Leo Flores: Third Generation Electronic Literature
Five years after he spent a year at UiB as a Fulbright, Leonardo Flores returns to give a talk and to be an opponent for Álvaro Seiça's PhD defence.
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Abstract: Third generation electronic literature emerges with the rise of social media networks, the development of mobile, touchscreen, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) platforms. This generation is less concerned with inventing form and more with remixing and creating work within well established platforms and their interfaces, parallel to a return to recognizable poetic forms, Romantic subjectivity, and pastiche in Postmodern poetry. This includes Instagram poetry, bots, apps, kinetic typography, lyric videos, memes, Twine games, and works that take advantage of smartphone, touchscreen, and VR technologies. This generation leaves behind book and open Web publishing paradigms and embraces new funding models, such as crowdfunding and software distribution platforms.
Even though the first generation of e-lit ended about 20 years ago, the second and third generation currently coexist, much as Modernist and Postmodernist literature do. And while second generation works are currently more sophisticated, complex, and aligned with academia, the third generation will produce the first massively successful works because they operate in platforms with large audiences that need little to no training to reading them. So while second generation works will continue to attract critical acclaim with limited audiences, it is the third generation that will produce the field’s first #1 hit.
