by justin berner (2020)
by the moment users become aware of what is happening in amazon, one of eugenio tisselli’s most recent works, they have already become complicit in a simple, digital rehearsal of this precious biome’s destruction. running a block of code that we have been instructed to copy and save as “amazon.html”, we witness a forest of green “trees” (represented by the “*” symbol) become replaced by brown numerals at an ever-increasing speed until, after a few minutes, the screen becomes almost entirely covered by these ever-changing digits, soon resembling an indecipherable, illogical stock ticker where once there was a peaceful forest. characteristic of the mexican-born, barcelona-based artist’s oeuvre, which features works that similarly use algorithmic processes to explore the real-world, material effects of the digital, amazon obliges its users to recognize the exploitation of natural resources for an ever-more-abstract concept of growth in a capitalist economy today based on digital tools and increasingly controlled by algorithms.
in addition to being united in this critical posture, many of tisselli’s works operate with what could best be described as an unaccommodating, destructive inertia: when interacting with them, we end up witnessing a process that we are powerless to stop. this dynamic is especially apparent in degenerative and regenerative, paired works that become progressively less comprehensible the more users interact with them. exemplars of the critical use of digital technologies, these two works will serve as the objects of this investigation, which is interested in how electronic literature can, first, help redefine the current relationship of the digital humanities to the instrumentalist logic overtaking the western academy and, second, demonstrate possibilities for a future in which the humanities are not only digital, but also, posthuman. briefly reviewing the literature that critiques the digital humanities for its complicity in the neoliberalization of the western university, the first half of this paper will then offer a reading of degenerative and regenerative that focuses on how the mechanism of each work obliges its users to reflect on the materiality of code. following on this, the latter half of the paper will first reconcile the speculative possibilities offered by the digital humanities and the posthuman, then analyzing how these paired works of electronic literature, by privileging the role of assemblages comprised of human individuals and groups as well as non-human actors in effecting change and being affected by these works, question the agency of the individual human subject.
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