Digital Literary Creative Practice and COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic caused great upheaval to working artists, with performance venues and public exhibitions having to close. Yet despite these new restrictions, digital literature has thrived during this time. Digital literature refers to works that are ‘native to the digital environment’ [Rettberg, S., 2019. Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press: 6]. In this sense, digital literature is distinguished from works that are simply digitally disseminated (for example, e-books) in that they require a computer/code to exist, and cannot be represented by traditional print. This dependence on a digital environment made digital literature exhibitions and festivals better able to adapt to restrictions imposed by COVID-19. In this article I examine the relationship between digital literary creative practice and COVID-19. From these interrogations, I reveal unique qualities of digital literary creative practice and practice-led research [Smith, H., and Dean, R., 2009. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press], with a particular focus on the immediacy and urgency with which these works have been produced and disseminated, as opposed to other artistic practice and media.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital literature
• COVID-19
• creative practice
• restraint

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI [grant number 21K12944].

Notes on contributors

David Thomas Henry Wright

David Thomas Henry Wright is an author, poet, digital artist, and academic. He won the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards’ Digital Literature Prize, 2019 Robert Coover Award (2nd prize), and 2021 Carmel Bird Literary Award. He has been shortlisted for multiple other prizes, published in various journals, and received various research grants and fellowships. He has a PhD from Murdoch University and a Masters from The University of Edinburgh, and taught Creative Writing at China’s top university, Tsinghua. He is co-editor of The Digital Review, narrative consultant for Stanford’s Smart Primer project, and Associate Professor at Nagoya University.