Opera aperta

Preface

This volume is one of the outcomes of the AHRC-funded project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900–2020: interart/intermedia (2015–2018), which involved Prof. Giuliana Pieri (Principal Investigator, Royal Holloway), Prof. Clodagh Brook (former PI, Trinity College Dublin) and Prof. Florian Mussgnug (UCL) and myself as Senior Research Fellow. The project explores a variety of hybrid forms in the arts, such as cinema, digital visual poetry, sound art, electronic literature and other practices, which have crossed arts and media with an extraordinary fluidity since the start of the twentieth century. Until very recently, however, this interartistic fluidity has been the prerogative of artists; researchers have worked against the grain of this cultural shift, analysing cultural products within our own disciplines (literature, art, music, etc.). In so doing, we have risked overlooking a paradigm shift, losing hybrid art forms in the gaps between disciplines – in which they receive only marginal attention – and underestimating the value of one art in favour of another. As interdisciplinary methodologies develop, however, researchers find themselves at a new historical vantage point. With this in mind, Interdisciplinary Italy has established a groundbreaking interartistic perspective on the arts, mapping the paradigm shift in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italy. As part of this project, this book concentrates on the Italian artistic experimentation developed across literary forms and electronic media – what we recognise today as ‘electronic literature’ – during the Third Industrial Revolution. Given the multimedia nature of the case studies considered, the volume will be supplemented by a dedicated website page titled OPERA APERTA The Book (<https://www.emanuelapatti.com>), which contains a corpus of embedded videos, images and links to social media. Please read the book in conjunction with these resources.

Portions of this book have previously been published as book chapters or journal articles. Chapter 4, Digital storytelling from experimental writing to popular culture, includes portions of a chapter titled ‘Popular culture in the digital age’, published in the volume The Last Forty Years ←xv | xvi→of Italian Popular Culture: Andare al popolo! (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), edited by Paolo Desogus and Enrico Minardi. Also, a previous version of Chapter 13, Collective distributed narratives: The Wu Ming Foundation (2006–), was published as a peer-reviewed article titled ‘From text to screen/From screen to text. Collaborative narratives in twenty-first century Italian fiction: the Wu Ming case’ in the Journal of Romance Studies, 16: 1, 2016, 39–61. Finally, sections of Part I and of chapter 5 have constituted a recent article titled ‘Umberto Eco’s Opera aperta and the birth of Italian electronic literature’ published in the Digital Modern Languages Section Launch Issue of MLO in December 2021. I take the opportunity to thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Liverpool University Press for granting me the permission to reuse my chapter and articles in this monograph.

This book explores the experimentation across literary forms and electronic media during the digital revolution, or the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’, by providing a reconstruction of the main experimental genres and key Italian authors of this revolution, as well as a critical reflection on the condition of ‘digitality’ as cultural logic. This Italian corpus of hybrid works, which tends to be recognised today as ‘electronic literature’, has its origins in Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark 1 (1961) and Umberto Eco’s co-eval seminal essay Opera aperta (1962). At the time, computer technologies were questioning the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ as the main system of preserving, maintaining and progressing culture, while also challenging the ‘closed’ and ‘linear’ concept of the book inherited from print culture and the verbal word in poetry. This digital revolution has been associated with a sense of ‘newness’ which, in line with the historical avant-gardes, embraced, at least initially, the modernist utopia of progress and democratisation: new media seemed to offer more opportunities for productivity and education, new creative and communicative horizons. However, the narrative of ‘newness’, subscribed to not only by the entrepreneurs and corporations that produce the media hardware and software in question, but also by whole sections of media commentators and journalists, artists, intellectuals, technologists and administrators, educationalists and cultural activists, is far from being ideologically neutral. Rather, it fully reflects the ‘globalising neo-liberal forms of production and distribution’ of the last decades (Lister et al. 2009: 11).

Although the genres of electronic literature cannot compete with the print canon, they tell us something important about the relationship between humans, mass media and computer technologies. Like print literature, electronic literature has had various functions: it has been conceived as a form of entertainment or playful experimentation to enhance and ←1 | 2→extend the affordances and languages of literature, but it has also served political, ideological and educational purposes, offering a critical perspective on technologies and their impact on society. Every time we use certain technologies, such as PCs or social media, we accept a certain cultural logic embedded in it, as well as its symbolic forms, through which we communicate and make sense of the world. The creative and critical use of these technologies, as in the case of electronic literature, can, however, play an important role in highlighting fallacies, inconsistencies and social issues. All of the works considered in this book thus shed light on how the different technological processes of digitality – that is, programming, screen visualisation, digitisation, hypertextuality and hypermediation, interactivity and participation, database, open source, virtuality and simulation, convergence, and remediation – have been creatively and critically reflected upon by Italian writers, poets and critics. In some cases, literary experimentation with new technologies has taken a clear polemical stance on mass media, globalisation, information society and digital capitalism, in an attempt to challenge and/or reconfigure artistic or social ontologies. In this respect, Eco’s key essay ‘Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realtà’ [On the Manner of Informing as a Commitment to Reality] has proven to be an effective methodological tool to analyse how artists have enacted both a poetics and politics of intermediality as creative practices and forms of critique to reflect on the relationship between digital media and human consciousness.