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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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]