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Hazel Smith’s latest volume of poems, Ecliptical, engages us in several ways. Attractively produced in both print and electronic formats, the book offers a journey through linguistic, sonic, and visual worlds. The title evokes the ecliptic plane, “the imaginary plane containing the Earth’s orbit around the sun”. For the Earth-bound watcher, in the course of a year, “the sun’s apparent path through the sky lies in this plane” (nasa. gov). The poet’s project is to propel earthly dwellers on paths we cannot immediately discern but must help to carve out. Our role is defined in one of the “bullet point” […]
I’m nothing. I’ll always be nothing. I can’t want to be something. But I have in me all the dreams of the world. -Álvaro de Campos, from “Tobacco Shop” (1928), All translations of Pessoa by Richard Zenith. To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the naked stage where various actors act out various plays. -Vicente Guedes, from the Book of Disquiet (text 299, c. 1918). I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so […]
Part 1: Introduction In Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago, 2020), Cary Wolfe offers a deeply probing and densely theoretical engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The thesis of this project is deceptively simple: in it, Wolfe asserts that Stevens is an ecological poet. Those familiar with Stevens’s poetry might be tempted to assume that this is because of Stevens’s affinity for describing in detail features of the natural world, including birds, landscapes both domestic and wild, and other attributes commonly associated with an environmental sensibility (however many things this capacious term might mean). Those more familiar with […]
Victory Garden 2022, one of the latest web reconstructions of e-literary classics made by the Electronic Literature Lab, delivers a promise of yet another 20 years of exploration of this vast hypertext. Created in Storyspace and originally published in 1993 by Eastgate Systems, Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext fiction achieved a status of a unique, literary evergreen, a wide ranging digital ouvre. The dense network of interconnected text spaces (993 lexias and over 2800 links) delivered an abundance of divergent stories that run in parallel or, sometimes, in contradiction to each other. Add to this some blind alleys and “secret” spaces, and […]
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 […]
Vernacular digital expression is the flux of signs that make up everyday networked life: the memes, selfies, bots, loops, emojis, profiles, webcam backgrounds, email signatures and everything else. Unlike what was once called “folk art” in pre-digital cultures, vernacular digital culture will always be intimately connected with the technology companies and network infrastructure that allow digital communication to occur. The types of platforms and tools determine the types of computational and multimedia writing that takes place. “Vernacular” is appropriated here as a more generic term for the delocalized forms of everyday internet expression. In his 1981 Shadow Work, the countercultural […]
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 […]
Main thread: http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/70/week-2-indigenous-programming-main-thread Despite being taught around the world, programming languages are written primarily in English. Why is English our default? While an increase in support for the international text encoding standard Unicode has allowed developers to create computing languages in their native tongues, their widespread adoption is far from the norm. In Week Two of the Critical Code Studies Working Group, Dr. Jon Corbett (a Cree/Saulteaux Métis media artist, computer programmer, and sessional faculty at the University of British Columbia), Dr. Outi Laiti (a Sámi Associate Researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Indigenous Studies program and project manager at […]
Software as Literature In 2006 Mark Marino released his Critical Code Studies Manifesto. This essay laid the groundwork for a recognized field of Critical Code Study: reading code as a work of literature. Everything involved in creating software, the code, the comments, the repository commit messages, the data structures, can be objects of interpretation. I am writing this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment is high, but people are hiring COBOL developers. The unemployment insurance machines are in COBOL, and they are breaking. There are technical reasons why these systems are failing. What else will we find? From […]
When I first proposed this paper, I had wanted this to be a closer analysis of learning management systems and their abilities and shortcomings in encouraging non-programming students to engage with code in critical and literary ways. But, as it so often does at the end of term, the grading took its toll. Indeed, this is particularly true for me as an adjunct instructor juggling the grading for more students than I care to admit while preparing for the next term to begin. So, this paper is in some ways less of an analysis of the platforms at play, and […]
I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. -William S. Burroughs If the computer virus is a technological phenomenon cloaked in the metaphor of biology, emerging infectious diseases are a biological phenomenon cloaked in the technological paradigm. As with computer viruses, emerging infectious diseases constitute an example of a_ counterprotocol phenomenon. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit Linguistic Inflections In Plague and the Athenian Imagination (2007), Robin Mitchell-Boyask considers the hypothesis of the Athens Plague being responsible for changes in the ways Greek tragedies came to […]
