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Lit Mods

A lesson in sabotage Modifying a machine Alter the machine so that it won’t work without you So far improve it that you alone are good enough for it Give it a secret fault that you alone can repair Yes, alter it so that any other man will destroy it If he works it without you That’s what we call: modifying a machine. Modify your machine, saboteur! —Brecht, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (435) Introduction This essay traces different genealogies of “modification” and “modding” in art, games, and literature in pre-digital and digital contexts. Though it departs from “art […]

Appealing to Your Better Judgement: A Call for Database Criticism

Like so many in comparative literature, I knew exactly two works of electronic literature as a BA student: Dakota by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Shelley Jackson’s My Body — a Wunderkammer. I loved both of these works, but was skeptical about the future of digital literature considering we only encountered it in classes, never in daily life. Imagine my delight when I found out about public electronic literature databases! It felt like entering a candy shop, filled with so many works I could browse through endlessly. Works that I liked, works I did not like, and works that I […]
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Unhelpful Tools: Reexamining the Digital Humanities through Eugenio Tisselli’s degenerative and regenerative

By the moment users become aware of what is happening in amazon, one of Eugenio Tisselli’s most recent works, they have already become complicit in a simple, digital rehearsal of this precious biome’s destruction. Running a block of code that we have been instructed to copy and save as “amazon.HTML”, we witness a forest of green “trees” (represented by the “*” symbol) become replaced by brown numerals at an ever-increasing speed until, after a few minutes, the screen becomes almost entirely covered by these ever-changing digits, soon resembling an indecipherable, illogical stock ticker where once there was a peaceful forest. […]
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Being the Asterisk: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and the Future of Game Studies

!! U B THE * !! Many Main-Run Features Starring U! She read it through and then went back to the first line, puzzled. U B the asterisk? Was she tootoxed or not toxed enough? You be the ass to risk. Gina nodded. For all she knew, she was looking at the secret of life. — Pat Cadigan, Synners (1991, 142) Noah Wardrip-Fruin excels at illuminating the not-so-obvious, regularly serving up Eggs of Columbus, concepts that seem entirely self-evident once he has explained them, but which somehow elude understanding until he opens our eyes. Consider his indispensable ELIZA effect, the […]
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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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“language isn’t revolutionary enough”: In/Human Resources and Rachel Zolf’s Gematria

“Mass affluent consumers’ key satisfaction drivers aspi- / rational by most common queries of most-common- / English-words-engine: fuck Q1 sex Q2 love the shit god i” (Zolf) “Capitalism is profoundly illiterate.” (Deleuze and Guattari) In the acknowledgements of Human Resources (2007), Rachel Zolf sardonically admits that “Funding from the Canada Council for the Arts [CCA] and the Ontario Arts Council [OAC] Writers’ Reserve gave [them] invaluable time and space to write” (2). The credit is caustic, given the text’s dual role as a book of poetry and a self-help guide for navigating the “Canada Council Art Bank,” an institution according […]
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Digital Ganglia and Darren Wershler’s “Nicholphilia”

The focus of this essay will be Darren Wershler’s NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs and its living, digital manifestation as a ganglion of texts and links in its online version, NICHOLODEONLINE. Wershler creates a textual homage to the influential Canadian avant-garde poet, bpNichol, in NICHOLODEON, which is a “book” initially published as a print version in 1997 and then later in an online iteration as NICHOLODEONLINE in 1998. The materiality of each iteration differs drastically from the traditional appearance and presentation of its book version to its online manifestation. NICHOLODEONLINE is a moving and dynamic aggregate of pathways—it is a […]
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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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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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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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“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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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 […]

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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Repetition and Defamiliarization in AI Dungeon and Project December

Introduction Recent advances in machine learning provide new opportunities for the exploration of creative, interactive works based around generative text. This paper compares two such works, AI Dungeon (Walton, 2019) and Project December (Rohrer, 2020a), both of which are built on the same artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3. In AI Dungeon, the player can choose from several predetermined worlds, each of which provide a starting point for the story generation. However, while interacting with the system within this world, the player can stop, edit, modify, and retry each utterance, allowing the player to iteratively “sculpt” the AI’s […]
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Week One: Introduction to Critical Code Studies

