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John Zuern considers the significance of the first volume of ELO’s Electronic Literature Collection for the future of electronic arts. “What are letters?” Nell, the young heroine of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, poses this question to her older brother Harv in response to his explanation that the letters “MC” are an abbreviation for “Matter Compiler,” a household device that in the novel’s nanotech-saturated world assembles consumer goods on demand from their molecular components. The children are examining the MC’s interface, made up primarily of a scrollable menu of animated icons, “mediaglyphics,” that represent the available products. It is only […]
The Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1 is essentially the first major anthology of contemporary digital writing, and there are few things not to appreciate about it. Sixty varied and highly refined works are included, produced by artists who have been practitioners for many years. A viewer who is not open to participating in explorative, often abstract works, may not like or be able to appreciate the content, and surely there are high-quality works that are not included (as in any literary anthology), but the material gathered here could hardly be more representative of what is happening in various digital genres […]
Adalaide Morris considers ‘tutor texts’ in the Electronic Literature Collection and, in doing so, articulates a poetics for the emerging field of e-lit. Instead of fulfilling Ted Nelson’s dream of ‘computer lib,’ the most compelling entries in the Collection emphasize the continuing necessity of writing under constraint. When the revolution turns out to be, not a liberation from a culture of control but its transformation, practices long familiar to experimental poets in print become generalized throughout new media and their panoply of ‘thinkertoys.’ “Our greatest problems,” Ted Nelson declared in his 1974 back-to-back double tract Computer Lib / Dream Machines, […]
In a reading of Christopher Nolan’s films (with and against texts by Poe, Wittgenstein, Searle, and Derrida), Walter Benn Michaels examines the autonomy of the work of art. 1 accidentally on purpose Christopher Nolan’s movie Insomnia is a remake of a Norwegian movie (directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg) and, although the two movies are very much alike (as Nolan says, they have “almost the exact same plot and situations” [Prestigiacomo]), they differ in at least one important way. Both involve a senior detective and his junior partner being sent far north (from Sweden to Northern Norway in the original, from L.A. […]
Reading Stephanie Strickland’s V: Losing L’una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse, Jaishree Odin explores the implications of the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity for our understanding of reading, writing and living. The uniqueness of a new-media work is the mobility of its elements, present as binary code in computer, yet capable of being mobilized into action through user interaction or through programming. Many new media works make full use of multiple functionalities of current software applications, bringing to light in unique ways the effect a well-designed interface can have on the meaning-making process. How do we read these digital texts that mutate with the […]
1. Introduction Every role-playing game takes place in a fictional world – a setting. In a session of play, players typically generate more information about the setting than they find in the canonical game materials. They may also create new rules or change canonical rules and setting elements to suit their tastes. Even if they use the game material without modifications, they choose how to assign importance to the various rules and setting elements. Players often extrapolate connections between small details in the provided world. This creates content that they consider implicit to the canonical game. Other groups may possess […]
1. Introduction The essence of the computer as a representational medium is procedurality – the ability of the computer to engage in arbitrary mechanical processes to which observers can ascribe meaning. Computers do, of course, participate in the production of imagery, support communication between people via the mediation of long-distance signals, control electromechanical devices, and support the storage and interlinking of large quantities of human-readable data. Many tools are available that allow users to engage these various capacities of the computer, such as image manipulation or Web page authoring, without requiring users to think procedurally. But it is precisely the […]
Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce the essays of the “Computational Fictions” section of Second Person, focusing on the conversion of human ludic interaction into computational processes – a necessary condition for computer games. Editors’ Introduction to “Computational Fictions” What makes computer games different from other games? What makes Pong different from tennis, video poker different from traditional poker, or one of EA’s Lord of the Rings computer role-playing games different from Dungeons & Dragons? Of course, the differences are many, when considering particular games – for example, whether referees are employed, cards are used, or hard cover rulebooks […]
1. These brief notes are offered in place of something longer and more fully considered, for which there will probably never be time. These days, reflection is a luxury in most working lives, and it comes particularly dear for those who work in cybertext, which can claim neither the high-cultural entitlements of literature nor the market appeal of video games, but subsists on the margins of those worlds, among others. Most who move in this edgy space are amateurs, obsessives, and/or academics, people driven by, if not to, distraction. We are always “of two minds,” as Michael Joyce (1975) put […]
Cinema and Software The twentieth-century cinema “machine” was born at the intersection of the two key technologies of the industrial era: the engine that drives movement and the electricity that powers it. While an engine moves film inside the projector at uniform speed, the electric bulb makes possible the projection of the film image on the screen. The use of an engine makes the cinema machine similar to an industrial factory organized around an assembly line. A factory produces identical objects that are coming from the assembly line at regular intervals. Similarly, a film projector spits out images, all the […]
