Einleitung/ Introduction 123 Allen, die die Bearbeitung dieses Problemkatalogs mit ihren Vorträgen und Diskussionsbeiträgen ein gutes Stück vorangetrieben und damit neue Horizonte des Diskurses für die kommenden Symposien eröffnet haben, sei an dieser Stelle herzlich gedankt. Unser besonderer Dank gilt unseren Förderern: der Universität Erfurt, der Universität Kassel, der Stiftung Brückner-Kühner und dem Kasseler Hochschulbund sowie namentlich auch Michael Giesecke und Winfried Nöth für ihre Projektbegleitung. Und last but not least danken wir Ernest Hess-Lüttich für die Möglichkeit zur Veröffentlichung in der Reihe Kodikas/ Code sowie Roberto Simanowski, der die Herausgabe der Tagungsbeiträge im e-joumal dichtungdigital (http: / / www.dichtung-digital.de/ Forum-Kassel-Okt-OO/ index.htm) ermöglicht und vorbereitet hat. pOesls - Poetics of digital text The series Poetics of digital text was launched on October 20th and 21st 2000 at the Center of Cultural Sciences (University of Kassel) with a symposium on the Aesthetics of digital literature. The conference was interconnected with the exhibition pOesls international digital poetry, which took place in the gallery Kunsttempel in Kassel. The series is acooperation of the Universities of Kassel and Erfurt and the Brückner-Kühner Foundation (Kassel). In September 2001 the series continued in Erfurt under the participation of international guests. The symposia on the poetics of digital text orient themselves along the following conceptual formulation: The intrinsic capacities and functions of a literature that is specificaily conceived for digital media shall be explored. As a literary form oscillating between innovation (the changed conditions ofdigital and networked writing) and tradition (with recourse to the traditions of the literary avant-garde) the question about classification and interpretation of this new kind of literature in media theory and literary criticism has to be solved. These two aspects dominated the Kassel symposium. The first group under the heading From print to digital literature convergence and disruption examines the relation between print and digital literature under different points of view, however, always with a focus on historical traditions ofliterature and/ or its relation to the literary avant-gardes. The scope of Hypertext- Text-Hype? Features of a phenomenon lies on the possibilities to describe media specifi.c features of digital literature compared to role models in the description of print literature .. The workshop reports of artists and authors demonstrate that both directions are followed but transposed in the artistic practice in different ways. Especially the discourse on digital literature is dependent on the close interchange between theory and practice. The technical demands, which are not easily grasped in analysis, critic, and the development of theory, are mediated at best through insights in the 'workshop for potential and realized literature'. However, theory may offer a synchronic and diachronic classification and a contextualization from a poetic, media theoretical and cultural point of view. Based on this presupposition it is the goal of our symposia to intensify the communication between theoreticians and artists working in the field of digital literature. The first part of our proceedings From print to digital literature convergence and disruption discusses the aesthetic dimension of semiotic change, aspects of text-image relations in the 124 Friedrich W. Block, Christiane Reibach und Karin Wenz frame of digitalization, the hypermedial transfer from a print version of experimental literature, the question of the influence of digital construction patterns in printed literature, and the features of literature as written discourse by the example of chat rooms on the Web. In his paper on Hermeneutics of in-depth information. On the psychology ofthe digital image Roberto Simanowski defines the digital image as part of a dramaturgy of the spectacle. Some hypermedial examples were chosen to mark the specific features of digital visualized text and the textual aspects of images. Thereby the double in-depth information of the digital image is discussed on different levels of the hidden source code. Simanowski questions that the common interpretation of images can grasp the new phenomena. Friedrich W. Block' s contribution Innovation or triviality? On the hypermedial 'translation' of Modernism comments on two persistent rumours: 1. We enter radically new spheres with digital literature. 