[…]dissemination of electronic literature, then, is the issue of access: what works do we have access to, and what do we have to do in the surrounding scholarship to lift barriers to access? This gathering works to address this issue head-on, and emblematic of this move is the fact that I, as editor of the gathering, was not able to attend the conference due to several issues of access, not the least of which is the fact that I remain precariously employed as an adjunct professor. And yet, by virtue of the generosity of the speakers and organizers of this […]
[…]the meeting of the character with his future wife, 20 years earlier. While the character “ask[s] questions to reveal her”, the reader can discover the face of the woman by moving the mouse cursor. These movements leave trails of questions which progressively unveil her face. The questions themselves constitute the portrait of the woman (see figure 12). In the third scene, 20 years later, the character can’t seem to understand a note left by his wife: “love poem or break up note?” The reader can experience this double meaning with gestures. If he/she moves the mouse cursor to the right, […]
[…]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 author and computer. As Hayles’s essay goes on to demonstrate, the […]
[…]and judgement, the causes and effects of behavior, and the need for a civil society … [dedicated] to reform and regulation, and to the higher order of compassion as the only route to justice. The time for real transformation is almost upon us, pressing.” -Johanna Drucker, DownDrift , p.194 One Problem I have one problem with the book. Estimates of the global biomass of mammals find that more than 60% of mammals are livestock, which should mean that DownDrift is populated predominantly by liberated pigs and cows. Humans are 30%. Wild animals are estimated to comprise only a meagre tiny […]
[…]his practice and vice versa. Higgins writes unabashedly about dropping out of Yale in order to study musical composition at the New School with John Cage. With equal frankness, he writes about starting the Fluxus movement with George Maciunas, putting himself into rehab for alcoholism, and witnessing an earthquake with his two young daughters that shifted his notions about life and nature. And, as is clear by the close of his "Something Else Manifesto," Higgins does not cling to the notion that art or the activity of an artist is any more (or less) precious than other forms of living […]
[…]multiplicity, a mark and a cloud of toxic particles. These signs are ephemeral, but like Keith’s latest stratospheric aerosol proposal, which includes speculative levitating nano-particulate discs, their scalar instability is modulated by the intermediator of the particle. In the chemtrail narrative these metallic particles inevitably rain down and contaminate water, soil, and body. Crucially, however, chemtrail media attempt to register the particle’s continued presence and render it visible at these later, centripetal stages. Chemtrail readers accomplish this by assiduously testing local soil and bodies of water, as well as their own bodies. These tests typically take the form of samples […]
[…]in urban landscapes. Moving these forms away from anthropocentric spaces and engagements, and towards more–than–human engagements, is an endeavor less commonly taken. And yet, locative works seem quite well placed to foster interactions between more–than–human elements of the world around us: Locative writing has a design focus on emplaced literary forms, as well as nonlinearity, rhizomic structures, interactivity, and multimodal sensory engagement (Hemment 2). Because of this, it may be a particularly potent contemporary art form for revealing tacit interactions between human and nonhuman actors. Place and landscape have often served as a significant Other in locative works – the […]
[…]illnesses that are not visible, they also offer spaces where people can share their stories, seek comfort and share tips with other users. While these pages are undeniably visual, their literary dimension is as much important. This leaves us wondering why women are turning to Instagram, a predominantly visual platform, to share their experiences with mental illness. The question driving this article is therefore the following: What does Instagram allow women to actually do that a text-based platform would not? In this piece, I argue that instead of using the image platform as a way to ascribe meaning to their […]
[…]valid text. Summarizing the underlying ontological claim of such research, Calvino argues that “[t]he world in its various aspects is increasingly looked upon as discrete rather than continuous” (8). It is crucial to keep track of what he is not saying: that continuous or fluid reality (the evolutions of cultures and practices over time, or human thought itself) can be modeled by computers. This would be a more modest claim. Instead, it is reality tout court, which may have seemed to be fluid, that has been revealed as “discrete.” Thought itself, Calvino argues, is “a series of discontinuous states, of […]
[…]1990). More precisely, the novel provides a model which can help us to understand ourselves, and to consider our own evolution over time as a fictional adventure. Yet, the forms of writing and reading engendered by digital literature could well shake up this model. The first reason for this upheaval is that the literary forms made possible by the web provide alternatives to the linearity of the novel. Simultaneously, the very tools which allow us to express our digital identity also seem to favor a gathering of isolated instants and fragments rather than a single trajectory. Are these two phenomena, the […]