Search results for "display/tomasula"
| Results 1 - 100 of 240
|
Page 1 of 3
|
|
Sorted by: Relevance | Sort by: Date
|
Results per-page: 10 | 20 | 50 | All
|
Steve Tomasula’s robust new anthology delivers its readers a dazzling variety of aesthetic artifacts, as the list after the title’s colon suggests. The diversity across its 500+ pages and 14+ hours of online content separates Conceptualisms from collections of a more mainstream bent. He has gathered online animations, recorded performances, and interactive platforms along with experimental works of fiction, essays, and poetry; in the collection’s last section, we see a transcript, a legal summary, a grant proposal, and a contract, all of which Tomasula argues can be classed as literature (while also proposing that the entries raise the question of […]
Square, the main character in VAS, is to undergo a vasectomy, as required by his wife who has gone through too many problems with pregnancy. His fear at the prospect of losing the highly emblematic reproductive function mingles with philosophical musings about the manipulation of bodies and technological advance, with its consequences on our relationship to space and time. Like most of his contemporaries, Square feels trapped in a whirlpool of acceleration, distances fading away as communication means develop. VAS – which possibly is the very novel that Square is writing – conveys a criticism of man’s illusory mastery and […]
Kiki Benzon: Some contextualizing questions about TOC. What motivated you to move from the codex print narrative to a multimedia format? What were you trying to achieve there that you thought couldn’t be done in a conventional book? Steve Tomasula: It dates back to my earlier work. I was working on The Book of Portraiture and VAS was supposed to have been the last chapter of that book. To me it’s all one novel about the history of representation, so to speak. It starts off with writing in sand, the first surface, and ends up with writing on skin, the last […]
Steve Tomasula “is the author of the novels The Book of Portraiture (FC2/University of Alabama Press); IN & OZ (University of Chicago Press); VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press), an acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution; and most recently, TOC: A New-Media Novel (FC2/University of Alabama Press).” In VAS, Tomasula weaves fertility concerns into a priapic future while using a very sophisticated visual layout that renders his prose as poetry. Tomasula’s TOC, an interactive DVD, is equally ambitious, incorporating motion graphics into a meditation on thermodynamics, myth and temporality. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/author/steve-tomasula Conducted by David (Jhave) Johnson, this interview was […]
The title of this paper borrows from Steve Tomasula’s own characterization of his novel in an interview; the central idea of his book, he suggests, is “the archaeology of human representation through layers of history that make up its chapters,” and in which “pages appear as strata in an archaeological dig” (Tarnawsky 2011). Indeed, Tomasula’s phrase “the archaeology of human representation” resonates sharply, for the specter of Foucault hovers tantalizingly throughout one’s encounter with the book. Central to Foucault’s grappling with “the history of the present” – comprising an archaeological method and a genealogical critique – is the idea that […]
I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking. – Donna Haraway Steve Tomasula’s latest novel delivers amply on Haraway’s formula. The book overflows with discovery, both scientific and artistic, a performance that should spark joy for some readers (this one, anyway). It weaves a structure for “collective thinking” that spans generations, disciplines, and personal histories. As for terror, it flirts with a maximum survivable dose. There is a numinous Terror Bird, a never-ending War on Terror, an ominous bead of amber; and above all, […]
&Now Conference April 5-6, 2004 W: Compared to the Holocaust Conference going on up in Massachusetts this weekend, I think &Now was an especially fun place to be. The preisenters were freaks for the most part, freaks and Lydia Davis, from the fringes of word art. Those who write and have other people publish books of stories or poems were probably in the minority. There was abundant electronica, collaborative text-collage performance, multimedia performance fiction, text-image-sound, and even a critic. Compared to AWP in Chicago last month (4600 in attendance), the frightening barren gothic oppressively mirthless tornadoproof Cambridge WWII Air Raid […]
I been to Chicago and I been to Detroit But I never had a good time till I got up in Illinois – Skip James, “Illinois Blues” Chicago Self-Portrait You are watching me, runny nose and throbbing headache, wheel an 80-lb. suitcase (for which United Airlines charged me a $25 overweight fee on the flight from Buffalo – still cheaper and more trustworthy than shipping) down Halsted Avenue in Chicago on a brisk sunny April Tuesday morning. The suitcase is freighted with books, and the books freighted with just about every spare moment I’ve had from my college teaching job […]
“You’ve never experienced a novel like this” asserts the publisher’s information for TOC (2009), Steve Tomasula’s new-media novel. This claim, presumably, is founded precisely on the new-media nature of TOC, its delivery of text, spoken word, music, graphics and animation all harnessed and combined in a computerised narrative. The publisher’s information certainly makes some bold claims. TOC is “a breathtaking visual novel,” “a multimedia epic”; “A new-media hybrid, TOC reimagines what the book is, and can be.” And I find myself powerless to disagree. “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” speaks volumes, for experience is at the heart of […]
Steve Tomasula’s work, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, an imagetext developed with graphic artist and typographer Stephen Farrell, considers the role of eugenics, its history, and its impact on the body and biotechnology in a novel that serves as a visual digression of how such topics as genetics, reproduction, and body modification are culturally represented through text and image. The plot follows the thoughts of a writer named Square as he deliberates over whether to get a vasectomy (the VAS of the title) as his wife, Circle, wishes. All the while, Square’s mother-in-law, hoping for another grandchild, believes that if […]
At least since Henri Bergson’s (2005, 1913) concept of Duration, a strong distinction has been drawn between temporality as process (according to Bergson, unextended, heterogeneous time at once multiplicitous and unified, graspable only through intuition and human experience) and temporality as measured (homogenous, spatialized, objective and “scientific” time). Its contributions to the history of philosophy notwithstanding, the distinction has a serious disadvantage: although objects, like living beings, exist within Duration, there remains a qualitative distinction between the human capacity to grasp Duration and the relations of objects to it. Indeed, there can be no account of how Duration is experienced […]
Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) tells a simple story. Square considers having a vasectomy as his wife, Circle, has asked him to. When I tell others this, I usually have to pause at this point in my summary to allow the nervous titters to subside. In a sense, this laughter—whether at the mundane subject matter or at the mere mention of the penis outside of a strictly clinical or politicized context—is very much to the point. It is the fact that a vasectomy could ever be considered so commonplace, “that many people wouldn’t even consider it a […]
