Tag Archives: electronic literature

The Hypercento: a New E-Poetic Form

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Thesis statement: The hypercento is a form of hypertextual poetry which I have invented, based upon the cento, a form of found poetry. The hypercento allows the poet to hyperlink, annotate, and rework and original text beyond what is possible in a traditional cento.

Project Description: The hypercento is made up of several different layers of text, which all combine to create one interactive hypertext. The first layer is a cento, a poem made entirely of lines taken from other texts. The second layer consists of longer excerpts of quoted text. Each line selected for the cento gets its own lexia, which gives the reader deeper insight into the original text and credits the original author. The third layer, accessed through hyperlinks in the second-layer excerpts, allows the poet to annotate the text, expand upon an argument or a poetic image, or subvert the original author’s message.

The hypercento will also contain a bibliography, which will include a list of lines grouped by author and ordered alphabetically. This bibliography will serve as a second poetic arrangement of the selected lines. The poet must allow the style requirements of the form to dictate how this part of the poem is arranged. This will represent the role of the archive in collecting and storing meaning for the future.

My first hypercento will be made of lines from the readings from this class, plus others which helped inspire the form. It will touch on themes such as the archive as a cemetery or a place of worship, religious worship and erotic worship, books as objects of fetishistic importance, and the sacred and profane acts of desecration required to make books and bookwork.

Medium: Twine, Harlowe: Free, easy to learn, easy linking system, customization tools, hypertextual, “twine”: thread connecting separate texts (textiles), link to “cento,” from the Latin for “patchwork garment”.

Annotated Bibliography:

1. Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Illuminations, Schocken Books, 1931, pp. 59-67.

  • I want to dive into Benjamin’s framing of book collecting. He claims that people collect books because of the meaning they hold for the collector, not because of the text within them. The cento is a similar kind of collection. It allows the poet to create a collection of lines which hold a meaning that only the poet can really understand. The hypercento allow the poet to share this meaning in greater depth.
  • Line choice: “These books arouse”: leaning into the erotic nature of books, as my classmates in Form & Theory of Poetry suggested.

2. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” 1941, https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf and https://fall2025-ecl596.jessicapressman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/the-library-of-babel-by-jorge-luis-borges.pdf.

  • I’m using both of the translations on the class site. Mostly to pilfer lines. Also going to bring religion into this, obviously. Something about worship in a religious sense and worship in an erotic sense.
  • Line choice (first link): “pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations,”
  • Line choice (second link): “kiss their pages in a barbarous manner”

3. Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

  • The cornerstone of the class. My poem will be about what makes a book and why we make books. Obviously, The Book must be in it. I will be focusing on passages related to electronic literature and bookwork.
  • Line choices: “trace our finger along text’s rim and make it sing,” and “refuse the book’s function while interrogating its form.”

4. Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2019.

  • The main excerpt I’m citing claims that “a single collection can potentially refashion an entire field’s underlying architecture.” I don’t know if the hypercento can actually do all that, since it’s not that revolutionary of an idea for hypertext, but I think it can change how I write poetry.
  • Line choice: “Whitmanesque multitudes”

5. Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.

  • Citing mostly for Drucker’s commentary on “the book as an electronic form” (14). There are also a few lines I want to pull from the footnotes.
  • Line choices: “an infinite and continually mutating archive of collective memory and space,” “the continuity of the sheet across the gutter,” and, “I would have to
  • include every poet”

6. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Postmodern Culture,

  • The hypercento is short for hypertext-cento, and so hypertext-specific analysis will be necessary in describing its place in hypertext poetry. In this article, Hayles gives a list of characteristics specific to hypertexts. This will also allow me to go on about Patchwork Girl, and I Will Go On About Patchwork Girl.
  • Line choices: “digital texts cannot escape fragmentation,” “spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines,” and, “complicate that sense through flickering connectivities, re-working it into something rich and strange.”

7. Marino, Mark. Marginalia in the Library of Babel, 2007, https://markcmarino.com/diigo/i_blog.htm.

  • It was vital to include this work, as it’s a hypertext based on annotating existing text. It is clearly one of my major inspirations for the hypercento. I particularly want to reference a few of Marino’s notes on the Babel Fish translation of Borges’ story.
  • Line choices: “Babel’s Fish does not know the meaning of hope,” and “those grains unto which we might all pass.”

8. Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” Refiguring the Archive, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

  • I wrote a blog post on Mbembe’s comparison of the archive to temples and cemeteries, places where magical rituals are happening. I’ll be using these motifs throughout the poem and my commentary.
  • Line choices: “the nature of a temple and a cemetery,” or “rituals that we shall see below are of a quasi-magical nature”

9. Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2020.

  • Focusing on the framing of the book as an object which holds meaning outside of the text it contains. Particularly want to use the motif of book as fetish object. This adds more connective tissue to the religious worship/erotic worship theme.
  • Line choices: “a poignant artifact and fetish object,” “an act of rebellion, self-construction, and hope,” and “a physical thing of beauty, complexity, and fascination.”

