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Rob Swigart has been a journalist, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a technical writer for Apple Computer, designer and writer of several computer games, secretary of the board of the Electronic Literature Organization, and is the author of nine novels, the latest of which is Xibalba Gate, A Novel of the Classic Maya. An interactive novel, Portal, was published in 1986 on computer disk and two years later in ‘hard copy’. Rob Swigart has been a journalist, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a technical writer for Apple Computer, designer and writer of […]
the hypertext murder case “Hypertext is dead – ” declared Markku Eskelinen at Digital Arts and Culture ’99 in Atlanta. “Cybertext killed it.” No doubt, interesting hypertext poetry and fiction remains to be written, but – if we consider hypertext as a category that defines a special, valid space for authorship and criticism of computerized works of writing – Eskelinen is clearly right. The hypertext corpus has been produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a patchwork that includes other types of literary machines. One viable category today, perhaps the most interesting one […]
I. The Planet Killers Elizabeth Kolbert throws up her hands at the end of her three-part New Yorker investigative series on the whys and wherefores of global warming: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technological society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing” (63). I’ve been thinking for some time about this notion of choice: that we could choose self-destruction is a datum in great need of explanation by anyone who styles himself an ecocritic. The resources of poetry and literature and art are not particularly […]
A recording of searing, unrelenting pain sounds has just started screaming on this page. Perhaps you have not noticed. Perhaps, like me, all sounds are painful to you and you routinely turn off the volume to live in silence (Colucci 2021). Or you are hard of hearing. Or your computer is malfunctioning. Perhaps, then, as you are now reading this in silence, you are wondering what signifiers you are missing—what clues are going unheard. Are the sounds vital to convey the full meaning of the piece? Is this piece like r(a/u)pture music where you see the multi-modal words converge—the rap […]
Having been here once here now once again. -Magdalena, Twilight, A Symphony To repeat evidently implies resemblance, yet can we speak of resemblance unless there is difference? -Peter Brooks I was sitting on my screened porch in the afternoon sunshine, cocktail in hand, the LCD screen of my laptop casting a pleasant glare in my face. I had, for whatever reason, decided that my reading of Michael Joyce’s latest hypertext fiction had come to a resting point, and it was time to mull over some recent criticism. Scanning through some online articles, my keyboard fearing for its life as my […]
It only takes a glance at the cover to get a feel for where Loss Pequeño Glazier’s new book is headed. The cover art for Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries first looks like a typographic jumble (an image of the cover is available at the book’s online appendix). Grey lines of text – mostly HTML code and Unix commands – run down the right side of the cover, immediately signifying “computerness.” The main title of the book is printed in a red X-shaped pattern that is overlaid on top of the light gray text. The top portion of the […]
From the outset, electronic textuality has been promoted through a kind of academic version of a hacker ethos. Just as hackers proclaim that “information wants to be free” and computers will democratize the world, proponents have celebrated electronic textuality for bursting out of the strictures imposed by print, and theorized its role in undermining hierarchies in the university and culture at large. This ethos has been grounded in an epistemology which has remained relatively implicit and therefore unquestioned. One finds an underlying sense in hypertext theory that electronic textuality is somehow more “natural,” more inherently suited to the human mind. […]
Artist Eduardo Kac writes on the attractions of the hologram as a malleable, fluid, and elastic medium for poetic expression. Experimental poetry followed many directions in several countries in the twentieth century. Each new direction attempted to address the historical, cultural, and often political needs of its own time. Between 1978 and 1982 I worked with countless experimental poetic styles, trying to develop my own direction. I explored traditional versification, recitation, body-based performance, visual poetry, graffiti, collage, typography, color, object-poems, sound, and a number of other possibilities. As a result of this relentless experimentation, I felt on the one hand […]
On the present and future of hypertext poetics (circa 1997). When a lifeline of words is dangled for an instant before meaning about to go under, or when some desperate insight pulls a knife on language, what happens next is poetry – that extraordinary product of extreme circumstances in which every verbal action has to count. A line of poetry is a walk along a high ledge, and one false word can mean a plunge to the prosaic parking lot below. Nothing less than “the best words in the best order,” to quote Coleridge’s no-nonsense definition of the art form, […]
From Zukofsky’s “A” to Powers’ Goldbug Variations, in search of a social ecology of the self-discursive text. Prelude In what follows, I compare the work of a (very much alive) novelist with that of a (very much dead) poet. Specifically, I compare a recent (long) novel to a not-so-recent (long) poem. In doing so, I read what some will call “content” across two distinct literary genres. My reason for reading Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations over and against Louis Zukofsky’s “A” is to help bring into clearer focus why we might do well to turn more of our critical […]