In earnest, I should flatly admit—and this is important—that my field of research is dandyism in nineteenth-century British fiction, which makes my contribution a somewhat wild(ean) one. Fortunately, it is not without its own logic, and can therefore embrace the fact that although VAS, Steve Tomasula’s embedded “Pedestrian Story” (149), is set in a complex semiotic system, his “simple story/With a plot as conventional as a museum’s base boards” (38), is found to stage in a rather geometrical way the reluctance of a would-be writer, Square, to undergo vasectomy, as agreed with his wife, Circle. This plot introduces a character […]
Introduction Every time contributors add a record to the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, they have the opportunity to add references to creative works of other articles of critical writing referenced. This enables the formation of a network of critical relations, what we have described in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base project report as a “literary ecology.” Using node references and attached views in the databases, these cross-references automatically display on both the record for critical writing and creative work it refers to. Over time, this develops into documentation of the critical reception of any given work documented in the Knowledge […]
[…]
This special gathering collects reflections of the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2020 (CCSWG ‘20), a biannual meeting to explore the intersections of humanistic inquiry and computer code studies. Coordinated by Mark Marino (USC), Jeremy Douglass (UCSB), and Zach Mann (USC), the 2020 Working Group was held online from January 20 to February 3. It brought together more than 150 participants from around the world to share ideas, populating dozens of discussion threads with hundreds of comments, critiques, and critical readings. The need to attend to code could not be more urgent. Code exerts a regulatory effect over society and […]
Joe, (I’ve copied this to Mark and Steve who might be interested in listening in on the discussion – Hi Mark! Hi Steve!) I had a fruitful and interesting discussion with Ewan yesterday. He’s going to pull together some time estimates and costs for re-working the interface and building the database. You know, he’s the perfect collaborative partner for this – he not only knows how to build the stuff, he thinks the dynamic activities through from a conceptual standpoint, and he’s familiar with the issues involved with scholarly publishing. He’s also attempting to create a hybrid practice that includes […]
Hi All, I just had to jump in here. What a courageous document / email “essay” this is. These issues of database construction, interface design and context, publication as active event, navigational cues, visual metaphors, environmental logic, reader-response “picture theory” etc., are crucial. So my first suggestion is that we archive these group emails as they evolve. We’re definitely onto something here. A lot of these issues are coming up in the net/web art scene too. Calling into question how an online publication presents itself is similar to calling into question how an exhibition context emerges for net-specific works of […]
An “eighteenth-century” novel, Ingenious Pain seamlessly combines various cultures of eighteenth-century England: it features the medical world, with its progress in surgical and other techniques (not to mention some entertaining in-fighting among schools of both physicians and “psychologists”), but it also offers a background and foreground peopled with less “officially” recognized members of the cultural terrain – a mermaid, a cabinet of wonders, table-top-sized automata, and a hermaphrodite doctor who collects human oddities for medical experiment. With its combination of high and low culture, the novel presents a full and rounded eighteenth century, but does so with a wit and […]
What follows is a transcript of a talk I gave on April 4, 2000 at a symposium held by the Science and Technology Law Center at Albany Law School. The symposium was called “Internet Crimes and Civil Violations”; I was asked to talk about music and the Internet in that context. I had been excitedly following the growth of the Internet, and particularly the implications for music and art. The invitation to speak gave me an opportunity to try to put a bunch of disparate ideas together. I’m pretty sure I failed in doing that (and I sure didn’t talk […]
Editor’s Note: Olivia Block and Seth Nehil are two sound artists who create music by integrating sounds from electronic sources, traditional instruments, field recordings and found objects such as old tape recordings or leaves, rocks, and pieces of glass. Collaborating together and at times with others, they are part of a world-wide community of composer/performers who are developing a new lingua franca of sound that puts the natural and the artificial into play with one another: composer/performers that blur genres of sound and music, as well as sound and silence. They extend the tradition of John Cage through their use […]
the hypertext murder case “Hypertext is dead – ” declared Markku Eskelinen at Digital Arts and Culture ’99 in Atlanta. “Cybertext killed it.” No doubt, interesting hypertext poetry and fiction remains to be written, but – if we consider hypertext as a category that defines a special, valid space for authorship and criticism of computerized works of writing – Eskelinen is clearly right. The hypertext corpus has been produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a patchwork that includes other types of literary machines. One viable category today, perhaps the most interesting one […]
Adrien Gargett on Pierre Missac’s unification of empirical biography and textual production, and the development of a “criticism of indirection” too often missing from Benjamin studies. Dartford, England: Like tourists in a world class museum, visitors swapped souvenir photos and packed marble halls in Europe’s largest shopping centre. Bluewater, a complex of 320 shops and restaurants on the outskirts of London, is the most prominent in a series of regional mega-malls to open in Britain, where an increasingly mobile population has warmed to this most American of commercial concepts. Built in a former chalk quarry 15 miles east of London, […]
ebr6/7 image + narrative winter 97/98 and summer 98 Welcome a two-part issue on narrative theory and the image. [the original interface, ebr2.0, can be accessed here – ed.] In this double issue we hope to explore through literature a transition already evident in the culture at large, where technology has enabled narratives of all types to undergo transformation by the image. Increasingly, our ways of telling stories, of creating meaning, are weighted away from a sole reliance on words. It’s not just that literary works and criticism have started to incorporate imagery as decoration or visual accompaniment. Writing itself […]
The question of shop windows To undergo the interrogation of shop windows The exigency of the shop window The shop window proof of the existence of the outside world When one undergoes the examination of the outside world, one also pronounces one’s own sentence. In fact, one’s choice is “round trip.” From the demands of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, my choice is determined. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the glass window. The penalty consists in cutting the pane and in feeling […]