The novel has long been associated with ethics. This link goes back to F.R. Leavis, but Andrew Gibson has shown that this tradition is alive and well today not only in the work of humanist critics like Wayne Booth, but among postmodernists like Richard Rorty and J. Hillis Miller. One way to interrogate Simon Critchley’s theory of ethics and political resistance in Infinitely Demanding is to set it alongside of contemporary novels and to ask how they respond differently to the same cultural moment. It isn’t hard to see Critchley’s book as a response to the bleak political moment in […]
When gamers interact with their environments . . . probing often takes the form of seeking out the limits of the situation, the points at which the illusion of reality breaks down, and you can sense that it’s all just a bunch of algorithms behind the curtain. – Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You Puppet master: An individual working “behind the curtain” to control the game. – Sean Stacey, “The Unfiction Glossary” In early August 2004, the alternate reality game I Love Bees gave its online players, over 600,000 in number, their first real-world mission. On a Web […]
In the summer of 2004, I was approached by my friend Greg Moccia with a unique task: to design a live-action role-playing event at which he could propose to his girlfriend. The resulting game was A Measure for Marriage, a one-session LARP in which players took the roles of nobles and attendants as they attempted to find romance, thwart villainy, and restore true love in an improvised Shakespearean comedy. Of course, designing a LARP about romance that must end with a real proposal is a daunting task, and the success of A Measure for Marriage was a result of careful […]
On December 16, 2003, popular Web magazine Slate published an article by journalist and author Steven Johnson (2003). Reviewing simulation games that engage problems of social organization, Johnson posed a question: “The [2004] U.S. presidential campaign may be the first true election of the digital age, but it’s still missing one key ingredient. Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004?” Upon reading this article, we smiled at its perfect timing: at that very moment we were developing The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first official video game ever commissioned in the history of U.S. Presidential elections. Former Vermont […]
Eliza Redux Then The first manifestation of Eliza Redux The title for this film has now been changed to The Veils of Transference to differentiate it from the online Eliza Redux. was a pre-scripted film produced in 2001 depicting a twenty-minute psychoanalytic session between a robot and a human, during which the robot and human switch back and forth in their roles as analyst and analysand; and in the end, it is the robot, in its role as a patient, that has a “baring of the soul” cathartic experience. The robot-actor in this case was essentially a puppet; its locomotion, […]
This essay-narrative originally appeared in a catalogue published by Eastwick Art Gallery in Chicago, and it was also included in ebr 11. FRIDAY EVENING, January 1999 Gold Star, 10:30. Two draft beers, DAB ($7.00 with tip). Daniel agrees that an interview would be better than an essay. He wants a text that will be unlike all the other catalogue texts. During the past few days, he’s been reading my copy of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Could we do something along the lines of a metalogue? Daniel asks if I know whether, on the Internet, he might […]
“Why shouldn’t Wordsworth be read through Whitehead? Why shouldn’t the canon of Romantic poetry be read alongside the inscription technologies of cartography or tour guides?” Eugene Thacker’s challenge to the recent compartmentalization of academic literary studies is inspired by a reading of Ron Broglio’s book, Technologies of the Picturesque. For Thacker, as for Broglio, literary Romanticism and phenomenological reflection are not the only unifying forces against the dissolution of the technological subject. It is often said that humanities departments in the States – and especially English literature departments – have turned away from theoretical reflection towards historical, sociological, and even […]
Only in North American academia would the first three titles listed above have appeared before the fourth. Only here would “culture” be the first thing literary scholars think of writing about when confronted with a transformation in the material media of our own practice. Works of literature are cited in these first three books, occasionally as participants in the transformation but more often as casualties or, at best, as well-crafted, all-too-human expressions of what it feels like to live through the transformation. Race in Thomas Foster and Martin Kevorkian, gender in N. Katherine Hayles, and class in all three are […]
“If every link is a next, every memory is a was.” – Michael Joyce, Othermindedness Michael Joyce tends to avoid overstatement or overemphasis, and nowhere is this more true than in his characterizations of the World Wide Web. The Web – which he refers to as something that “our culture has slipped on … like a lonely guy slips on a T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe” (Othermindedness 52) – underwhelms him. A more expansive collection of these characterizations, many taken – in the true spirit of surfing and sampling – out of context, would include the WWW as something […]
For Nick Spencer, January 28, 1966 – July 18, 2008 – In Friendship 1. Discussions of the history of 20th- and 21st-century critical thought often proceed by delineating an itinerary of schools (new criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, new historicism, new materialism, neo-formalism, etc.) and ‘turns’: the linguistic turn, the religious turn, the ethical turn, the ontological turn, the spatial turn, the rhetorical turn, the medial turn, and of late the so-called ‘affective turn’.Of these phrases, perhaps the one that caught on the least is that of the ‘medial turn’. See, however, Joseph Tabbi’s essay “The Medial Turn” for a lucid exposition. […]
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien in Göttingen, Germany, 10 June 2006. A slightly different version was published as “Strange Sympathies: Horizons of German and American Media Theory.” American Studies as Media Studies. Ed. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 3-23. I In linking a national civilization (America) with media, this conference suggests a road less traveled in media studies. Media studies as a field has generally taken three main forms. One is textual and interpretive: to read and figure out what is taking place, for example, in The Sopranos. […]