Software as Literature In 2006 Mark Marino released his Critical Code Studies Manifesto. This essay laid the groundwork for a recognized field of Critical Code Study: reading code as a work of literature. Everything involved in creating software, the code, the comments, the repository commit messages, the data structures, can be objects of interpretation. I am writing this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment is high, but people are hiring COBOL developers. The unemployment insurance machines are in COBOL, and they are breaking. There are technical reasons why these systems are failing. What else will we find? From […]
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Week Two: Indigenous Programming

Main thread: http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/70/week-2-indigenous-programming-main-thread Despite being taught around the world, programming languages are written primarily in English. Why is English our default? While an increase in support for the international text encoding standard Unicode has allowed developers to create computing languages in their native tongues, their widespread adoption is far from the norm. In Week Two of the Critical Code Studies Working Group, Dr. Jon Corbett (a Cree/Saulteaux Métis media artist, computer programmer, and sessional faculty at the University of British Columbia), Dr. Outi Laiti (a Sámi Associate Researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Indigenous Studies program and project manager at […]

Electronic literature as a method and as a disseminative tool for environmental calamity through a case study of digital poetry ‘Lost water! Remains Scape?’

The terms “making” and “building” have circulated for some years in the field of Digital Humanities (see Drucker 2009; Svensson 2010; Stephen and Rockwell 2012; Klein 2017; Endres 2017). These terms indicate empirical and pragmatic approaches and have brought a paradigm shift in the graphic tools and digital technologies used for visualization. These approaches in the humanities deploy the information and innovative visualizations to reinforce and supplement the conventional hermeneutics. This transformation is underpinned by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration and brings together a range of stakeholders and experts from different fields such as writers, artists, researchers, and the public. Scholars […]
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The Art Object in a Post-Digital World: Some Artistic Tendencies in the Use of Instagram

This paper aims to reflect on two labels that have been used to define sets of artifacts born out of the same context but evoking different connotations. I refer to the terms “post-digital” and “post-internet”. Both terms allude to a post-stage, a leap that announces a cultural shift, perceived by artists but difficult to pinpoint and demarcate with precision, a prefix that might refer to ‘after’ (chronologically) as well as ‘beyond’ (spatially); often used to highlight that what has been superseded is the novelty and exceptionality of the internet and digital technology. Actually, these terms address the fact that digital […]
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Digital Narrative and Experience of Time

It is often said that our relationship with time has changed in recent years. New Management strategies mean that employees feel themselves subjected to ever increasing urgency and stress. FOMO, the fear of missing out is a phenomenon inherently linked to the digital environment and its constant flow of information. The Covid-19 crisis has no doubt accentuated this tendency, with its injunction to stay connected and respond immediately to digital notifications and solicitations on a 24/7 basis. According to Paul Ricoeur (1984), “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its […]

Language |H|as a Virus: cyberliterary inf(l)ections in pandemic times

I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. -William S. Burroughs If the computer virus is a technological phenomenon cloaked in the metaphor of biology, emerging infectious diseases are a biological phenomenon cloaked in the technological paradigm. As with computer viruses, emerging infectious diseases constitute an example of a_ counterprotocol phenomenon. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit Linguistic Inflections In Plague and the Athenian Imagination (2007), Robin Mitchell-Boyask considers the hypothesis of the Athens Plague being responsible for changes in the ways Greek tragedies came to […]
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Learning Management Platforms: Notes on Teaching “Taroko Gorge” in a Pandemic

When I first proposed this paper, I had wanted this to be a closer analysis of learning management systems and their abilities and shortcomings in encouraging non-programming students to engage with code in critical and literary ways. But, as it so often does at the end of term, the grading took its toll. Indeed, this is particularly true for me as an adjunct instructor juggling the grading for more students than I care to admit while preparing for the next term to begin. So, this paper is in some ways less of an analysis of the platforms at play, and […]
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Platforms,Tools and the Vernacular Imaginary