Steffen Hantke on Tom LeClair’s and Richard Powers’s novelistic imaginations of terror. Since the end of the Cold War, American fiction has aided in the cultural and political effort to reorient the public imagination, making sense of this brave new world and its concomitant order. It is a significant ideological gesture to think of the present geopolitical situation as “post-Cold War” – constant repetition of the term reinforces a view that is perhaps not as clear cut as it first appears. The label itself establishes a cultural dominant, a watershed moment or turning point that could very well be considered […]
When Vineland appeared in 1990, critics and reviewers immediately recorded their dissatisfaction with the novel they assumed was the follow-up to the wondrous Gravity’s Rainbow, the “project” Thomas Pynchon had been secretly (what else?) working on all those seventeen years in between. Vineland was just another novel – trademark Pynchon ideas, for sure, with its movie-dimensional characters, episodic plot that nevertheless hints at paranoiac connectedness, flaring out here and there with a rock-n-roll sensibility in the form of the death-cult Thanatoids – but surely this was not the book Pynchon spent all those years in producing. I would venture to […]
Salvador Dali’s clocks aren’t wrong or stopped or broken. Their active faces slide like pancake batter over edges of a bureau, bend and hang across branches. Adapted to the shape of every object they meet, these clocks announce that there is no standard time in Dalí’s universe – nor, as Dali knew – in Einstein’s. In fact, Dali’s clocks are not clocks at all, if we mean bookkeepers that measure unvarying flow. But then the human heart is not that kind of clock either; rather, it is a fractal tempo tracker that runs concurrently to the beat of several highly […]
Eve Andrée Laramée addresses the hot topic of technology without digitizing, streaming, or projecting imagery – that is, without using “new” technology in her MIT installation, A Permutational Unfolding (1999). So startling to see a contemporary installation unplugged, especially at a site associated with technological expertise, one can hardly believe there’s not a MIDI trigger hidden somewhere. The artist transforms the List Visual Arts gallery by painting, furnishing, and upholstering the room in the style of an early 19th century, Empire period parlor which she fills with artifacts of that period. One also finds anachronistic elements such as woven copper […]
Daniel Clowes stands without a doubt as one of the most significant American cartoonists to emerge from the alternative comics ghetto in the past two decades. Graduating from early science-fiction and genre material like Lloyd Llewellyn to the more all-encompassing world of his pictorial potpourri Eightball (all published by the Seattle-based comics publisher Fantagraphics Books, Clowes has demonstrated a knack for narrative sophistication and character development – not to mention a keen and often devastating wit. These traits have garnered his work critical acclaim and some amount of commercial success, including the recent feature motion-picture version of his graphic novel […]
Frequently in True North, Strickland makes reference – and hypertext may be, even in poetry, primarily a medium and method of annotation – to Muriel Rukeyser’s 1942 biography of Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903). From this source comes the narration of an incident, of a sort to help posterity recognize a man “of whom,” says Rukeyser, “so few stories have been told” (224): Gibbs spoke only once in a Faculty Meeting, during protracted, tiring debate on elective courses: should there be – more English, more Classics? More? Or less. They were astonished to see him rise, after thirty-two years, though familiar […]
Dorothy wants to leave Oz, the land of spectacle, so she chants “There’s no place like home,” three times to awake in familiar grey Kansas. That’s a far cry from Vienna and Paris, but in Beatriz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity, these European cities provide the backdrop for a discussion of home. Focusing primarily on the houses and interiors designed by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Colomina argues that architecture, far from being immune to the influence of mass culture as traditional architectural thinking has it, was influenced by mass media such as advertising and photography. As Colomina writes: The building […]
There are blow jobs and then there are blow jobs. The volumes at hand deal with both figurative and literal examples of the genre. And they manage to range over, as well as map, the landscape of what is loosely called print journalism in book form. They reveal not just hidden agendas, but the transformation journalism has undergone at the end of the twentieth century. One might first note the obvious: they are all written by men. There are books written by women inspired by Bill Clinton’s life and loves (Gennifer Flowers, Dolly Kyle Browning), but these are, in the […]
Following such foundational studies as Robert Nadeau’s Readings from the New Book on Nature (1981), N. Katherine Hayles’s The Cosmic Web (1984), David Porush’s The Soft Machine (1985), and Tom LeClair’s The Art of Excess (1989), Strehle and Johnston continue to work with a remarkably stable canon whose authors have “turned to modern science and technology for alternative concepts of narrative necessity and thematic organization” (Johnston 64). In the distributed network of alternatives that these mainstream studies have created, Pynchon occupies the shifting center, Barth and Coover persist in the academic margins, Gaddis and McElroy stand in perennial need of […]
Remediation is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with Understanding Media (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for Remediation among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter […]
Reviewing Harry Mathews is an onerous task, for the review is a taxonomical genre, and Mathews defies classification. Perhaps it is best not to assess his writing but to process it. One could leaf through it using one of his own devices, such as “Mathews’s Algorithm” – a literary machine he invented which recombines given elements according to a simple, elegant procedure. Indeed, Mathews’s texts – which include Oulipian exercises, poetry, translations, reviews, short fictions, memoir, and novels – read as if generated by an algorithm with a few bugs still in it. Mathews has characterized his singular prose style […]
1999 will mark the 10th anniversary of the web-based literary journal Alire. The journal – created in January 1989 by the Parisian group L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture), which included Philippe Bootz, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard, and Tibor Papp – is known as the oldest multimedia journal in Europe, and certainly one of the oldest in the West. Before the arrival of CD-ROMs, before the Internet explosion, the journal was already publishing poetry written for and intended to be read through computers. The tenth anniversary will be an occasion to return to several of the pathways located […]