The terms “making” and “building” have circulated for some years in the field of Digital Humanities (see Drucker 2009; Svensson 2010; Stephen and Rockwell 2012; Klein 2017; Endres 2017). These terms indicate empirical and pragmatic approaches and have brought a paradigm shift in the graphic tools and digital technologies used for visualization. These approaches in the humanities deploy the information and innovative visualizations to reinforce and supplement the conventional hermeneutics. This transformation is underpinned by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration and brings together a range of stakeholders and experts from different fields such as writers, artists, researchers, and the public. Scholars […]
It is often said that our relationship with time has changed in recent years. New Management strategies mean that employees feel themselves subjected to ever increasing urgency and stress. FOMO, the fear of missing out is a phenomenon inherently linked to the digital environment and its constant flow of information. The Covid-19 crisis has no doubt accentuated this tendency, with its injunction to stay connected and respond immediately to digital notifications and solicitations on a 24/7 basis. According to Paul Ricoeur (1984), “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its […]
This paper aims to reflect on two labels that have been used to define sets of artifacts born out of the same context but evoking different connotations. I refer to the terms “post-digital” and “post-internet”. Both terms allude to a post-stage, a leap that announces a cultural shift, perceived by artists but difficult to pinpoint and demarcate with precision, a prefix that might refer to ‘after’ (chronologically) as well as ‘beyond’ (spatially); often used to highlight that what has been superseded is the novelty and exceptionality of the internet and digital technology. Actually, these terms address the fact that digital […]
Introduction Recent advances in machine learning provide new opportunities for the exploration of creative, interactive works based around generative text. This paper compares two such works, AI Dungeon (Walton, 2019) and Project December (Rohrer, 2020a), both of which are built on the same artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3. In AI Dungeon, the player can choose from several predetermined worlds, each of which provide a starting point for the story generation. However, while interacting with the system within this world, the player can stop, edit, modify, and retry each utterance, allowing the player to iteratively “sculpt” the AI’s […]
Since its consolidation in the late 1940s, cybernetics has been the primary locus for defining the posthuman as a comingling of computational devices, cyborg amalgamations, and AI entities. At the same time, in its development to the present moment, other lines of cybernetics have performed a series of self-reflections, generating cogent conceptual and philosophical responses to their original technoscientific premises. That process has endowed contemporary systems theory with a range of important differentiations. Foremost among these is the distinction between first-order and second-order cybernetics. First-order cybernetics maintains traditional scientificity in its stance of objective detachment toward the systems it designs […]
What does it mean to be post? In a time of countless movements of post-[x], the value of the prefix itself becomes of interest: what happens to a concept when we turn it into a ‘posterity’? In the light of recent discussions surrounding post-humanism within electronic literature (cf. Literary and Aesthetic Posthumanism), as well as the questions surrounding post(?)-pandemic platforms discussed at the 2021 ELO Conference (cf. ELO 2021), it seems that we are far from being post-post, and the prefix continuously returns in different forms to allow us to discuss ongoing, multidirectional, and complex changes with a sense of […]
Computer games, programming, and hacking have been linked since the nascent years of computing. WarGames, a film about computer games, programming, and hacking, was released in the summer of 1983, at the tail-end of the Golden Age of Video Games when early arcade and home video games were at the height of popularity. The film’s viewers in 1983 would have been acquainted with computer games like Space Invaders (1978), a shooter game with a striking soundtrack and bit-mapped graphics, and Zork (1980), an adventure game in which the user navigates a maze via text-based interactions with the program. When the […]
This paper follows the threads of speculative interfaces through electronic literature and the digital humanities, arguing not only that the speculative interface is a key attribute of electronic literature, but also that speculative interfaces are an important methodology in the digital humanities. I will discuss the interfaces of three works of electronic literature, each written decades apart: Christopher Strachey’s M.U.C. Love Letter Generator (1952), Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story (1990) and Kate Pullinger’s Breathe (2018). Each of these creates a new, speculative interface: Strachey programmed a mainframe computer to generate love letters, Joyce pioneered hypertext fiction, and Pullinger created a […]
