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[…]work, bridging the gap between cultural studies, history and sociology, is focused on critical animal studies and environmental humanities. In her PhD thesis she analyzed cultural and ideological ramifications of rat control programs. Currently she works on changes in breeding practices in rural Poland before 1989, in order to understand conceptual and material relations between animals, socialism, agriculture and modernity. Her book “Species Cleansing. The Cultural Practice of Rat Control” was published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag (Imprint of BRILL Deutschland) in 2024. Other publications: “Unveiling Dark Sites: Urbex/Rurex as a Method in Critical Animal History”, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, […]
[…]and artists using language as the material of their artwork; what it was called language art, with groups such as Art and Language as well as independent artists and writers working using language but without a PhD. In the ‘90s, as a visual artist with a background in English Philology, I was interested in different art forms including sound art, installations, performance, and videoart. I explored the use of phonetics, alphabets, visual language, and interaction through performances like Speaking in Tongues (1995) and videos, such as From A to Z (1995), Social Interaction (1996), and Learning a Language (1999). I […]
[…]but a reflection of a deeper, psychological landscape where the social glue that binds such groups dissolves. This interpretation resonates with the ‘megadungeon’ model proposed in recent media studies, which conceptualizes digital spaces as vast, procedurally generated networks where the inherent repetition and absence of clear navigation evoke both complexity and disconnection (Berti, De Vincentis, & de Seta 2023). The repetitive, unremarkable corridors in The Backrooms – lacking distinct markers or any sense of human existence – can be understood as a visual metaphor for modern societal fragmentation. These unvarying, almost mechanical passages mirror a condition in which communities become […]
[…]of the first chapter. This project came from a real interest of the intersection between black studies and game studies and media theory. It came initially from this idea that so many people in game studies talk about choice, but not necessarily about freedom, right? Choice is this often binary thing, or at least this limited movement and so many decision trees and things that we do in games come down to choice, and sometimes choice and freedom are treated as being similar to one another, especially in places like the United States, where getting to make consumer decisions is […]
[…]can be ambiguous and evolving. A well-known example is Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge, the source code of which is easily accessible and that has inspired many others to make their own generators by modifying the code. For this reason, the work’s authorship has been described as “a hybrid body of human and synthetic writers and readers” (Marques da Silva & Bettencourt 47). The authorship of the works in the research material could also be regarded as much more complicated than the paratexts are letting on. ChatGPT produces text based on probabilities and patterns from large quantities of data, and its […]
[…]of the first literary journals to be invented online, and remains a central locus for cutting-edge critical discourse, methods that challenge the status quo, and in-depth work addressing the digital future of literature, theory, criticism, and the arts. Tabbi is the author, most recently, of The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism. He wrote the biography of the novelist William Gaddis, one of the most important modern/postmodern writers of the 20th century, Nobody Grew but the Business: The Life of William Gaddis. Tabbi is a scholar who has been consistently critically engaged with the various intersections of science and literature, as […]
[…]debate on cybertext, an ecocritical thematic section on natural media, a thread on critical code studies and – most recently – on AI and digital writing), but the journal has been consistently offering new formats of critical interventions and academic exchange, such as riPOSTes, thREADs, essay gatherings, and editorial glosses. All of them are based on the idea of ebr’s intertext, in “contrast to the decontextualized and ahistorical approach to presenting essays” in outlets such as Academia, ResearchGate, and such like (Fan 2023). ebr, circa 2025, is now in the process of gathering contributions whose authors (or readers) have self-consciously […]
[…]we’re talking about your project, Surveillance Microcosms, which is a book project you’ve been working on for a while. Mathias Klang: That’s right. I’ve been kicking around the idea for a long time. I thought first, like you do, it’s a small article, and then I realized, no, it’s grown, and then coincided nicely with the Fulbright. So, I thought, this is amazing. I’ll have time to start writing it, planning it out and developing it. I’ve done some really good work. Scott Rettberg: Excellent. When do you think the book’s going to be published? Mathias Klang: I hope by […]
[…]it sends an automated alert to the police. And they had an independent report on how this was working, that found it wasn’t working, it wasn’t reducing crime. In fact, it was causing extra work for the police and also had other problems. And even so, the politicians urged to increase that; to keep going. They’ve just suggested this in Sweden, where they’re worried about increased violence. Oh, 2,500 surveillance cameras, that’s going to fix it, not looking at the societal problems. SR: Yeah. I wonder if people always argue that it’s going to fix it though, or if they […]
[…]Bruxelles: De Boeck & Larcier, 1996. Landow, George P. Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Parallax. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Marshall, Eric, untitled poem, 3rd International Obfuscated C Code Contest, 1986. https://www.ioccc.org/1986/marshall/marshall.c Nichol, Barrie Philip. First Screening. Toronto: Underwhich Editions, 1984. Papp, Tibor. Orion. alire n° 11 (2000). Rapkin, Lewis, Automatic on the road, 2018 (video). Strachey, Christopher. « The “thinking” machine ». Encounter, no 13 (October 1954): 2531. Vian, Boris. « Un robot-poète ne nous fait pas peur ». Arts, no 1016 (April 1953): 21926. Winder, William. « Le Robot-poète : littérature et critique dans l’ère électronique ». In Littérature, […]
[…]the noninvasive brain sensors, because they are now beginning to track brain signals, they can decode speech. They can decode what you are going to say. They can decode the music you are listening to. They can decode what you are seeing. They can do these under specific conditions, which are usually fMRI, but also magnetic encephalopathy, and in the last two weeks there was a merger between Forest Neurotech and Butterfly. Butterfly produces this handheld ultrasound sensor, which, in the medical context, is very, very helpful. SR: I know a digital artist who’s moved to that company. JJ: Wow. […]
[…]about programmed digital literature; which is to say, literary writing in which the author (or group of authors) creates the program of the work. In this essay, I will first expound the procedural model theory, then indicate how we can compare different theories in it and show some semiotic analyses using the model. I will finish with a general overview covering about 30 years of research, analyses, theoretical frameworks and observations. I will not go into all details and not all analyses will be addressed in the essay. In particular, I will not analyze specific textes-à-voir. 2. A model in […]
[…]Think Deeply Again (2022). These topics are presently highly relevant; several thousand academic studies worldwide have been devoted to how digital media and platforms change our attention and literacy, ranging from students’ in-depth information processing and sustained attention capacity (Delgado, P., & Salmerón, L., 2021), how reading on screen leads to more shallow processing and can hinder reading comprehension (Jensen, R. E., Roe, A., & Blikstad-Balas, M. 2024), and which reading format is better suited for children’s books (Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N., & Bus, A. G., 2021). I often wonder, when looking for a main claim, if the core […]
[…]of a certain size. So I adapted TiddlyWiki for longer works. I printed out the TiddlyWiki source code and took it with me on the subway on the way to work. I jotted notes in the margin and highlighted things I didn’t understand. Based on that, I built small command-line tools that allowed me to work in a way that made sense to me, but eventually generated TiddlyWikis. Of course, TiddlyWiki had an open source license, so I could do that. I think platforms build on each other. They don’t usually emerge from nothing. They certainly react to each other. […]
[…]this a little bit, was the idea that in your scholarship, you have a lot of references to game studies and media studies, but also the psychology and psychotherapy, all the way back to Jung, to the present, neurobiology and cognition and theories like Joseph Campbell, who are kind of connecting story and psychology. So, there’s a lot of connections to narratological ways of thinking and really exciting interdisciplinarity, I guess you’d say, which is one of the things we’re trying to think a lot about with the Center for Digital Narrative. What happens when we bring these different perspectives […]
Critical Code Studies: 10 years later Almost 20 years ago, Mark Marino’s Critical Code Studies manifesto in electronic book review called for scholars to explore the extra-functional significance of computer source code in a new field he called Critical Code Studies (Marino, 2006a). After eight biannual working groups, several books, and a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2023, not to mention the eponymous manuscript from MIT Press, Critical Code Studies as an approach to algorithms, software and code is thriving (Marino, 2020; Marino and Douglass, 2023). The original essay has been inspirational for a range of practices based […]
[…]Kelly, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, Critical Cultural Communication, New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011. Haraway, Donna, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99. Magnet, Shoshana Amielle, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Maurer, Kathrin and Anders Engberg-Pedersen (ed.): Visualizing War, Emotions, Technologies, Communities, New York and London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham and London: Duke University Press, […]
[…]leave right away. I perhaps was trying to console myself. And so, I asked him what else he was working on. And he mentioned a couple of writing projects. And then he said, plus, “I want to teach this new workshop using the computer to make stories that can be read in maybe a variety of, infinite numbers of different orders and sequences that you determine as the reader.” And I said, “Oh, you mean hypertext?” And his eyes lit up, and he looked at me, and he said, “You know about this stuff?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I […]
[…]Day of Wrath, came out in 2014. Bob was born in Charles City, Iowa and got his BA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University. He served in the Navy from 1953 to 1957 and then went on to get an MA from the University of Chicago in 1965. He met his wife, Pilar Coover, née Sans Mallafre, who is Catalan, during his time in the Navy, while port-hopping in the Mediterranean. They retained strong attachments to Spain and Catalan Culture, Bob most ardently through his love of soccer, as a supporter of Barcelona, and his interest in Spanish wines of […]
[…]so much time becoming such a good— WL: But he also is sort of a craftsman. SR: For him, the code is an artform. WL: Absolutely, yeah. SR: And then, “Oh well, I’m going to spend 20 minutes with ChatGPT and have code that does some similar things.” WL: I guess he’s looking into limitations of— SR: Constraints. WL: Constraints, yeah. SR: And it’s not that any of that’s going away, it’s just that this discourse about machine generated content and how we work with text generation generators, or computational narrative systems, as he calls them, that’s changing pretty quickly. […]
[…]and writing – a process which I discussed in some other ebr publications as well as in Switching Codes (2011). At the same time that I was working on that series of nonfiction works in the desert southwest of the United States, I was starting more experimental collaborations with fiction writers and poets. One of the first of these was a fragmented panoramic narrative project filmed in Mexico City with author Deb Olin Unferth and entitled Something That Happened Only Once. In this project, song fragments narrativize the actions of individuals picture upon a rotating panorama in impossible ways, spinning […]
[…]the students to stand on their desks and read these very strange things. It was fun! So I started working with constraints because it was a for collaboration purposes and for teaching purposes. Rob Wittig What are your thoughts about the possible community building potential of Netprov, and/or Netprov as a tool to build bridges in a polarized society? William Gillespie You’re asking me about the potential for community building of Netprov and the potential of Netprov to build bridges in a polarized society? God damn, I’m going to need an ellipsis! Rob Wittig [pretending to shout at Anna] Can […]
[…]part of the world – geographically and socially speaking – strives to get that connection working. Works Cited Adema, Janeke. “Experimental Publishing as Collective Struggle. Providing Imaginaries for Posthumanist Knowledge Production”. Culture Machine. Journal of Culture and Theory, vol. 23. https://culturemachine.net/wpcontent/uploads/2024/09/CM23_Adema_ExperimentalPublishing.pdf Accessed: Oct. 1, 2024. Arcangel, Cory. Preface. Digital Folklore by Lialina and Espenschied eds., Merz& Solitude, 2009. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. trans. R. Miller. Blackwell, 1974. Berens, Kathi. “Third Generation Electronic Literature and Artisanal Interfaces: Resistance in the Materials”, Electronic Book Review, May 5, 2019, https://doi.org/10.7273/c8a0-kb67. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions. Software and Memory. The MIT Press, 2011. Ensslin, Astrid and […]
[…]relief overall is Gaddis’s persistent interest in existential humanist questions even as he was working on his great “systems novel,” with its long legacy of antihumanist or posthumanist critical interpretation. Gaddis at one point asks in a note why Slade, with all his devilish powers, would let the people beat and torture him in the opening scenes where his previous town runs him out on a rail. Gaddis imagines rewriting the scene to more fully stress Slade’s “scorn of the mob in the midst of this agonizing torment, his almost inhuman attempt to give them the satisfaction of seeing him […]
[…]85, 86 , 89): the first time to say that he is planning it, the second and third to describe his working conditions (unable to type continuously because of disturbing neighbours, and so writing by hand and making lots of notes), the fourth to describe the “incredible slowness” of his progress on it, working from midnights to 4am. He discusses further struggles with it months later in a letter to Charles Socarides: though it “fits so insanely well with facts of life,” “I watch myself ruin it” through “bad writing,” an example of which he extracts for proof (Letters 97). […]
[…]lab. It’s been just this kind of funny thing that my entire career I’ve generally I moved from working in a solitary practice to working in physical spaces, generally in teams, working collaboratively. SR: I want to read the list because you’re the Director of the Immersive Storytelling Lab at York University, the Augmented Reality Lab, and the Founding Director of the Future Cinema Lab. That’s a lot of labs. CF: It’s a lot of labs. SR: Can you say just a little bit about what all those things are and how you juggle it all? CF: Yeah. So, the […]
[…]Words, contagion… infinite incubation—buried deep… within cellular structures—whispering code… the epidemic… of syntax. Bacterial in nature… or viral—language, a parasite—a mutation—lurking beneath the tissue of the tongue—infected… the throat—a maze… of Greek heroes and… Egyptian deities… spread through osmosis—dripping… from the mouths of… pirates… navigating the seas of… reason. Ulysses… eye… a scalpel—slicing through… Could any of the pseudo cutups we generated be passed off as fragments of Burroughs? Yes, at least to non-experts. That would accord with the conclusion in a recent paper which recounts carrying out a similar attempt to mimic the style of H. P. Lovecraft. They […]
[…]the contradictory potential of the politics. As such, bookishness offers analytical potential and critical insights to reflect on feminist knowledge within digital culture and contributes to broader discussions on knowledge production in a digital age. Not only would this be the future discussion of bookishness, but it also inspires much discussion at the intersections of affect, technology, aesthetics, and politics in our post-digital world. Works Cited Cramer, Florian. 2012. “Post-Digital Writing.” Electronic Book Review, December. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/post-digital-writing/. Cramer, Florian. 2015. “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?” In Postdigital Aesthetics, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 12–26. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1057/9781137437204_2. Gill, […]
[…]even with crews whose business model will entirely depend on small donations. However, not all groups share the same ideals about the charitable nature of their work. For instance, scanlating communities do not uniformly share the ethical code prescribing the principle of non-interference with established book publishers who have licensed or are in the process of licensing the translations of manga comics. Some groups will refuse to strictly limit themselves to scanlating discontinued or out-of-print manga and may or may not remove from circulation a scanlation that becomes commercially available by accredited channels, even when they are requested to do […]
[…]labour among Korean youth working as fashion brands’ “supporters”. During her bachelor’s studies in Art & Technology and Gender Studies at Sogang University, she co-authored an article on the cultural politics of feminist comedy podcasts and the significance of podcast platforms as digital feminist […]
[…]which I guess is ultimately text. Another thing I remember about it is, I’m not sure it was working even at the time, but there’s a soundtrack, right? RA: I managed to get it working again because RealAudio Player got completely left behind, and so I’ve since reloaded the 8-tracks as MP3’s. There were suggestions of which tracks to play with which chapters. Another note here is that my good old friend Colin Gagon and Will Oldham, there he is again, were the collaborators on the soundtrack. Colin and I played with and toured with Will for many years in the […]
[…]book Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis: “At the time, I was working on a novel with the pretentious title Awake, which I imagine, if it had ever been published, would have put most people asleep. I looked at it a few years ago, and it certainly had its soporific charms. In any case, Gaddis was pleasant and patient with me during our weekly meetings. He made suggestions for editing, and talked generally about my work, but thirty-five years later, I do not remember the specifics. One event I do remember, however, is […]
[…]“Oil-Fueled Accumulation in Late Capitalism: Energy, Uneven Development, and Climate Crisis.” Critical Historical Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2020, pp. 206–40. https://doi.org/10.1086/710799. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1976. Panitch, Leo and Sam Gindin. “Finance and American Empire.” American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance, edited by Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings, Palgrave, 2008. Shaw, George Bernard. The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Nibelung’s Ring. Dover, 1967. Sobel, Robert. The Age of Giant Corporations: A Microeconomic History of American Business, 1914–1992, 3rd ed., Praeger, 1993. Spiro, Joan Edelman. The Politics of International Economic […]
