Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature

The Dada movement was a multimedia avant-garde art practice that began in Zurich during World War I and flourished in Berlin, Paris, and New York from 1916 until 1920. Beginning as a disgusted response to the war and the blithely nationalistc bourgeois attitudes the Dada felt were at the root of the conflict, the Dada developed and refined the notion of "anti-art" as an expression of dissatisfaction with the dominant contemporary ideology. Although the period in which Dada was an active organized cultural movement was quite short, its legacy is widespread and profound. Individual Dada artists including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and others went on to influence many of the twentieth century's most important art movements, such as surrealism, modernism, and conceptual art. This essay examines new manifestations of these elements of Dadaist practice in works of electronic literature produced within the last decade. Ninety years after the original Dadaist movement, writers and artists use elements of Dadaist practice in the production of contemporary works of electronic literature. Through readings of works of electronic literature, the essay argues that while techniques have been adapted to the media-specific affordances of the networked computer, many of the practices popularized by the Dada during the early twentieth century form the basis of methods utilized by new media artists and writers today. By comparing the art and activities of early Dadaist artists to the work of contemporary digital writers, the essay advocates a critical approach to new media writing that both accounts for the specific properties of literature produced for networked computer environments and also examines these artifacts within the contextualizing historical framework of the avant-garde.