Pharmacological Design So you have realized, or admitted to yourself, that digital media really have reformatted your mind. You feel ill at ease in those few moments when you do not have your smartphone. You have a stack of books on your bedside table; if they are not dusty already, they soon will be. But the phone in your hand is also a book, after a fashion—an unending book that seems to adapt to your desires. “You” in the preceding paragraph is in fact me. With effort and the proper conditions, I can still find myself in a sustained state […]
When we introduce critical making projects to our students, they are excited to think about themselves as designers and about the materials they will work with. However, they do not consider how their making process fits into larger systems. For example, when prototyping augmented reality experiences, students focus on what they can get players to do: how they can anchor stories to spaces on and off campus and create interactions around them. They are less attentive to the fact that their players are people and that their AR stories are anchored in community spaces. For this reason, students need help […]
Trina: A Design Fiction brings together speculative computing (Drucker, SpecLab), speculative software (Fuller), and speculative design (Dunne and Raby) in equal measure. The story is a feminist reconfiguration of language, bodies, and writing technologies, co-authored by myself and Janet Sarbanes. In Trina’s collaged photo-graphics, text, image, and environment coalesce. We read/watch/listen as Trina traverses the gendered politics of typewriters and guns, Left Bank literary expats, and the personnel files of E. Remington & Sons, interrupted by perfunctory sessions with an AI therapist. The graphic story is told entirely through the interactions between Trina and her speculative software prototypes, designed in […]
Video recording of the Post-Digital Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review Zoom book launch September 17th, 2020 Scott Rettberg: We’re very excited to be doing a book launch tonight for Post-Digital: Volume One and Volume Two. Joe Tabbi, who’s the editor, is here with us. Just to say a bit about the volumes before Joe gets into it. I wouldn’t say it’s the ‘best of’ the electronic book review,’ exactly, but it’s a selection of texts from ebr from the past 25 years that the journal has been published. ebr is one of the leading – and it […]
Hardly any readers of Chinese Web novel would pay much attention to the “cover” for the serial narrative they are fervently pursuing. This is not surprising, given that the book design and Web design are converging in the digital age (Mod); moreover, it is the serial design of the narrative and the platform that compels a reader’s return to the novel. Indeed, if the book is disappearing into the Web, what is the point of salvaging a book cover for a Web novel? If the Web novel, as a branch of e-literature, is essentially “a writing-centered art” that explores “the […]
While Canadian poets have made forays into digital writing, one could be forgiven for questioning whether there is an identifiably Canadian substrate of new-media poetry. bpNichol, whose First Screening (1984) seems somehow as influential as it is sui generis, is one option. Still, the work is of a piece with Nichol’s other work, which ranges wildly across and between genres and formats; Nichol is a shapeshifter, or possibly something like Canadian poetry’s William Gibson – a technology-obsessed weirdo who, although partially or coincidentally Canadian, is identifiable more as someone who jacks in to the cyberspace of Neuromancer (1984) than as […]
The focus of this essay will be Darren Wershler’s NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs and its living, digital manifestation as a ganglion of texts and links in its online version, NICHOLODEONLINE. Wershler creates a textual homage to the influential Canadian avant-garde poet, bpNichol, in NICHOLODEON, which is a “book” initially published as a print version in 1997 and then later in an online iteration as NICHOLODEONLINE in 1998. The materiality of each iteration differs drastically from the traditional appearance and presentation of its book version to its online manifestation. NICHOLODEONLINE is a moving and dynamic aggregate of pathways—it is a […]
“Mass affluent consumers’ key satisfaction drivers aspi- / rational by most common queries of most-common- / English-words-engine: fuck Q1 sex Q2 love the shit god i” (Zolf) “Capitalism is profoundly illiterate.” (Deleuze and Guattari) In the acknowledgements of Human Resources (2007), Rachel Zolf sardonically admits that “Funding from the Canada Council for the Arts [CCA] and the Ontario Arts Council [OAC] Writers’ Reserve gave [them] invaluable time and space to write” (2). The credit is caustic, given the text’s dual role as a book of poetry and a self-help guide for navigating the “Canada Council Art Bank,” an institution according […]
!! U B THE * !! Many Main-Run Features Starring U! She read it through and then went back to the first line, puzzled. U B the asterisk? Was she tootoxed or not toxed enough? You be the ass to risk. Gina nodded. For all she knew, she was looking at the secret of life. — Pat Cadigan, Synners (1991, 142) Noah Wardrip-Fruin excels at illuminating the not-so-obvious, regularly serving up Eggs of Columbus, concepts that seem entirely self-evident once he has explained them, but which somehow elude understanding until he opens our eyes. Consider his indispensable ELIZA effect, the […]
Our reading project is a digital humanities effort in that it is a collaboration that employs digital computing practices in order to analyze a text from the perspective of humanistic hermeneutics…. Our intervention in this book is to show how digital-based practices can enable literary interpretation while also providing new models of how interpersonal collaboration works. — Pressman, Marino, and Douglass, Reading Project 137 In 2009, we three scholars embarked on a collaborative reading of a single work of literature. One text, three readers. The work is a piece of electronic literature that combined a one-word-at-a-time story with flashing images, […]