2. The digital media would be better equipped to represent the modernist ways of poetic writing which have been developed, the digital media would be the late realization of modern poetics. Block argues that we have to take into consideration the specificity of digital literature and the aesthetic gain of a poetry that is extended by hypermedial forms. As an example to elucidate this problem, Block chose an interactive cd-rom, published in 1998, which transforms a novel of Andreas Okopenko (Lexikon-Roman 1970). The abyss of electronic text archives: On status and conditions of the production of digital literature is the topic of Markus Krajewski's contribution. The concept of digitality in literature is approximated theoretically and transferred to literary processes and their technical equivalents in word processing beyond mere copy and paste principles. The data base strategy of collections of texts is not necessarily limited to the computer but also a principle of the production of print literature. This central argument of Krajewski is demonstrated by the example of Kempowski's Echolot. Krajewski faces the border between digital and print literature and shows that this border has to be perceived as pervious. Uwe Wirth' s paper on Between answering machine and online chat refers to some chat projects presented on the InterSzene symposium in Romainmoitier by Gisela Müller, Tilman Sack, and Susanne Berkenheger. Proceeding on these projects, he developes some presuppositions towards a poetics of chatting. He sees this form of 'written orality' in relation with the poetic of the epistolary novel and the practice of telephoning. The chat as a 'long distance written dialogue' resumes the 'written to the moment' of the poetics of the epistolary novel, by making the act of writing visible in a specific frame: the chat room. The subject area of the second part Hypertext text-hype? Features of a phenomenon concentrates on forms of description of digital literature. Starting from the idea that we are dealing with new forms of appearance in the field of digital literature, research in this field has to develop new categories of description. Ernest Hess-Lüttich focuses on the semiotic change and its aesthetic impact in his paper on net art. New tasksfor media aesthetics and tele semiotics. Hess-Lüttich takes a closer look at new genres of aesthetics as e.g. net literature, hyperfiction, computer animation in film. As these forms cannot be classified along well-known traditional lines, he calls for new models which take the hybridity of these new genres into account. Beat Suter describes digital texts as A new literary environment [between transfugality and 'event-uality']. He names a high degree of experimentality, the desire for artistic design which is more than the transfer of traditional forms, hybridity, narrative spatiality, non-finality and the striving for interactivity and 'event-uality' as characteristics of 'hyperfiction', Einleitung/ Introduction 125 'cyberfiction', 'webfiction' and 'net literature'. Suter claims that these characteristics are best grasped functionally with Wolfgang Welsch's terms ofthe 'transversal' and the 'transfugal'. The artificial and interactivity are the key terms of Gesine Lenore Schiewer' s contribution on Research on AI and the aesthetics of digital literature. She approaches an aesthetics of digital literature by following Espen Aarseth' s definition of interaction, bis description of · ergodic literature and Herbert A. Simon' s idea of a relationship between the artificial and the complex. The central question of this paper is whether the multiple possibilities of reading and perceiving offer beside a playful journey through the text new insights to the recipients. These new insights should enable the recipient to be aware of his or her possibilities of interaction as weil as of the hidden guidance and restriction which are also features of digital literature. Christiane Reibach develops in her paper The invisible story: Theses on the nature ofnet literature the different characteristics of net literature in comparison to non-networked digital literature. Her theses can be summarized as: the medial quality of the intemet determinates the specifity of net literature and net art. Especially net literature mirrors in very different ways the specific properties of technically networked documents and users, of the processbased software and the symbolic codes that computer and intemet are based on. Tue theses are illustrated by artistic examples from the field of net literature and net art. How differentiated their tendencies seem to be at a first glance, they all share common features which make a categorization possible. Anja Rau' s Time in digital fiction: The temporal strategies of adventure games is concemed with a very different digital phenomenon: the computer game. She describes how the use of multi-mediality and programm-based recursivity changes ways of 'chronocentristic' storytelling. With several examples she demonstrates that computer games and especially the adventure game aim towards a subversion of linear time concepts. This subversion is integrated into computer games as a specific aspect of their narrativity. In Virtual quills: Towards an aesthetics in the polemical mode Joseph Wallmannsberger undertakes a critical deconstruction of some myths of the digital. The alleged openness of