[…]and if what they do is often for harmful or destructive ends, it compels us because it reflects critical understanding of a traditional hierarchy and society that is equally corrupt behind its façade of rightness. One tradition of American antiheroes is closer to this line. These begin with Twain’s Birdofredum Sawin and Huck Finn, moving through Holden Caulfield toward (from Gaddis’s era) Randle McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like the European model, these are Romantic rejectors of an overly rationalized civilization, but unlike the Europeans they are often anti-intellectual and wilfully naïve, hence a greater proportion of […]
[…]philosophy has lost its way. How could philosophy lose its way when philosophy is precisely the critical thinking which propels us forward? By adding form to content we have the possibility of thinking beyond thinking. The Recognitions does just this: It thinks beyond the end of thinking. Gaddis is here attempting to solve the same crisis of the end of philosophy that Kierkegaard was, knowing perhaps that philosophy has been written too straightforwardly and needs to perform stylistically. Far from being abstract or unrelated to the bettering of this world—far from the cries of those who think Gaddis’s novels could […]
[…]revealing, but that the novel itself has much to contribute to existing debates within Translation Studies. Its major themes—originality, authenticity, authorship, even forgery—are central matters of debate in Translation Studies, and while Gaddis himself seems to have had notably “old-fashioned” ideas about how translators should actually handle his novels, the contrast between how his protagonists Otto and Wyatt deal with originality, authorship, and authenticity in The Recognitions gets to the heart of more recent debates about translation as theory, practice, and profession. Translators and translation theorists, therefore, would benefit from reading it. Gaddis and His Translators The Recognitions remains one […]
[…]annotations are evidence of his writerly attention to what he read, and his separate working notes are often where these concerns are centralized. List-making, in these working notes, was an essential part of Gaddis’s workflow: hundreds of such sheets reside in his archive. Our most representative roadmap for Gaddis’s intellectual concerns in the late 1950s, pertaining to Stebbing and the PP, might well be the following page, composed in a fine calligraphic hand, from a folder of loose 1950s notes toward the player project (see Figure 1). This document is exceptional for our study: it presents a host of critical […]
[…]and putting it back together again in order to fully grasp its material being, like the inner workings of a well-crafted clock. As a reader, I probably came well-prepared. Only three years earlier, I had had the privilege of attending the first seminar Hans-Walter Gabler, professor of English Literature at Munich University, offered using his recently published, first-ever critical edition of Ulysses. Naturally, in my early encounters with Gaddis, I deeply sympathized with Steven Moore’s approach as embodied in his Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s ‘The Recognitions’ to first and foremost lay bare the literary, cultural, and mythological allusions buried […]
[…]silent because my presentation was just so non-academic. You know these are all people who are working on books, they’re working on chapters in an anthology, they’re working on their doctorate, and it was just a really funny contrast. But it occurred to me at that moment “yet here I am,” you know, so there is something that’s causing a bit of a bridge there to academia. I just sat there and I remember thinking in my mind we’re going to get to the end of this and I’m not going to have been asked a single question, whereas the […]
[…]installing innumerable traffic lights, or anonymous programmers, writing billions of lines of code, have shaped ours. The mound builders must have realized that by rising higher, they were not only able to see further, but understand more deeply the fabric of life they were part of. Using Google EarthPro we can get a intimation of why they revered the bird, soaring above them at 38°39’33.64″N 90°04’27.69″W. But instead of just looking at the pictures, look at the Pro data that makes this view possible: Imagery Date 3/13/2022 38°39’33.64″N 90°04’27.69″W elev 0 ft eye alt 3281 ft Image © 2024 Airbus. […]
[…]feedback loops happening, but it really is a networked thing. And you can see this in the way that groups treat characters like you’ll have fandom, and everybody will converge on an idea of who that character is. And sometimes it’s quite different than what’s in the original work, but because everybody has been writing these stories, they come together as one characterization. FK: The other thing I was going to mention is that it can be tempting to say, well, there’s fan studies and there’s all this stuff and that’s basically social science research. Maybe you could do literary […]
[…]technological change will reshape the future persist, making the case for the continued value of critical literacies, with an emphasis on critical reading of and making with technology from within the humanities, rather than naïve reading practices and technological determinism in the face of emerging technologies. Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Aguilera, Earl, and Jessica Z. Pandya. “Critical Literacies in a Digital Age: Current and Future Issues.” Pedagogies 16.2 (2021): 103–10. Burn, Stephen J. “The Collapse of Everything: William Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel.” In Paper Empire: William Gaddis […]
[…]American life and letters. He discussed a wide range of topics at St. Michael’s, including critical responses to The Recognitions and J R, the pernicious influence of corporatism on American culture, the Protestant work ethic, the philosophy of pragmatism, the promise and degradation of the American Dream, as well as the legacy of Watergate, the win-at-all-costs ethos of football coach Vince Lombardi, J. Paul Getty’s How to be Rich, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Bob Rafelson’s film Five Easy Pieces. On December 9th, the lecture was broadcast on Vermont Public Radio. The recording is collected in the American […]
[…]felt it would be even more difficult to try to convey that in J R than it is in The Recognitions. Working with the dialogues and working with this oral register in a way that wouldn’t sound too informal or even too pedantic, in many ways, was a difficult challenge in Portuguese. Max Nestelieiev: For me, the hardest part was, as I said, rhythm which depends on the length of the words. The other hard part was punctuation and syntax, which also depend on the length of the words and the differences between syntax and punctuation, English and Ukrainian. Yoshihiko […]
[…]fact that the fundamental disputes within copyright law effectively reiterate this hoary literary-critical debate. But the larger problem Gaddis is identifying is that in attempting to clarify experience to enable justice, legal language designed for business contracts fails to make sense of aesthetic experience without deforming it. Oscar cannot elucidate his point in the deposition, easily led into traps the Hollywood studio’s pricey lawyer sets for him. In that sense, corporate law cannot make sense of the heresy of paraphrase because it does not see the profit in the heresy and cannot monetize the particular aesthetic experience represented (and heresied). […]
[…](Peters; Parikka, A Geology of Media; Fan; Starosielski) and – with respect to the context in critical data studies – data as an assemblage (Kitchin and Laurialt) of wider cultural techniques of sensing, aggregation – and site-specificity. These helped to also outline techniques of knowledge beyond enumeration as they come to address infrastructures of data and the materiality of the digital (Offenhuber). Here the move from electronic literature on network platforms to the sites and infrastructures through which data, sensing, and inscription are expanded to elemental media becomes core to our argument. To execute this idea, our stories shift between […]
[…]threaten’d in this place!” I have plans to explore the Gaddis of contracts further in later critical work, but here, in the limited space of this archive-based piece, let me emphasize the counterintuitive aspects of Gaddis’s criticism of contract law in J R by referring to one of the novel’s most adroit readers. In a 2012 review of J R’s reissue by Dalkey Archive, Lee Konstantinou notes that Gibbs is citing nineteenth-century English jurist Henry Maine’s ideas, in Ancient Law (1861), about the movement from anchoring life in social institutions and their often hierarchical networks (Status) to grounding it in […]
[…]regrettable. Gass continues, “I could see [Gaddis’s] youthful love glowing plainly when our group visited Dostoyevsky’s apartment. The sight of the master’s desk actually wet Willy’s eyes. I envied him. When my eyes moistened, it was only for Bette Davis, and such a shallow show of weakness made me angry with my soul” (196-97). Their opposing opinions on Russian authors stand out because in practically every other way Gaddis and Gass were likeminded literary souls, and perhaps this kindredness is most plainly seen from a distance; that is, by looking at the arc of each man’s entire career. Both writers […]
[…]more? So when I saw Gaddis’s piece in The New Yorker, I surmised that he had something he was working on, so I thought we should just go out big! At least this is how I was going to sell it to Allen Peacock. Who cares if you overpay, because it’s William Gaddis! Soon after Al went to Gaddis’ agent Candida Donadio. Allen’s boss was Joni Evans, who was married to Dick Snyder, the CEO of Gulf and Western—who owned Simon and Schuster. From what I was told, there was this ripple in the backdrop about the decision to buy […]
[…]affecting all areas of life in the postwar period. In doing so, the links between Gaddis’s critical project in The Recognitions and in his mid-career novels become clearer, demonstrating an ongoing critical engagement with the effects of unfettered economic growth that undergirds Gaddis’s wide-ranging engagement with the social, economic, and political realities of his time. Works Cited Alberts, Crystal. “Mapping William Gaddis: The Man, The Recognitions, and His Time”. William Gaddis, ‘The Last of Something’: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck, McFarland & Company, 2010: 9-27. Burn, Stephen J. “After Gaddis: Data Storage and the Novel”. […]
[…]of course, you seek to make it your own. In that whole tradition, regardless of what genre you are working in, there is often a way of having a kind of inner textual conversation with the artist you are working with. But I think with the mindset that I was entering the piece with, in a sick way, I kind of wanted to just flatten everything, to let the dissonances between the pieces be structural elements that add tension, and to not have too many moments that would call attention to one piece or another. And I think part of […]
[…]focus from Gaddis to the characters. Second, readers need to place individuals in larger aggerate groups and recognize how these groups act like an ecosystem for ideas and values—a blend of history, culture, and economics. Understanding the movement of ideas and values between individuals and aggregate groups help readers find nuanced meaning with regards to how they hold characters responsible for their actions, as well as how culture shapes characters. This dynamic relationship is central to a writer’s craft. In other words, every writer has choices when building a character. The writer can present a character as racist but also […]
[…]clear to me that that was not at all what the world was like. Marty and I were living in Illinois working at Dalkey, and, yeah, I was just super lonely. I often felt like I had nobody to talk to despite working at one of the coolest presses in America. There was nobody to talk to about books, or the kind of books I liked. I remember reading something from one of my favorite writers saying something like: “If you want to be invited to the party, start a party.” So I said, all right, it’s time to start […]
[…]Prodigy Went to Market: The Education of J R.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts et al., McFarland & Company Publishing, 2010: 126–42. Chetwynd, Ali. “Friction Problems: William Gaddis’ Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of J R.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 8.1, 2020. https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.2 Duplay, Mathieu. “Fields Ripe for Harvest: Carpenter’s Gothic, Africa, and Avatars of Biopolitical Control.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts et al., McFarland & Company Publishing, 2010: 143–59. Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, trans. Albert Sbragia. […]
[…]Gothic’: Gaddis’s Anti-Pauline Novels.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise and Birger Vanwesenbeeck. McFarland and Company, 2010: 115–125. Stampfl, Barry. “Hans Vaihinger’s Ghostly Presence in Contemporary Literary Studies.” Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 40.3 (summer 1998): 437–454. Thomas, David Wayne. “Gödel’s Theorem and Postmodern Theory.” PMLA 110.2 (March 1995): 248-261. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (1911). trans. C. K. Ogden. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924. Vidal, Gore. The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Southend […]
[…]throughout his writing. In Underworld we meet the “garbage guerilla” turned UCLA cultural studies professor Jesse Detwiler, who lectures his students on the basic maxim of their civilization: “Consume or die” (286-87). While commentators have noted DeLillo’s aversion to American materialism, consumption, and extravagant waste, in Peripheralizing DeLillo, Thomas Travers offers the first systematic reading of political economy in his work. Travers deploys Marxist literary theory under the influence of Fredric Jameson to analyze the crisis in late capitalism’s ceaseless subsumption of markets and its creation of a permanently unemployable underclass, a surplus population. Narrative fiction that represents capitalism’s totalizing […]
[…]contributions from literacy studies, Foucauldian theory, environmental justice scholarship, and critical data studies. Next, I explain why extractive ideologies are at the core of infopower. My guiding assumption throughout is that data and power are always intertwined. Writing in Big Data & Society, Andrew Iliadis and Frederica Russo rightly emphasize that corporate, governmental, and academic entities “own vast quantities of user information and hold lucrative data capital,” enabling them to “influence emotions and culture,” and that “researchers invoke data in the name of scientific objectivity while often ignoring [the fact] that data are never raw [but] always ‘cooked’ ” (1). […]
[…]the Atari VCS, around not just about Combat, but that whole platform, and about the platform studies approach as we saw it. So, Ian and I wrote a book called Racing the Beam. And we also started a series with MIT Press, Platform Studies. Racing the Beam incorporates these ideas, it has a methodology to it, we reverse engineered some of the cartridges, we looked at the material history of the system, by analogy to book history, or the material history of texts. We did a few interviews, but it was not a qualitative social science approach that we took, […]
[…]Era: Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Gaddis at his Centenary’” 2: Futures for Gaddis Studies’ Steven Moore – “New Directions in Gaddis Scholarship” Various Authors – “Futures of Gaddis Studies: Visions for the Next 100 Years’” 3: Gaddis in Context: Peer-reviewed articles Benjamin Bergholtz – “‘Trouble with the Connections’: J R and the ‘End of History’” Jack Williams – “‘A Long and Uninterrupted Decline’: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions” Elliot Yates – “Gaddis at Textron: From Fruits of Diversification to Financialization” David Ting – “Indeterminacy as Invention: How William Gaddis Met Physicists, Cybernetics, and Mephistopheles […]
[…]laudable and understandable, especially in the light of Herman & Krafft’s flawless politeness, critical generosity and respect for other critical voices, such a narratological ‘solution into playful irony’ tends to smooth out the often painfully sharp and hurtful edges and contours of specific sentences, passages and characterizations. Considering that Pynchon’s texts always acknowledge ‘our’ immature complicity with the dark sides of power and sin, we should perhaps give his texts some leeway, and in fact come to value their controversial and immature tendencies. Maybe one might even imagine a poetics of “more maturity, more immaturity!” Maybe we should value the […]
[…]2010s was academia. Notwithstanding the biography and letters, there was no further conference, critical monograph, or collection of essays on Gaddis between The Last of Something and the centenary events: not even another conference panel after “Why Now.” The reason may be generational: many of the 20th century’s Gaddis scholars—the generation(s) whose foundational 1970s or 1980s articles, or 1990s monographs, were compiled in Harold Bloom’s 2004 Modern Critical Views —had retired by the early 2000s. Between 2015 and 2022 a third of Bloom’s Gaddisians died. The bibliography of Gaddis scholarship reveals that only a small proportion of Gaddis’s scholars have published […]
[…]is responsible for the advancement of feminism, anticapitalism, posthumanism, postcolonialism and critical race studies.” No. Literature is an art project, not a political project, and should be judged solely on its artistic merit, not for its usefulness in pursuing social justice. Last year a Jane Austen specialist wondered about teaching older novels that fail “to speak to pressing societal issues. Perhaps a world in grave crisis truly doesn’t have time for texts from the past which can’t be instrumentalized by the future.” No concern for artistry, craftsmanship, style, tone, wit, only whether a novel qualifies as a tool for social […]
[…]and the artist’s value and role in a rather disenchanted society, have been recurring topics in critical studies of Gaddis, as they were for the man himself (see for example Angela Allan’s excellent recent study on neoliberalism and the value of art). Due to the encyclopedic and allusive nature of the novels across abundant cultural, religious, and philosophical themes and aesthetic issues, interdisciplinary, intertextual, intermedial, and transgeneric critical approaches suggest themselves. Various of Gaddis’s acknowledged influences have thus been studied; visual art illuminates him through studies of the meaning and implications of perspective and technique of fifteenth-century Flemish painting for […]
[…]2022 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism for editing the first issue of The Digital Review on critical making and critical design. What is The Digital Review, and how is it distinct from other kinds of journals? And also, what is critical making? LF: Thank you for asking that. Because I think a lot of people will associate the editorial work I’ve been doing with ebr, electronic book review, which has been edited by Joseph Tabbi for a long time. TDR came, not necessarily out of the pandemic, but it was manifested in 2020. So, the timing seems as if […]
[…]simply builds on its community focus, since at the heart of all of these essays is the way that a group can use algorithms to do something that really wasn’t possible before. But the ability of these kinds of algorithmic systems to foster creative practices, rather than simply replacing artists, is something that needs more emphasis in our current debates. In a recent Atlantic article, Ian Bogost wrote about how he is using AI image creators like DALL-E to produce visuals to accompany seemingly trivial musings (“My daughter texted, asking what her ‘goth name’ should be; moments later, I sent […]
