
war, and we were still for the war. Things have to collide: the situation so
far is nowhere nearly gruesome enough’ (cited in Doherty, 2006: 87). This
statement, like any Dadaist proclamation, can’t be taken entirely at face
value. The war had exposed the consequences of nationalism, in the form of
death and deprivation. The results of the war were clearly grotesque. The
artworks of the German Dada were intended not to continue the war itself, but
to continue to make visible the grotesque.
The artist George Grosz wrote in
1924, retrospectively,
What did the Dadaists do? They said what does it
matter what art is produced … a sonnet from Petrach … or Rilke? What does it
matter if you spend your time gold-plating the heels of boots or carving
Madonnas? People are being shot. There is mass profiteering. And hunger. People
are being lied to. What is the point of art? Was it not the height of deception
that they were pulling wool over our eyes with these ‘sacred’ works? Was it not
utterly ridiculous that they were taking themselves seriously? (Grosz, 2006: 310)
The Berlin Dadaists were at war on bourgeois
complacency. The art of the Berlin Dada is among the most shocking and
purposefully disturbing the movement produced. Their art was not intended to
mollify, but to offend, to serve as a kind of anti-kitsch.
Many of the Dada artists dramatized
the fragmentation or destruction of the human body, and in particular the
relationship between human bodies and machines. The paintings of Otto Dix offer
us nightmares of deformity. In ‘Skat Players’ or ‘Card Playing War Cripples’,
(1920), three deformed amputees play card around the table, one wearing a
military uniform and medals, another wearing a businessman’s suit, all three of
them missing various limbs and parts of their faces. All three of them also
seem half man/half machine, with peg legs, mechanical arms, missing or glass
eyes, bolts and hinges sticking out of their half-shaved heads, a hinged jaw,
and an absurd ear phone on a cord in place of a missing ear. Several of Raul
Hausmann’s works also focus on the theme of man-machine hybrid. His ‘Mechanical
Head (The Spirit of Our Age)’ (1919) features a head from a hairdresser’s dummy
with attachments including a crocodile wallet, a ruler, a pocket watch
mechanism, camera parts, a typewriter cylinder, a segment of measuring tape, a
collapsible cup, the number 22, nails, and a bolt. The assemblage suggests a
post-industrial form of humanity, which can’t be separated from the measurements,
machines, and devices, to which it is constantly attached.
The paintings and collages of Max
Ernst also often feature bodies that have been dissected, segmented, or
modified in a variety of ways. His photomontage ‘The Anatomy as Bride’ (1921),
for instance, features a woman’s a head and shoulders; her body laid over and
connected to a machine of some kind. Her face is half metal, her throat an open
anatomy drawing. One of her arms is amputated and connected to the machine with
a pipe. The other is a prosthetic device. Several of Ernst’s other works
include beautiful venus-like women whose heads have been removed. Man Ray’s
photograph ‘Dadaphoto’ (1920) later titled ‘Portmanteau’ presents us with a
nude woman wearing a black sock that nearly merges into the background,
referencing amputation. In front of her is a paper cutout on a stand of a
woman’s shoulders, arms, and head. The face on the cutout is a kind of simple
Munch-like scream.
In almost every instance, when we
encounter a representation of the human body in Dada works, it is a fragmented
body, a body that has in some way been deformed, merged with a machine, or
sliced up. In his essay, ‘The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in
Weimar Visual Culture’ (Biro, 1994) Matthew Biro theorizes that Hausmann and
the other Berlin Dadaists anticipated the concept of the cyborg, although they
never used the term in writing. The fragmentation and deformation of the human
body in the work of the Dada was both a direct response to the horrors of
modern warfare and the legions of amputees who came home from the battlefield,
and in keeping with the larger project of contesting the bourgeois notion that
works of art should necessarily be aesthetically pleasing. The Dada contested
the notion that when the human body is represented, it should be a beautiful
body. The Dada were producing art immediately after a war in which human bodies
had not been treated delicately, but had been objectified, de-humanized, and
torn apart. Dada bodies represent consequences.