The legacy of Charles Darwin remains as vexed as ever. In my part of the States, a debate over Darwin is played out on the backs of cars. To signify their theological commitments, some affix plastic silhouettes of fish to their bumpers or trunks. Sometimes the point is driven home by placing the name “Jesus” inside the fish. The occasional secularist joker lampoons these logos with a parodic variation that gives the fish tiny feet and a little smile. These turn it into a lizard, presumably from the Galapagos Islands, and often the point is made explicit by inscribing “Darwin” […]
Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer “ping trace” can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation. An earlier version of this essay was given at the 2008 Electronic Literature Conference in Vancouver, WA. Thanks to all who listened and commented. “Only the imagination is real.” William Carlos Williams Hello Baghdad. Hosts are open, packets receiving. I’m in Iraq in milliseconds. But the DoD turns me back, their firewall refusing to echo, ending my request. I tell you the net is […]
Suddenly, reading has the become subject of broad public excitement and debate – sprinkled as it’s been with the magic pixie dust of consumer electronics marketing. How will we read in the future when books, like every other type of media, have become fully digital? Not a day passes, it seems, when some new ebook reader is announced. This month at the Consumer Electronics Show, Steve Ballmer made his pitch for Windows-based tablet computers by demonstrating their ability to run a Kindle ebook reader. What a strange moment, when books are the hot topic of electronics marketing. Electronics companies, reviewers, […]
Let me jump right into the heart of my topic, by presenting two examples. The first, Image Fugurator, a project by Julius von Bismarck which won the Prize Ars Electronica 2008 in the category Interactive Art at the Cyberarts Festival in Linz, Austria, inverts the functioning of a regular camera. Whereas in a normal camera the light projected by objects is captured unto film, with Image Fugurator, an image stored on film within the camera is briefly projected onto the external world when the flash goes on. The whole process is triggered when the camera senses other flashes in the […]
In this piece – part introduction, part artist’s statement – Whitney Anne Trettien reflects on her “combinatory” approach to the history of “text-generating mechanisms.” Author’s note: Each piece of writing reconfigures its object historically; the following is no exception. Part introduction and part artist’s statement, this essay reflects upon the historical methodologies I pursued in producing my born-digital critical archaeology of text-generating mechanisms – a work of criticism that, like the baroque volvelles and experimentalist cut-ups it studies, forces the reader to navigate through descriptive bits of text to combinatorially accumulate knowledge. Woven into these reflections are threads of writing […]
What does it mean to apply a “critical” lens to programming code? Members of the CCS Working Group grapple with this and other foundational questions, hashing out the methods, boundaries, and stakes of a new academic field. This essay is part of a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion. Editor’s note: We are pleased to present a distilled version of the lively discussion that took place in the summer of 2010 at the Critical Code Studies Working Group. Mark Marino, the organizing chair of the group, has written an introductory essay to these discussions […]
David Haeselin reviews Ted Striphas’ The Late Age of Print, which explores the crucial role of book publishing in today’s society of controlled consumption. The oft-repeated death knell for reading, Striphas argues, is the equivalent to a Fox News jeremiad on the death of American morality: it’s wholly ideological and selective. In 1929, Joseph Wharton Lippincott, the president of the National Association of Book Publishers, penned an article in Publisher’s Weekly noting a nascent trend of built-in bookcase construction in new houses, as well as ways of retrofitting older ones. Strangely enough, many customers needed “mimic books” to actually utilize […]
This review is a simultaneous publication from the current issue of American Book Review. *** A literary text is processed in the brain like any other complex stimulus: mysteriously. While particular types of sensory input tend to be processed in specific regions of the brain – the cerebellum specializes in motion perception, for example, and the amygdala and hippocampus are implicated in emotional memory – our engagement with objects and spaces is seldom, if ever, the product of a single sensory or cognitive process. The information required to carry out a task like reading a book involves parallel interactions among […]
With additional questions from Eric Dean Rasmussen and Rone Shavers, the editors, representing Electronic Book Review. Lydia Davis: Some writers I know are very unhappy writing, and some fly high. On a scale of one to ten, from agonized to elated, what were your feelings in the midst of working on American Genius, A Comedy? Lynne Tillman: I ran the gamut, from one to ten. One was my not being able to find the voice that moved it all, told it. A ten was, for instance, when I was writing the séance scene, which was so wacky I couldn’t believe […]
In Week 3 of a six-part series, Critical Code Studies contributors spelunk the mysteries of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal text adventure game. Delving into close readings of the original FORTRAN code, the group plots the twisty passages linking media theory, deconstruction and philosophies of programming. Group Code Annotation: Colossal Cave Adventure According to Donald Knuth, designer of the “literate programming paradigm,” Colossal Cave Adventure is the “ur-game for computers” (Knuth 1998/2002). Because computer games have, for decades, been a point of connection between the worlds of technology (from the Greek techne, “skill”) and art (from the Latin ars artis, […]
My parents had to have my dog put down when I was a kid. Later in life, I had a finely bred cat that went crazy and had to be destroyed. I have hemophobia which makes an ordinary blood-test an ordeal. So much I share with Helen, the narrator of Lynne Tillman’s recent novel American Genius, A Comedy. Further references will be given in the text to AGAC. No doubt there are other things we have in common, for Helen’s compulsively repetitive monologue at once invites and irritatingly repels such easy forms of identification. AGAC, of course, is a book […]