[…]was a direct response. When hydropower arrived, there were a lot of folks who were in horrible working conditions and, frankly, were undervalued in what they were doing and were out of a job. And so there were a group of folks who used a fellow by the name of Ned Ludd as their sort of spiritual leader, and they decided to fight the rush towards industrialization. And they started, as you said, breaking into factories, breaking the looms, and they worked really hard to target the factories, the mill owners and the people who supported this rush to industrialization. […]
[…]I love the idea of Google Docs. But in practice it’s hard to track, depending on the size of the group that you’re working with. I love that Google Docs is so wide open. You can radically alter the aesthetics of the writing space itself, which adds a whole different level. Lately, I’ve been using Reddit a lot with students, I like it, because it’s easy to create accounts. There you can bracket space by creating a subReddit. And you can define norms for play within that space. You can kind of do your own thing unobstructed for periods of […]
[…]I thoroughly enjoyed reading every article, most articles also hold the promise of becoming unique studies in and of themselves. That scope of exploration is not necessarily Tyler’s purview. Still, this obvious need for more study underscores the work’s potential as thirteen enlightening starting points for exploration and elaboration. I am hopeful that others will take up this challenge as I was left wanting closure with certain topics. After reading this book, you may also find yourself in an endless search for conclusions to his can of worms (which seems a fitting metaphor). Scholars such as Haraway continue to affect […]
[…]share memes. And if you don’t, it’s like you don’t belong. So, these platforms are kind of working to galvanize these groups and prepare them for something, whether it’s just being on this platform and being a member of the community or taking action offline. SR: And it’s sort of a recruitment tool. AS: That’s right. SR: It’s bringing people to different kinds of movements, and then maybe that’s what gets replicated in other parts of the world, that people see that this is an effective propaganda tool. AS: That’s it exactly. I believe, Parler was and Telegram, Parler was […]
[…]is inseparable from human embodiment at any and all levels of linguistic structure. The LLMs are working with text not language.” While acknowledging the strength, persuasiveness, depth and clarity of Cayley’s arguments, the central claim here is that multimodal ML trained on youtube and massive quantities of public domain science data that exceeds the spectrum of the human-perceivable world will give AI a grounding that is in some ways vaster than that experienced by a singular human neurophysiology. The distributed body of 21st century AI, ingesting the output of mass uploaded images-text-speech-video and cartographic-accelerometer data, will utilize humanity as its […]
[…]from the hope that it might be possible to organize mass behavior otherwise. In other words, “code, communication, computing, feedback, and control…embodied an effort to develop more enlightened analytics for the force wielded by science and the state” (2). This impulse (or temptation) is to achieve the ends of the colony, asylum, and camp without resorting to their grisly means. At the risk of editorializing too aggressively, this is the main tension that persists in me upon finishing the book: To achieve submission to authority without violence and to obviate politics though technology (a recurring point within the book) are […]
[…]and some of the most impactful, powerful experiences for students are when they’re actively working on projects that we’re working on, or at least witnessing it, being a part of it, that kind of thing. So I could really see those two integrated. SR: Yeah. And merging practice and theory, I think is real important. It’s something that might be, if not unique, pretty distinctive about the environment that we’re bringing here. JN: I think you’re right. Because it is true as a research Center, it is actually really unique in that regard, in the sense that we have both […]
[…]joining the reactionary. And, beyond Stiegler, maybe that risk should anyway be taken in order to critically assess new technologies? As I argue above, not all negative critique is reactionary, and not all new inventions are purely good (or bad). As for specifically “left-wing” critique, I am not sure why critique of technology or new media should be assigned to either or any wing at the start. And, finally, if I may comment on the description of “the old bank robber” – yes, Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, as is well known from his own books and elsewhere. But […]
[…]elusive and frank, beautiful and witty and quietly challenging, which rethinks the very idea of a group show, from singular research journeys these three artists have separately taken and the self-described “bundles” of ordinary materials they perhaps unpredictably collect and bring home to work with or hang onto as memories; that sometimes nonetheless retain their identity as materials in finished works that in turn, warmly and surprisingly, may also happen to respond one to another in this “collective,” and slantingly to their journeys, materials, and questions. Have I ever seen a group show like this one? So varied, delicate, even […]
[…]possible in print, how it’s better. And if in some cases it’s not better. That’s where the critical component, critical communities, the two Cs, that’s what one gets with EBR when it’s working. SR: Yeah, and I do think that it’s been one of these places that really did expand the reach and the community of electronic literature. So for example, I know people like Steve Tomasula, an experimental novelist, or Lance Olsen. I see their work, they our work. We sort of have this experimental tradition in print literature, interacting with this experimental tradition in digital literature. So I […]
[…]2016. I met Mark Marino in LA when I was living there. I’d been following his work in critical code studies from afar for years, and I had been wanting to talk to scholars of code about the way code is used in some types of LARPs. There’s a reason for this bizarre moment, for this sort of liquid — what Colin Wilbert has called technogenic life — when the technology in our life restructures things. As I studied code-based LARPs I was realizing the timing matched up — these are computing practices bleeding into an analog practice where we’re […]
[…]them in historical literary contexts, comparing them to conventional literary genres, to focus groups, working with studying male gamers in their own voices. And a thing that I’m very excited about is experimental research, where we’re actually working with creative writers and digital artists and exploring the potentialities of these new forms for storytelling, seeing how they affect us, how they affect our consciousness, our sensory apparatus, our experiences of narrative, our affect in different ways. So really ranging from qualitative survey-based research to documentary research, database-driven research, visualization, to that kind of creative experimental research. Jill: One of the […]
I appreciate the thoughtful reply from Søren Bro Pold, as it really forces me to drill down to the crux of the matter. There is nothing mistaken in his reply, but I do believe that he focuses the key dynamic to the core reality that we need to push on: 1) “It already happened.” And, 2) “how do we understand the many ways this tertiary retention grammatizes us?” For me, to be reminded of the ways in which the social knowledge base of the University has already disappeared is painful. As a teacher, editor, and researcher, I know that the […]
[…]and which leans towards ideas of elit practices enveloped within the broader field of literary studies, rather than a literary studies composed as much of form-making as it is breakages and proto-redefinitions of genre. Echoes of the traversals from Grigar and Moulthrop’s own “first cut at an oral history of early electronic literature” in Pathfinders (2015), later elaborated upon in Traversals (2017), can be heard in Ensslin’s interviews with the key figures of the history; however, Moulthrop and Grigar go further by including interviews and video recordings of the artist experiencing their own pre-web work, and recordings of two additional readers, […]
[…]S. (2017). Towards a Tension-Based Definition of Digital Literature. Journal of Creative Writing Studies 2. 1. Chen, J. (2012). Refashioning Print Literature: Internet Literature in China. Comparative Literature Studies 49. 4, pp. 537-546. Croft, W. B., D. Metzler, and T. Strohman. (2015). Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice. Pearson Education. Dillon, A., and B. A. Gushrowski. (2000). Genres and the Web: Is the Personal Home Page the First Uniquely Digital Genre? Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51. 2, pp. 202-205. El Bouyahyaoui, S. and L. Al-Khemar. (2014). _Hafanāt Jamr (Bunches of Embers). http://narration-zanoubya.blogspot.com/, accessed on Sept. 6, […]
[…]Data may become Dada through ML processes. Through this series of reflections, we aim to approach critical data studies as an aesthetic process of sensemaking, which combines what data analysis can make us see with how the platform produces data and text – or, to present a literary perspective on what the platform is as a technical apparatus. Although the apparatus according to Michel Foucault reflects an assemblage of “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions,” (Foucault and Gordon 194) our ultimate aim is not to provide a full apparatus analysis […]
[…]that resonates with a foundational tenant for the methodology of textual criticism as a literary studies specialism. Text is not to be identified with its physical instantiations. Text in a computer is the same object of textual critical study as text in a book. And alphabetic text is, in fact, foundational for modern computation. It is determinant of important characteristics for encoding conventions which still predominate. But as we have also already pointed out text implies nothing more than some kind of regular relation with language as such, and it does not take much research – think English spelling (orthography) […]
[…]able to get the Bing chatbot to reveal its secret name “Sydney,” which was in fact the project code name that Microsoft used while it was initially training the Bing chat feature. This comes however after Roose has already suggested to the chatbot the “well-reported” fact that Sydney is its code name and then associates Sydney with the alter ego. Eventually Roose manages to get the chatbot to suggest destructive acts that its shadow self might perform. Roose has invoked a binary, and it really shouldn’t be that surprising or that unsettling that an AI chatbot is able to list […]
[…]Chinese web and universities Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) from the second half of the 1990s, most studies on the development of Chinese Internet literature tend to trace the beginning of the phenomenon to 1998, when the first online popular novel – Cai Zhiheng’s The First Intimate Contact – was published in Chinese cyberspace. Yet, it is with the rise of literary forums and literary websites that Chinese Internet literature experienced the great surge in its popularity that still continues today. 2.1. Internet literature websites and online literary communities Between the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, Under the Banyan Tree was […]
[…]“what they do not have is data pertaining to the human embodiment of language. . . The LLMs are working with text not language.” Large language models are, in fact, large text models. If your concern is with the nature of text-generation based models as writing machines, with a decades-long history of digital-technological experimentation and achievement preceding it; or if you are interested in the poststructuralist-theoretical context of text generation-based model development, then Cayley’s observation, or his contention, is not necessarily constraining. The fact that GPTs have no data on human embodiment would be largely irrelevant. It is indeed fascinating […]
[…]– the Technologizing of the Word. London & New York: Routledge, 1988. Print. Pold, Søren Bro. Critical Attention and Figures of Control: On Reading Networked, Software-Based Social Systems with a Protective Eye. Electronic Book Review (2020). Print. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/critical-attention-and-figures-of-control-on-reading-networked-software-based-social-systems-with-a-protective-eye/. https://doi.org/10.7273/gp2w-c620. Stiegler, Bernard. Organology of Dreams and Archi-Cinema. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24.47 (2014): 7-37. Print. http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/nja/article/view/23053/20141. —. Technics and Time, 3 : Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Meridian. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U.P., 2011. […]
[…]haul through the forest, create conditions for telling new stories; just as electron microscope studies of Burgess fossils made possible Gould’s insights. Lest we miss the techno-narrative connection, Jane goes on to lament that she is herself becoming “a dinosaur” – unwittingly echoing a train of thought from the bygone Professor in the previous chapter. Both are estranged from academic peers, hers obsessed by images “made possible by graphics cards in those powerful, new computers – a massive 128K of RAM compared to the 64K of memory in the Eagle moon lander” (143). Jane’s wisdom is not universal, so we […]
[…]difference of sense-data. The atmospheric of language in this article derives from elemental media studies. In elemental media studies, media is defined as relationality and order of things (Peters; Jue). Melody Jue proposes a milieu-specific analysis, addressing the nature of situated knowledge production for specific observer, that is, “in what environmental milieu do scholars write their theory, and to what extent does it inform their thinking and writing”(14). As Jue clarifies, milieu-specific analysis calls attention to the emergence of specific thought forms relating to “different environments”, which are significant for “how we form questions about the world, and how we […]
[…]sequences, both common and uncommon. It is urgent that we open the door of negative speculation in critical digital media studies. We should be free to think about what could possibly go wrong without having to prove that it already has (even when, sometimes, it already has gone wrong). And though there are other voices out there doing the same, Kirschenbaum’s piece comes in the right place and the right time to help frame the reception of a highly hyped piece of popular technology. In that spirit, I would like to push Kirschenbaum’s critique a bit further. Here, I consider […]
[…]book of poetry each month. The work began with human literature. This was fed into neural network code, which produced blocks of largely incomprehensible A.I.-generated text. These text blocks were then human edited or ‘carved’. Jhave argues that ReRites establishes that ‘contemporary […] neural nets will never produce coherent, contextually-sensitive poetry,’ and thus need a human input in order to generate poetry, by combining ‘embodied human and disembodied algorithm.’ In the case of the computer-generated critical writing, Amerika (2022) laments that he wishes he could take credit for creating the sentence that perfectly elucidated his thoughts, the same way ‘GPT-2 […]
[…]texts, but we didn’t have them with us. So we were like: what do we do this weekend? I had been working for a web company called the Mining Company, which became about.com. I’d just written a story about hypertext, which was a new thing to me at that point. I asked: why don’t we try doing one of these hypertexts about the book tour we’re gonna go on after we publish this book? We started with a single page, taking turns writing. And we were really enjoying it. Then we sort of decided that we should make fun of […]
[…]really push it, but yeah. Rob Wittig My thinking about the future of Netprov includes those small group projects where it’s your group of friends, plus Netprov Featured Players like you, Alex, playing small private versions of satires. But Netprovscan be big or small. Anyway, sorry, I rambled on. Alex Mitchell The Yes Men basically do parody, but they stay in character for a long time. And then there was the guy with the website Birds Aren’t Real, right? He stays in character. And then you do start to wonder about conspiracy theories: is that Netprov? Maybe that actually starts […]
[…][1971]. 43 See Edwin J. Barton, ‘On the Ezra Pound/Marshall McLuhan Correspondence’, McLuhan Studies,Premiere Issue, http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1iss1/11index.htm#toc, accessed 16/09/21. 44 DH Woodward, ‘Notes on the Publishing History and Text of the Waste Land’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 58/ 3 (Third Quarter, 1964): pp. 252–69. 45 McLuhan, ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’, p. 560. 46 Ibid., p. 571. 47 Ibid., p. 574. 48 Emily Bender et al., ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models be Too Big?’, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): […]
[…]I was having a lot of fun, even while holding in mind the turbulence that is surely coming for working artists, perhaps for large tranches of the arts themselves. In the end, I feel like I’m asking you to hate these images I made, because hating them is the right thing to do — as is hating the exploitative, amoral, dehumanizing technology that makes them possible. And yet part of me still wants you to look at them and like them and think they’re cool. I guess that makes me human. Coda It’s only fair that I confess. In the […]
[…]of a machine that easily mimics human expression. And yet, it is human language (not computer code) that is the primary method by which these tools take instruction and learn. As Scott Rettberg recently wrote in an AI writing listserv: “writing, interlocution, becomes the essential thing again.” AI technology and its cultural impacts are changing so rapidly that ebr editors are now opening the journal to more informal submissions for the machine-writing thread. Along with the traditional essay, we welcome blog posts, riPOSTes, reviews of AI art or AI tools, audio/visual media, transcribed conversations or interREviews, marginal glosses and experimental […]
[…]of the works; it is precisely the medium that is missing. Patti does not need to examine source codes or identify different types of “interfacial media figures” (Saemmer) or “dysfunctionalities” (Ryan); the writers’ skills are read-only skills. Does all this mean that Patti’s essay is not recommended? Absolutely not (who would dare to advise against Dante?) for at least two reasons. The first is that Patti has provided a compelling analysis of the ideology of literary forms and a timely reinterpretation of Italian “open works” in relation to popular culture and society. The broader spectrum of theoretical and ideological influences, […]
[…]as much in that environment. But in that project I ended up composing some messages in Morse code — there are several Morse code translators on the Web — and then getting responses back in Morse code from people I’d never met and whose messages I was only ever partially able to translate and understand because, at that point in time, there were virtually no automated Morse Code to alphabetic language translators. I like how Morse code looks and I think a lot about coding and communication in my work so to have other people pick up these threads from […]
[…]than all of us!’ I love that spirit. And I loved how you and Mark were open to whoever you were working most closely with on a new netprov. You did it with Claire and me, you just said — the next netprov is you two! You two just run it! That’s how we did All Time High, right? You gave support to it, but you were also: ‘this is your show now.’ That was really cool. The invitation to play netprov is always open. Whenever I, or anyone else, says, ‘Gosh, I don’t know how much time I have […]
[…]would happen that would take place within the context of the pandemic living room setting. We were working really hard to try to conceptualize and execute and it never quite got there. But it was fun to think around. Rob Wittig 21:48 I would encourage you not to let that go. I think there are a lot of possibilities there! In Your Living Room with a Wrist Band! Claire Donato 21:59 We never could quite figure out what it was. We had the net artists. Net performance artist Molly Soda made a webpage for it. The game part of it […]
