Search results for "display/tomasula"
| Results 1 - 100 of 250
|
Page 1 of 3
|
|
Sorted by: Date | Sort by: Relevance
|
Results per-page: 10 | 20 | 50 | All
|
Steve Tomasula’s work has been written about more than he has written for ebr: Languages of Fear in Steve Tomasula’s VAS, an Opera in Flatland The Importance of Being Earnest in Flatland Pierre Menard with a Pipette: VAS and the Body of Text The Archeology of Representation: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Erroneous Assumptions: Steve Tomasula’s Ascension “You’ve never experienced a novel like this”: Time and Interaction when reading […]
(The tick-tick-tick of a counter climbing up as messages are sent. The ding of an inbox visible to only one person. The looming crumple of an email automatically sent to ‘Trash’. A digital veil rises, allowing the brief imitation of contact to be made. Here, THE BARKER stands, center stage.) BARKER: This month, in electronic book review: (The lights drop. A pale blue spotlight bursts into life.) BARKER: Jussi Parikka, Paolo Patelli, and May Ee Wong delve into their captivating post-digital narrative work, The Environmental Audiotour, in “Ecocritique between Landscape and Data: The Environmental Audiotour”! (The Barker pats down the […]
Before: the sense of everyone gathering for some cosmic event, like the landing of an alien spaceship (maybe like those people waiting for the spaceship they thought was traveling in the tail of the Comet Hale-Bop?). During: a sense of the world gone horribly wrong—the most fundamental things about the world out of whack—the light, the colors, the seasons, especially day and night…. But setting out from Chicago, the ‘During’ was yet to come. Following the cycles laid down by planetary motions as our solar system developed, there’s a total solar eclipse somewhere on Earth every 18 months. And we’ve […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Following last month’s essays about the impact of generative AI on digital writing come two articles that further address the evolving states of creativity in a rapidly changing digital world. Stuart Moulthrop’s review of Steve Tomasula’s Ascension explores the work’s cybernetic and apocalyptic dimensions. Moulthrop traces its subterranean, encyclopedic lineage through print fictions like Joyce’s Ulysses, Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, DeLillo’s Underworld, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – novels that are, as Edward Mendelson put it, “the products of an epoch in which the world’s knowledge is larger than any one person can encompass.” Mujie Li’s expands on these techniques of […]
I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking. – Donna Haraway Steve Tomasula’s latest novel delivers amply on Haraway’s formula. The book overflows with discovery, both scientific and artistic, a performance that should spark joy for some readers (this one, anyway). It weaves a structure for “collective thinking” that spans generations, disciplines, and personal histories. As for terror, it flirts with a maximum survivable dose. There is a numinous Terror Bird, a never-ending War on Terror, an ominous bead of amber; and above all, […]
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 […]
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. […]
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” […]
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 […]
Part 1: Introduction In Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago, 2020), Cary Wolfe offers a deeply probing and densely theoretical engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The thesis of this project is deceptively simple: in it, Wolfe asserts that Stevens is an ecological poet. Those familiar with Stevens’s poetry might be tempted to assume that this is because of Stevens’s affinity for describing in detail features of the natural world, including birds, landscapes both domestic and wild, and other attributes commonly associated with an environmental sensibility (however many things this capacious term might mean). Those more familiar with […]
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 […]
Steve Tomasula’s robust new anthology delivers its readers a dazzling variety of aesthetic artifacts, as the list after the title’s colon suggests. The diversity across its 500+ pages and 14+ hours of online content separates Conceptualisms from collections of a more mainstream bent. He has gathered online animations, recorded performances, and interactive platforms along with experimental works of fiction, essays, and poetry; in the collection’s last section, we see a transcript, a legal summary, a grant proposal, and a contract, all of which Tomasula argues can be classed as literature (while also proposing that the entries raise the question of […]
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 […]
This special gathering collects reflections of the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2020 (CCSWG ‘20), a biannual meeting to explore the intersections of humanistic inquiry and computer code studies. Coordinated by Mark Marino (USC), Jeremy Douglass (UCSB), and Zach Mann (USC), the 2020 Working Group was held online from January 20 to February 3. It brought together more than 150 participants from around the world to share ideas, populating dozens of discussion threads with hundreds of comments, critiques, and critical readings. The need to attend to code could not be more urgent. Code exerts a regulatory effect over society and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
!! 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 […]