In Week 4, Critical Code Studies contributors kept the magic alive as they discussed Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “On Sourcery and Source Codes,” the first chapter of her forthcoming Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Informed by Chun’s psychoanalytic reading and her awareness of the materiality of code work, the conversation deals with fetishism, gender, genetics, and performativity in ways both abstract and tangible. Week 4 of the CCS discussion began with a reading from the first chapter of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s recent book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. We are grateful to MIT Press for allowing us to share […]
I feed too much on inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. -George Eliot Art destined to live has the aspect of a truth of nature, not of some coldly worked out experimental discovery. -Eugenio Montale Let’s get it on, sugar. Let’s get it on.- Marvin Gaye In January 2001, Guardian Unlimited published Jeff Noon’s manifesto, “Post Futurism,” in which Noon laments the contemporary state of […]
This essay was first published by The MIT Press in 2009 in the collection Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. High Magic Comics belong to an interstitial form, occupying a privileged place between the dominant media of word and image. They are enough like long-form prose narrative for some to be known as graphic novels, and they are first cousins to storyboards, important genetic material for most films. Indeed, as Scott McCloud suggests, a comic is a bit like a film reel with a slow playback rate (8). Yet we should also […]
Preface This essay is modified from a keynote lecture I gave at the “Arabic Electronic Literature: New Horizons and Global Perspectives” sponsored by the Rochester Institute of Technology Dubai on February 25-27, 2018. The conference organizers, Jonathon Penny from RIT and Reham Hosny from Minia University, arranged for simultaneous English-Arabic translations, enabling all participants to understand and respond to each other’s presentations. I learned that an Arabic group dedicated to electronic literature, The Unity, already exists and has several hundred members. Although it was not clear how active the group is at present, a spokesman was given space in the […]
The essays collected in Against the Grain were first presented in 2008 during the International Pynchon Week conference that took place in Munich, Germany. Mainly devoted to Pynchon’s seventh book, Against the Day, the collection reminds readers of the questions that any scholarship devoted to this most intertextual, allusive, encyclopedic, and thoroughly investigated writer must necessarily address: how to make an original contribution to a “Pyndustry” (to use the editor’s term [12]) that has been thriving for over thirty-five years; how to do justice, in 15-25 pages, to a novel of over 1,000 pages; how to distinguish between the casual […]
In an increasingly monolingual, globalized world, the second volume of the Electronic Literature Collection may just offer a map of the territory. The question the reviewer, John Zuern, poses is how do we navigate this terrain going forward? Although we can now make what we write instantly available more or less everywhere in the world, every act of writing takes place somewhere, in a particular location, at a particular time, in a particular dialect of a particular language, and within the corresponding geopolitical, historical, cultural, and linguistic parameters. Moreover, every act of writing is somatically situated, exerting a strain, often […]
In a 1997 interview, Dennis Cooper lamented that his novels’ formal qualities often got lost in the attention bestowed upon his extreme subject matter (qtd. Canning 309). The five-novel George Miles Cycle (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period) explores the eroticization of death amid a swirling confusion of fantasy and reality, and the sex is often as violent and graphically depicted as the murders. Cooper’s cycle presents such transgressions as queer sex, incest, pedophilia, kiddie and snuff porn with uncomfortable rigor and a brutally disengaged tone. Within them, the figure of George Miles circulates, sometimes named George, sometimes taking other names, […]
PREFACE Beginning with the title, a variation on Nietzsche’s “Use and Abuse of History for Life,” this paper offers a practice-based theory of how new media writing and traditional prose scholarship might converge. The essay itself will be in the form of a literary remix. Hence, the author’s own sense of the affordances and constraints of new media will be conveyed primarily through the words of Nietzsche as well as selected works of critical writing in and about new media. One of the essay’s themes is already evident in the essay’s derivative form – namely, that the only way that […]
In week five, Stephen Ramsay performed a live reading of a livecoding performance: in a video, he presented a spontaneous commentary over a screencast of Andrew Sorensen’s “Strange Places,” a piece Ramsay had never seen before. The screencast showed Sorensen using Impromptu, a LISP-based environment for musical performance that he had himself developed, to improvise a piece of music; Sorenson developed the piece’s musical themes by composing and editing code. The video allowed the audience to watch Sorenson write and edit his code in the Impromptu editor window. This presentation inspired a discussion that broke livecoding down into two overlapping […]
Introduction On a theoretical level, the Digital is based on the manipulation of discrete units with formal rules (Bachimont). On an applicative level, interactive works are based on the gestural manipulations of semiotic forms (text, image, sound, video) by the reader. Both types of manipulations mentioned above are related. Manipulation is indeed the essence of the Digital. In terms of manipulation, the Digital offers a range of technical possibilities. To what extent can these possibilities affect the conditions and modalities of literary writing? The idea here is to confront literary creativity with the manipulative possibilities of the Digital. To what extent […]
Review of Mark Z. Danielewski, edited by Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons. University of Manchester Press, 2011. Everyone is tired of talking about postmodernism. This is especially the case with literature, where few writers ever embraced the term enthusiastically. Today calling yourself a postmodernist novelist seems to mean picking a fight with Joyce and Hemingway that everyone else has lost interest in, like an uncle who insists on trying to get everyone worked up about Iran Contra every time the family gets together. Regardless of how we imagine that thing that comes after postmodernism, Mark Danielewski is likely to be […]