[…]of imaginations”. So, is the poem enacting an anxiety of the speaker, afraid that the mic is not working, concerned that use of a traditional form (whether it be the prosaic bullet point or the more flowery sonnet) will fail to switch on the hearing of the audience? If so, what does the speaker want us to hear? The only clue we can reliably follow from “Emergent Emergencies” and the other four bullet point poems is the end-stopping of each line which suggests that meaning is at best discontinuous, and that propositions may prove false or misleading guides. A line […]
[…]researches in the fields of Australian women’s literature and feminist approaches to literary studies. She has published several articles on Australian women writers of the 1930s-1970s, most recently, “Modern Man and the War at Home: Eleanor Dark’s The Little Company (1945) in War, Gender and Reflective Australia, edited by Joy Wallace and Christine Jennett, Independent Scholars Association of Australia (ISAA) Review, 2021, vol.17, no.2 and vol. 18, no.1. With John O’Carroll, she has published on the distinguished Australian poet, Judith Wright, most recently, “Beyond Subjectivity: The Appearances of Extinction in Judith Wright’s Fourth Quarter (1976), Fusion Journal, 2016, Issue 10. […]
[…]turn, internally segmented into 4 to 9 subunits of 2 to 4 pages each. These divisions are further grouped into four major parts that approximately give us childhood and adolescence (“The Born Foreigner”, 1888-1905), youth (“The Poet as Transformer”, 1905-1914), adulthood (“Dreamer and Civilizer”, 1914-1925) and middle age (“Spiritualist and Humanist”, 1925-1935). The equivalence between bibliographical sections and narrative techniques thus approaches the structure of a novel on the education and development of the individual combined with elements of the historical novel. A dense description of family life, education, everyday life and writing production of the character is situated in […]
[…]to consider the nature of the fringe as a form of frontier. In areas such as new media festivals, critical commentary, and public intellectualism in New Media and Electronic Literature, he was anything but a marginal figure. Jeremy Hight was a pioneer of the intersection of theory and praxis, as seen from 34 north to Biomimetics and Shifting Language, one of his last theoretical texts written for the NeMeArt Center in Cyprus (2021). His work and texts constantly broke expectations and mixed speculation with emerging technology and culture. As with many writers, Jeremy had a fierce soul. This is understandable, […]
[…]that enable and delimit the digital encounter. It is here that Jones notes how artists ‘working in experimental poetry and the critical off-shoots of poetry called ‘poetics’ often conceive of language as a system of logics that can be bent and broken to deviate from the conditions of the sayable delimited by existing norms’ (22). This crafting of errancy may lack the viscerally disruptive, often unwelcome surprise brought about by the functional unravelling of digital systems, interfaces, and working patterns, but they still provide a matrix through which to read diffractively the complex (and frequently frictional, uncertain) entanglements of the […]
[…]account of these sorts of speculative and critical practices can be found in Daniela K. Rosner’s Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design. Although it is more about industrial design than about labs, Rosner’s work also performs a critical reading against the historical grain to focus on speculative possibilities by recentering innovation around those who have been pushed to the margins of design. And for anyone looking for other examples of these practices beyond those already mentioned in The Lab Book: Allied Media Projects represents a network of scholars, community organizers, hackactivists, and citizens raising critical awareness about […]
[…]the “muteness of the real” (15), to make that theory or poem or gesture or sound or artwork or codework that would finally enunciate the origin (and so also the end) of language, meaning, value, life, etcetera. He thereby establishes a topology of “this side” and “that side,” or inside and outside. “I like to believe I’m working on a frontier,” but “beyond the Pale there’s nothing but the agony of shadows” (123). And the book then becomes an expression of the horrifying, impossible wish to travel to the other side, and also a journal of the repeated failures to […]
[…]time was raising funds to support the Georgian National Legion in Ukraine (Scott). However, the group’s weapon of choice is the ubiquitous “doge,” or Shiba Inu—badly represented, sometimes bordering on the aesthetics and ontologies of dank memes. Activists call themselves “fellas” (just like @SniperFella who proposed NewFellaLand) and specialize in viral content aimed at combating Kremlin war propaganda, including videos of the Russian army set to music, intently mocking the efforts of occupiers. Along with @SaintJavelin (a fundraising movement established in February 2022 by Chris Borys, a journalist with ties to Poland and Ukraine) they constitute a swarm of digital […]
[…]play. When I hear them, I hear that magical thing that happens in childhood where you’re all working together to create a virtual something and they’re working it out and they’re tussling a little bit about what the reality is. But it’s in that tussle that the reality gets defined. And that it can happen inside netprovs is really exciting and could be interesting for social change. Anna Nacher Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, we have this ongoing discussion on how electronic literature can actually contribute to social change, the required social change. So I think netprov definitely […]
[…]social and environmental issues. David Bowie said of art: “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting” (Bowie). Humanity (and technology) progresses with experimentation and it’s the weirdo visionaries that call on us to rethink what we know, reimagine what it means to […]
[…]disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, film and media, cultural studies, religious studies, cultural geography, and anthropology. This vibrant area of research and teaching falls under the umbrella term “the environmental humanities.” [2] That said, there is certainly much more to discuss vis a vis Wolfe’s engagement with Luhmann via Stevens, Derrida, Heidegger, Maturana and Varela, etc. [3] This is a concept that repeats in Stevens’s “Connoisseur of Chaos,” with the opening stanza: “…A great disorder is an order. These / Two things are one…” (CP 215). [4] As A. Seidenberg writes in “The Ritual Origin of the Circle and […]
[…]as we please, but at any moment a single key stroke takes us back to a chronologically organized group of nodes (a Stream) or a semantically affiliated narrative vignette (a Path). Years of Stuart Moulthrop’s experience as a mentor and teacher of digital literature, and as a practicing hypertext scholar and writer, are built into the anniversary edition of Victory Garden. Navigational apparatus and main concepts that help us traverse this dense network of stories are – at least in theory – closer to mapping the three dimensionality of hyperspace than many visual tools. On the title page of the […]
[…]to think logically about what you’re doing, you just do it, intuitively, but patterned off the critical dataset of source material and experiential filters you’ve trained yourself to access and auto-remix over time. It’s a very physical experience and reminds me of professional athletics. It’s where athletics meets aesthetics. Meanwhile, right before and during the pandemic, which was when the book was being written, I was reading the fiction of Clarice Lispector. Not since my engagement with postmodern fiction and post-structuralism, had I become so entranced by a writer. The first time I had heard of her work was through […]
[…]have an idea and we’ll kind of run with it as a group and the idea evolves and it just becomes a group project over time. And so we met as a group last year in May. And then throughout the summer, we met and we were talking about what kind of project can we make now as a lab that is pretty much relegated to meetings on MS Teams. That’s the platform that the school uses. You know, not just socially distanced, but really distanced. I mean, really, like some of our members are isolating in their hometowns, which […]
[…]sections, Bigelow lists the code for “the Cage text,” which you need to cut and paste into a code converter Bigelow links to. For your labor, you see that the code repeats this sentence over and over: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” The point of all this work isn’t to get to Bigelow’s subjective interior—it’s an homage to Cage’s own play with expectations, dramatizing the mental framework we bring to bear when we an encounter aesthetic object. It also prompts thinking about the work we don’t always realize that we do when we process language […]
[…]journal. Vernacular by default, the early web was made of half-finished homepages, alien looking code, broken links and error messages. It was also a period of creative possibilities and utopian dreams for free personal expression in networked groups. With few large hubs to connect people, islands of communities formed around trying to figure out what the web might be. Lialina’s own innovative digital art, as with the “net art” movement in general, was made in the context of this emerging web folk culture. She writes: “…although I consider myself to be an early adopter–I came late enough to enjoy and […]
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/87/week-3-feminist-ai-main-thread According to its 2019 fourth quarter earnings report, Google nets $15 billion US dollars annually, and the building block of its revenue is ad sales from Search. As the internet began to expand in the early 1990s, the need to search its uncatalogued environment became a critical building block for digital interconnectedness. Two approaches to the logic of searching the internet emerged: American investor Bill Gross promoted search results as sites to be auctioned to the highest bidder, while Larry Page and Sergey Brin vehemently opposed advertising and developed an algorithm. These two search logics (algorithm or […]
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 […]
[…]to Critical Code Studies (Main Thread).” CCS Working Group 2020, http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/57/week-1-introduction-to-critical-code-studies-main-thread. Marino, Mark C. Critical Code Studies › Electronic Book Review. 31 Jan. 2012, […]
The Critical Code Studies Working Group 2020 (CCSWG ‘20) was another watershed moment for this burgeoning field. On the one hand, it celebrated 10 years since the first Working Group. On the other hand, the fact that we were still convening working groups meant that scholars still needed help finding their way through code. Notably, we were also hosting this Working Group the year that MIT Press published Critical Code Studies. We took the opportunity of the book launch to spend Week 1 introducing Critical Code Studies (CCS) to the participants in a new way. While the Working Groups always […]
[…]was originally published on the CCS website in January 2020 as “Week 1: Introduction to Critical Code Studies”. Welcome to the first week of the 2020 Critical Code Studies Working Group. During this week, we’ll be introducing critical code studies in general by means of the introductory chapter to the forthcoming book Critical Code Studies (The MIT Press). We’ll also take this week as an opportunity to introduce newcomers to the field but also to take stock in where the field has come and to look forward to where it is headed next. Critical Code Studies (CCS) names the […]
[…]specifically coordinated) range of combinations that are bound within the artifact that is the code base. Similarly, the initial iteration of Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2009), while it builds stanzas randomly in real time as the work runs in your browser, is also a bounded object whose entirety can be understood by examining its code. Or can it? A work like Taroko Gorge, as elegant as it is as a standalone work, has achieved widespread attention thanks to the wave of remixes that it has inspired. The ever-growing list includes works of varied quality, some of which could stand alone as […]
[…]I ended up doing, with the help of a programmer friend of mine Jon Orsi, was to share the editable code using JSFiddle, a “free code-sharing tool that allows you to edit, share, execute and debug Web code within a browser.” Marketed as a “Code Playground,” JSFiddle allowed Orsi to input Montfort’s code into the JSFiddle browser, separating the JavaScript and the CSS stylesheet, and allowing for an in-browser run of the code to see edits in real-time and to check for bugs. The workaround worked, and students were able to take the edited code, “fork” it, and start editing […]
[…]How Did Public Health Guidance Get So Muddled?” NPR, 4 Aug 2020. Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies \ a lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Grosser, Ben. The Endless Doomscroller, endlessdoomscroller.com. 2020. Hassan, Robert. The age of distraction: Reading, writing, and politics in a high-speed networked economy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. 2012. Hou Je Bek, Wilfried. “Loop.” In Software Studies \ a lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2008. Kimball, Whitney. “Presenting The Endless Doomscroller.” Gizmodo, 4 Aug 2020. Knueven, Liz and Avery Hartmans. “Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has grown over $40 billion in the last year alone. Here’s how […]
[…]systems and other materials—entangling cameras, satellites, drones, web graphics, esoteric code, academic writing, and the printed codex, exploring what their contingent exchanges can reveal about the structures, dynamics, and possibilities of sensing across the contemporary environment. The hybrid art-texts generated by these activities are thus better understood in light of their complex origins, deriving their creative and critical force as much by encouraging reflection on these varied aspects and processes, as the actual markings left behind. Landform An artistic gesture that I am presently exploring is the use of image generating technologies for producing creative textual outcomes. Specifically, I am […]
[…]Søren Pold and Scott Rettberg. 2020. “E-lit Pandemics – Roundtable”. https://elmcip.net/critical-writing/e-lit-pandemics-roundtable Nacher, Anna, Søren Pold and Scott Rettberg. 2021. “COVID E-LIT: Digital Art from the Pandemic curatorial statement”. In Electronic Book Review. https://doi.org/10.7273/kehh-8c36 Newman, Jane O. & Hatch, Laura. 2013. “Panel 70 – Introduction. The Baroque as the Renaissance?”. In Mnemosyne: Meanderings through Aby Warburg’s Atlas. https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/image-group/panel-70-introduction-1-5 Parikka, Jussi. 2016. Digital contagions: A media archaeology of computer viruses. Second Edition. Peter Lang. Rettberg, Jill. 2021. “Speculative Interfaces: How Electronic Literature Uses the Interface to Make Us Think about Technology”. In Electronic Book Review. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/speculative-interfaces-how-electronic-literature-uses-the-interface-to-make-us-think-about-technology/ Thacker, Eugene. 2004. Biomedia. Vol. 11. […]
[…]and scholars must strive towards reaching, whichever road is taken. Whether one chooses to critically read or critically not-read works by problematic 3G e-lit practitioners (whatever critical reading and critical not-reading might mean in digital contexts), and whether we choose to allow perpetrators of violence to tell their own stories (an issue deliberated upon by Yuri Yim in response to a docu-series about Ted Bundy), meaningful conversations about these works and authors can occur. To be sure, these conversations are happening, but there is still substantial room for further interdisciplinary consideration that draws from both academia and popular culture. Our […]
[…]Scott and Roderick Coover. “Addressing Significant Societal Challenges Through Critical Digital Media”, Electronic Book Review, August 2, 2020, doi:10.7273/1ma1-pk87. Silva Pereira, Paulo. “Greening the Digital Muse: An Ecocritical Examination of Contemporary Digital Art and Literature”, Electronic Book Review, May 3, 2020, doi:10.7273/v30n-1a73. Svensson, Patrik. “The Landscape of Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol.4, no.1, 2010. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html#drucker2009a T., Shanmugapriya and Nirmala Menon. “Infrastructure and Social Interaction: Situated Research Practices in Digital Humanities in India.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 2020. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000471/000471.html “Vision of Digital India.” Digital India. N.d. […]
[…]on the screen; social performance, or how digital texts “perform” us; the performance of codes and scripting; and the performance of the machine itself, i.e., what does an engineer mean when s/he talks about performance? Performance means that a process is underway; it is an event rather than an object. Ian Bogost’s (2007) concept of “procedural representation” further highlights the uniqueness of digital works in relation to performativity: [procedural representation] explains processes with other processes. Procedural representation is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language. […] Procedural representation itself requires inscription in a medium that actually […]
[…]according to Casone, “was developed in part as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology” (12), but more specifically from the attention paid to the failure of these technologies: system crashes, bugs, glitches, distortion, noise floor…signals that these technologies were as imperfect as the humans who made them, and which were incorporated in the musical compositions. From that moment, the post-digital has been associated with a process of “amateurization” in art: everybody can become an artist using DIY techniques, low tech, recycled materials and software, found objects and tools lying around the house. […]
[…]Research Center (University of Aarhus, Denmark) and the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group (University of Bergen, Norway) in collaboration with dra.ft (India) and the Electronic Literature Lab (Washington State University Vancouver, USA). With over a year of experience with digital meetings, it was clear that the typical 20-minute conference presentations for a full week would simply be a battle of endurance rather than the generative space similar to the hustle and bustle of in-person conference. Instead, the organization chose a format of 5-minute presentations combined with extended time for engaged discussions. Most presenters also submitted a written papers in advance, […]
[…]Shklovsky, Brecht, and Boal: Ostranenie, V-Effect, and Spect-Actors as Analytical Tools for Game Studies. Game Studies, 17(2). Retrieved December 10, 2021 from http://gamestudies.org/1702/articles/potzsch Pötzsch, H. (2019). From a New Seeing to a New Acting: Viktor Shklovsky’s Ostranenie and Analyses of Games and Play. In Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy (pp. 235–251). Lexington Books. Quach, K. (2021, September 8). A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down. The Register. Retrieved December 10, 2021 from https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/08/project_december_openai_gpt_3/ Rohrer, J. (2020a). Project December [Conversational AI]. Rohrer, J. […]
[…]at the outset for analysis. The solo works of E-Lit may seem very backward and of no use for critical conversations within the broader discourse of E-Lit but my proposition is to question the paradigm of the electronic itself and consider to what extent people, in a space like India, can experiment on their own in spite of the digital divide. The understanding that emerges is that there is immense scope for collaboration and if I am to add a cliché: a spectre of E-Lit is circling India and it’s just a matter of time before it gets more wide […]