Our reading project is a digital humanities effort in that it is a collaboration that employs digital computing practices in order to analyze a text from the perspective of humanistic hermeneutics…. Our intervention in this book is to show how digital-based practices can enable literary interpretation while also providing new models of how interpersonal collaboration works. — Pressman, Marino, and Douglass, Reading Project 137 In 2009, we three scholars embarked on a collaborative reading of a single work of literature. One text, three readers. The work is a piece of electronic literature that combined a one-word-at-a-time story with flashing images, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
This article has greatly benefited from the research group “Exocanónicos: márgenes y descentramiento en la literatura en español del siglo XXI” (PID2019-104957GA-I00), part of the Spanish Programa Estatal de Generación de Conocimiento y Fortalecimiento Científico y Tecnológico de I+D+i funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. Creative Making as Critical Thinking: A New Framework for the Digital Humanities At the turn of the 21st century, literary critics like Johanna Drucker (2002), Jerome McGann (2001) or even digital poet Loss Pequeño Glazier (2002) wrote about the importance of “making things” as a way of doing theoretical work. The benefits […]
[…]
[…]
[…]
[…]
Joe Brainard (1942-1994) is an artist recognized by a relatively narrow circle of devotees, far less famous than some of his friends and collaborators – Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, though his prodigious artistic output encompasses over a thousand visual works – collages, assemblages, oil paintings, gouaches, and drawings – showing some affinity with Pop Art, Minimalism and camp, as well as more than a dozen literary volumes of what might be termed experimental life writing. Today, his best-remembered works are a series of images of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy cast in unlikely, humorous contexts and his 1975 book […]
A cosmological perspective on the numerization of human languages Contemporary western and westernized cultures have fully embraced Technic, an accomplished reality system that, as we hope to briefly show, is all-encompassing and deeply troubling. Reciprocally, the embrace has enabled Technic to bring forth a specific kind of culture that can be understood as a device whose primary aim is to perpetrate, expand and infuse its world-making powers into every realm of human existence. The embrace is a techno-serpent that bites its own tail. But what sort of techno-poison does the serpent’s bite instill? Federico Campagna (2018) has proposed to think […]
Introduction “Re:traced Threads” is a hybrid physical-digital work inspired by the discourse of computational craft. It is an installation piece that includes both procedurally-generated, ephemeral, digital artifacts of poetry (displayed on a computer monitor) and the physicality of handmade quilts (displayed on the wall). The project builds on the traditions of quilted poetry, which combines methods of applique and piecing with both written language and representative or abstract imagery, but using a digital, procedural source to guide the making. The project consists of two elements: a Twitter bot producing hypothetical works of quilted textual art, and a set of 9 […]
With a disarmingly simple gesture, a quick keyboard shortcut captures what appears on the screen, in part or in whole. Print screen: the practice is now a daily banality. It archives what scrolls on our screens and enable us to leave this momentary display of the present and its individual consultation. This way, we engage a wider reflection on the Web, its spatiotemporalities, its images and its modes of recordings. For this article, I would like to question the practice of screenshots as they are increasingly being used in digital art and literature. I will therefore analyze three different projects: […]
0. It may be true that contemporary digital culture is by now deeply rooted in everyday life of an important part of world’s population–including our habits of writing and reading. Yet digital literature remains more or less invisible to most people. Many people can feel “at home” within digital everyday life and, still, consider that literature is only something related to print books, at most digitized. Regarding this–at first sight–paradoxical situation, I will argue that its cause lies in the strong experimental impetus that digital literature has entailed since its first appearances in mid- 20th century. E-lit has kept this […]
A Note from the Co-Editors: This Introduction is in dialogue—literally—with the contributors to the “Natural Media” gathering. Roll over the dialog bubbles embedded in the text to read marginal comments by Karen Bishop, Elizabeth Callaway, Alenda Chang, Zachary Horton, Diana Leong, and Joseph Tabbi. The remarks were posted in the mysterious pre-publication period after the essays had passed the initial stages of peer review. These exchanges, while somewhat informal in tone and digressive in shape, suggest how thinking-in-practice continues at different stages of the publishing process within an editorial milieu that, like so much of the infrastructure and labor supporting the […]
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 […]
The actual ends of ‘electronic literature’ are implied by a name that embraces its supposed means. ‘Electronic’ refers to means in a way that is well understood but promotes quite specific means as the essential attribute of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that was once new, a new kind of literature, a new teleology for literary practice, an ‘end’ of literature having its own ends, the end of electronic literature in its means, misdirected ends justified by misappropriated means. This brief essay will not remain bound up within the conceptual entanglements of a name. We will move on from ‘end(s)’ […]