Introduction The paper formulates the category “shuffle literature” to help reveal important qualities of certain intriguing works of fiction and poetry. We show how unusual formal and material aspects of these literary works interact with one another, revealing new things about aspects of literature that have been gaining scholarly interest and have increasingly attracted readers. Given the many new concerns about changing ways of reading, it seems particularly relevant to have a closer look into the form of literary expression that invites the reader to choose her own way of progressing the story while still belonging to the traditions of […]
Rui Torres tracks the practice of intertextual borrowing or “plagiotropia” between the works of Portuguese experimental poets. Plagiotropia is a tangible and fecund practice in digital poetry, where poetic texts migrate and grow across media. Torres’ arguments culminate in an examination of his own online combinatory cyber-poetry, which creatively re-writes earlier pre-digital experimental works. Introduction Húmus by Herberto Helder (1967) is recognized for its direct quotation from Raul Brandão’s 1921 poem of the same name. However, Helder’s work is more than the simple intertextual suggestion of a text: it transforms it, putting into motion its latent power, reviving it. As […]
The world of things has become a world of signs – a universe that both brings into being and is brought into being by symbolic codes. Perhaps it is for this reason alone that that most symbolic of all codes, the literary text, can foreshadow a future world while the contemporary world suggests the future of poetics. – Steve Tomasula Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism restages and reactivates Fredric Jameson’s call, over twenty years prior, for a new situation and new mode of criticism adequate to late capitalism. While reduplicating Jameson’s title, terminology, methods […]
“…with wonderful skill, he carved a figure, brilliantly, out of snow-white ivory, no mortal woman, and fell in love with his own creation.” —Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book X “Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything.” —Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism “Yes, it hurts being carved. The stone beyond the boundary of oneself is numb, but there always comes a time when the chisel or the point reaches down to where feeling begins, and strikes.” —Emily Short, “Galatea” Introduction […]
Since this is a paper about the computational context of literary writing, and to some extent poetry, I have invested heavily in metaphor, at least as far as the title is concerned. Taking key terms in no particular order: by end I mean not so much terminus as singularity or convergence of opposites, that defining, indefinable point where turn becomes return as one state gives way to another; from the imperative lift, I take both the sense of elevation or burdening (lift up) and appropriation (shoplifting); and by the numinous article this, I will eventually mean the inescapable subject of […]
Since its release in 2010, the Apple iPad tablet has launched a new form factor for computing, driven by the chameleon-like interface of direct manipulation provided by its touch screen. The iPad and the many other tablets that have followed in its wake (including the Kindle Fire, the many varieties of Android tablets, and the Windows Surface and touchscreen-centered Windows 8 devices) are transforming our physical relationship with texts by co-opting many of our expectations of print and integrating them with a range of gesture-driven interactive elements. As these electronic “books” have emerged on tablets, ranging in form from clear […]
Chris Funkhouser and Andrew Klobucar situate the poetry anthologized in the recent collection “Gnoetry Daily, Vol. 1: a collection of poetry written interactively with computers” within a long genealogy of computer aided writing in order to illustrate how that genealogy continues to be both aesthetically generative and socially significant. Editor’s note: The following essay mixes the voices of its authors, Christopher Funkhouser and Andrew Klobucar. conceived of named Daily one research substance poems ostensibly language years programmatic hard or no your and nothing different Jim arrangement work explores discovery which author to explicitly remove lines […]
According to Janez Strehovec, e-literature operates on the model of post-Fordist immaterial production. He argues it’s precisely because “a part of contemporary art (especially the new media one and e-literature) is crossing into the service sector of (new) networked economy in the post-industrial, information, spectacle- and software society” that e-literature needs to cultivate its own autonomous context. E-Literary World and the Service of E-Literature It often seems that autopoiesis and self-reference play a crucial role in the basic understanding of e-literature, which the established scholarship (e.g. e-literary criticism) considers first and foremost in terms of its new media specificity. This […]
Originally given as the keynote lecture at the Electronic Literature Organization conference, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, June 22, 2012 Disclaimer: This lecture was written after having been out of touch with the field of electronic literature as it is represented by the ELO for half a decade. The author’s work has shifted from literary studies to applied design research, and towards modes of electronic publishing where the experiment lies in production and distribution, such as in Libre Graphics and open source book sprints. Nevertheless, this might help to reframe electronic literature within larger cultural developments in writing and publishing. […]
Soon it’ll be ten years since William Pannpacker, official blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education and commentator of the 2009 Modern Language Association’s annual convention famously proclaimed the Digital Humanities “the next big thing.” The last decade saw many gatherings, many articles written with DH in mind, many tweets – because the “big thing” also constitutes itself via small texts – and various collections of essays defining what DH is and what it is not. Notable among these is Matthew K. Gold’s 2012 Debates in the Digital Humanities whose second installment appeared in 2016. Both volumes, with 49 and […]