[…]possible answer to our searches. By making algorithms visible, by showing that they are in fact working – even when their precise workings elude us –, these works question some of the naturalized behaviours and hegemonic meanings of digital culture. In Kozak’s words, making this kind of materiality visible – as ways of being with materiality – invites us to question what it means to think of the digital sphere as a culture of “users” (2019a, p. 74). How these pieces work with the algorithm’s modes of being and doing is what interests me here, and it is what has […]
[…]Sciences at IIT Jodhpur and a HASTAC scholar (2021-23). His interests lie in and around Literary Studies, Digital Humanities, Remediation, Pedagogy and Promoting Access via Networks. His other roles include filling in as a Technical Advisory Member with Humanities Commons, as the facilitator of ‘Digital Objects and Media’ special interest group with Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations, as a transcriber with The Canterbury Tales Project, as a Liaison with The Association for Computers and the Humanities and as the founding member of Electronic Literature […]
[…]“What makes the analysis of bots different from other textual generators is that the source code, which many theorists consider key in understanding works of e-lit, is rarely available for reading.” [Lampi 2017]). Could we generate text on a picture that told a continuing story? (Yes, memes, the ultimate me – me generation). In short, we were enticed by the dark lore of possibilities, and we were surely led astray by the power of creation. Yes these journeys (we/a)re available only to a few. Yes, you could spend your years ferreting out all the possible meanings—even those that the author […]
[…]of earlier eras, but as uncanny, hypermediated receptions of transmitted data, at times as massive coded data streams, minimally as disembodied voices. In the thrust and escape velocity of such cosmological narratives, the AI imaginary beams outward and away from Earth along expansionist and monolithic lines of evolutionary progressions toward cosmic heights ever receding from its human origins. Moreover, even within the human orbit, self-willed artificial personalities work so well that they overtake their programmers and assert their own goals. 2001’s HAL 9000 is an archetypal example of such a non-trivial or unpredictable machine intelligence. As this renegade AI is […]
[…]33) – or perhaps, another ‘godless cult’ in the words of Kracauer. This characterization of code makes sense not only in relation to the role of code in computing, but also in the everyday use of computers – and not being able to understand the functioning of large global platforms, even from the inside or through reading the code. The mass perspective of profiling: the Nooscope Following both a history of minimalism and computationalism, we see that a central difference between the metainterface spectacle and former spectacles lies in particular instrumentalist hiding of the production of the mass perspective. To […]
[…]a future. Taken together, the juxtaposition signifies a stance in which one embraces a certain critical distance (gained through posterity) to the otherwise elusive phenomenon of the digital, allowing for heightened appreciation of its aesthetic, theoretical, and critical contours, while at the same time being thoroughly situated (through the contemporary anchor) within and at close range to instantiations of that same phenomenon, offering material and transformational agency in the face of computational capitalism. Cramer notes how post-digital, as a term, “sucks but is useful” (“What is ‘Post-digital’?” 12) – the conceptual stance of contemporary posterity, then, is an oxymoron but […]
[…]are always asking me, oh do you hate Facebook, for example? A lot of my work is about Facebook and critical of Facebook and critical of Mark Zuckerberg. And I mean, yes, in many ways, sure. But I also have gained a lot from Facebook, and I think that’s the complication that deserves attention, that there are interesting things about it. There’s reasons there’s 3 billion people there. It’s not only because it’s a monopoly and dominant, although that’s a big part of it and kind of its own tactic, the corporation’s tactics. But it’s also about a hunger for […]
[…]Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. —–. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 1.1 (2001). www.gamestudies.org. Accessed 1 Mar 2018. Atkinson, Paul. Computer. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. Beck, Melinda and David C. Martin. “A New View of Nuclear War.” Newsweek 18 Aug (1980): 39. Accessed 26 Jan 2018. Blackford, Holly. “PC Pinocchios: Parents, Children, and the Metamorphosis Tradition in Science Fiction.” In Sherman and Koven, eds. 74-92. Brand, Stewart. “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.” Rolling Stone 7 Dec 1972. https://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html. Accessed 24 Dec 2020. […]
[…]Álvaro Seiça’s “lit mods” (Seiça 2020a; Seiça 2020b), or in the insistence of critical code studies that we must look at the underlying code, as well as at the interface and the content (Marino 2020). Traditional speculative fiction, in the form, for instance, of a science fiction novel or television series, involves world-building, and proposes new possible worlds and societies for readers to imagine and think with and through. afternoon and many other early works of electronic literature tell completely realistic stories, with no science fiction or fantasy or other speculative elements. Their speculation is all in the interface, in […]
[…]electronic literature, we often associate writing under constraint with the avant garde literary group Oulipo, which introduced often structurally demanding ways of generating texts and working with limited frameworks (Salter 533). Michelle Grangaud, for example, wrote the poetry collection Stations, which entirely consists of anagrams of Parisian metro station names. The restraints, then, are generally related to the formal characteristics of language or media. In this manner, the constraint resists the ways in which we commonly use language. And the results can be powerful, as Tabbi argues: Resistance too figures not as a political opposition but as a resituation of […]
[…]will become cluttered with emoji trees, the text suddenly overgrown by a forest. The precise workings of the “Cadabra” button can be discovered in the online repository of Abra’s code (Hatcher). A text file contains the names of each of the 39 “spells” that the “Cadabra” button can cast. Next to each spell is number that reflects the likelihood that the particular spell will be cast, with higher numbered spells more likely to occur. One function called “AREA_RANDOM” is given the highest number, 28. The second highest number, 7, belongs to the function “RANDOM_ERASE.” The most frequent numbers assigned to […]
[…]Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Black Inc., 2019. Ratto, Matt. “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.” The Information Society 27.4 (2011): pp. 252-260. Řehůřek, Radim, and Petr Sojka. “Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora.” In Proceedings of the LREC 2010 Workshop on New Challenges for NLP Frameworks, Malta, May 2010, pp. 46-50. Roman Holiday. Directed by William Wyler, performances by Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, Paramount Pictures, 1953. Rozendaal, Rafaël. “Abstract Browsing,” 2014. http://www.abstractbrowsing.net Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Translated by Stephen Barker, Stanford University Press, 2010. […]
[…]Future work could specify and nuance our considerations, drawing on insights from domains like critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, labor and working class studies, and geography and area studies. Developing attunement also means being attentive to the specific context of your making project, campus, and makers. We have gestured to our own specifics in the examples above, but asking similar questions about your own contexts may lead you to very different answers or even entirely new questions. Notes Tech fields have a long history of these exclusionary practices, especially when it comes to questions of gender […]
[…]– what if students could decide for themselves whether they wanted introduction to women’s studies to begin with British suffragette or African priestess, early composer or the fur trade? 19th century or 5th? How might the collective identity of feminism be negotiated differently? How would the act of traversal change the reader? I came of intellectual age in a time of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Denise Riley’s “Am I that name: feminism and the category of women in history … ” and so had been interested in challenging the cohesion of identity alongside the development of an understanding that […]
[…]response to the long history of racial tensions and racial injustice that continues today, critical games (or what are sometimes called “serious” games) have emerged such as Freedom, the Underground Railroad (2012) and Rise Up: The Game of People and Power (2017). Such games are developed in an effort to help players and the broader public understand sociocultural issues about race, racism, and anti-racism—each a unique topic, each deserving their own conversation. To begin to understand the critical work of games on racial equity, in October 2020, we gathered in a roundtable to begin theorizing what racial equity game design […]
[…]Through Reflective Game Design Practices.” Game Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, Dec. 2018. Game Studies, http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/marcotte. Murphy, Sheila. “Controllers.” Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, Routledge, 2013, pp. 19–24. O’Gorman, Marcel. “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys: Adventures in Applied Media Theory.” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 27–42, doi:10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2519. O’Gorman, Marcel. Making Media Theory: Thinking Critically with Technology. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2020. O’Gorman, Marcel. Necromedia. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pullin, Graham. Design Meets Disability. MIT Press, 2009. Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Ruberg, Bonnie. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. NYU […]
[…]Hi, everyone. I’m Jin Sol, I’m also a Co-Editor on the special issue of tdr and ebr, “Critical Making, Critical Design”. I am currently going into my fifth year of the PhD at the University of Waterloo. I’m in the department of English and I am studying the cross sections of critical race theory and digital photography. LL: Cool. Thank you, Jin Sol. So let’s start off with a land acknowledgement. So based in [00:01:00] Canada, the electronic book review would like to acknowledge that this land is made up of more than 630 First Nations communities representing more than […]
[…]Press, 1992. Polyani, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday and Co., 1967. Rosner, Daniela. Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design. The MIT Press, 2018. Ruecker, Stan, et al. “Drilling for Papers in INKE.” Scholarly and Research Communication, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, p. 5. Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action. Basic Books, 1983. Simon, Herbert A. “The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial.” Design Issues, vol. 4, no. 1/2, 1988, p. 67. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.2307/1511391. Sterling, Bruce. “Made Up Symposium Keynote, January 29, 2011.” Made Up: Design’s Fictions, Art Center Graduate Press, 2017, pp. […]
[…]writing, est. 2020) are proud to announce their first collaboration: a special double issue on “Critical Making, Critical Design” that pairs digital works of making or design with critical and scholarly mediation. See the Table of Contents of The Digital Review issue as well. From prose and art installations to craftwork and video games, creative works are often released without giving artists the opportunity to explain their processes, contexts, and motivations. Else, creative works may be examined through through separate forms of static, print-based scholarly publishing that risk isolating works from their creative impulses and taking works out of their […]
[…]body/minds around was discussed by each and every artist we talked to over Zoom in March 2021, working on a forthcoming documentary skillfully produced and videographed by Ashleigh Steele. For many pandemic crisis has been experienced as both an intense, extended period relieved from FOMO, and as sheer boredom and utter restlessness. Most of us have experienced the intrusion of platforms like video conferencing into our very living rooms and bedrooms, which has led to the emergence of critical awareness but also to a way of getting used to being together across screens. In this sense, old distinctions between online and […]
[…]For all the benefits of asynchronous organization for some aspects of conferences, the networking purpose is harmed rather than helped. This must be balanced. Opportunities to meet and chat should be synchronous, but more time at less intensity could be productive here as well. For example, networking sessions for particular topics or especially for newcomers can make for more intimate spaces more conducive to finding the right people, as well as generally being smaller and less overwhelming. Online conferences also fundamentally alter what kinds of presentations can be included, as we saw with the impossibility of translating installation art. It’s […]
[…]possibilities could resolve Murphet’s parrhesic/polyphonic predicament (permission to create a working prototype of DOABY for research purposes has been granted by David Higham Associates). In Coetzee’s novel, the format and the book medium are strained. Creating a digital DOABY could resolve this strain, or at the very least transform how the work is constructed. It is important, however, to tread carefully when adapting and contrasting digital and print text formats. In her critique of the works of Borges and practice-led research into digressive digital literature, hypertext theorist J. Yellowlees Douglas (2000) criticizes ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ as a print […]
[…]projects. Its concerns range from autoethnography to close reading to something like critical code studies, from the abstractions of Wallace Stevens to the polychrome delights of “trash spinning.” It is both a critical study and a guide to creative practice. The mixed nature of the work flows from our subject, which is both a tool for making and a made thing. Twine is an unlikely proposition—a software platform crafted entirely by volunteers, some of whom have never met in person, and a worldwide community of creators who explore and expand the platform. To understand this phenomenon, we do a kind […]
[…]no input while they run. These systems are open to some types of interaction. One can study the code and can choose to interact with it by making changes; at least one critic has tweeted (@ugly_feelings, May 28, 2020) that he has done this with The Truelist (Klobucar 2019). I don’t know of “remixes” or “forks” of Autopia or The Truelist that have been released. There are many modifications of other simpler text generators of mine, such as “Taroko Gorge,” with several modified versions collected at https://collection.eliterature.org/3/collection-taroko.html. That poetry generator, while often riffed upon, is a more conventional work computationally […]
[…]task of basic coding (Shepard 20). Unfortunately, evidence of this coding – and the resultant code that generated The Policeman’s Beard – appears to have been lost to time. The clearest description we have of the system’s functionality comes from a short article from The Wall Street Journal (Miller): Racter’s method is a complicated blend of haphazardness and linguistic savvy. The program basically strings words and phrases together randomly, but it has two important constraints. It contains rules of English, so Racter speaks grammatically. In addition, it contains enough information about each word in its 2,400-word vocabulary to let Racter […]
[…]just started my first real job; I was still kind of really full of all these ideas from critical code studies – the project that Mark Marino had been developing; and my work as a grad student with Rita Raley, and thinking about ‘Z-space’, was something that occupied my mind for a good chunk of time. One thing that I take from that experience is that what is so great about ebr – what ebr offers that no other journal that I’ve ever worked on really offers – is the opportunity for improbably improvisational criticism, on-the-fly conversations, real-time responses to […]
[…]E. Lewin, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Greenberg, Clement. “Collage.” Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, 1961, pp. 70–83. —. “Modernist Painting.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Franscina and Charles Harrison, Westview Press, 1982, pp. 5–10. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, British Film Institute, 1990, pp. 56–62. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 67–90. Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of […]
[…]clear that Canada holds a rich variety of transmedial literature, digital poetics, and net art—a critical and creative landscape more recently brought to the attention of global e-literature communities through the 2016 ELO Meeting in Victoria, Canada (co-chaired by Dene Grigar and Ray Siemens) and the 2018 ELO Meeting in Montréal, Canada (co-chaired by Bertrand Gervais, Caitlin Fisher, and others). The objectives of the Editors Dani Spinosa and Lai-Tze Fan are not only to highlight what has been accomplished in early digital poetics in the 1990s and early 2000s in Canada, but also to represent what new literary voices and […]
[…]that, I [wondered]: what would experimental poets of the [nineteen] twenties be doing? They’d be working in hypertext, they’d be working in these areas. Then there was kind of no turning back. I thought electronic literature is actually sort of the end game for where all of that was going. It was super fun! I’ve written about it elsewhere, but the dissertation itself I was enormously proud of. Writing it changed me. Image from Fisher’s dissertation. Source: Caitlin Fisher. There were really no readers for it at the time I produced it. It wasn’t even archived. The electronic literature piece […]
[…]of research. DS: Canada has many research resources and labs dedicated to digital arts, media studies, and digital literary studies, including Caitlin Fisher’s Augmented Reality Lab in Toronto, Brian Greenspan’s HyperLab in Ottawa, Karis Shearer’s AMP Lab in Kelowna, Marcel O’Gorman’s Critical Media Lab in Waterloo, and your own NT2 Lab in Montréal. Are there other Canadian labs or resources you’d like to foreground in particular? BG: I think we could add to this list of major projects, the Ex Situ Laboratory, led by René Audet at Université Laval, which focuses on digital literature and culture, as well as on […]
[…]City. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. Smith, A.J.M. Introduction. The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology, edited by Smith, W.J. Gage, 1943, pp. 3-31. Spinosa, Dani. “Toward a Theory of Canadian Digital Poetics.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2018, pp. 237-255. Starnino, Carmine. Introduction. The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, Signal Editions, 2005, pp. 15-36. Waber, Dan. “On First Screening.” First Screening, by bpNichol, edited by Jim Andrews et al., vispo.com, 2007. http://vispo.com/bp/introduction.htm. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2005. Wunker, Erin, and Travis Mason. Introduction. “Public Poetics.” Public Poetics: Critical Issues in […]
[…]499-520. Print. —. “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 31.1 (2004): 49-84. Print. Lucretius. On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura. Ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print. Mauro, Aaron. “Versioning Loss: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Materiality of Digital Publishing.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.4 (2014): np. Web. 3 October 2017. . McCaffery, Steve. “Nichol’s Graphic Cratylism.” At the Corner of Mundane and Sacred: a bpNichol Symposium. Avant Canada: Artists, Prophets, Revolutionaries. Niagara Artists Centre. 7 Nov. 2014. Conference Paper. Motte, Jr., […]