Things live only on the basis of their disappearance, and, if one wishes to interpret them with entire lucidity, one must do so as a function of their disappearance. (Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? 31) The use of the past tense in the central theme of this issue – “what in the world was postmodernism?” – implies that postmodernism has disappeared from the landscape of contemporary literary, critical, artistic, and philosophical practice. While previous articles in this collection chronicle the emergence of postmodernism and how it came to disappear, this article asks what we can learn from its disappearance. […]
The aim of this little volume is, as far as may be, to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate. Such an attempt demands patient, continuous sight as pure as the gazer can refine it of theory, fancies, or his mere subjective enjoyment. —Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), preface to Sight and Song, 1892 After the author is gone and the page is gone, what is left but for the poet […]
A book is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment-a book is also a sequence of moments… A book is a space-time sequence. – Ulises Carrión. The New Art of Making Books Ulises Carrión, A Comparative Media Theorist On the verge of becoming a canonical figure in Mexican literature amidst the larger context of the Latin American literary scene of the second half of the 20th century, Ulises Carrión broke apart from the mainstream of literary production. Having written two novels published in the early 1970s and relocated in Europe, Carrión began a […]
Despite concentrated critical analysis spanning two decades (or more, depending on who you ask), videogames still have a legitimacy problem. Critics have only in the recent past made the case for videogames as culturally legitimate pieces worthy of academic study, and predictably, the form’s previous stigmas – deserved or otherwise – have carried into the debate over its place in the art world and the academy. For example, an article on the University of Southern California’s videogame design graduate program’s recent influx of women students focuses on the benefits that this demographic shift may have vis-à-vis the ubiquitous expectation of […]
Fig. 1 Screenshot of the ESG MalwareTracker Worldwide Infection Map One glance at the ESG MalwareTracker (fig. 1) is enough to make one’s skin crawl. Borrowing a visual strategy from epidemiology, MalwareTracker uses a map to depict computer virus infections worldwide. The map is dotted with red insects with shiny bulbous bodies that appear to be sized in proportion to the number of infections in a location. There are only three discernible sizes, representing 11 suspected infections at the low end (Cape Verde), up to 1.7 million at the high end (the United States). Each country has just one insect […]
[…]
John Bruni’s review raises a number of important questions about what I’d still be inclined to call an emergent and major theoretical paradigm, namely posthumanism. In Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (Bloomsbury 2013—an updated translation of my Posthumanismus—Eine kritische Einführung, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2009) I argued that the best way to understand the phenomenon of posthumanism is by looking at it as a discourse (more or less in a Foucauldian sense). Everything that directly or indirectly says something about the “posthuman,” including the no-longer-quite- and the more-than-human, constitutes the disputed object of that discourse (comprising all sorts of texts, practices, subjects, institutions, […]
This essay appears previously in the proceedings of the Universities of Paris 8 conference “Translating E-Literature/Traduire la littérature numérique.” Practices and theories of translation are situated at a crucial position in the domain of the practices and theories of language. We are comfortable with distinguishing practices of language whose systematic differences allow us to say that the users of languages in which they are separately competent are, nonetheless, “mutually unintelligible” to one another, and so we may say that they are using different, distinct languages. However, certain practitioners may be proficient in any number of such languages and they may […]
Thing-power perhaps has the rhetorical advantage of calling to mind a childhood sense of the world as filled with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not. It draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve. (Bennett 20) This is an essay to be taken with a child’s, or Gilles Deleuze’s, naïveté. To those who fail to find such thinking sufficiently serious, take heed—you may well find yourself neatly aligned with The Lego Movie’s antagonist, Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who is also the […]
Review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. The posthumanist turn in recent theory and cultural studies continues apace. Posthumanism, briefly, is in general the effort to challenge and even displace the vestiges of anthropocentrism that persist within the conceptual regimes of the human sciences. In this, it follows a series of sustained and by now familiar decenterings of certain privileged subject positions: the postcolonial decentering of a certain Western subjectivity, or the queer decentering of a certain heteronormative subjectivity, for instance. Posthumanism wishes to go further, however, and […]
If posthumanism signals the end of a certain way of describing—or, more precisely, orienting—selfhood, then we might ask, as Ralph Waldo Emerson did at the start of his famous essay, “Experience” (that addressed, among other crucial issues, slavery), “Where do we find ourselves?” (266). To be sure, technology has already expanded ideas about seeing the human as created through evolution. Marvin Minsky argues that robots will be the next evolutionary phase; they will be our “children.”Ray Kurzweil anticipates the ethical issues of posthumanism will be worked out by machines gaining consciousness and then guiding themselves (and, presumably, us) through deeper […]