This essay argues for a resistance to the semantic slippage that algorithm invariably I will only be concerning myself, for the duration of this essay, with works of electronic literature and not with phenomena such as Facebook or Google in which texts are also assembled largely via algorithm. However, I think the present analysis could be expanded to account for these Internet applications. My sense of the “invariable” injection of indeterminacy is partly based on Lev Manovich’s observation, stated in “Database as Symbolic Form” and, later, in The Language of New Media, that a paradigm shift has occurred in our […]
A Preface and a Disclaimer If the first “wave” of Digital Humanities was said to have prompted a quantitative turn, e.g. the compilation and implementation of databases as well as the organization of information in elaborate arrays, then the much anticipated “second wave” is to be “qualitative, interpretive, experimental, emotive, generative in character” (Schnapp & Presner, 2009). As curator of the Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection for the ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice) Knowledge Base, I have been asked to partake in this second wave and offer a few conclusions about Brazilian electronic literary […]
Introduction Snapchat, an app for iPhone and Android that is growing more popular across the world, especially among teens, is one of the latest iterations of vanishing text and image in the electronic world. If not quite literature—although it certainly might be by now, as e-writers turn to ever more inventive software for literary expression—it definitely represents a contemporary version of vanishing text and image. Snapchat allows users to snap a picture, send it to others, and assign a time frame for that picture to expire and no longer be visible. Typically, a picture can be viewed from one second […]
This essay is excerpted from Swanstrom’s monograph, Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics (under contract to be published by the University of Alabama Press). “The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from “oak or rock,” it was enough for them.” —Plato “The leap from living animals to humans that speak is as large if not larger than that from the lifeless stone to the living being.” —Martin Heidegger “Today was a sunny day and I was able to sunbathe a lot… I […]
What she’s doing is, every time she works out a value for y, she is using that as her next value for x. And so on. Like a feedback. She’s feeding the solution back in the equation, and then solving it again. Iteration, you see. – Tom Stoppard, 44 [I]n order to understand geometric shapes, one must see them. It has very often been forgotten that geometry simply must have a visual component – Benoit Mandelbrot, quoted in Holte 1 Figure 1: screen shot slippingglimpse The first screen of slippingglimpse beckons “select one to start.” Select which […]
End Scene Our mission was simple: write, edit, and publish a book in three days from the floor of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was a deliberately outlandish thing to do, setting up a booth at the largest, noisiest book expo in the world and inviting a small group of writers to sit there, talk, type, and edit a series of answers to the question “what is the future of publishing?” Dramatis personae on-site included celebrated science fiction writer and essayist Charlie Stross, publisher and Virginia Quarterly Review web editor Jane Friedman, author and entrepreneur Dan Gillmor, and novelist, essayist […]
Countdown Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, most of which is set in the German ‘Zone’ during and shortly after WW2, is pervaded by references to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “There is a mean poem about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke” (644) the narrator notes; evoking the Tenth Elegy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Strange, though, alas, the streets of Grief-City, where, in the artificiality of a drowned-out false stillness, the statue cast from the mould of emptiness bravely swaggers: the gilded noise, the flawed memorial. O, how an Angel would utterly trample their market of […]
How does the electronic literature community continue to develop? Amaranth Borsuk looks towards the print literature community, and suggests that we adopt a number of its most successful practices. This series of short interventions were made at the “Futures of Electronic Literature” discussion at the bi-annual Electronic Literature Organization conference in 2012. Titled “Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints,” the conference took place at West Virginia University in Morgantown on June 20th to June 23rd. The contributors were organized by Stephanie Strickland to offer suggestions on how to improve the organization as it attempts to re-define its mission in a shifting […]
If posthumanism signals the end of a certain way of describing—or, more precisely, orienting—selfhood, then we might ask, as Ralph Waldo Emerson did at the start of his famous essay, “Experience” (that addressed, among other crucial issues, slavery), “Where do we find ourselves?” (266). To be sure, technology has already expanded ideas about seeing the human as created through evolution. Marvin Minsky argues that robots will be the next evolutionary phase; they will be our “children.”Ray Kurzweil anticipates the ethical issues of posthumanism will be worked out by machines gaining consciousness and then guiding themselves (and, presumably, us) through deeper […]
Review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. The posthumanist turn in recent theory and cultural studies continues apace. Posthumanism, briefly, is in general the effort to challenge and even displace the vestiges of anthropocentrism that persist within the conceptual regimes of the human sciences. In this, it follows a series of sustained and by now familiar decenterings of certain privileged subject positions: the postcolonial decentering of a certain Western subjectivity, or the queer decentering of a certain heteronormative subjectivity, for instance. Posthumanism wishes to go further, however, and […]
Thing-power perhaps has the rhetorical advantage of calling to mind a childhood sense of the world as filled with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not. It draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve. (Bennett 20) This is an essay to be taken with a child’s, or Gilles Deleuze’s, naïveté. To those who fail to find such thinking sufficiently serious, take heed—you may well find yourself neatly aligned with The Lego Movie’s antagonist, Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who is also the […]