[…]strategies of copying and appropriation? It’s simple: the computer encourages us to mimic its workings… If I can chop out a huge section of the novel I’m working on and paste it into a new document, what’s going to stop me from copying and pasting a Web page in its entirety and dropping it into my text? (xviii) He goes on to cite a longer lineage of conceptualism, before the digital age, concluding that words “very well might be written not to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated” (xxi). This lack of concern for actual reading […]
[…]suggests that what they fear is “that the former objects of their gaze have become self-aware critical agents” (2014; 312). In this characterization, Garneau’s screen objects follow Freud’s description in The Interpretation of Dreams of a “critical agency [that] stands like a screen between the [unconscious] and consciousness,” particularly in dreams, but also “directs our waking life and determines our voluntary, conscious actions” (542). Likewise, Garneau’s screen objects operate within a style of dream-like vision, but one with implications for the waking world as well. Significantly, some of these implications enact a return onto Freud’s own discourse. Rather than being […]
[…]travels go from allusions to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (a research center that studies the Earth, the sun, the solar system and the universe, which was built in memory of physicist Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard), to Marina Vlady’s scene shots and glimpses of the city of Paris in “Two or three things that I know about her.” Resembling the representation of Hydra’s twisting snake in the sky, the reader is caught in the twists of language that revolve within the constellations imaginaries: Godard? Goddard? God? Art? The process of “deconstructing” HYA shows that the voices of Wittgenstein, Derrida, Godard, […]
[…]or “commented upon” Carpenter’s work, but it is very rare that a literary scholar does the critical work of close reading it. Refreshingly, Watts does indeed give Carpenter’s work the critical attention it deserves, providing astute close reading and literary analysis throughout. Watts’s analytical approach to Entre Ville reveals, too, the strangeness of the critical neglect of new media writing in Canada because Entre Ville, like so many electronic literary works, is “specially positioned to explore the traditionalism inherent in mainstream conceptions of literature, literary culture, and cultural production–including most especially parallels between Montreal literature and new-media literature.” That mediated […]
[…]University of Victoria, and in publications like Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) and Literary Studies in the Digital Age (LSDA), to name but a few points of overlap. Additionally, funding for projects related to the archiving and documentation of electronic literature have been provided by the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Moreover, from 2006 to 2011 the Electronic Literature Organization––the hub of activity for electronic literature art and scholarship––was hosted by the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland at College Park, arguably one of the top digital humanities […]
[…]that we are sorely in need of more input from electronic literature authors and researchers working in critical race studies, both to bring in documentation of works and criticism of e-lit that addresses race and diversity, and to tag records in the database that already address these matters. The Knowledge Base has “controlled vocabularies” for core bibliographic information, but not for themes and content descriptions. In this case, we use a folksonomic “tagging” system that is idiosyncratic precisely because it is open – each individual contributor tags the records they contribute or develop using an uncontrolled vocabulary. In my course, […]
[…]of projects that demonstrate how Western subjectivity is contingent upon BIPOC labor, like Black Code Studies, Liquid Blackness, or Lisa Nakamura’s “Indigenous Circuits,” in which she excavates how Fairchild Semiconductor exploited and racialized indigenous Navajo labor to establish a foothold in Silicon Valley. Such histories are also a part of e-lit’s, though direct connections have yet to be made. Aesthetically, antiracism recuperates imagination from the logic of white supremacy and resituates it among a dynamic array of material and symbolic structures. My attempt, then, is not to say anything new, as novelty is complicit in the colonial wanderlust for expansion, […]
[…]119, my translation) It is worth mentioning in this regard the call “for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data” (Milan and Treré “Big Data from the South(s)” 319). In their introductory essay for a special journal issue that explores “Big Data from the South”, Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré acknowledge the valuable work done by many researchers over the past few years counterbalancing the “hyperbolic narratives of the ‘big data revolution’” (320), by interrogating on the cultural, social […]
[…]Story People. Blood & Laurels. Linden Research, Inc., 2014. Marino, Mark C. Critical Code Studies: Initial Methods. MIT Press, 2020. Mateas, Michael. “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner.” On The Horizon. Special Issue. Future of Games, Simulations and Interactive Media in Learning Contexts, vol. 13, no. 1, 2005. Mateas, Michael, and Andrew Stern. Façade. Microsoft Windows. Procedural Arts, 2005. Maxis Software, Inc. The Sims. Microsoft Windows. Electronic Arts, Inc., 2000. McCoy, Josh, et al. “Prom Week: Designing Past the Game/Story Dilemma.” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Society for the Advancement of the […]
[…]for, but doesn’t demand, time to eddy in Sentences, the first example being an example of time working in a closed loop, an eddy, and the second being an example of two time scales working at once. The possibility for simultaneity of event, of lyric, in a “perpetual present” demonstrates the unique relationship the analog shuffle has to time, and it’s all in the hands of the reader (Barthes, S/Z, 5). So too, explicitly calling the verses on Grenier’s index cards ‘lyrics’ implicates the personhoods in Sentences, the human presences in the work. In a standard lyric usage, the reader […]
[…]Schwenger draws a parallelism with another type of “global language,” expressly, “computer code” – though this comparison between the two does seem a little unbalanced, given that “computer code” already possesses its own disruptive and dysfunctional modes of expression. Chapter 2 presents yet another type of dialectic tension, specifically a dialogue between “three asemic ancestors” – Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly, respectively – representational echoes of so many other artists/writers who practised “asemic writing” well before it was designated as such. As happens in other chapters, Schwenger does not provide an extensive list of artists or artworks (he […]
[…]Jesper. Games Telling Stories? Game Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2001, http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/, http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/. Kracauer, Siegfried. Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces. New German Critique, vol. 40, 1987, pp. 91-96, doi:DOI: 10.2307/488133, www.jstor.org/stable/488133. —. The Mass Ornament. translated by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, 1995. Landow, George P. Hypertext the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Latham, Alan. The Power of Distraction: Distraction, Tactility, and Habit in the Work of Walter Benjamin. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 17, no. 4, 1999, pp. 451-473, doi:10.1068/d170451, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/d170451. Mencia, Maria et al. Electronic […]
[…]the primacy of code to e-literary and digital humanities work, asserting “you don’t have to code to perform poetry with this code.” By building this inclusive model of code-play into her poetics, Strickland places Ringing the Changes firmly in conversation with feminist digital humanists, who have long argued that centering codework in digital humanities (and by extension, electronic literature) centers exclusionary, masculinist value systems that force women and BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) out of the field. Within Strickland’s oeuvre, texts like True North (1997) and V:Vniverse (2002) reveal a poetic practice that has long been invested in bringing […]
[…]of value and justice (Eskelinen, 387). The cultural turn is expressed most strongly, though, in studies like Flanagan’s Critical Play, Mia Consalvo’s Cheating, and Miguel Sicart’s Ethics of Computer Games, which created frameworks for a new generation of cultural game studies. The most recent exemplars include Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux’s Metagaming, Shira Chess’ Ready Player Two, Bo Ruberg’s Video Games Have Always Been Queer, and Melissa Kagen’s Wandering Games. Again, there are no absolute distinctions. The culturalists are often keenly engaged on a formal level – Boluk and Lemieux, for instance, operationalize their theories through conceptual levels and mini-games […]
[…]Practice, vol. 14, no. 2 (2013): 147-160. Nacher, Anna. “Migrating Stories: Moving across the Code/Spaces of our Time”, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, special issue “Other Codes / Cóid Eile”, no. 20 (2019). http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz20/. Accessed 30 Sep 2019. O’Sullivan, James. “Electronic Literature in Ireland.” Electronic Book Review, 11 April 2018. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/electronic-literature-in-ireland/. Accessed 10 Jul 2019. O’Sullivan, James, Órla Murphy, and Shawn Day. “The Emergence of the Digital Humanities in Ireland.” Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, 7 Oct 2015. https://breac.nd.edu/articles/the-emergence-of-the-digital-humanities-in-ireland/. Accessed 10 Jul 2020. O’Toole, Fintan. The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. Verso, 1997. Pagel, Walter. “The Paracelsian Elias Artista […]
[…]thank the students whose work was featured here. We are grateful to the Creative DH Frameworks Working Group. Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Accessed 7 July 2020. Akazawa, Chloe. “Individual and Group Final Projects – DIGHUM 101.” GitHub Repository, 2020, github.com/chloeaka/Digital-Humanities-Project. Accessed 1 Sept. 2020. “Akazawa Video 2020.” Akazawa, Chloe. Google Drive, 2020, drive.google.com/file/d/1Nn3rEaQyZsBxCFoVYJlSOCjrnj2jkS2E/view. Accessed 1 Sept. 2020. “Art Up Close”. Akazawa, Chloe, 2020, artupclose.wordpress.com/. Accessed 1 Sept. 2020. “Art Up Close Blueprint 2020.” Akazawa, Chloe. Google Drive, 2020, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gUaGubLdqVp-J9ZGzQ2l9En5MwdSPKz2/view. Accessed 1 Sept. 2020. “Berkeley News.” Public Affairs, UC Berkeley, […]
[…]of collaboration, if either of your writing processes have changed over the years as a result of working together? Warren: Through the years since Dennis and I have collaborated he’s said that working with me has changed the way he writes, and he tends to think more visually because of it. I feel fortunate because a lot of poets are not going to let some other person mess with their stuff like this. At times Dennis would say hey you went too far, or you can’t break that line there. So there’s definitely negotiation in certain instances. I respect what […]
[…]had been working in collaboration with Jeremy on developing the initial practices of critical code studies, the application of hermeneutics from the humanities to the interpretation of the extra-functional significance of computer source code. That practice involved examining source code as a cultural text in order to discuss its cultural meaning. He models these methods in his new book Critical Code Studies. Together we three scholars set out to read a work of digital literature together using the methods we had been developing separately. The result was a collaborative reading experience that changed the way we saw the digital object […]
[…]breakdown of that chain of causality that brings forth text and images through the mechanism of code. By having code literally erase itself (more accurately, by having the PHP script erase or corrupt the corresponding HTML file) in response to user interaction, Tisselli precludes this digital erasure of word for action, making code, in its full, material thingness, apparent to its users. Viewing the works today and being presented the narrative of their respective processes of breakdown in this way obliges the viewer to confront obsolescence – the gradual wearing down of each work’s instrumental functionality – in a way […]
[…]Pressman, Mark Marino, and Jeremy Douglass, in Reading Project (2015), or Marino in Critical Code Studies (2020). Literary and artistic works that are written in digital systems cannot be fully understood and explored without the praxis of their processes and interfaces. This approach is fully embodied in creative-critical code practices such as Montfort and Strickland’s “cut to fit the toolspun course” (2010, 2013), a version of annotated code that expands the possibilities for essay-writing in form and content. Their elegant annotations were published in the comments of the source code of the work itself, Sea and Spar Between. In the […]
[…]metrics are carefully designed to discern spending habits and time allocation. World views and critical evaluations are precisely what go missing in corporatized social media – not just from the uncritical inclusion of any and all literary writing in scholarly databases tagged for categorical distribution, but in the “digital humanities” generally, a scholarly emergence(y) that, for all of its “infinite ungraspable” canons of creative and scholarly work has yet to establish, in academia anything approaching a widely shared curriculum for literary studies of born digital writing and scholarship. In 2014, a “decade-plus” into “the emergence of digital humanities (DH),” David […]
[…]and research groups have the opportunity or desire to implement these methods in the same way. Critical Data Studies applies different strands of critical theory across stages of collection, analysis, storing, and dissemination when engaging with data. Jen Jack Gieseking notes that: “big data must be sized up through its mythos, measurements, and the pace of its accumulation” (2). Gieseking not only provides an alternative that makes doing data research more attainable, but also better as “new insights can be gained by accounting for multiple, nested, and imbricated scales of data” (3). How do we build this assertion into a […]
[…]a number of different types of voices. The six characters sort of represent different age groups, different socioeconomic groups, as well as different types of reactions to the events. Some of this was again based loosely on the documentary research that Rod and his students did. The voice of the fisherman character for example, and some elements of his story were adapted from interviews of longshoremen that Rod’s students found in union archives. The voice of the FEMA worker, in a way serves an expository role, to bring in factual information about all of these toxic waste sites on the […]
[…]by Scott Rettberg – January 2021 Exploring Creative Research Practice “Digital Creativity as Critical Material Thinking: The Disruptive Potential of Electronic Literature” by Alex Saum – August 2020 “Addressing Significant Societal Challenges Through Critical Digital Media” by Scott Rettberg and Roderick Coover – August 2020 “What Should the System Say? Humanities Interpretation Guiding E-Lit Technology” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin – December 2020 Proposing Critical Reading Methodologies “Collaborative Reading Praxis” by Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino and Jessica Pressman – September 2020 “Lit Mods” by Álvaro Seiça – September 2020 “Unhelpful Tools: Reexamining The Digital Humanities through Eugenio Tisselli’s degenerative and regenerative” by […]
[…]moment and inspired by them. Granted, clearly visible Rettberg’s inspirations by the platform studies to some extent allow for acknowledging the role of the audience, as does the reader-response theory – the usual suspect when it comes to finding the proponents of audience-based approaches in aesthetic and literary theory. Also, it was Scott Rettberg who brilliantly pointed out a decade ago that if electronic literature is to thrive and develop (speaking in terms of its infrastructure and practicalities), it should communitize rather than monetize. Speaking from the perspective of 10 years after, to a great extent, we can see how […]
[…]is shot through with commercial values in the content and the data-hoarding platform itself whose code is uninspectable and whose parent company is being boycotted by more than one hundred companies withholding their Facebook ad spend during July 2020 to protest Facebook’s agentic role in attacking civic organizations and discourse. What might “decolonization” look like? Cramer pointedly wonders whether we should “dispense with the notion of literary writing.” Art made from internet “plunderground” such as 4chan image macros, is authentic to democratized access but risks “remaining at a safe distance” that “doesn’t actually question the ontological status of ‘literature’” (366). […]
[…]perpetuate a deep faith in the promises of technological advancements at the expense of more critical and dystopian attitude to the high-tech issues that are at play in contemporary media art and its criticism. Unlike e-literature, new media art and its hacktivism (e.g. the recent drone art projects) contribute new devices and tactics to civil society (and to the social citizen science); issues of aesthetics are pushed aside in media art situated beyond the technopositivist ideology. Unfortunately, the significant part of digerati are not familiar with the procedures that demonstrate the malfunction and the role of high technology in the […]
[…]the wrong people the right questions, or he is asking the right people the wrong questions. This critical mésalliance, however, also often results in some of the strengths of the volume. The various negotiations of interviewers and interviewees, especially where the critical agenda is not fully received and accommodated by a deep allegiance to singular literary vision and craft, tend to open up the discussion in a way that I suspect will be appealing for most readers, and what emerges is an expansive and rich global literature focused in non-dogmatic ways on the productive intersections of history, personality, and storytelling. […]
[…]the business models of the Big Four, but also psychosocial energies—both of individuals and of groups—which, however, are thereby depleted. (Stiegler 2019: 7) Transformed into data providers, these entities (both the individuals and groups that the so-called “social” networks take apart and reconstitute according to new protocols of association) are stripped of their individuality: their own data, which constitute what we might call (drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology of temporality) their retentions, are then what allow them to be dispossessed of their own protentions – which is to say their own desires, expectations, volition, will, etc. (Stiegler 2019p: 7) By thus […]
[…]‘the humanities’ own methodological toolkits’ with theoretical insights from software, critical code and platform studies” (Pitman, Taylor 4). While I don’t disagree with the potential of this approach to DH, what I am suggesting inverts the traditional Humanities discursive order more radically, by situating making and materiality alongside or, even better, as conceptual undertaking, by taking the place of the immateriality of the rational logos. In order to avoid falling in the trap of instrumentalization, my e-lit framework does not “supplement” traditional humanities’ methodologies but inverts its rational order and asserts the importance of creativity over or, more accurately, within […]