10. Stewart, Garrett. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

  • The original title of this poem was Bookwork, and it was mostly about bookwork and book objects. The poem, as it is now taking shape, is more generally about our class, but it still refers quite a lot to bookwork. And if I’m referring to bookwork, Stewart must have at least one line in the poem.
  • Line choices: “denied, violated, or evacuated in content,” “But the loop isn’t a facile short-circuit,” and “making the traversed space of their own content metaphoric.”

Is Digital Media Scary or Cool? (Yes)

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As Dr. Pressman said in the lecture about Electronic Literature, “any time there’s new tools or technologies, artists play with them.” When watching the lecture, I was amazed at how artists took the computer and coding to another level to create meaningful art and challenge how people interact with the digital world. Though I know AI is relatively new, I feel like it’s been around or at least talked about so extensively that I’ve thought of it as something I’ve known for a while. Which is why I was surprised when, just recently, I saw an artist’s digital artwork that uses the common mistakes and uncanniness of AI art to create their own art. Somehow, though the art was a terrifying amalgamation despite using bright colors, it felt like it had a soul. I enjoyed its dilapidated subject that was blurred and had an odd amount of fingers, but wondered where the wonder and want for creating using technology has gone.  Personally, I feel limited in my use of the digital, especially with corporations shoving their products down my throat. No longer do I have the same curiosities and willingness to sit in front of a computer and simply explore internet spaces. Though I’m aware the internet is practically limitless in the things you can find, nowadays it feels more restricted to a few search engines, similar formats that encourage endless scrolling, and constant advertisements. Seeing all of the creative endeavors that occurred in previous years, with the development of the internet, makes me crave electronic literature. Yet, I also fear the sustainability of electronic literature. 

As we’ve heard in class, things like Mark Marino’s “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” have gone dark because of a shift in technology. Though “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” was restored and functions the way it’s supposed to, some other pages from Flash don’t get as lucky as being restored properly. Recently, I revisited my favorite childhood game “Poptropica,” which was ran with Flash, then restored, but not to the same quality as it was in the 2000s. This makes me question when the pages, articles, games, and art I consume online will simply disappear one day, and if they’d feel or be the same as they were. Obviously, it seems like a case-by-case situation, but it still makes me question what we leave behind in order to pursue the new. 

Week 10: Is All Media Three-Dimensional?

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Electronic literature scholar N. Katherine Hayles writes in 2007 that contemporary e-lit authors “explor[ed] . . .the Z-axis as an additional dimension for text display, behavior, and manipulation” (“Electronic Literature: What Is It?”). Hayles describes the work of Ted Warnell, whose TLT vs. LL (2006, strobe/flashing warning) “shifts to a dynamic surface in which rising and sinking motions give the effect of three dimensions as the layered letter forms shift, move, and reposition themselves relative to other letters” (Hayles). I am considering this spatial depth alongside our discussions of screen interfaces and my own work with Rufus Butler Seder’s Gallop! (2007), a book which combines leaf layers to produce an animated effect.

In a comment on Micaela’s post last week, Sierra mentioned otome games – a subgenre of visual novels, which themselves emerge from interactive fiction games. It’s made me think about the conventional display interface of visual novels, which generally overlay narrative text and selectable options over illustrations. While considering how Gallop! produces animation and sequence through interactions between bound layers, I’m realizing that I haven’t attended to the “Z-axis” in screen media like 2D visual novels, animation, or even the computer screen interface itself. The backlit LCD display of my computer also produces animation via interactions between layers of light and crystal. This is a 3D process. Because the computer interface produces media through X, Y, and Z axes, even what appears to be 2D screen media is materially 3D.

We therefore don’t look at a screen, but through its layers. Interactions between layers produce optical effects, much like the Scanimation barrier-grid effect produced in Seder’s Gallop!. N. Katherine Hayles has already explored computer backlighting’s “media-specific” influence on e-lit through texts like “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” (2000), but I’m only now realizing the implications of the Z-axis to electronic literature. How does an e-lit work engage with the 3D spatiality of its medium?

Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen (2005) mediates the 3D spatiality of print books by inviting co-reading between human and computer readers. As the human user physically moves the book’s QR-coded pages in view of a computer reader’s camera, the computer retrieves and displays 3D visuals that are mapped onto the visual feedback. As Dr. Pressman argues in “Reorienting Ourselves toward the Material: Between Page and Screen as Case Study” (2018), Borsuk’s augmented reality book shows that “technology is not only part of the work but also part of the text to be read and compared” (323). Borsuk’s “3D concrete poem[s]” (323) reflect the 3D spatiality of “page and screen” interfaces. Following Dr. Pressman’s example of “the piggy poem” in Borsuk’s project as an allusion to the animal skins used in medieval manuscripts (326), we might consider how animal skins themselves form outer layers over complex interior systems, and how the reduction of these systems to a single, ‘2D’ exterior layer reduces the complexity of their multidimensional, mediated bodies.

From now on, I’ll view media objects as assemblages of layers. This is kind of blowing me out of the water in terms of reframing my approach to e-lit and animation studies. Engaging with the materiality of Gallop! in concordance with Hayles, Borsuk, and Dr. Pressman’s e-lit studies reveals the multidimensionality of media and media activation. The medium cannot be flattened. How might e-lit engage with this spatiality, and with the illusion of flatness, as narrative and material conflicts?