electronic texts, described as a transgression of the border between reader and author in hypertext, is reached much more effectively and profoundly by the flexibility of data bases. A second myth on the realization of literary dreams in the synaesthesia of virtual worlds tums out to be a hidden geometry and therefore of high mathematical abstraction. An extended understanding of text which involves data bases and coding, opens up an understanding of literature. Following Wallmannsberger the (collaborative) development of digital code can be described as poetic practice. The making of digital literature: Workshop reports closes this Kodikas number and transfers theory into aesthetic practice. Johannes Auer introduces his project Frieder Rusmann: Fabrikverkauf, which functions as an interface between the intemet and a real-life performance. He uses the terms 'community' and 'e-commerce' as starting point for an artistic performance which the user has to create himor herself in a [walking exhibition]. To participate the user has to order a graphically designed T-shirt online and has to wear it at a place and time in real life. This [walking exhibition] was announced on the intemet. lt is Auer' s goal to translate the virtual structures of e-commerce back into our everyday life. A virtual business is made visible and the buying of an art object is freed from its commercial function. 126 Friedrich W. Block, Christiane Heibach und Karin Wenz hei+co@hyperdis.de discusses in his contribution Searching and referring digital authorand readerships the disappearing author on the intemet. Intertextuality as well as copyand manipulation-practices of documents subvert the authenticity of authorship on which print-literature is based. Refusing auctorial identification, the paper discusses the question of the relationship between author and reader on the intemet, using numerous anonymized quotes. Not only in its message but also in its structure this paper is experimental the anonymized references can only be resolved by visiting a website. This practice demonstrates at the same time the medial convergence and the difference between print and intemet. TanGo & Co: A report on some intemetprojectsfrom Stuttgart by Reinhard Döhl clarifies that these projects have to be seen in the tradition of earlier experiments from Stuttgart (computer text and -graphic, concrete and visual poetry). The reproductive and productive possibilities of the intemet are used in so far as single texts have been added under the rules of the game, which is the technical condition of the intemet. These projects highlight digital variations of visual poetry, while Martina Kieninger' s German-Uruguayan TanGo-project can be described as a cooperative and intercultural digital-literary anthology. German and Uruguayan participants were asked to associate along the themes 'Tango' (for Germany) and 'Schuhplattler' (for Uruguay). The variety of presentations and the combinatory perspectives culminate in an ironic representation of cultural chliches. Finally, Florian Cramer follows a very strict view on digital literature, which he explains with his online-project permutations. The project combines historical and own examples of text machineries programmed in PERL. Cramer understands digital literature as a conceptual design of coding and progrartuning, an algorithmic, self-executing ars combinatoria. His perspective is opposed to the key terms of a digital poetics that focuses on hypertext, multimedia, and interactivity. The variety of the contributions and the different perspectives fans out the broad range of digital literature. Compared to print-literature we are just at the beginning of a development which raises more questions than it offers solutions.. The Kassel symposium shows the necessity of an interdisciplinary discourse to grasp the potential and the possibilities of the field. The first preliminary results shall be accompanied by a continuation of this discussion, which allows to review perspectives and forms of description and to consider at the same time the appearance of new developments. We want to thank all participants of the first pOesl s symposium who have strode ahead the development and thereby opened up new horizons for the coming discussions. This is the place and the time to show our appreciation for the generous support we have received from the University of Erfurt, the University of Kassel (and especially the Center of Cultural Sciences), the Brückner-Kühner Foundation, and the Kasseler Hochschulbund, and personally from Michael Giesecke and Winfried Nöth by their help and companion during the development of our project. Last but not least we are grateful to Emest Hess-Lüttich for the possibility to publish these proceedings in Kodikas/ Code and Roberto Simanowski who has made possible the publication of most of these contributions in his e-journal dichtung-digital (http: / / www.dichtung-digital.de/ Forum-Kassel-Okt-00/ index.htm).