What is the status of digital literature in contemporary culture? After more than 20 years of production, the audience for digital literature remains small in comparison with the audience for “serious” or popular fiction. Many scholars and practitioners assume that digital literature constitutes a contemporary avant-garde, which does its work of experimentation outside or in opposition to the mainstream. Recent comparisons of digital poetics and early modernist art practices (e.g. by Scott Rettberg and Jessica Pressman) indicate continued interest in this issue. The notion of the avant-garde might seem thoroughly out of date in a consideration of the digital future. Important theorists (e.g. Huyssen, Drucker) have argued that the avant-garde is no longer viable even for traditional media and art practices. On the other hand, the avant-gardes of twentieth-century modernism made claims about the function of art that remain surprisingly influential today–within the art community and within popular culture. As Peter Bürger and others have discussed, an important division grew up in modernism on the question of whether art should strive for formal innovation or for sociopolitical change. Avant-gardes of the twentieth century took up positions along a spectrum from pure formalism (e.g. the Abstract Expressionists) to overt political action (e.g. the Situationists). This modernist problem is still apparent in the practices of digital art and digital literature today. While the digital literature community is in general committed to formal innovation, some are critical of this commitment, in part on the political grounds that (technological) innovation has become a byword for the digital culture industry. We propose to read examples of contemporary digital literature in terms of this modernist problem. Our reading is meant to contribute to the larger question: do digital art practices in the twenty-first century constitute a turning away from the aesthetics of the avant-gardes of the twentieth?

In this paper, we discuss the opportunities and the difficulties of applying the concept of the avant-garde to digital poetry and poetics. We examine the question with reference to a body of critical and poetic works and performances from the recent E-poetry 2007 symposium in Paris. These works suggest that digital poetry treats the historical avant-garde as a tradition to draw on, rather than a model to emulate through truly disruptive practice.

Walter Benjamin is best known for his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, (Benjamin, 1968b) in which he argues that film and other mechanical technologies are destroying the aura that had belonged to traditional art. In this article we apply Benjamin’s concept of aura to new (digital) media, and in particular to ‘mixed reality’, a group of technologies that blend computer-generated visual, aural, and textual information into the user’s physical environment. We argue that mixed reality increases the options for designer-artists and apparently allows the invocation of aura in new ways. Our culture’s pursuit of auratic experience remains problematic in mixed reality as it was for Benjamin in the case of film. New media maintain aura in a permanent state of oscillation or crisis, and this crisis is a key to understanding new media.

Our culture has come to appreciate hybrid representational practices not only in digital media but also in traditional forms such as television and film. Nevertheless, our culture's fascination with a contrary representational practice—its "desire for immediacy"—remains strong. The desire for immediacy manifests itself not only in popular entertainment forms, but also (with unfortunate results) in the popular understanding of forms of scientific representation.

New digital forms, particularly computer and video games, pose a challenge to the cultural status that film has enjoyed for decades. This challenge provoked an anxiety about new media reflected in a series of films in the 1990s, including eXistenZ and The Matrix. Hollywood filmmakers have responded to the challenge with a twofold strategy: they have adopted computer-graphic special effects, while maintaining a commitment to linear narrative and transparent representation. Recently, the DVD has led the film industry to explore hybrid forms of representation and even interactivity.