Stephanie Strickland on the translation of poetry from print to screen. Talk given at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN, April 10, 1997 I want to start by evoking some of the many times that poetry is not a “book” of poetry: for instance, Prospero’s Books, a film, itself a version of Shakespeare’s theater poem, “The Tempest”; poetry videos, poetry spots on the radio; and many kinds of live performance, from slams to sonic poetry. We have also, today, for the first time, hypertext. Poems, and collections of poems, can be composed as, or into, hypertext, using the many specific capabilities […]
Sound is not voice. The desire for it to be so, however, seems to lie at the heart of much compelling art, music, and film. How we feel about this desire – that to be human at all is to thoroughly take that desire for granted or, conversely, that to live in post-Enlightenment (much less postmodern) culture is to see that desire as romantic in the worst possible sense – is a question visited upon audiences with the most uncanny and disconcerting force in Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark. When the film was first released in May […]
on the ghost in the machine: the font as spiritual medium in CD-ROM poetry design “No one up here pays attention to reviews. We don’t care about reviews. Frankly reviews are mostly for people who still read. Like most of the written word, it is going the way of the dinosaurs. Most people get their information from the cinema and electronic media. I don’t know any actors or people in show business who have any serious interest in what is written about our world.” – Bruce Willis Up to now, setting type on a computer has followed a logic of […]
Is there a music to media ecology? John Cage argues: “Music as I conceive it is ecological. You could go further and say that it IS ecology” (Birds 229). The radical nature of this claim still demands to be understood. The challenges of Cage’s long trajectory across various media signal his stance toward a complex exteriority, an eco-musicology he calls “the impossibility of language” (113). Cage is a thinker of complexity, that is, of the materiality of systems, of the “working” aggregates he names music. His work is not adequately summarized by too-quick dismissals as a neotranscendentalism or Romanticism (as […]
Arriving on the literary scene in the early ’90s, Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing is one of those pro-hypertext books whose earnest boosterism leaves you feeling a little embarassed. Nonetheless, Bolter’s book has recently been seen changing hands around graphic design graduate programs — I once heard it referred to as “the only interesting writing about new media.” While interesting isn’t a word I would use to describe the writing itself, the book does touch upon a central area of interest to graphic designers: the impact of technology on the material embodiment […]
A postmodern parlor game we liked to play in grad school worked like this: at an appropriately advanced juncture in the evening, distribute a text to each person there. Make sure there is a range of texts—no, a real range, as in not only Chaucer and Erdrich and Pynchon and Acker and Austin, but a cookbook, a comp class assignment, a phone book, an album cover, loose sheets that missed the can. Then take turns driving—the designated driver (sobriety unrequired) points to a person who randomly picks a place to begin reading; that person reads until halted by an open […]
About halfway through the 1994 film Bad Girls, Anita Crown (Mary Stuart Masterson), a young widow, discovers that she is no longer entitled to a claim on her deceased husband’s land rights. She has sought the advice of a lawyer, and when he informs her that the claim is invalid, she avows, “If your laws don’t include me, well, then they just don’t apply to me either.” This could well be the rallying cry of the bad girl in a so-called “postfeminist” era. Like Thelma and Louise, the four women in Bad Girls violate patriarchal laws and end up purifying […]
[ Some of the links to journals mentioned here are no longer active; others are, and yet others, such as Amy Janota’s “Amy.com” appear to be under new ownership. See Todd Napolitano’s contemporaneous essay, Of Graphomania, Confession, and the Writing Self for another view on Web journals, and Rob Wittig’s Justin Hall and the Birth of the Blogs for a more recent discussion of what came to known as “blogs” -eds. ] Exactly what constitutes women’s writing on the World Wide Web is a problematic question. Almost any Web page constructed by/for/about women might be labeled as “women’s writing.” Since […]
Common sense ought to tell us it requires less effort to open a web browser than it does to walk across campus. Which is fine, at least for the moment, at least until academicians in both the humanities and the sciences begin to appreciate the potential for interdisciplinary exchange that the network now offers them. And by interdisciplinary, I don’t mean the routine say you say me patter of a literary critic having a conversation with a colleague in history. Instead, I mean aggressive interdisciplinary work, as when a cultural studies scholar looks in on the Artificial Intelligence Lab at […]
Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink performs an autopsy on the hypertextual corpse. The hypertext corpus has been produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a patchwork that includes other types of literary machines. (Nicholas Montfort) Many thanks to Nick Montfort for his “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star” reviewing Espen Aarseth’s work Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Aarseth’s work is part of a valuable base of critical material that has attempted to refine the poetics of electronic literature on-the-fly, so to speak – to establish criteria in a field that is very young. As the form […]
Rita Raley on the varieties of code/text, as discovered in the object-oriented aesthetic of Mez, Ted Warnell, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, and others. 6.) Code. Use the computer. It’s not a television. Excerpted from Lewis Lacook’s posting of his “rules” for net.art to the Webartery mailing list, reposted to the Nettime list (February 14, 2002). Codework refers to the use of the contemporary idiolect of the computer and computing processes in digital media experimental writing, or [net.writing]. Some of the prominent practitioners include Alan Sondheim, who has given the practice and genre its name, Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), Talan Memmott, Ted […]
Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for ‘content.’ Admittedly, New Media has aged. It has acquired a history or at least some genuine engagement with the reality principle, now that the Net is accepted as a material and cultural given of the developed world, now that the dot.coms have crashed, now that unsolicited marketing email and commercialism dominates network traffic. Nonetheless, artistic practice in digital media is still often driven by youthful, escapist, utopian enthusiasms. Net Art as such pretends to leapfrog this naivety through […]
1. A gorgeous little book for a filthy little topic, Laporte’s History of Shit almost defies analysis. A history of the psychoanalytic, social, cultural, and political appropriations of human waste, Laporte’s approach is almost as fluid as his subject-matter and the result is both fascinating and frustrating: full of whimsical insight, jumps of logic, free association and half-constructed arguments that are reiterated 50 pages later. It is also engagingly illustrated with contraptions for the control of four centuries of Western shit, and the cover design evokes an anus. Although influenced by Freud (“whose three requirements of civilization are cleanliness, order […]
