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Neocybernetic Posthumanism and the AI Imaginary: Artificial Communication in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora

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 […]
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Contemporary Posterity: A Helpful Oxymoron

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 […]

“Is this a game, or is it real?”: WarGames, computer games, and the status of the screen

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 […]
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Speculative Interfaces: How Electronic Literature Uses the Interface to Make Us Think about Technology

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 […]
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How to Re-Hijack Your Mind: Critical Making and the ‘Battle for Intelligence’

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 […]
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Restoring the ‘Lived space of the body’: Attunement in Critical Making

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 […]
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Researching Writing Technologies through the Speculative Prototype Design of Trina

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 […]
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Post-Digital Debates and Dialogues from the electronic book review

  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 […]
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Reconfiguring Flatness on Screen: A Short History of Cover Designs for Chinese Web Novels

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 […]
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“the many gods of Mile End”: CanLit Print-Culture Nostalgia and J.R. Carpenter’s Entre Ville

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 […]
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