Search results for "node/Swigart"
| Results 41 - 50 of 76
|
Page 5 of 8
|
|
Sorted by: Relevance | Sort by: Date
|
Results per-page: 10 | 20 | 50 | All
|
Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a “niche” – and why, despite Bell’s concern, that’s not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to “thee,” “implicitly dragging her into the niche with me,” this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters. Whirl around long enough on the event horizon of contemporary culture and you will find yourself apologizing to ghosts, speaking to persons who have quit the scene, copping to offenses no […]
Prologue: Life on Mars Narratives that require that their viewers fill in crucial elements take … complexity to a new level. To follow the narrative, you aren’t just asked to remember. You’re asked to analyze. This is the difference between intelligent shows, and shows that force you to be intelligent. (italics added) – Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You In episode one of the BBC police drama Life on Mars (2006 – 2007), our hero, Sam Tyler, walking through a busy street in Manchester, England, the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” playing on the sound track, contemplates the show’s central […]
In the second installment of a six-week discussion, contributors search for examples of Critical Code Studies “in the wild.” Instead of asking how code can be read critically, they examine how code is already being created and disputed by lawyers, programmers, and the general public. Editor’s Note: In the second installment of the discussion that took place in the summer of 2010, Jeremy Douglass leads the Critical Code Studies Working Group in exploring the practical challenges and constraints of reading code critically, with an emphasis on real-world examples. An introduction and overview for this week by Mark Marino and Max […]
Caroline Levine argues that Jason Mittell’s attempts to classify The Wire by genre results in “some slippery logic, some fruitful and provocative but not altogether persuasive argumentative moves in Mittell’s own game.” She suggests that examining the show through the lens of form – not genre – clarifies why it warrants comparisons with texts like Bleak House: both works attempt to represent the distinctly networked quality of urban social life. Jason Mittell’s provocative essay is exactly the kind of argument that is good to think with – it prompts a new alertness to facile and wooly assumptions. Mittell charges that […]
Colin Davis’ Critical Excess is an important book: examining, as the subtitle suggests, what Davis calls “overreading” or “over interpretation” in the critical practice of Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek, and Cavell (but also Gadamer, Heidegger, and Lacan), it is a call for more textual analysis, for more attention to the page, for that thing our undergraduate students (and, perhaps, family and friends) accuse us of all too readily: reading too much into it. Typically, then, in my reading of Davis, I read too much into it, or I read too much around it, spending weeks at a time boning up […]
In a discussion of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information, N. Katherine Hayles writes, The theory makes a strong distinction between message and signal. Lacan to the contrary, a message does not always arrive at its destination. In information theoretic terms, no message is ever sent. What is sent is a signal. Only when the message is encoded as a signal for transmission through a medium—for example, when ink is printed on paper or when electrical pulses are sent racing along telegraph wires—does it assume material form. (18) It’s hard enough, for most literary scholars, to think about print and […]
In week five, Stephen Ramsay performed a live reading of a livecoding performance: in a video, he presented a spontaneous commentary over a screencast of Andrew Sorensen’s “Strange Places,” a piece Ramsay had never seen before. The screencast showed Sorensen using Impromptu, a LISP-based environment for musical performance that he had himself developed, to improvise a piece of music; Sorenson developed the piece’s musical themes by composing and editing code. The video allowed the audience to watch Sorenson write and edit his code in the Impromptu editor window. This presentation inspired a discussion that broke livecoding down into two overlapping […]
Introduction Creators of electronic literature are progressing toward a more pervasive employment of the “ludic” — of the spirit of play inhabiting not just the writing, and not just the programming, but both in an elaborate, symbiotic combination. The tradition of “ludic” writing is well-rehearsed in criticism of electronic literature, for example in the magisterial anthology The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. The tradition starts somewhere with the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who sought to delete chance and subjectivity from their work by the employment of extreme constraints,George Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo […]
“…with wonderful skill, he carved a figure, brilliantly, out of snow-white ivory, no mortal woman, and fell in love with his own creation.” —Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book X “Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything.” —Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism “Yes, it hurts being carved. The stone beyond the boundary of oneself is numb, but there always comes a time when the chisel or the point reaches down to where feeling begins, and strikes.” —Emily Short, “Galatea” Introduction […]
Since this is a paper about the computational context of literary writing, and to some extent poetry, I have invested heavily in metaphor, at least as far as the title is concerned. Taking key terms in no particular order: by end I mean not so much terminus as singularity or convergence of opposites, that defining, indefinable point where turn becomes return as one state gives way to another; from the imperative lift, I take both the sense of elevation or burdening (lift up) and appropriation (shoplifting); and by the numinous article this, I will eventually mean the inescapable subject of […]