How does the electronic literature community continue to develop? Amaranth Borsuk looks towards the print literature community, and suggests that we adopt a number of its most successful practices. This series of short interventions were made at the “Futures of Electronic Literature” discussion at the bi-annual Electronic Literature Organization conference in 2012. Titled “Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints,” the conference took place at West Virginia University in Morgantown on June 20th to June 23rd. The contributors were organized by Stephanie Strickland to offer suggestions on how to improve the organization as it attempts to re-define its mission in a shifting […]
Countdown Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, most of which is set in the German ‘Zone’ during and shortly after WW2, is pervaded by references to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “There is a mean poem about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke” (644) the narrator notes; evoking the Tenth Elegy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Strange, though, alas, the streets of Grief-City, where, in the artificiality of a drowned-out false stillness, the statue cast from the mould of emptiness bravely swaggers: the gilded noise, the flawed memorial. O, how an Angel would utterly trample their market of […]
End Scene Our mission was simple: write, edit, and publish a book in three days from the floor of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was a deliberately outlandish thing to do, setting up a booth at the largest, noisiest book expo in the world and inviting a small group of writers to sit there, talk, type, and edit a series of answers to the question “what is the future of publishing?” Dramatis personae on-site included celebrated science fiction writer and essayist Charlie Stross, publisher and Virginia Quarterly Review web editor Jane Friedman, author and entrepreneur Dan Gillmor, and novelist, essayist […]
electronic book review is a peer-reviewed journal of critical writing produced and published by the emergent digital literary network. Although ebr threads include essays addressing a wide range of topics across the arts, sciences, and humanities, ebr’s editors are particularly interested in critically savvy, in-depth work addressing the digital future of literature, theory, criticism, and the arts. ISSN: 1553-1139 Contact: contact@electronicbookreview.com Editor in Chief: Joseph Tabbi Managing Editor: Will Luers Director of Communications: Lai-Tze Fan Editors: Lai-Tze Fan, Anna Nacher, Jason Lajoie, Anne Karhio, Tegan Pyke, Daniel Johannes Rosnes, Jasmine Mattey Previous Editors: Lori Emerson, Davin Heckman, Lisa Swanstrom, Eric Dean Rasmussen Previous […]
What she’s doing is, every time she works out a value for y, she is using that as her next value for x. And so on. Like a feedback. She’s feeding the solution back in the equation, and then solving it again. Iteration, you see. – Tom Stoppard, 44 [I]n order to understand geometric shapes, one must see them. It has very often been forgotten that geometry simply must have a visual component – Benoit Mandelbrot, quoted in Holte 1 Figure 1: screen shot slippingglimpse The first screen of slippingglimpse beckons “select one to start.” Select which […]
This essay is excerpted from Swanstrom’s monograph, Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics (under contract to be published by the University of Alabama Press). “The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from “oak or rock,” it was enough for them.” —Plato “The leap from living animals to humans that speak is as large if not larger than that from the lifeless stone to the living being.” —Martin Heidegger “Today was a sunny day and I was able to sunbathe a lot… I […]
Introduction Every time contributors add a record to the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, they have the opportunity to add references to creative works of other articles of critical writing referenced. This enables the formation of a network of critical relations, what we have described in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base project report as a “literary ecology.” Using node references and attached views in the databases, these cross-references automatically display on both the record for critical writing and creative work it refers to. Over time, this develops into documentation of the critical reception of any given work documented in the Knowledge […]
Introduction Snapchat, an app for iPhone and Android that is growing more popular across the world, especially among teens, is one of the latest iterations of vanishing text and image in the electronic world. If not quite literature—although it certainly might be by now, as e-writers turn to ever more inventive software for literary expression—it definitely represents a contemporary version of vanishing text and image. Snapchat allows users to snap a picture, send it to others, and assign a time frame for that picture to expire and no longer be visible. Typically, a picture can be viewed from one second […]
A Preface and a Disclaimer If the first “wave” of Digital Humanities was said to have prompted a quantitative turn, e.g. the compilation and implementation of databases as well as the organization of information in elaborate arrays, then the much anticipated “second wave” is to be “qualitative, interpretive, experimental, emotive, generative in character” (Schnapp & Presner, 2009). As curator of the Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection for the ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice) Knowledge Base, I have been asked to partake in this second wave and offer a few conclusions about Brazilian electronic literary […]