This essay appears previously in the proceedings of the Universities of Paris 8 conference “Translating E-Literature/Traduire la littérature numérique.” Practices and theories of translation are situated at a crucial position in the domain of the practices and theories of language. We are comfortable with distinguishing practices of language whose systematic differences allow us to say that the users of languages in which they are separately competent are, nonetheless, “mutually unintelligible” to one another, and so we may say that they are using different, distinct languages. However, certain practitioners may be proficient in any number of such languages and they may […]
John Bruni’s review raises a number of important questions about what I’d still be inclined to call an emergent and major theoretical paradigm, namely posthumanism. In Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (Bloomsbury 2013—an updated translation of my Posthumanismus—Eine kritische Einführung, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2009) I argued that the best way to understand the phenomenon of posthumanism is by looking at it as a discourse (more or less in a Foucauldian sense). Everything that directly or indirectly says something about the “posthuman,” including the no-longer-quite- and the more-than-human, constitutes the disputed object of that discourse (comprising all sorts of texts, practices, subjects, institutions, […]
Fig. 1 Screenshot of the ESG MalwareTracker Worldwide Infection Map One glance at the ESG MalwareTracker (fig. 1) is enough to make one’s skin crawl. Borrowing a visual strategy from epidemiology, MalwareTracker uses a map to depict computer virus infections worldwide. The map is dotted with red insects with shiny bulbous bodies that appear to be sized in proportion to the number of infections in a location. There are only three discernible sizes, representing 11 suspected infections at the low end (Cape Verde), up to 1.7 million at the high end (the United States). Each country has just one insect […]
Despite concentrated critical analysis spanning two decades (or more, depending on who you ask), videogames still have a legitimacy problem. Critics have only in the recent past made the case for videogames as culturally legitimate pieces worthy of academic study, and predictably, the form’s previous stigmas – deserved or otherwise – have carried into the debate over its place in the art world and the academy. For example, an article on the University of Southern California’s videogame design graduate program’s recent influx of women students focuses on the benefits that this demographic shift may have vis-à-vis the ubiquitous expectation of […]
A book is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment-a book is also a sequence of moments… A book is a space-time sequence. – Ulises Carrión. The New Art of Making Books Ulises Carrión, A Comparative Media Theorist On the verge of becoming a canonical figure in Mexican literature amidst the larger context of the Latin American literary scene of the second half of the 20th century, Ulises Carrión broke apart from the mainstream of literary production. Having written two novels published in the early 1970s and relocated in Europe, Carrión began a […]
The aim of this little volume is, as far as may be, to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate. Such an attempt demands patient, continuous sight as pure as the gazer can refine it of theory, fancies, or his mere subjective enjoyment. —Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), preface to Sight and Song, 1892 After the author is gone and the page is gone, what is left but for the poet […]
Things live only on the basis of their disappearance, and, if one wishes to interpret them with entire lucidity, one must do so as a function of their disappearance. (Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? 31) The use of the past tense in the central theme of this issue – “what in the world was postmodernism?” – implies that postmodernism has disappeared from the landscape of contemporary literary, critical, artistic, and philosophical practice. While previous articles in this collection chronicle the emergence of postmodernism and how it came to disappear, this article asks what we can learn from its disappearance. […]
“Getting lost” in a work of fiction is a conventional expression that speaks to the immersive power of narrative. The reader (which here will include the viewer and the player) is so moved or transported by the drama, characters and unfolding terrain that she loses herself to the physical world and perhaps cannot hear the person directly in front of her. Another sense of getting lost in a text, described by Umberto Eco in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, is a “digressing and lingering [that] helps to enclose readers with those time-woods from which they can escape only after […]
The actual ends of ‘electronic literature’ are implied by a name that embraces its supposed means. ‘Electronic’ refers to means in a way that is well understood but promotes quite specific means as the essential attribute of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that was once new, a new kind of literature, a new teleology for literary practice, an ‘end’ of literature having its own ends, the end of electronic literature in its means, misdirected ends justified by misappropriated means. This brief essay will not remain bound up within the conceptual entanglements of a name. We will move on from ‘end(s)’ […]
INTRODUCTION In his book The Interface Effect (2012), Alexander Galloway considers how interfaces are not simply tools or stable objects, but “effects” (33) of concrete material conditions, as well as “practices of mediation” (16) that reflect culture. Computational devices are thus not simply machines that emulate other media, but translation processes occurring between many layers of code. Behind the surface-level of the interface, myriads of performances take place, too small and too fast for the human eye to perceive. Articulated with these, there are layers of protocols to which these processes must comply in order to be interpreted. These protocols […]
Soaking in info, the soothing facts In just a minute we’ll get to the bottom of just about anything Anything at all (Pat Maloney, “Deaf Ear to the Ground” 2014) Introduction We live in an age of surveillance. We now blog about our lives openly. We carry around smartphones that push geospatial information about our location into the cloud. All this voluntary datafication has changed the way surveillance works so that now data can be easily captured rather than laboriously gathered. Ever since 2013 when news organizations like the Guardian began reporting on the extraordinary collection of classified […]