Vernacular digital expression is the flux of signs that make up everyday networked life: the memes, selfies, bots, loops, emojis, profiles, webcam backgrounds, email signatures and everything else. Unlike what was once called “folk art” in pre-digital cultures, vernacular digital culture will always be intimately connected with the technology companies and network infrastructure that allow digital communication to occur. The types of platforms and tools determine the types of computational and multimedia writing that takes place. “Vernacular” is appropriated here as a more generic term for the delocalized forms of everyday internet expression. In his 1981 Shadow Work, the countercultural […]

Hypertextument: reading the new Victory Garden

Victory Garden 2022, one of the latest web reconstructions of e-literary classics made by the Electronic Literature Lab, delivers a promise of yet another 20 years of exploration of this vast hypertext. Created in Storyspace and originally published in 1993 by Eastgate Systems, Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext fiction achieved a status of a unique, literary evergreen, a wide ranging digital ouvre. The dense network of interconnected text spaces (993 lexias and over 2800 links) delivered an abundance of divergent stories that run in parallel or, sometimes, in contradiction to each other. Add to this some blind alleys and “secret” spaces, and […]
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Writing as a life form: A Review of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: A Biography (2021)

I’m nothing. I’ll always be nothing. I can’t want to be something. But I have in me all the dreams of the world. -Álvaro de Campos, from “Tobacco Shop” (1928), All translations of Pessoa by Richard Zenith. To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the naked stage where various actors act out various plays. -Vicente Guedes, from the Book of Disquiet (text 299, c. 1918). I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so […]
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‘More of a performer than a listener’: Reading Hazel Smith’s Ecliptical

Hazel Smith’s latest volume of poems, Ecliptical, engages us in several ways. Attractively produced in both print and electronic formats, the book offers a journey through linguistic, sonic, and visual worlds. The title evokes the ecliptic plane, “the imaginary plane containing the Earth’s orbit around the sun”. For the Earth-bound watcher, in the course of a year, “the sun’s apparent path through the sky lies in this plane” (nasa. gov). The poet’s project is to propel earthly dwellers on paths we cannot immediately discern but must help to carve out. Our role is defined in one of the “bullet point” […]
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‘A Shifting Surface World’: The Techno-Graphomania of David Jhave Johnston’s ReRites

The time of tongues is past… and the time of tongues continues to speak with us. This is our voice, only: what of those others, those computational others, whispering their pharmakon into our ears? While we might take solace in our own anthropic prejudice, dismissing such nonsensical communiqués as nothing more than computerized gobbledygook, we might unwittingly miss a chance to study first-hand the babytalk of an embryonic sentience, struggling abortively to awaken from its own phylum of oblivion. 1. INTRODUCTION ReRites is a multi-media project begun by the poet David ‘Jhave’ Johnston in 2017 and completed a year later. […]
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On Digital Aesthetics: Sense-Data and Atmospheric Language

Media Language In which way could the digital be understood as a creative force that engenders a lived experience of writing? The question suggests a way of exploring the digital in writing through a concern of its aesthetics, where aesthetics here means a creative engendering of the experience of being and becoming. The “digital” in recent literature of digital and computational aesthetics refers to the automation of the computational. As M. Beatrice Fazi and Matthew Fuller have indicated, computation “is a systemization of reality via discrete means such as numbers, digits, models, procedures, measures, representations, and highly condensed formalizations of […]
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From Datarama to Dadarama: What Electronic Literature Can Teach Us on a Virtual Conference’s Rendering of Perspective.

This article is a reflection on our experiences with co-organizing the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) yearly global conference in 2021, entitled “Platform (Post?) Pandemics”, which was fully virtual due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The article will be focused on how to understand the conference through critical data studies and will propose applying poetics and techniques from electronic literature to develop qualitative interpretations. The conference presented a wide range of literary performances, exhibitions, workshops, presentations of academic papers, and discussions that in different ways addressed (as stated in the call) how with “social media, apps, search engines and targeted advertisements, platformization […]
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Modelit: eliterature à la (language) mode(l)