The simultaneous publication of these three texts on the first anniversary of 9/11 presents a unique opportunity to assess both relations among prominent voices in critical theory and the political meaning of aspects of theoretical discourse. Readers who are familiar with these authors will not be surprised by the dominant perspectives and some of the ideas in these texts: Baudrillard’s negotiation of the simulacral and the real, Virilio’s critique of the extensions of military technology, and Zizek’s appeal to Lacanian concepts are all on display. Baudrillard, Virilio, and Zizek use these frameworks to address the significance of 9/11, but the […]
Following Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum agrees that materiality matters. I’ve found both sides of the exchange about what cybertext theory can and can’t do useful and stimulating. I’m grateful to ebr and the various participants. Here I want to push the discussion of “materiality,” a word used by both Markku Eskelinen and Katherine Hayles, and a word I myself have been using since I started writing about digital media in the mid-1990s. For materiality does indeed matter, as Hayles has said. This is precisely the point I make (and a phrase I use) in an article forthcoming in the journal […]
In 1993, Simon During edited the Cultural Studies Reader for Routledge, a volume that helped consolidate the then-emerging field (and Routledge’s place in it). The New Media Reader, majestically edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort for the MIT Press, will represent an achievement of equal or greater import for the rapidly accreting field of new media and digital studies. Anyone who doubts the necessity of a “reader” for an ostensibly screen-based enterprise is missing the point: as the editors note, new media’s past is to be found among hitherto fragmented and incompatible documentary forms: “on the Web in PDF, […]
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present Wittgenstein, Tractatus (6.4311) It seems increasingly apparent to me that formally experimental writing is running counter to the main current of history. Whether we consider the global expanse of capitalism, the unrivaled position of the United States in international affairs, the rise of the Republican party nationally, or the worldwide audience for Hollywood film and American popular music, the general direction of the last three decades has been toward increasing consolidation of the dominant. My aim in […]
Welcome to Baltimore (aka) Charm City (colon) A Charm Bracelet of Half-Baked Delicacies or Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Collapse of the Avant Garde into Waves of Ecstasy There’s an epigraph: A motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition setting forth a theme. [Greek, epigraph, to write on] – American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language “Hey, Rock, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” – Bullwinkle J. Moose The GI Bill Considered as the Indian Removal Act What brings us to Baltimore? We can thank a forward-looking piece of legislation at the end of […]
No other American writer has anatomized the madness of our culture with more prescience than Don DeLillo. With rare intuition, a novelist takes a look at the depths of the nation’s soul – imagines, magnifies, distorts, and moves on – while American reality catches up. The Bush administration’s $16 million simulation exercise in Chicago and Seattle, for the purpose of testing the emergency preparedness in the event of bio terrorism, is eerily reminiscent of the SIMUVAC episode in White Noise (1985). In DeLillo’s cultural satire, an emergency response team stages a simulated evacuation amid a real environmental disaster caused by […]
Despite its apparent global variety, the Internet is more linguistically uniform than it is linguistically diverse. Almost all Internet traffic is conducted in one of the world’s 100 or so dominant languages, and the great majority takes place in the top 10 or so languages, with English being especially dominant due, among other reasons, to its use in the Internet’s coding infrastructure. Unwritten and nonstandardized languages, which make up the majority of the world’s approximately 6,700 languages, are hardly accounted for in the structure of Internet communication. On the worldwide distribution of languages see Grimes, Ethnologue. The emphasis in today’s […]
Today’s headlines, “NASDAQ Drop Leads Global Market Fall,” promises a definitive answer to the question as to whether “digital cultural objects” are “assimilable within the capitalist commodity form”: “no.” This was the question posed to participants at the Special Symposium on Cybercapitalism at the Institute of Advanced Social Studies. Princeton University, USA, March 29, 2001, where this paper was first delivered. It draws on collaborative work in process on the interactive game industry with Dr. Stephen Kline and Greig de Peuter, both of Simon Fraser University. This paper also draws on recent research on the computer and video game industry […]
One of the project formats the editors solicited for this collection they described as “workplace narrative.” Not only will you read here a narrative of my workplace, my work, and my fellow workers, but also a commentary about some “working relations” narrativized within this workplace in January 2001. Telling stories, examining stories, and reshaping stories have all been essential activities in my teaching, research and professional understandings. This essay attempts to entangle and untangle stories of these sorts. Since 1986 I have been teaching university courses engaging the historical materialities and politics of writing, the contemporary meanings of which then […]
A survey of humanities research websites (and how to teach with them) by Susan Schreibman. The World Wide Web is both a source of frustration and richness for educators. It is a source of frustration in that students plagiarize from it more easily than from published texts, while they do not seem to be able to differentiate reliable from unreliable resources. Our own searches often reveal substandard source material, particularly when held in comparison with print publication. Some educators refrain from using the World Wide Web in the classroom because they feel intimidated by their students’ seemingly superior ability to […]
Laura Sullivan and her students explore webwriting and content provision as activist tools. Rosemary Hennessy challenges progressive academics “to return cultural studies to the fundamental category of capital” (83). To do so will mean going against the dominant tendencies within a discipline which often “produces ways of understanding that exile meaning-making and identity in the realm of culture, sheltered from any link to capital or class” and thus “reiterate[s] a cultural logic that has been one of capitalism’s most potent ideological forms” (83). My work in the electronic classroom has tried to avoid the kind of cultural studies that Hennessy […]
Whether they fret over Ziggy Stardust or the condition of posthumanity, fans and scholars share, argues Harvey Molloy, a few habits of mind. The Fan’s Desire When I teach my course in Writing and Critical Thinking, I try, like every other teacher of composition, to awaken in my students a sense that they should approach their writing as a valuable exploration of an interest, instead of as an obligatory duty that must be performed in order to complete an assignment. As a model of passionate writing, we review a number of fan sites and Web logs on the Web. The […]
