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Charles Darwin: Conservative Messiah? On Joseph Carroll’s Literary Darwinism

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” […]
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Ping Poetics

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 […]

Ebooks, Libraries, and Feelies

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, […]

Between Play and Politics: Dysfunctionality in Digital Art

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 […]
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Computers, Cut-ups, and Combinatory Volvelles

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 […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week One Discussion

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 […]
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Dead Trees, or Dead Formats?

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 […]

The Binding Problem

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 […]

Lydia Davis Interviews Lynne Tillman: The ebr Interview

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 […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Three Discussion

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, […]
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