By the moment users become aware of what is happening in amazon, one of Eugenio Tisselli’s most recent works, they have already become complicit in a simple, digital rehearsal of this precious biome’s destruction. Running a block of code that we have been instructed to copy and save as “amazon.HTML”, we witness a forest of green “trees” (represented by the “*” symbol) become replaced by brown numerals at an ever-increasing speed until, after a few minutes, the screen becomes almost entirely covered by these ever-changing digits, soon resembling an indecipherable, illogical stock ticker where once there was a peaceful forest. […]
A lesson in sabotage Modifying a machine Alter the machine so that it won’t work without you So far improve it that you alone are good enough for it Give it a secret fault that you alone can repair Yes, alter it so that any other man will destroy it If he works it without you That’s what we call: modifying a machine. Modify your machine, saboteur! —Brecht, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (435) Introduction This essay traces different genealogies of “modification” and “modding” in art, games, and literature in pre-digital and digital contexts. Though it departs from “art […]
Like so many in comparative literature, I knew exactly two works of electronic literature as a BA student: Dakota by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Shelley Jackson’s My Body — a Wunderkammer. I loved both of these works, but was skeptical about the future of digital literature considering we only encountered it in classes, never in daily life. Imagine my delight when I found out about public electronic literature databases! It felt like entering a candy shop, filled with so many works I could browse through endlessly. Works that I liked, works I did not like, and works that I […]
This article has greatly benefited from the research group “Exocanónicos: márgenes y descentramiento en la literatura en español del siglo XXI” (PID2019-104957GA-I00), part of the Spanish Programa Estatal de Generación de Conocimiento y Fortalecimiento Científico y Tecnológico de I+D+i funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. Creative Making as Critical Thinking: A New Framework for the Digital Humanities At the turn of the 21st century, literary critics like Johanna Drucker (2002), Jerome McGann (2001) or even digital poet Loss Pequeño Glazier (2002) wrote about the importance of “making things” as a way of doing theoretical work. The benefits […]
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Joe Brainard (1942-1994) is an artist recognized by a relatively narrow circle of devotees, far less famous than some of his friends and collaborators – Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, though his prodigious artistic output encompasses over a thousand visual works – collages, assemblages, oil paintings, gouaches, and drawings – showing some affinity with Pop Art, Minimalism and camp, as well as more than a dozen literary volumes of what might be termed experimental life writing. Today, his best-remembered works are a series of images of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy cast in unlikely, humorous contexts and his 1975 book […]
A cosmological perspective on the numerization of human languages Contemporary western and westernized cultures have fully embraced Technic, an accomplished reality system that, as we hope to briefly show, is all-encompassing and deeply troubling. Reciprocally, the embrace has enabled Technic to bring forth a specific kind of culture that can be understood as a device whose primary aim is to perpetrate, expand and infuse its world-making powers into every realm of human existence. The embrace is a techno-serpent that bites its own tail. But what sort of techno-poison does the serpent’s bite instill? Federico Campagna (2018) has proposed to think […]
Introduction “Re:traced Threads” is a hybrid physical-digital work inspired by the discourse of computational craft. It is an installation piece that includes both procedurally-generated, ephemeral, digital artifacts of poetry (displayed on a computer monitor) and the physicality of handmade quilts (displayed on the wall). The project builds on the traditions of quilted poetry, which combines methods of applique and piecing with both written language and representative or abstract imagery, but using a digital, procedural source to guide the making. The project consists of two elements: a Twitter bot producing hypothetical works of quilted textual art, and a set of 9 […]
With a disarmingly simple gesture, a quick keyboard shortcut captures what appears on the screen, in part or in whole. Print screen: the practice is now a daily banality. It archives what scrolls on our screens and enable us to leave this momentary display of the present and its individual consultation. This way, we engage a wider reflection on the Web, its spatiotemporalities, its images and its modes of recordings. For this article, I would like to question the practice of screenshots as they are increasingly being used in digital art and literature. I will therefore analyze three different projects: […]
