Experimentation is central to the Irish literary tradition, so it is striking to see that many new forms of digital literature remain uncultivated on this island. Where Irish literature has engaged with the digital, it is usually in the form of film-poetry, fragments of text set to video and sound. Other national canons have long progressed to more technically sophisticated genres – literary games, walking simulators, interactive fiction set in immersive virtual worlds – but Irish digital literature remains dominated by the film-poem, and in many respects, seems stagnated. But the situation in Ireland is not entirely bleak: in the figure of Doireann Ní Ghríofa, now a household name after the success of A Ghost in the Throat (2020), Ireland has a high-profile author who has shown a willingness to embrace the digital, something which may encourage further support for multimodal writing among arts practitioners and policymakers. Through its emphasis on Ní Ghríofa’s e-lit works, this chapter explores the past, present, and future of digital literature in Ireland, its major impediments, and possible futures.

In editing this volume of essays, Technology in Irish Literature and Culture, for the Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture series, we are pleased to accept the dual invitation delivered by series editor Ronan McDonald: in his words, ‘to choose a significant issue that animates or perplexes contemporary Irish culture, and use it as an aperture through which to examine the literature of previous eras’. Our choice of subject is technology, a subject of fundamental significance to our current condition, and central to very many of our contemporary concerns, vexations, pleasures, and opportunities.

What do we mean by ‘digital art’? Much art, as one would expect with any type of cultural production in the twenty-first century, is framed by the digital. But art which is digitally remediated only so that it can be stored or shared via computers is not necessarily digital art. Acts of digitisation can change aspects of a work and influence reception, but if we are to see digital art as a distinct formal category, then we must recognise the distinction in works which draw upon new media as an essential part of the creative process. And yet, many works of digital art owe a debt to the analogue arts, to non-digital processes and materials, indeed, many digital works might feature a mix of forms. As the editor of this volume, I believe that digital art is fundamentally digital; it is art which cannot happen without some contemporary media technology, some element of computation, some bit-based machine. And yet, as many of the contributions to this collection will show, the digital can co-exist within a constellation of aesthetics, including its non-digital others.

As articulated by Christiane Paul, one of the foremost scholars and curators of the form, ‘Digital art is predominantly understood as digital-born, computable art that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies and uses the features of these technologies as a medium’ (2016, 2). Perhaps this book might be seen, in the first instance, as a response to Paul's position. However classified, digital art goes by a lot of names – new media art, electronic art, computational art, net art, screen-based art – but generally, this is a domain in which the objects of discussion rely, either absolutely or in part, on digital technologies to achieve their artistic purpose.

In the summer of 2019, I had the pleasure of co-curating, with Chris Clarke, an exhibition at the Glucksman gallery in Cork city (Clarke and O’Sullivan 2019). Titled Peripheries, the show was part of University College Cork's hosting of ELO2019, the first time that the annual Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival was held on Irish shores (O’Sullivan 2019).