Extraction, Cloud, Waste: electronic-literature as a catalyst for our internet eco-material awareness

In this article, I contextualise the role of e-lit in order to address, through three case-studies and projects, the environmental implications of digital growth and progress. These projects correspond to three life cycles of the internet’s materiality: extraction, optimisation — or cloud, — and waste. The first project is a minimal speculative text operating system directly booting from the ground. Taking the counterpoint of our dominant tropes of digital weightlessness, it sheds light on the geological nature of our technological devices. The second project is a platform poetry machine: stretching and making tangible through dial-up modems the embodied logics hidden behind our platform’s minimal aesthetics. The third explores the materiality of e-waste: exploring how sensitive data can be retrieved from our electronic discards. Using these three projects, I argue for the importance of e-lit as a catalyst shedding light, through arts and design methods, on the materially situated characteristics of the digital.