In works such as Applied Grammatology, Teletheory, and Heuretics, Gregory Ulmer has rigorously advocated a shift from critical interpretation of culture to theoretically-charged cultural invention. His articulation of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories informs not merely a composite system of textual criticism but an expansive method of artistic creation. Ulmer’s theories of invention have vitalized his collaboration with the Florida Research Ensemble, a diverse group of artists and scholars who have worked for over ten years to counter the instrumentalist tendencies of new media. Instead of suggesting immediate ways to fix social problems, the FRE attempts to describe the psychological undercurrents […]
Gregory Ulmer describes his current work, not as scholarship or critical writing, but as a “project for a new consultancy.” And it was partly for advice that I initially contacted Ulmer to request an interview for the electronic book review. I wanted to see whether Ulmer’s ideas about electronic literacy (“byteracy”) could be of use in designing an online review of books and media. Also, since I happened to be organizing an ebr forum around Michael Bérubé’s article, The Politics of Selling Out, I thought that Ulmer might help me to extend Bérubé’s arguments to electronic economies. I reasoned: the […]
A colleague recently remarked to me, “I don’t want to write essays on paper any more. It’s so much easier to manipulate a document in hypertext. I mean, if it’s on paper, it may as well be engraved in stone.” Though I quickly pointed out the limits to this line of thinking, shuddering to imagine my graduate school thesis about comparative mimesis in eighteenth-century narratives placed on par with the acclaimed ten-part essay dictated to Moses, I began to ponder the implications of these new malleable texts in this “late age of print.” The quotation is from J. David Bolter, […]
part i: macaroni and meatballs everywhere i turn these days – the new yorker, harper’s, the voice, the chronicle of higher ed., not to mention the academic presses – i seem to run into either a piece of writing by or a reference to michael bérubé, proof-positive that he’s attained academic superstar status of the kind enjoyed during the turn-of-the-eighties by andrew ross… and now i have before me yet another of bérubé’s institutionally-centered ruminations, cultural criticism and the politics of selling out… sheesh… this one reads at times like an apologia, with bérubé self-consciously quoting himself by way of […]
Introduction Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience (Laurel 1986; Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall, and Reilly 1992; Blumberg 1996, Hayes-Roth, van Gent, and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed that combines plot and character into a full-fledged dramatic experience. The game industry has been producing plot-based interactive experiences (adventure games) since the beginning of the industry, but only a few of them (such as The Last Express) begin to […]
Computer games are clearly a distinct form of media, with an emerging history and place in entertainment and increasingly in the arts. At this particular juncture, there is much misunderstanding of this new genre primarily because games are played through established technologies such as televisions and computers. At the same time, games display characteristics that are, at least superficially, similar to existing media forms, which creates possibilities and confusion at the same time. The numerous recent attempts to develop games as extensions of profitable movies have resulted in abject failures and rare, weak successes. This, in my opinion, is due […]
Stuart Moulthrop’s concerns in addressing networked and programmable ludology are strongly inflected by issues and values in the ethics and politics of “new” media, summed up for me in his reminder that “cyberspace is not a book or a moving picture but a complex virtual environment that should never be allowed to become second nature.” Inclinations such as these are heartily welcome and always salutary, especially given Mouthrop’s engaged stance and engaging literary persona, but here his chief counterpoint, Markku Eskelinen, represents a consciously theoretical approach to the game at hand. This leaves Moulthrop to speculate on mights, woulds, and […]
Hypertext Fiction and Its Critics Although games, visual art, and textual experiments had long been areas of academic research, the first artistically convincing explorations of literary computing appeared in the late 1980s. It was only in these years that computers became sufficiently commonplace that a computational creation could realistically hope to find an audience. Of equal importance was the gradual acceptance of Ted Nelson’s thesis (Nelson 1976) that computers could be tools for artistic expression, for even in 1982 the title of Nelson’s Literary Machines was meant to shock and surprise. The final and critical step, first taken by an […]
The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media. The term “ludology” was coined by Espen Aarseth, who advocates the emergence of a new field of study, specifically focused on the study of games and game play, rather than framed through the concerns of pre-existing disciplines or […]
The following sketches a theory of time in games. This is motivated by: (1) plain curiosity; (2) theoretical lack: much work has been done on time in other cultural forms, but there is very little theory of time in games; and (3) the hope that a theory of game time may help us examine specific games, help trace the historical development of games, connect to the big question of how a game feeds player experiences, and generally serve as an analytical tool for opening other discussions in game studies and game design. Most computer games project a game world, and […]
I. “White Noise/White Heat,” or Why the “Postmodern Turn” in Rock Music Led to Nothing but Road – A Preface (of sorts) TEN YEARS BURNING DOWN THE ROAD I wrote “White Light” near the end of the 80s, which had surprisingly proved to be perhaps rock music’s most fertile and innovative decade. I originally wrote the essay as a feature article that appeared in American Book Review in the Spring of 1990 (McCaffery, “White Noise”). I was aware that ABR readers were book-lovers not rock fans, and my main goal in developing the essay that way – i.e., presenting an […]
In Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin 1999) proposed a theory on media evolution that attempted to break with the myth of the newness of new media and the linear supersession of older media by newer ones (their main target, although this is not the explicit program of the book, is definitely Marshall McLuhan, whose teleological Understanding New Media is clearly meant to be remediated by a more nuanced and more powerful theory). Coining the notion of Remediation, they argued that each new media refashioned at least one older medium. This process of refashioning, however, does not obey a […]
Two histories of optical media have recently been produced in Germany, and at first glance they would seem to be complementary texts. They both cover roughly the same time period – from the origins of linear perspective to the development of virtual reality – and both authors were clearly familiar with each other’s work. Oliver Grau’s Virtual Art is a revised and translated edition of his earlier book Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Virtuelle Strategien (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Press, 2001), which was itself an expanded version of the dissertation he completed at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1999, and […]