The fragmentation and deformation of
the human body is likewise a prominent theme in many works of electronic
literature. The Dada presented us with the post World War I automaton tottering
off the battlefield and into everyday bourgeois life. In the current period
when representing the human form as fragmented of deformed, electronic
literature writers are responding both to what Talan Memmott, in Lexia to
Perplexia (2006b) has termed the ‘cyborganization’ of human identity within
the network apparatus, and, like the Dada, to the dehumanization involved in
the practice our current wars. The representation of the human body and the
corresponding fragmentation of identity in contemporary electronic literature
is a topic that deserves a more thorough treatment in another forum. For the
purpose of comparing the representation of bodies in the Dada to the same in
contemporary electronic literature, I’ll only briefly discuss some of the work
of Alan Sondheim here, though the body is thematized compellingly by other
digital writers, notably in the work of Shelley Jackson.
It is difficult to summarize Alan
Sondheim’s project. An archive of Sondheim’s Internet Text (1994-February 2,
2006) was recently published in the Electronic Literature Collection,
Volume One, but it is virtually impossible to read his work as a whole. His
work is not in fact a work in the conventional sense of the word; it is not a
body of writing that has discrete and inviolate parts, but a mammoth shifting
corpus of writings, programs, videos, and communications of various kinds.
Sondheim performs his texts on the internet via a variety of means, via a
weblog, a directory and most notably on email lists. The nature of Sondheim’s
textual output ranges from straightforward observations and philosophical
musings to highly processed texts that have been subject a variety of
modifications. Sondheim is constantly digging back into the body of texts he
has already created to harvest new recombined texts from it. In a 2001 article
published on TEXT, Sondheim described his process,
I'll very rarely let anything alone–I don't really
care how the text is produced–so I'll go back into it and rearrange things,
making the text say things or lead the reader in new and different directions.
In other words, the commands are catalysts for text production–not designed to
deliver the final text, but to deliver a textual body I can then work on,
operate upon (Sondheim, 2001).
Sondheim’s body of work is the textual equivalent of
one of Schwitter’s Merzbau sculptures. Sondheim’s work is never complete, but
always a process. It’s interesting that he describes his work method in terms
of working on, operating on, a body. In practice, he both destroys and
reconstructs his own texts. His practice itself sometimes comes across as a
form a violence, for instance when a staid progressive mailing list, for
instance, finds its civilized political discourse interrupted by an email from ‘Jennifer
Disgust’ with the subject line: KILL ME. In the same sense as Dada art could be
understood as anti-art, Sondheim’s works are a kind of anti-spam. Rather than
encouraging us to buy Viagra or invest in Nigeria, more often they will remind
of us of the condition of corpses in Kosovo, Iraq, and Auschwitz. Many of his
textual and video works thematize the body as subject to violence of various
kinds. Sondheim often writes from the perspective of a variety of stock
characters, such as Nikuko, Jennifer, and Doctor Leopold Konniger. These
characters are often subject to and subjecting each other to degrading forms of
violence. Like the Dada, Sondheim is attempting to make visible the real
violence that is often made to seem virtual and obscured by contemporary media
culture. In a recent interview with Simon Mills, Sondheim describes his project
as being one of revealing the structure of the virtual:
I’m trying to diagram the virtual as a tool
eliminating the other–the absence of corpses for example, of Iraqi–even our own
dead and wounded. So the situation might be written (self-virtual)–we ourselves
are becoming-virtual as a result of this absence. It’s like a tag that has no
place to ‘sit.’ The instability that occurs through this can be politically
manipulated–i.e. the war is not a war, the war is safe, the war is clean,
everyone loves US. I think this is one of the reasons that the so-called
‘insurgency’ (which it isn’t of course) emphasizes brutality–that gets through,
can’t be ignored or controlled by the military (Mills, 2006).
One recent strand of Sondheim’s video work uses poser
and other modeling programs and video effects to contort bodies into a variety
of twisted, abnormal configurations. Much of his video work mixes the virtual
with the actual, moving bodies back and forth between virtual and real realms.
For instance, in Sondheim’s short video ‘Avatar Duet’ (2006a) the dancers Maud
Liardon and Foofwa d’Imobilite perform a dance based on poser avatars moved by
motion capture, in this case transferring the twitching, angular movements of
virtual avatars back to human bodies. In other videos, such as ‘Kali Dance
Avatar’, (Sondheim, 2006b) Sondheim
subjects the avatars to ‘unperformable’ contortions, such as having heads swap
places with arms, legs shifting to necks. In the video WolfTC (World Trade
Center) (2007) Sondheim layers a video of an animated wolf avatar, whose body
is literally coming apart from the inside out, hide peeling off of twisting
bones, over an eerie video of the World Trade Center site, as a frenetic
soundtrack plays. Sondheim’s video work underscores his theme that what we so
often think of in only abstract terms, targets underneath our smart bomb sites,
virtual enemies in faraway places, have actual bodies and actual form. The wolf
is at our door. Sondheim links the tormented forms of the virtual to the actual
sufferings of real human bodies.