When addressing the modelit in my title, I might point to its partial derivation from literature via the North American college-jargon abbreviation, lit. This would briefly beg the question of what literature is, in pragmatic and Foucauldian terms: as, for example, a discourse variously determined and policed by implicated constituencies. Whatever literature is, viewed thus, comes to be determined by the discourse-based power and knowledge struggles of these constituencies. In the case of eliterature, the broader constituencies of its students, on the one hand, and its practitioners, on the other, are particularly tightly integrated, for largely historical reasons that might […]
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Classifying the Unclassifiable: Genres of Electronic Literature

This is an appropriate moment to systematically revisit genre theory and re-evaluate its premises and conceptual frameworks in light of emerging literary genres associated with digital technology. Since the mid-eighties of the last century, a new kind of literature that has taken advantage of computational technology began to attract the attention of literary scholars and became the subject of various literary studies. This new literature has come to be known by the designation of electronic literature, as assigned to it by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO); the first international organization in the field interested in promoting, disseminating, and investigating the […]
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Episode 2: Joseph Tabbi on the Electronic Book Review, Research Infrastructure, and Electronic Literature

SR: Welcome to Off Center, the podcast about digital narrative. My name is Scott Rettberg. I’m the director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen in Norway. Today I’m joined with Joe Tabbi. Hi, Joe. JT: Scott, hi. SR: Joe is a Professor of English at the University of Bergen, and he’s leading the Electronic Literature node at the Center. Just maybe to say a little bit about your background before we begin, Joe, you have what I would say is a fascinating and diverse background as a researcher, scholar, and publisher, which we’ll be talking […]
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Episode 4: Meme Culture, Social Media, and the January 6th Insurrection with Ashleigh Steele

SR: Welcome to Off Center, the podcast about digital narrative and algorithmic narrativity. My name is Scott Rettberg, and I’m the director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. In this podcast, I’ll have conversations with the researchers at the center, as well as other experts in the field to discuss topics revolving around digital storytelling and its impact on contemporary culture. Today, I’m here with Ashleigh Steele, a recent graduate of our master’s program in Digital Culture. Today we’re going to talk about Ashleigh’s master’s thesis on meme culture and its connection to the January […]
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“Honored by the Error”: The Literary Friendship of Gaddis and Gass

Anyone more than a little familiar with William Gaddis or William Gass likely knows of their long friendship. They first met at the National Book Award ceremony on April 21, 1976—Gass being one of the judges that gave the prize to J R—and when Gaddis was near death in 1998 Bill Gass was one of the last people he wanted to speak to. Unfortunately Gass received the message too garbled and too late, and that final telephone conversation never took place. Throughout their more than twenty-year friendship, they supported each other’s work in myriad ways, both publicly and privately, and they […]
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"Trouble with the Connections": J R and the "End of History"

William Gaddis’s J R (1975) anticipates and formally embodies the “end of history.” Popularized in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article (and, later, book) of the same name, the “end of history” denotes a post-Cold War landscape in which the “universalization of Western liberal democracy” would inaugurate, in Fukuyama’s view, not merely “the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such” (“End of History?” 4). J R complicates this rosy conclusion, of course, but it does a lot more than that. Published more than a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall precipitated Fukuyama’s […]
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Episode 6: Gendered AI and Editorial Labour in Digital Culture with Lai-Tze Fan

SR: Welcome to Off Center, the podcast about digital narrative and algorithmic narrativity. My name is Scott Rettberg, and I’m the Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. In this podcast, I’ll have conversations with the researchers at the center, as well as other experts in the field, to discuss topics revolving around digital storytelling and its impact on contemporary culture. Today, I’m here with Lai-Tze Fan, and we’ll be talking about gendered voice assistants, as well as Lai-Tze’s experience as a professor, editor, critic, and creator in the field of digital culture. Welcome. LF: […]
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“A Long and Uninterrupted Decline”: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

The centrality of spiritual and aesthetic themes in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), combined with its encyclopedic style, has resulted in a general tendency to filter the rest of the novel’s themes through the lens of either religion or art. Thus, critical discussions of Gaddis’s satirical portrayal of “a society too wholly reliant upon exchange value as a definitional principle” (Leise 40) have largely focused on capitalism’s degrading effect on art and religion. This is certainly an essential theme in The Recognitions, but it is only one facet of a broader, multi-levelled critique that anticipates Gaddis’s later works, particularly J […]
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