The technologies and speculations associated with “virtual reality” and cognate terms (such as “cyberspace”) have recently made it possible for scores of journalists and academics to develop variations on a favorite theme – the newness of the new, and more specifically, the newness of that new and wildly different world-historical epoch, era, or Zeitgeist into which we are supposedly entering (and on some accounts, have already entered) with the creation of powerful new machines of simulation. The innovative powers of the machines of virtual reality are so extensive, it would seem, that they are even supposed to be able to […]
All forms of “interactive text” demand a physical body with which to interact. When we use the now-common interface that consists of a mouse and keyboard as input devices, and the computer screen as display mechanism, it is easy to forget the body whose eyes perceive the screen, and whose hands and fingers manipulate the mouse and keyboard. In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles (1999) has eloquently explored how “information lost its body.” Hayles investigates the theoretical, historical, and literary maneuvers through which modern society has dissociated information from a body or medium. The consequent elevation […]
Praise for the body art of Camille Utterback, and commentary on controls. Early on in the feature film Superman, reporter and professional victim Lois Lane falls from a helicopter dangling from the roof of a New York skyscraper. Plummeting to her certain death, she is rescued in mid-air by Superman (aka: a man made of steel [and, for all we know, in some instances, of bits and bytes]), in his first appearance both in Metropolis and in the film. Such is his innate tenderness and his fine-tuning as a deus ex machina that he alters his ascending velocity to her […]
First, thank you to both respondents for their insightful and kind comments! To respond: Matt Gorbet critiques my implication that “poetic” interfaces do not allow users to maintain control of the interaction, stating instead that it is precisely the simplicity and clarity of this control that allow my examples to be successful. I agree that whether a work is artistic or purely functional, the connection between a user’s actions and these actions’ effects on the system must be clear and immediate. If a user cannot easily understand how his or her actions affect an interactive system, then the interactivity is […]
Body politics and mouse use scroll through the scene. (To Diane Gromala) 1) “Textuality — an open, infinite process that is meaning-generating and subverting.” Yes. This is one of the forms of textuality that I am interested in. Yet I want to go beyond the logocentric – the analogy of the text in discourse – somehow even in the extended sense of writing that Derrida describes (probably because he is a writer), he seems to bring us back to the way “writing” and/or “text” operate to understand that extension. The central issue is this – I do not believe we […]
Sidebar images from “Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics – Media-Element Field Explorations.” 19.sidebar.4-8. Examples of The World Generator in use. 19.sidebar.9. Control panel display for The World Generator. back to Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant […]
Introduction The new electronic spaces that I am interested in have the following characteristics in common: They are large. Many sites now support interchanges between hundreds and thousands of people. Usenet newsgroups and large listservs are the most common of such sites. I call these usually text-based, usually asynchronous interchanges, very large-scale conversations. (Sack 2000c) They are network-based. More specifically, they support network-based communities. The boundaries of these spaces and the communites they support are not geographic boundaries. Communities of artists, writers, and scientists are examples of pre-internet, network-based communities; i.e., communities based upon a social network and some shared […]
There is an uncalculated cost to abstracting information patterns from a body, and then again to forming a “data body” from patterns: an energetic cost, a time cost, and a loss that comes from viewing bodies as mere vehicles for pattern, whether that pattern be mathematical, statistical or structural. Vesna addresses these issues in n0time, as she did previously in Datamining Bodies. Her solution is to visualize social networks using tetrahedra and tensegrity (Kenneth Snelson, Buckminster Fuller) principles. In other words, a figure that has shown itself to be highly useful at many scales for gravitational architectures—of all polyhedra, the […]
Introduction (The Gossip on Voice Chips) This essay develops a frequently asked question (FAQ) list for Voice Chips. Like the questions in most FAQs, these questions are not actually frequently asked, but they might be, and like every FAQ, the attempt is to structure the accumulation of experiences in a sociotechnical project. Voice Chips and their newer partners, speech recognition chips, are small low power silicon chips that synthesize voice, play prerecorded voice messages, or recognize voice commands. Although this functionality is not new, what makes voice chips unique is that they are small and cheap enough to be deployed […]
Simon Penny adds object-context to the talking machines of Natalie Jeremijenko’s essay. Talking greeting cards, talking ashtrays, talking toilet roll holders: these are some of the more alarming products of the information economy, more alarming for their utter triviality and transience. Natalie Jeremijenko’s analysis of voice chip products (and secondarily, of voice recognition products) attempts a sociology of machines integrated into the human social circuit. This integration occurs on the basis that the machines engage, in some sense, in speech and speech acts. As she points out, this speech, lacking any but the most rudimentary sentience, confounds theories of speech […]
Reading subjectivity into the software interface, N. Katherine Hayles offers a compelling case for computational authorship. As leading theorists and practitioners Marvin Minsky (1985), Daniel Hillis (1999), and Brian Cantwell Smith (1998) have been telling us, computers are much more than hardware and software. In their most general form, computers are environments of varying scope, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. Indeed, in Edward Fredkin’s (1990) interpretation, computational processes ultimately generate the fabric of the universe. It comes as no surprise, then, to find researchers arguing that computation is fundamentally altering the ways in which […]
The following interview with Slavoj Žižek took place on the morning of September 29, 2003 in the Palmer House Hilton, a Gilded Age-era hotel in downtown Chicago. In the hotel’s opulent lobby, it was easy to spot the bearded Žižek amongst the nattily dressed businesspeople and well-healed tourists. As befits a self-described “old-fashioned left winger,” See Geert Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek” in Uncanny Networks (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002) p. 39. Žižek seemed dressed down for our meeting. Yet when he lectured at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute later that night, Žižek […]