This experimental essai is written in performative awareness of the challenges of tone in electronic literature. It is a developing piece and will appear in writethroughs, readthroughs, playthroughs (the sous rature mark seems appropriate) elsewhere Key: electronic literature, literature, tone, print, lexia, footnote, postscript, post- literary, countertextual. Instructions for Use If you are not interested in literature (or literature), in all its guises, do not read this text. If you do, read Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ first, but don’t expect poetry in what follows. Next up, read Stephanie Strickland’s ‘Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of […]
Translation and translation issues are among the most fundamental issues in any writing practice or theory and no writer can avoid addressing them. Countless theories and methods have given birth to no less countless ideas and speculations, best and worst practices, illuminatingly simple and deceivingly complex outcomes, as well as dead ends and springboards to the endless process of rereading and rewriting texts in and between all kinds of languages –and more and more also between all kinds of media, for it is now generally accepted that the whole field of adaptation also belongs to the larger field of translation […]
Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker is tour de force stuff. In some sense, this is to be expected. Acker led a colorful, bohemian existence before and during her reign as the enfant terrible of postmodern literature. Legendary for her “transgressive” fiction and edgy punk image, Acker was one of the few writers—and only woman writer—to achieve a degree of fame as a countercultural figure in her time. Aware of the dangers depicting such a cult figure, Kraus has written a thrilling biography that respectfully lays bare the self-mythologization and image cultivation behind what would become Kathy Acker. Neither hagiography nor […]
McElroy’s 2017 talk, Forms of Censorship; Censorship As Form, delivered at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, addresses contemporary forms of censorship and how they shape contemporary literature and discourse. He identifies three forms of censorship: (i) “official acts enforced by police prohibiting the printed word or publicly… heard voice,” (ii) the “muting effects” of censorship in autocratic societies, and (iii) the “glut” of “lying, multiplying, derivative” efforts, “spreading without overtly meaning to conceal or prohibit or blot out.” The first form of censorship can be regarded as a more ‘traditional’ and direct type of censorship, while the […]
1. Introduction We meet computer-based translation online on a daily basis, and while it often is helpful when trying to read a text on foreign language, we often have to read through errors and misunderstandings caused by the statistical translation algorithms. Increasingly such computer-based translation seeps into software as sloppy machine translation of help text, interface texts and instruction manuals, especially when you get outside of those languages for which there are more automated technologies. Sloppy machine translation often reinforces the experience of navigating a somewhat deserted place without any human intervention, reading texts written by and meant for nobody, […]
How to answer the invitation by the editors of electronic book review to provide a response of some kind to ‘A Strange Metapaper on Computing Natural Language’? Should I write a report or review meant to evaluate the suitability of this ‘strange metapaper’ for publication? If so, then in which ways would my report be essentially different to those of the three reviewers whose reports already assess what Portela and da Silva call the ’embedded paper’, ‘If then or else: Who for whom about what in which’? In the version that appears on electronic book review, the authors have added […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Contemporary Arabic e-literature reproduces the ritual function of the earliest written poetry in Arabic. As a form of ritual, communication doesn’t merely communicate information about a world that already exists; communication creates our social world. As media historian James Carey describes it, communication creates, sustains, and transforms the very culture we inhabit as communicators. This function of communication as ritualized creation of social reality poses the problem of the individual. How is the individual speaker or listener, the individual voice and the individual ear, related to the community that communication builds? This question of the individual communicator within the community […]
In “Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages,” Katherine Hayles works to reposition our relationship with technological devices, viewing the human user not as an “autonomous being[]” who uses and develops these devices, but rather “as a component in a cognitive assemblage.” In this way, Hayles requires that we view cognition “as a spectrum rather than a single capability.” Here, Hayles intervenes in the pervasive mythos of the human as “completely autonomous” (an anthropocentric fantasy she aligns with Thoreau), and proposes instead a way of viewing digital literary production as communal, a process that sees not just activity, but creativity, distributed between […]
Introduction One might suggest a central consideration of Arabic electronic literature is the shape-shifting nature of electronic literature in general. What one sees when looking for electronic literature depends upon the perspective from which one looks. I suggest another way of considering electronic literature: by listening. This essay considers sound—especially that of the storyteller’s voice, but including environmental and mechanical sounds as well—to be at the heart of every literary experience, whether contextualized in print or pixels. Conceptual Framework This centrality of sound draws directly on the rich oral history of Arab cultures and storytellers who, using only their voices, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: 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 […]
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 […]
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 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: […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]