Experimentation
and Nothingness
In this essay I have treated only a handful of the
ways in which the work of contemporary electronic writers reflects themes and
techniques either influenced by or directly derived from the work of the Dada.
Some of the connections I’ve drawn here are clear, others less explicit. While
it’s entirely possible that authors working in new media would have arrived at
similar techniques, themes, and attitudes without the precedent of the Dada, I
argue that developing a better understanding of the avant-garde movements of
the past can only serve to enhance the experience of those who will push the
boundaries of new media work in the future.
I believe it’s also useful to
remember that for all of the impact that Dada had on the art of the twentieth
century, in actuality, Dada lasted only for a very short period as a
semi-coherent movement before the Dada split into a variety of other art
movements and practices, most notably in Paris to the establishment of the surrealist
movement. And while we continue to see the techniques of the Dada at work in
both conventional and new media art forms, during the time it was a recognized
movement, there were never more than a few dozen artists who were active in the
movement. I mention this because as we think about the future of electronic
literature through the lens of Dada’s past, it’s quite encouraging to realize
that it doesn’t take a particularly large group of people, or a particularly
long span of time, for an interesting approach to creating new forms of art to
have a great deal of positive impact. While some of the Dada were well-known
artists during their day, and many of them became famous in subsequent decades,
at the time most of their activities were regarded by the conventional art
world as ridiculous at best, if not dangerous.
While the practice of electronic
literature is still not widespread, a growing group of artists have been
seriously engaged in the creation of literary experiments for the computer and
network for close to two decades now, and while some have already declared ‘the
golden age’ of literary hypermedia past, the community of writers producing
literary experiences has only grown stronger in recent years. Electronic
literature now has a variety of established publication venues, works of new
media literature regularly appear in university syllabi, and perhaps most
importantly, informal communication networks have developed between writers and
artists around the world. If much of the world still doesn’t know that literary
art specific to the computer even exists, the writers themselves do, and are
aware of and responding to each other’s work. Like the Dada, the electronic
literature movement is fundamentally different from, and in many ways in opposition
to, the established conventions of print-oriented literary culture. No
hypertext novel has every appeared on a best-seller list, indeed most works of
electronic literature are not sold at all, but rather given away in a gift
economy.
For a long stretch of time after the
movement dissolved, the Dada was largely not taken seriously within the ‘official’
art world. How could this chaotic brand of ‘anti-art’ find a place in museums
and collections and so on, when its proponents declared themselves in every way
opposed to that culture? Yet today, of course, the art world credits Dada with
many of the most important techniques and ideas of twentieth century art.
Digital writers who consider themselves to be on a fool’s errand, toiling in
obscurity, might do well to take note of this.
The Blind Man’s issue on the Exhibition of
Independents included one important thought that I’d like to conclude with. The
Blind Man asked,
If a painter shows you a picture, you can make
nothing out of, and calls you a fool, you may resent it. But if a painter works
passionately, patiently, and says, ‘I am making many experiments which may,
perhaps, bring nothing for many years,’ what can we have against him? (Roché, 2006: 151)
Beyond the creation of any single technique, the most
important thing that the digital artists and authors of the future might learn
from the Dada is their very willingness to experiment, to create objects and
experiences that may bring nothing for years, or alternatively, may inspire
other artists a century hence.
Author's Biography
Scott Rettberg is an associate professor of
Humanistic Informatics in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic
Studies at the University of Bergen. He is a co-founder and served as the first
executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization, and currently
serves on its board of directors. A writer and practitioner as well as critic
and scholar of new media, Scott is the co-author of the award-winning hypertext
novel The Unknown, the email novel Kind of Blue, and the sticker novel Implementation. He is a regular contributor to the new media research weblog
Grand Text Auto, and has published a variety of critical and theoretical
articles on electronic literature. Along with N. Katherine Hayles, Nick
Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland, he recently co-edited the Electronic
Literature Collection Volume One, a CD-ROM and web anthology of electronic
literature. Most of his writing is available on his website: http://retts.net
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