De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Technoscience and Cyberculture. Almost forty years ago C.P. Snow set the terms for a struggle between science and the humanities which yet shows little sign of resolution. In the mid-1950s Snow found that scientific and literary intellectuals lived in two cultures, watching each other with either “frozen smiles” or “hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” By 1963 he discerned the emergence of a third culture in the universities of the United States as American academies strove to bring together the disarticulated halves of the intellectual culture. Subsequent events suggest that his […]
Apologies: This is not a ‘balanced’ review of the Hypertext ’97 conference, but only, as Ted Nelson would put it, one particular, packaged, ‘point of view’. I haven’t named all the names I should have or even many and I have not explicitly acknowledged the herculean efforts of the many organizers. Readers are referred to the full published conference proceedings, The Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, edited by Mark Bernstein, Leslie Carr, and Casper Osterbye (New York: ACM, 1997). My perspective is that of a practitioner of literary cybertext. This piece was written quickly as a draft towards a (probably […]
Considering hypertext as a subset of cybertexts, Markku Eskelinen offers seven examples of how to implement Espen Aarseth’s seven-fold typology. Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice? – Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited introduction There’s at least one serious downside to Espen Aarseth’s cybertext theory: reviewed by Nick Montfort in ebr winter 00/01 it puts, or is very capable of putting, an end to hype in the rapidly expanding field of digital textuality, where it seems there are always newcomers who can’t make a living without fashionable exaggerations and homebred buzzwords (like […]
New media in a book, metafiction in hypertext: the printed book, as yet, is the more hospitable medium. (The New Media Reader; Figurski at Findhorn on Acid.) 1 If there is a bound codex that writers of hypertext and new media artists have been waiting for, The New Media Reader is it. In its 823 pages the editors sample the work of a stunning array of writers, designers, programmers, scientists, and artists. Italo Calvino and Robert Coover stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jan L. Bordewjik and Ben van Kaam, authors of “Towards a New Classification of Tele-Information Services” and, for less surprising […]
Jim Rosenberg sends a shot of grammar straight across the bow of Nick Montfort’s controversial Cybertext review, adding volume to a volley already in progress Nick Montfort’s review of Espen Aarseth’s book Cybertext, “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star,” ebr 11, has much to say about cybertext which is useful. I have found the concept of cybertext to be a useful generalization of hypertext and many other forms of electronic writing, and have taken to using the term a good deal myself. I’m not sure I disagree with Montfort on the fundamentals of cybertext. However, Montfort’s essay contains numerous assertions on […]
One “is no longer maintaining a public online presence” (as if you could ever really be “present” on the Web). The other blogs away like it’s going out of style (and some can only hope). The first time I used the word blog I was walking through a park long ago and I needed a word to describe what I had just stepped in. At their worst, weblogs promise to be reality television’s revenge on literature; at their best, they are a digital art form that promises to keep us extraordinarily human. I intend to keep my mind open. And […]
Stuart Moulthrop re-opens the debate on the “electronic book” and its continued marginalization vis-a vis print. Dear Editors: Praise to Dave Ciccoricco for a thoughtful, comprehensive, and notably open-minded essay on the contours of “contour” and other vicissitudes of Joyce-Bolter-Bernstein hypertext. I welcome an account that gives both eros and engineering their due; and for all the iconography of cairns and monuments, I’m glad to read something that isn’t a premature death notice. I do take friendly objection to one point the author makes in closing, citing my opposition to the concept of “electronic books.” Mr. Ciccoricco writes: “Clearly, ‘electronic […]
Joel Felix listens in on Postmodern Culture’s privatization debate. The Pitch Postmodern Culture , the gray old lady of electronic discourse just a link away from ebr and all other web-based journals, I emphasize this non-geographical proximity for several reasons: Web-based journals and e-zines are subjected to the same economic and rhetorical laws by nature of their material (or, non-material, as this case entails) expression. Internet based forums for “critical inquiry” (whether from ebr, PMC, C-Theory, Salon, Suck) may differ in content/rhetorical modes (academic/peer-reviewed or expressly public sphere/ political or simply parodic/sarcastic), yet are materially examples of electronic discourse. What […]
Introduction: LudologyA concept introduced to computer game studies by Gonzalo Frasca in 1998.and Narratology It is relatively stress-free to write about computer games, as nothing too much has been said yet, and almost anything goes. The situation is pretty much the same in what comes to writing about games and gaming in general. The sad fact, with alarming cumulative consequences, is that they are under-theorized; there are Huizinga (1950), Caillois (1979), Ehrmann (1969), and Sutton-Smith (1997, Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971) of course, and libraries full of board-game studies, in addition to game theory and bits and pieces of philosophy — […]
Hypertext Fiction and Its Critics Although games, visual art, and textual experiments had long been areas of academic research, the first artistically convincing explorations of literary computing appeared in the late 1980s. It was only in these years that computers became sufficiently commonplace that a computational creation could realistically hope to find an audience. Of equal importance was the gradual acceptance of Ted Nelson’s thesis (Nelson 1976) that computers could be tools for artistic expression, for even in 1982 the title of Nelson’s Literary Machines was meant to shock and surprise. The final and critical step, first taken by an […]