The first time I ever heard about digital literature was when I received an email from the College of Arts and Letters, calling for art submissions. In my head, digital literature didn’t make sense because I had only ever thought of literature on a physical page in a book. I thought: How can literature be digital (besides me typing a story or poem on my computer)? It confused me as to how anyone could go beyond that, even though I had already seen versions of digital literature without knowing. 

Unfortunately, I cannot remember the exact museum I went to, but I do remember the art piece. I was in a dark room with a video playing on one screen. In the video, a woman sat in a kitchen and picked items up one at a time, naming them. You couldn’t really predict what she would show you next and, quite frankly, it was hard to discern any true rhyme or reason to which objects she would choose. That was so until she had listed perhaps 16 items and I had realized she was listing them all in alphabetical order. There was something quite eerie about the recording considering there was no ‘typical’ story besides the one you imagined. Not only did this story of sorts force me to listen in a very specific way but it also encouraged me to view these words with a specific emotion attached to them. Where “apron” might just be any other word, it was the beginning of her story.

The electronic literature displayed in Professor Pressman’s lecture reminded me a lot of this experience. I found that by watching and reading these pieces, I was experiencing something far more profound than a book. While both literature in books and digital literature are art, they convey different messages because of the medium they are attached to. I recognize that there are limitations to art based on what message should be presented to the audiences. The digital literature artists could not have performed these stories without the technology they used. It’s quite simple when you think about it, as a painter can’t make a painting with paints and a canvas. Otherwise, it would be an entirely new art medium. These digital writers are using digital technologies to play with audiences’ reception of the art, to change the way readers consume, to redefine what it means to read words in a specific order and speed.

With the alphabet story, I believe I felt uncomfortable listening to it, not only because of her listing objects without explaining a motive, but because of the pace she chose to read them at. It was a slow process, getting through the alphabet in roughly five minutes. It demanded my attention yet also forced me to listen and think. In the silence, she gave me time to consider the story between the lines. Similar to “Pry” that engages readers by having them actively pry out more information from between the lines, this video encouraged me to make my own story from the omission of filler words.