[…]one excellent digital humanities documentation and preservation project. Mark Marino’s Critical Code Studies (The MIT Press, 2020) proposes a humanities-driven research method of analyzing code of particular relevance to electronic literature. Perhaps with the exception of the forthcoming volume Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2020) edited by Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan, none of these publications extensively place electronic literature among DH debates or practice. Here we do so in a free online open access forum that takes advantage of the multimedial affordances and discursive environment of the Web. With a clear and focused field […]
[…]and sentiments,” as well as evokes a “sense of how much one is like others” (78). While working on the first installment of his project, Brainard wrote in a letter to Anne Waldman that he felt I Remember “is about everybody else as much as it is about me” (qtd. in Padgett 171). However, he chose not to gloss over the memories which clearly mark out his experience from that of the majority of the book’s audience – his homosexuality: I remember one football player who wore very tight faded blue jeans, and the way he filled them. (19) I […]
[…]behind the essay would usually emanate from a particular type of theoretical framework or critical stance — either one that is pre-existing or constructed by the author — the backing would be theoretical/critical literature that related to that framework. The presence of backing for the warrant would vary quite considerably from essay to essay, since any essay would be underlined with assumptions, some of which would be taken for granted as commonly understood by the academic literary community, others that would be strongly questioned. Here I suggest, using Bernstein as an example, that creative criticism may be most effective when an […]
[…]constraints. Confusion and discomfort, poliphony and complexity, will eventually emerge from this critical proposition. But we do need to critically address linguistic discourses from within, based on an aesthetics of frustration (Bootz 2001) that investigates the creative tensions of e-literature. We need to investigate digital language art from the specific digital linguistic processes and constraints, promoting a transgression of writing, subverting our current technical apparatuses. E-literature should perhaps insist on critical digital literacies, placing the reader in situations of loss, unsettling, making foundations falter, turning our relationship with languages into crisis. De-proletarization through transparency, deception, criticality and difficulty should ideally […]
[…]of practices located across a great mire of communities and cultures. Ireland, with artistic and critical communities existing on the edge of Europe, lost between the great institutional powers that can be found within Britain and North America, is the ideal place to explore the peripheral” (see O’Sullivan 2019). This special issue is intended as a continuation of that exploration, comprised of scholarly essays and artistic interventions that demonstrate the great breadth of intellectual and creative endeavour pursued by members of this community. It is only a snapshot of that which was presented in the halls of the Kane and […]
[…]have seen the emergence and dynamic unfolding of new and overlapping transdisciplinary fields or critical methodologies (e.g. Cultural Ecology, Ecocriticism, and Environmental Humanities). Interdisciplinary and plural, combining a large array of multifaceted scholarly approaches (Rose et. al. 2012; Oppermann 2011; Gersdorf and Mayer 2006), the field has however a focal point: the need to reconceptualize environmental issues as social and human questions rather than mere technical ones, to be handled by experts or technocratic structures. Engaging with these ongoing critical discussions, this paper offers an eco-oriented reading of literary and artistic digital works. How do the contemporary digital art and […]
[…]literature (and interactive narrative, more broadly construed) are intimately tied to questions of code: who codes, and how, and perhaps most importantly how it is taught (Salter). With “Re:traced Threads,” that work becomes material. Works Cited Berens, Kathi Inman. “Tournedo Gorge.” Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3, Feb. 2016, http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=tournedo-gorge. Black, Shannon. “KNIT + RESIST: Placing the Pussyhat Project in the Context of Craft Activism.” Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 24, no. 5, May 2017, pp. 696–710. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/0966369X.2017.1335292. Blauvelt, G., et al. “Integrating Craft Materials and Computation.” Knowledge-Based Systems, vol. 13, no. 7, Dec. 2000, pp. 471–78. ScienceDirect, […]
[…]as “Ours Lingages” for eloPorto, where we used language learning tools, collective writing, code, voices, dance, singing, audience participation and a blindfold, had a protocol that could be easily memorized and was not rehearsed. As using “behavioral art” was not an option, I had to find something else. Maybe “agency art” would be better. Arjen Mulder uses it in his article “The Beauty of Agency Art” from 2012. In this article, visiting thinkers as diverse as Shannon, Wiener, MacKay, McLuhan, Cassirer, Langer, Gell, Latour, Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou, Rancière, Danto, Whitehead, Steiner, Rolnik, Deleuze and Guattari, he sets out to see […]
[…](Benjamin). It writes with both the text and the metainterface; its data, material and code. Even if the data-realist third generation e-lit works highlighted here do not directly engage with what is typically called the ‘material’ of computational systems (i.e. the code), they take part in constructing and reconstructing the culturally shared imaginaries related to these systems, which are here considered to be equally ‘materialist’ as e.g. the code (Bucher). Often metainterfaces appear to be ‘smart’ and hide their functionality behind seemingly banal functionalities in order to be integrated ‘seamlessly’ into reality, but they also come with grammars-of-action (Agre). These […]
[…]flatness. Analogously, Christopher Funkhouser suggests in Prehistoric Digital Poetry (2007), poets working with code have long sought to create texts that “make their essence apparent,” (3) that make legible and unmistakable their algorithmic bones. A poem that passes a poetic Turing Test will have instead cleverly obscured its digital nature. Moreover, such tests often take as their standard the well-worn forms of literary inheritance – sonnets, haikus, etc. (This includes, we should note, the Neukom Institute’s “Turing Tests in the Creative Arts”; Rockmore founded this contest and Booten is a former competitor.) To add to Funkhouser’s observation about the modernist […]
[…]David. M. Critical Theory and the Digital. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. Berry, David and Anders Fagerjord. Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. London: Polity Press, 2017. Print. Broken English. “Memes.” http://brokenenglish.lol 23/8/2019 Flores, Leo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature” electronic book review. 4/7/19 http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/third-generation-electronic-literature/ Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: Notre Dame UP, 2008. Print. Hight, Craig. (2008) “The field of digital documentary: A challenge to documentary theorists” Studies in Documentary Film 2:1, pp3-8 Keating, Abigail. “Video-making, Harlem Shaking: Theorizing the interactive amateur” New Cinemas 11.2+3 (2013): 99-110 Montfort, Nick. “A Web Reply […]
[…]and we should dedicate some time to discussing how we reached the selection criteria used in the working-prototype presented. The algorithm is (currently) tasked with finding a ‘goodness of fit’ of a 5/7/5 syllable structured poem (sometimes referred to as a Haikù poem originating from Japanese literature) latent within the finite set of words detected on each double page. The algorithm semantically parses the set terms, filters for English ‘stopwords,’ which NLP classifies as generic, but necessary, parts-of-speech (for example pronouns, particles, conjunctions and prepositions) and ranks the words by degree of ‘salience.’ Salience in this context is measured using […]
[…]by self-driving cars. But we also need to keep asking these questions backwards, applying this critical frame to earlier navigational regimes. For most of human history the ship was the fastest we could travel, the furthest we could think. It’s no mere coincidence that the logo for Netscape Navigator, the world’s first widely publicly accessible web browser, combined a distant horizon and a ship’s wheel. The ship’s passage is defined by a rudder, a vertical blade at the stern of the ship that can be turned horizontally to change the ship’s direction when it is in motion. The word ‘rudder’ […]
[…]of an imperilled global Anthropos. In his Stanford Blog, Mentz notes the problematic of adopting uncritically the planetary grandeur of Anthropocene rhetoric, which elides the unequal distribution of its origins and impacts, and thus observes its supplanting by the “Neologismcene” in the environmental humanities – cataloguing dozens of varied ‘cenes that seek to highlight what their originators contend are the key culprits, symptoms, and ethical demands of the present moment: Anglocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Homogenocene, Oliganthrocene, Plantationocene, Thermocene, and Trumpocene, to name a few. A shared motivation behind these colourful labels is a recognition that the phenomena, dynamics, and potentials of […]
[…]life sciences fieldworkers. This connection was made when some participants from my Glider study group were asked to use Diffraction during nighttime wildlife spotting routines, in order to consider how this may affect their experience with the more–than–human world. However, this preliminary involvement of participants is still ongoing.+++ References: Aagaard, Jesper. “Introducing Postphenomenological Research: a Brief and Selective Sketch of Phenomenological Research Methods.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 30, no. 6, 2016, pp. 519–533. Taylor and Frances Online: doi:10.1080/09518398.2016.1263884. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous Perception and Language in a More–than–Human World. Vintage Books, 1997. Armstrong, Keith. “Embodying […]
[…]project”), where it has garnered a fanbase committed to ensuring that the IF continues to have working emulators (such as Gargoyle or Windows Frotz) on which to run. In view of this, it is possible to discuss the omission of Slouching from the three ELC volumes without chagrin or fear for the longevity of the work. As Joseph Tabbi level-headedly pointed out while setting a direction for the Electronic Literature Directory in 2007, [p]romoters of e-literature should avoid sounding too disappointed about the ‘loss’ of established works of e-lit whose platforms are now outdated […] the vast majority of past […]
[…]fast. The screen is what allows the users to visualize and operate the interface, which decodes the continuous flow (Chatonsky 88). Flux is useful in order to address the incessant movements of information between devices: impossible to comprehend in their entirety. It is in these terms that Galloway addresses culture and the interface, to which I will return shortly, but I can already state that those effects are fundamental incompatibilities: it is the impossibility of reading the present as historical. « Laisse venir » which means “let it come” in french is also very similar to this notion of flux. In a […]
[…]Ecco, 2017. Hecht, Paul J. “Distortion, Aggression, and Sex in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 53, no. 1, 2013, pp. 91–115. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sel.2013.0000. Klein, Richard. “The Future of Literary Criticism,” Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, special issue of PMLA, vol. 125, no. 4, 2010, pp. 920–23. ProjectMuse. Klimas, Chris. “Twine: Past, Present, Future.” chrisklimas.com. 21 June 2019. https://chrisklimas.com/twine-past-present-future/. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015. Ligman, Chris. You Are Jeff Bezos. 2018. https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos. Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. MIT University Press, 2003. Moulthrop, Stuart. “Stuart […]
[…]are not random (non-conscious) but formed within the social organization of our respective groups. Interestingly, this doesn’t mean that our feelings are not real or felt in our bodies, but rather that they are always representational, discursive. Wetherell’s explanation is thus an interesting way of approaching representation as the very foundation of our felt everyday lives. It also urges us to consider non-traditional spaces of meaning-making. Building on this, I argue that the routines and relational patterns that are created through the affective practices of care are themselves creating meaning; one that manifests itself not only in signs, codes and […]
[…]and analytical tools of postclassical narratology, ludology, applied linguistics, critical code studies, and semiotics (starting around the mid-2000s). Spear-headed by pioneering early hypertext reader-response work done for example by David Miall and Teresa Dobson, and further refined by scholars like Anne Mangen, Adriaan van der Weel, Colin Gardner, James Pope, and, most recently, by the UK-based “Reading Digital Fiction” research group (Bell, Ensslin, van der Bom, and Smith; see also Ensslin, Bell, Skains, and van der Bom), a third wave of e-lit scholarship has been producing empirical insights into how readers perceive, process, and communicate experiences of multilinear reading, of […]
[…]after another, adopt multiple voices, and carry a mixed assortment of messages and cargo. The code may not be the text – or all of the text – but here a glance at the work’s code helps illustrate the variety of locations, experiences and materials involved. Transmissions have numerous points of departure and arrival; they are situated in specific material locations or places of personal significance: [‘Canada’,’England’,’Ireland’,’Scotland’,’Wales’,’Cornwall’,’New Brunswick’,’Nova Scotia’,’Cape Breton’,’Newfoundland’,’Labrador’,’the Maritimes’,’the Scilly Isles’,’the Hebrides’,’the Orkneys’,’the New World’,’the old country’,’home’] Each message is not only geographically situated, but also embedded in a system of communication that has a technological and material, […]
[…]introduction to the work. The usual code for punch cards at the time was EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code). Comparing the card perforations and the printed text of the poems in the same cards, the use of EBCDIC is demonstrable. El canto del gallo is a visual poem book, designed in an IBM MT72 composer. When explaining in an article how best-selling novelist Len Deighton composed in 1968 also with an IBM MT72 his novel about World War II, titled Bomber, Mathew Kirchembaum poses that Deighton’s was the first novel ever written on a word processor. He also […]
[…]they don’t, they shouldn’t accept my critique. If an idea within or an aspect of my work is critical or critical art practice, like I’m trying to get at something, then it seems unlikely that I actually know what it’s really important to get at. But I hope that my students will continue to look for the art or critical art practice that is most important to them. Scott Rettberg And maybe do both at the same time. John Cayley And maybe do both at the same time. They should. And I hope that some of them will actually figure […]
[…]Petromelancholia describes a structure of feeling that allows the messaging of corporate advocacy groups like the American Heartland Institute to resonate, touching deep attachments to energy infrastructures, which are also cultural infrastructures. Of petromelancholia, I wrote, What impedes the productive grieving of oil, if we’re to follow Freud in supposing that grief should be superseded by the taking of a new object, is that we, by which I mean myself and most Americans, refuse to acknowledge that conventional oil is running out and that Tough Oil isn’t the same resource, in terms of economic, social, and biological costs. Denial inhibits […]
[…]reads through and finds the appropriate match. LS: What did you use to author the bot? NL: I just coded in Java. LS: Are you willing to share your code? NL: No, sorry. A number of people asked, but they wanted to use it for the opposite intent. Happy to send bits of the bot that would be useful in themselves but not really the bot itself. There were a number of people asking to buy it, and I think that was really why it was shut down in the end. Some people thought I had stepped over a line […]
[…]Duty, because more of us are familiar with the quotidian experience of managing a household than working as military operatives. Acknowledging that realism often carries a social edge in other media, Galloway ultimately suggests that game scholars “turn not to a theory of realism in gaming as mere realistic representation, but define realist games as those games that reflect critically on the minutia of everyday life, replete as it is with struggle, personal drama and injustice.” In the context of this essay, we might speculate whether Galloway’s theory of social realism could encompass non-player-centered or non-social aspects of gameplay, from […]
[…]who contradicted official government pronouncements of safety. Promulgators of fūhyōhigai were coded as harming the regional and national financial recovery after Fukushima, and thus as oppositional to the collective welfare of Japan. As Kimura argues, “After the Fukushima accident, the concept was used to describe people who avoided foods from affected areas as fearmongers who caused much suffering to the food producers” (Kimura 32). Sometimes the government’s pushback against forms of subjectivity that didn’t align with neoliberal norms was more pointedly gendered, as in the deployment of the derogatory phrase “radiation brain mom” to “deride these concerned mothers as hysterical […]
[…]social problems, fill educational voids, and offer disaster relief in the built environment. The group’s social platform marries collaboration, education, environmental responsibility, and architecture. The ideals funded and promoted by Architecture for Humanity are wholly opposed to the totalitarian ideologies promulgated by the Pinochet dictatorship that systematically organized the torture of more than thirty thousand citizens and the disappearance of at least fifteen hundred. In submitting their proposal to the Open Architecture Challenge, then, AGC sought support from a nonstate, nonprofit entity committed to rebuilding and empowering communities in the wake of disaster. The reappropriation of this site of torture […]
[…]considering that proponents of the cultural turn (i.e., post-structuralism, social constructivism, critical race studies) occasionally reduce the sciences to their most deterministic, teleological, and imperialistic iterations. In this respect, the collection shares with recent theories of new materialism the “sense that the radicalism of the dominant discourses which have flourished under the cultural turn is now more or less exhausted” (Coole and Frost 6). And yet, because the “conflicts of interest…between social classes or nations” and “academic critique[s] of power” include the fundamental concerns of people of color, to denigrate these as “fashionable” or “no more than a shifting of […]
[…]change and even crisis (mad cow disease in the British countryside, gentrification of formerly working farms, abandoned city plots gone to seed, farm to table food contrasted with processed convenience food, polar landscapes on which masculinist/nationalist fantasies are projected), but Bracke does not do the critical work to connect these varied environmental crises to the climate crisis of her title and introduction. In fact, Chapter 1 is the section of the book that comes closest to addressing climate and narrative. Chapter 2 focuses on “pastoral” narratives where the novels under consideration draw upon tropes of an idyllic British countryside in […]
[…]an attitude, one must set oneself apart from the object of critique – one must view it “from a critical distance.” For the critically minded, the only alternative to critique is affirmation, or the mindless acceptance of the status quo. In Luhmann’s view, this theoretical attitude is played out: “The distinction between affirmative and critical fails to connect with what is empirically observable […] because it excludes the possibility that what has realized itself as society gives rise to the worst fears, but cannot be rejected. This is the case if one considers the evolutionary improbability of self-supporting structures, the […]
