Literary Form under Conditions of Media Ephemerality

In this essay, I examine how digital literary works negotiate the relationship between literary form and media under conditions of technical ephemerality. By tracing how digital works mutate across software environments, interfaces, hardware systems, and storage media, the essay approaches digital literature as part of an evolving media ecology and attends to the specific forms of experience and disappearance that emerge from it. Focusing primarily on Agrippa (a book of the dead), Calum Rodger’s videogame-poems, and the monita-shi and AR-shi of the Japanese poet ni_ka—while relating these works to earlier hypertext fiction and later procedural videogames—it argues that impermanence is not merely a threat to digital literature but a constitutive aspect of its formal logic. Rather than treating obsolescence, fragmentation, variability, and platform dependence as external preservation problems, the analysis shows how these works integrate such conditions into the very structure of digital poetics. Across the three cases, ephemerality emerges in technically distinct forms: programmed self-erasure, procedural mediation through interaction and gameplay, and infrastructural erosion.