0. It may be true that contemporary digital culture is by now deeply rooted in everyday life of an important part of world’s population–including our habits of writing and reading. Yet digital literature remains more or less invisible to most people. Many people can feel “at home” within digital everyday life and, still, consider that literature is only something related to print books, at most digitized. Regarding this–at first sight–paradoxical situation, I will argue that its cause lies in the strong experimental impetus that digital literature has entailed since its first appearances in mid- 20th century. E-lit has kept this […]
A Note from the Co-Editors: This Introduction is in dialogue—literally—with the contributors to the “Natural Media” gathering. Roll over the dialog bubbles embedded in the text to read marginal comments by Karen Bishop, Elizabeth Callaway, Alenda Chang, Zachary Horton, Diana Leong, and Joseph Tabbi. The remarks were posted in the mysterious pre-publication period after the essays had passed the initial stages of peer review. These exchanges, while somewhat informal in tone and digressive in shape, suggest how thinking-in-practice continues at different stages of the publishing process within an editorial milieu that, like so much of the infrastructure and labor supporting the […]
Introduction: Writing in troubled waters “Computer technology, both a product of and a tool for calculation, has submitted the written text, image processing, musical sounds and the vibrations of the human voice to the same digital writing process. The extension of its applications is so far-reaching that we may indeed feel troubled or disturbed by the continued use of the term, ‘writing’. However machines do write, and they write everything”, argues Clarisse Herrenschmidt. This article deals with the troubled feelings which we may have when confronted with a machine that writes, as referred to by Clarisse Herrenschmidt. It aims to […]
Too often science fiction ignores science, or concentrates on technology: spaceships, lightsabers, lasers. Typical sci-fi alien films are usually army invasion films: uniforms, jeeps, helicopters, weapons. Yet occasionally books arise that explore unique and provocative universal potentialities, books that are provoked by scientific research and grow into speculative knowledge. Johanna Drucker’s DownDrift (2018) is such a book. Its narrator is a distributed organism, Archaea, — Archaea? Relatively few people, besides biologists, have heard of archaea. But it is genuine science, not fiction. Archaea is a third distinct branch of life, structurally-similar to bacteria but chemically-distinct, discovered in the 1970s. DownDrift’s […]
Introduction 1. The Field of Digital Literature Gap No.1: Creation: From Building Interfaces to Using Existing Platforms? Gap No.2: Audience: From a Private to a Mainstream Audience? Gap No.3: Translation: from Global Digital Cultural Homogeneity to Cultural Specificities? Gap No.4: The Literary Field: From Literariness to Literary Experience? 2. The Reading Experience Gap No.5: Gestures: From Reading Texts to Interpretation through Gestures? Gap No.6: Narrative: From Telling a Story to Mixing Fiction with the Reader’s Reality? Gap No.7: The Digital Subject: From Narrative Identity to Poetic Identity? 3. Teaching and Research Gap No.8: Pedagogy: From Literacy to Digital Literacy? Gap […]
When I’m teaching students to build websites in HTML and CSS, I hear the Prince song as I tell them: “tonight we’re gonna program like it’s 1999.” HTML is a display language, not programming, but I like how the syllables of “program” scan for “party.” What is the role of hand-coded, artisanal e-literature in today’s corporate Web, where browsing is branded through intermediaries like Facebook and Google? Rather than browsing the open Web, a click inside of the Facebook app redirects within the app to a Facebook-hosted version of what one clicked on. In this sense, social media platforms are […]
If ever there were e-literature that could fill a stadium, it’s Instagram poetry. This essay, which I presented on the panel “Toward E-Lit’s #1 Hit” at the Electronic Literature Organization 2018 conference in Montréal, responds to Matthew Kirschenbaum’s keynote at the prior year’s conference. Kirschenbaum traced the coincident development of stadium (“Prog”) Rock–specifically Electric Light Orchestra–and electronic literature, a twinning that led some of us to speculate about what might constitute massively popular e-literature, its “#1 hit.” Formally more akin to a greeting card than traditional poetry because of its sentimentality and combination of text and image, Instagram poetry is […]
1.Structure of the work 1.1 Scenic configurations Created in 2015, Elpenor exists in two languages: English and French. It can be shown in installation, played in performance or published in a virtual machine. Its readable side develops on 2 separate screens. The interface is displayed on one screen, a text changing in time is on the other one. The interface consists of an image. Moving the mouse on the image changes it. The audience is immersed in a changing musical atmosphere. In the installation and performance configurations, the text is projected onto a large screen behind the small screen on […]
Brian Davis: The Fall 2017 volume of The New River features Volume Two of your three-volume work-in-progress hypertext, We Descend: Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor. That’s quite a long title. What’s this project about? Bill Bly: We Descend is the short name for an ensemble of writings put together and passed along over a span of many generations. It takes the form of a three-volume hypertext novel that masquerades as a critical edition, with all the commentary, apparati, and other scholarly encrustations appertaining thereto. The overall story (and, since it’s hypertext, this story can be got at more than one […]