Modding Literature

The occasion of reading Galloway’s “Countergaming” made me think about whether the terms and techniques around modding exist in other genres. “Countergaming” focuses on “art mods,” defined as mods that elude or eviscerate gameplay and goal-based aspects of a given game and highlight, alter, or reduce a game to just its aesthetics, errors, and game technologies. A guiding example for me in thinking about the category of “art mods” that is referenced, but not explained fully in “Countergaming” is Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, where all content of the original Super Mario Bros is removed save the background blue color, the trademark Mario clouds, and the side-scroll mechanic. It uses Super Mario Bros’s aesthetic framework and digital technology, but it highlights and alters select aspects of it. There’s a wide variety of mods and modding culture produces new games in and of themselves (The Stanley Parable and Garry’s Mod being equally famous mods of Half-Life 2). But the technique of effacing gameplay in favor of aesthetic manipulation defines “art mods” for Galloway.

All of this got me thinking if there is a version of “modding” in literature. And in my eyes, the answer is clearly yes. Let me give some examples. Joey Yearous-Algonzin’s Air the Trees puts the text of Larry Eigner’s poetry book Air the Trees in Word, lets spell-check run its course (Air the Trees is full of complex grammar, syntax, and spacing that Word flags), changes the font to white, and creates a new document composed only of Word’s famous spell-check squiggles. This is almost exactly the technique of Super Mario Clouds, and frankly, the works look very alike. Although Yearous-Algonzin’s book also relies on digital technology, its source material is exclusively literary. For an example that does not require digital media, R E D by Chase Berggrun is an erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m tempted to count the whole history of the erasure poem as a kind of literary modding. But while erasure work like Yearous-Algonzin’s is devoted to game modding and digital culture, literary erasure is an older lineage that can be read as separate from game modding. Nevertheless, Berggrun’s R E D and similar erasures hold many of the principles that Galloway describes for “art mods.” For a stretchier example, Paul Legault has made a poetic career of summary and re-writing classics of poetry. His book The Emily Dickinson Reader is composed of one-sentence summaries of Emily Dickinson’s collected poetry. They can’t truly work as poetry of their own, but they retain fossils of Dickinson’s original poems.

All this to say, I’m not sure Godard is the most useful parallel for Galloway in considering art mods. It seems to me that the history of conceptual literature and film and the turn to the material that started as early as the work of the Baroness Elsa von Freitag Loringhoven and Marcel Duchamp could be more useful. This is especially true considering that contemporary conceptual or postconceptual artists, especially the young NYers and those in the Bay Area organized around online small presses like GaussPDF, Troll Thread, Internet Poetry, and Wonder, and those involved in avant-garde small presses like Les Figues, are actively thinking about and even making game mods. This seems like a more fertile dialogue than with counter-cinema. But, perhaps, I am just biasing my own interests.

Berggrun, Chase. R E D. Birds, LLC, 2018.

Legault, Paul. The Emily Dickinson Reader. McSweeney’s, 2012.

Yearous-Algonzin, Joey. Air the Trees. GaussPDF, 2013. http://www.gauss-pdf.com/post/49448604514/gpdf071-joey-yearous-algozin-air-the-trees