“Canoe Repair” takes place at a transitional time for the main character. Zanes moves from New York City to a New Hampshire town and has to adapt to a new life and a new job, running a Laundromat, as well as to his son’s new hang-gliding activity and his wife’s new TV job. Thus, “Canoe Repair” occurs at a moment when rural and urban worlds are put in “connection and disconnection at the same time” (“Midcourse Corrections” 50). While we learn more about Zanes’ occupations, we also read a portrait of the town’s life. We discover a picture of America […]
And I felt ready to live it all again too; for the first time , in that night alive with stars and signs, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself – so like a brother, really – I felt that I was happy again. -Albert Camus The Stranger My father is a rich man He wears a rich man’s cloak Gave me the keys to his Kingdom (coming) Gave me a cup of gold He said “I have many mansions” And there are many rooms to see But I left by […]
The following essay began as a response to Chapter Six of First Person, The Pixel/The Line, which Noah Wardrip-Fruin invited me to contribute to electronic book review ’s version of that text. 1. There are several things I’d like to write in response to all three essays of The Pixel/The Line – by John Cayley, Camille Utterback, and Bill Seaman – but I’d like to lead into this response by quoting a passage from Seaman’s Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics. My primary concern will be with the issue of text and meaning and the reduced terms with which these are […]
Stanford law professor and first-tier cyberlaw theorist Lawrence Lessig has probably thought more about the relationship between copyright, the Internet, and technology than any other intellectual. In 1998 Lessig represented Web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Unfortunately, he lost the case. The reasons for the defeat are delineated in Lessig’s latest book Free Culture, a synthesis of recent popular thought on copyright. The central claim of Free Culture is that in the past decisions could have been made that would have both stunted (or […]
If you’re under the impression that Americans are wealthy, check out the capital city of Latvia. This essay was written for the launch of electronic text + textiles, a residency based in Riga, Latvia. The author gratefully adknowledges David Mace for supplying auto statistics, Linda Krumina for fashion tips, and Toms Rosenbaums for population statistics. A Latvian now working and studying in Argentina, Toms became a point on the data he researched. On a Sabbatical in the Spring of 2003, I was going by train along the North Sea coast and then by bus through the Baltics – from Hamburg […]
I. Rising action If Ben Marcus’ well-meaning defense of experimental/innovative/slipsteam/anti-didactic/non-simple/counter-discursive/et al. writing becomes the end-point for our post-millennial discussion of the William Gaddis’, the William Burroughs’, the Kathy Acker’s, not to mention the Kass Fleisher’s, the Lance Olsen’s, the Steve Tomasula’s, and the more than 100 other writers, artists and purveyors of pro-language, pro-innovation who participated in the second &NOW conference at Lake Forest College in early April 2006,The conference is reviewed by participant-observer Ted Pelton, publisher of Starcherone Books. then the terms of this debate may have inadvertently become as effective as a good ol’ red state/blue state hootenanny. […]
Knowing no more about the book than its title, Nietzsche’s Kisses, this work of fiction triggered in me an association to a line that must have been in my unconsciousness for years, a remainder of a lasting, difficult relationship with the dead man who wrote it: “Der beste Autor wird der sein, welcher sich schämt, Schriftsteller zu werden.” The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer. Professional writer, that is, and writer of fiction – the loose translation above misses the finer meanings of Schriftsteller, especially as they are opposed to the less technical […]
“Hello World” is one of the first programs that computer scientists write in a programming language. The program, usually only a few lines of code, causes the computer to output a greeting, as if it were speaking. The Lisp (List Processing language) version of such a program, for example, looks like this: (DEFUN HELLO-WORLD () (PRINT (LIST ‘HELLO ‘WORLD))) DEFUN defines the function HELLO-WORLD (with no set arguments). The computer as a result will speak its greeting to the world in our natural language. What could be a more appropriate language for this activity than Lisp, a family of algebraic […]
The sites referenced by McGann appear under the ebr ‘enfolded thread,’ which was established at the time this essay was published. This paper was presented at the University of Chicago on Friday, 23 April 2004. Late in the 19th century, Matthew Arnold looked to France as a model for a salutary “Influence of Academies” on culture in general. Twenty-five years ago Arnold’s academic inheritors appeared to be living the realization of his hope. But then came the crash. Humanities scholarship and education has been a holy mess for some time. Looking at the way we live now in the academy, […]
Steve Tomasula’s latest book, The Book of Portraiture, published by FC2, continues his project, begun with VAS and IN & OZ, to reshape the novel to accommodate technology, artistic, social, and sexual history. The Book of Portraiture is a cunning reply to the historicity that demands a response. Using the formal innovations of postmodernism with a naturalistic treatment of historical conditions, Tomasula has composed a nearly comprehensive text that shows us the stakes of making art in the 21st Century. The novel is composed of five chapters that are as much thesis as plot, from the first, which narrates the […]
Steven Shaviro reviews Shelley Jackson’s Half Life, the first print-based novel by a pioneering hypertextualist. Shelley Jackson’s Half Life is a dazzling and amazing book – the first print novel by the author of the hypertext fictions Patchwork Girl and My Body, the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, and the short story “Skin,” which is being tattooed one word at a time on the skin of volunteers. Half Life is ostensibly, or overtly, about a pair of conjoined twins, Nora and Blanche Olney, who have separate heads but share a single torso and set of limbs. “Twofers,” as […]
Collage and cutup are ways of interrupting the continuity of the controlling discourse – mosaic is a way of renewing discourse. Mosaic: new tiles, old fragments, odd scraps remix. Out of remnants new design. Continuous not discontinuous (Sukenick, “In My Own Recognizance”) I “The best way to consider originality,” Edward Said provocatively argues in The World, the Text, and the Critic is “to look not for first instances of a phenomenon, but rather to see duplication, parallelism, symmetry, parody, repetition, echoes of it… The writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting.” And he goes on to conclude: […]
I’ve been reading Marjorie Perloff’s criticism, and putting it to use in my own, for many years now. She remains one of the few critics not also a poet who demonstrates a consistent understanding of the new, innovative, avant-garde (or choose your term) poetries while working from a historically solid understanding of 20th century literature, indeed the whole modernist ‘heave’ as Pound might have put it. Differentials, her new collection of essays, adds some new names and works, returns to others, and, despite containing essays written for a wide variety of occasions, seeks to make some specific arguments concerning the […]