[…]theory to explore what a planetary imagination might look like when conceived with and through critical race studies in general, and black studies in particular.” Because the collection’s essays provide an overview of Margulis’ impact on the life sciences and what might be called philosophies of life, they provide Leong with an opportunity to explore how and why certain visions of life become attached to projections of the future. It is with this goal in mind that she examines how Margulis’ scholarship mediates the various scales of our ecological imaginations – from the very small (i.e., genes and microbes) to […]
[…]Jussi, « New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter », Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 9, n. 1, 2012, p. 95-100 Peters John Durham , The Marvelous Clouds – Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2015. Petit Victor, « Internet, un milieu technique d’écriture », in E. Rojas (éd.), Réseaux socionumériques et médiations humaines. Le social est-il soluble dans le Web ?, Hermès-Lavoisier, Paris, 2013, p. 155-173 Pignier Nicole et Mitropoulou Eleni (dir.), Former ou formater ? Les enjeux de l’éducation aux médias, Editions Solilang, 2014 Simondon Gilbert, Du mode d’existence des […]
[…]had said. Sit back and watch in awe as one sophisticated critter eviscerates another on a color-coded screen. Much too bright or not enough to be convincing descriptions of nature. For the disillusioned, there are these three things: 1. sonorous cowboys hitch up primate dungarees 2. to restore the consolation of silence will remain the role of objects 3. four little girls, along with fragile creatures of many other kinds, will wander in and out of this color field just beyond our grasp Given the charge that the term Anthropocene implies – opening new territory beyond scientific and ethical neutrality […]
[…]breakdowns” and “leaky distinctions” are the very stuff of the postmodern, provocative, and critically productive “Cyborg Manifesto.” However, along with the intellectual liberations induced by the breakdown of “boundaries” around the human, the animal, and the machine, around the material and the semiotic, the actual and the virtual, the physical and the informatic, in the subsequent critical literature such terminal blurrings have also led to significant instances of terminological haziness. The problem that autopoiesis brings into a cyborg world is precisely that it is a theory that posits boundary production for those systems that exhibit the autopoietic form of organization […]
[…]lust, etc… ) are preserved across the vertebrates. “Cross-species affective neuroscience studies confirm that primary-process emotional feelings are organized within primitive subcortical regions of the brain that are anatomically, neurochemically, and functionally homologous in all mammals” Unfortunately for me in my quest for ethical superiority, the truths proposed or exposed by Drucker are subtle, nuanced, reflective, refractive, contextual, hilarious, and problematic. DownDrift refuses to be claimed as a repository for moral indignation. No stance is given a pure line. Hybridization complicates hunting. Society ferments. “A nursing mother whale, just a little offshore, pulls her calf tight to her teat. She […]
[…]our tools, particularly visualization tools, has not yet been accompanied by a new regime for the critical interpretation of these tools; this critical regime is still in a fledgeling state. These digital tools entail “a methodological implementation and a paradigmatic inscription and finally determine singular epistemological postures” (Bigot, 2018), without the designers of the tools nor the researchers who use them always being aware of it. These devices hold normative power over research practices but also over conceptions of scientific knowledge. How might digital literature be of assistance to us in this shift from an epistemology of measure to an […]
[…]to translate these non-electronic literature works to forms that now include some remnants of code, networking, programmability. Let us ask: how should we, how could we remediate these works? Escrita [Writing] could perhaps be remediated (or better, recontextualized) in the Kimchi Poetry Machine, by Margaret Rhee (2014), where she uses tangible computing: when the jar is opened, “poetry audibly flows from it, and readers and listeners are immersed in the meditative experience of poetry.” Small paper poems are inside the jar, with invitations to tweet a poem to the machine handle, and eight original feminist “kimchi twitter” poems were written […]
[…]Jessica Pressman, Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass braid together media archeology, critical code studies and visualization as they exfoliate William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (2005). Attribution matters in Project, but the authorial divisions are deliberately, productively messy. Identifying who wrote what discloses the edges of expertise and allows readers to chart the progress of the authors’ mutual influence. Writing very much for each other, such openness requires emotional “vulnerability” (140) as discoveries “reroute individual interpretive efforts and [lead] to group epiphanies” (138). The result is a suspenseful book of literary criticism. Chapter one teaches the reader how […]
[…]Funkhouser picks up where the previous book left off (around 1995) and makes a series of case studies that span about 15 years of Web based digital poetry. In these case studies, he maps out some of the most important developments in digital poetry, showing how writers from the first generation continued to develop their work in the 2nd generation or contemporary period. And while this book concluded with a nod towards some of the emerging platforms of the time: social media networks, mobile platforms, and Web APIs, its conceptualization of the field was aligned with Hayles’ notion of contemporary […]
[…]26 August 2018. https://nickm.com/post/2018/08/a-web-reply-to-the-post-web-generation/ NPD Group. “Instapoets Rekindling U.S. Poetry Book Sales.” https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/2018/instapoets-rekindling-u-s–poetry-book-sales–the-npd-group-says/ 2018. Nacher, Anna. “The Creative Process as a Dance of Agency: Shelley Jackson’s Snow: Performing Literary Texts with Elements,” in Digital Media and Textuality: From Creation to Archiving, ed. Daniela Côrtes Maduro. Bremen. 2017. Reed, Rob. “Everything You Need to Know About Emoji.” Smashing Magazine. 14 November 2016. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/character-sets-encoding-emoji/ Rettberg, Jill Walker. “A Network Analysis of Dissertations About Electronic Literature.” Paper presented at the 2013 Electronic Literature Conference. Paris. http://conference.eliterature.org/sites/default/files/papers/Jill-Walker-Rettberg-A%20Network%20Analysis%20of%20Dissertations%20About%20Electronic%20Literature.pdf Rettberg, Scott. “Room for So Much World: a Conversation with Shelley Jackson.” EBR. 6 January 2019. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/room-for-so-much-world-a-conversation-with-shelley-jackson/ […]
[…]“I got nothing out of the poetry I read,” that for him “It was as if poems were written in code,” (Knausgård, 2018, 422), and then he goes straight into this very rigorous and fascinating, in fact virtuoso reading… Joseph Tabbi: But that massive lack is real. And the way that he accesses Celan is more like what Scott described. He reaches up and takes a book off the shelf. I think the essays are some of the best parts in the corpus actually. But one reason they’re some of the best is that we’ve got the writer reflecting on […]
[…]essay? If not, why not? For “the distinction”, as Peter Boxall writes, “between creative and critical writing is becoming harder to sustain” in the twenty-first century. And if everything, as Professor Einstein might put it, is relative with no consistent frame of reference, how can our shared social categories that define writing and genre hold? Yet, not everyone subscribes to the view that there is a contemporary melding of creative and critical practices. Recent computational approaches by Andrew Piper have revealed that this breakdown of boundaries is less pronounced than we might imagine. Piper shows, for example, that machine classification […]
[…]a complex non-linear view of the atomic world through the wave/particle duality, highlighting the codependence between observing apparatus and observed object. The notions of probability, quantum codependence, quantum entanglement and general relativity provide the fundamental analogies and metaphors for extrapolating from nuclear physics and astrophysics into the social field. Drucker’s appropriation of notions from the general theory of relativity and from quantum mechanics to describe the social medium can be summarized in two formulations: a) social spacetime (“social atmosphere” is the concept used in the GTSR) is relationally constituted as a field of interactions whose agents are brought into being […]
[…]information of a cursor with a plot triggers a bell sound created by additive synthesis. The vocoders only use 3 samples: a cello sound lasting one second, a whisper in a musical atmosphere of 50 seconds and the lapping of a river of 14 seconds. Due to the digital processing of sounds, these samples can be recognized only at certain times. The whisper can be heard only at the beginning of the work and the sound of the water only at the end. In other words, the “primitive” sounds of the piece can only be heard in specific geometric configurations […]
[…]Review. August 29, 1993. Delany, Paul and Landow, George P. “Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Literary Studies: The State of the Art.” In Paul Delany and George P. Landow’s (Eds) Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991, 3-50. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeologies of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York, Pantheon, 1972. Grigar, Dene, and Stuart Moulthrop. “The Interview with Bill Bly about We Descend.” Pathfinders, http://scalar.usc.edu/works/pathfinders/bly-interview. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008. Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical […]
[…]context, with the presence of an audience, albeit an invisible, online audience, and working in the “safe” private space of the rehearsal group. As Sawyer explains, “[r]ehearsal enables interactional synchrony to be established more quickly, but it also makes the group performance more predictable” (65), suggesting there is a tension between the need to build trust and work through possible “group riffs”, while at the same time avoiding creating too much familiarity and the associated potential loss of spontaneity. Once the “live” netprov was launched, participants did begin to post their pre-written materials, but gradually there was a shift from […]
[…]of poetry by imprisoning the verbal and social elements of poetry within a relatively static codex. Poets working in the age of print were, certainly, aware of how print had transformed the possibilities of their art, leading to experiments like typographic poetry in which the formatting of the words on the printed page make a shape emblematic of the theme of the poem. Nevertheless, poets like Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, and Fatima Naoot continue to practice poetry as a verbal, social, and ritualistic art form. What Adab and websites like it do is to return even modernist poetry back more squarely […]
[…]story about a spiritualist named John Murray Speare, who built a machine (under instruction from a group of helpful spirits known as the “Associated Electrizers”) that was intended to house the second coming. It was called the “New Motor” or the “Wonderful Infant.” A woman calling herself the “second Mary” lay near the device and simulated labor, summoning the spirit down into the machine, which moved, a little. (A mob smashed it.) This seems to me not just an eerie real-life update of Frankenstein, but a perfect parable for the times, and brings me back to literature. I think postmodernism […]
[…]Thus, this gathering positions the authorship of electronic literature as threefold: an author or group of authors who initiate creation, the technology which makes significant cognitive decisions in the production of the work, and a readership that alters the work as they read and engage on a sensory level. All in all, this gathering is designed to immerse electronic book review readers into the discussions and debates that occurred at and surround the 2018 Arabic E-lit Conference in Dubai. As such, it is crucial that I end by reminding our readers that the ebr began and continues as an open-source […]
[…]does not imply free will but rather the implementation of behaviors programmed into the genetic code” (25). This definition of cognition as related to choice allows Hayles to distinguish between what she calls cognizers and noncognizers (30): “On the one side are humans and all other biological life forms, as well as many technical systems; on the other, material processes and inanimate objects” (30). As she explains, “The crucial distinguishing characteristics of cognition that separate it from these underlying processes are choice and decision, and thus possibilities for interpretation and meaning. A glacier, for example, cannot choose whether to slide […]
[…]and slapstick. Under language speaks to both the necessity to notice how writing intersects code, and the consequences of a collision (collusion?) when poetry meets code. So, “under language” underlies and infuses Under Language, which is, fundamentally, a generative textual work, meant to be experienced visually, on the screen. But the brilliance of this work is Moultrop’s sonification of the underlying five layers of computer code. The first is a series of computer-voiced renditions of ActionScripts programmed by Moultrop that operate the work. The second layer is a series of ambient recorded collages of tunings across radio broadcasts. The third […]
[…]of the AEL is the first in this context, which includes activities such as conferences, workshops, studies, and networks. Closing the digital divide : The culture of collaboration between the writer and the programmer has not been sufficiently promoted in the Arabic e-lit context. Moreover, most Arab writers do not have a solid background in programming and computer software. This context created a digital gap between the Arabic e-lit and its world counterpart. As explained before, the comparison between the digital technology used in the current Arabic e-lit and that used in the ELC3 resulted in a clear digital divide. […]
[…]business is also the economy of sharing, the sharing economy. And if you look for instance at studies of Uber drivers—you could say that they were completely non-alienated to this sharing ecology. But actually what the studies show is that they work for limited time periods. They work for only one year as an Uber driver. And while they’re doing it, they develop very different strategies of circumventing the system. If they are categorized as a certain kind of laborious subject they can for instance turn off, reset the system. (Munn, 2018) They constantly develop tactics to deal with this system. […]
[…]has a long history in electronic literature. She considers, for example, the role of the source code and its manipulability in Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” and the many remixes and revisions produced thereafter. She even looks back to John Cage’s chance procedures and use of computational processes to identify that this process even predates what we now call electronic literature. The movement towards embracing the computer as co-producer of the literary work is an unstoppable current, she seems to suggest at the essay’s end, observing that “[w]e are now on the verge of developments that promote our computational symbionts to […]
[…]between human and other-than-human nature. The tremendous popularity of the selfie has produced studies, which trace its origin and distinguish in detail between user groups and occasions. The most prominent book-length study in English is Alicia Eler’s The Selfie-Generation: How Our Self Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture (2017). While this study explains many less obvious purposes of the selfie, it fails to place the phenomenon in the context of environmental concerns. Often, the selfie does relate to the urge to appear popular, successful, and attractive online. It thus shifts focus from any surroundings to […]
[…]noted, practitioners in the games industry who might call what they do something else, scholars working in predominantly critical capacities, the most prolific of which is arguably Anne Karhio. The point that I am making here is simple: Maguire was, for a long time, Irish e-lit’s only representative, and whatever small community we now have owes a considerable debt to his pioneering efforts—to borrow from Grigar and Moulthrop—as I often do—Michael Maguire is Ireland’s pathfinder. When we assess Maguire’s contributions to the field, we need to look beyond what he did as an instigator: not only did he start a […]
[…]a number of different types of voices. The six characters sort of represent different age groups, different socioeconomic groups, as well as different types of reactions to the events. Some of this was again based loosely on the non-fiction research that Rod and his students did. The voice of the fisherman character, for example, I adapted the style of that voice, and some elements of his story, from interviews that Rod’s students did with longshoremen in Philadelphia. And the voice of the FEMA worker, in a way he serves an expository role, as a way to bring in that factual […]
[…]intention and would insist instead that these names, words, and messages were knowingly encoded, but not by writers or authors; on the contrary, the paragrams would be “knowingly” encoded by language itself.” Jhave: No […]
[…]of national, regional, and stylistic varieties and combinations of natural and computational codes. The media in which these expressive forms occur shape the potential uses and meanings of various semiotic modes, and each digital language art-efact thus has to be seen as a stand-alone, unique manifestation of the semio-medial liberties that digital language artists have at their disposal, or indeed create for their own practices and those of others. Although the illness metaphor evoked by Cayley’s titular suffixation may seem inhibiting, the complexity of his underlying ideas helps to move us toward an idealist image of humanity faced with the […]
[…]Press, 1996. Coover, Roderick. “The Digital Panorama and Cinemascapes.” In Switching Codes; Thinking through Digital Technologies in the Humanities and Arts, edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover 199-217. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Coover, Roderick, and Scott Rettberg. Toxi•City: A Climate Change Narrative. 2014, 2017. http://crchange.net/toxicity. CR Change Production. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Benjamin’s Aura.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529060, 336-75. Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2015. Jackson, Shelley, Snow – a Story in Progress, Weather Permitting. 2014-. https://www.instagram.com/snowshelleyjackson/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/25935290@N04/sets/72157639539497175, 2014-. Morris, Jeremy. “Sounds in the […]
[…]in resisting the constraints of Big Software on digital media would, I believe, have two options: working with non-proprietary tools, or subverting proprietary tools. John Cayley’s The Listeners is clearly inscribed in the latter. Finally, The Listeners not only highlights the workings of programmed language but it also, and especially, demonstrates the possibility of a literary listening to programmed language, opening a space for the inscription of human-intentionality beyond the surface level of the human-computer interface instrumental rationale. As a literary intervention exploiting Alexa’s software and natural language processing frameworks, this work creates a new form of attention to the […]
[…]Gernsback’s writings precede the work of a growing number of artists who tinker with code or hardware to create art. These digital tinkerers experiment with medium affordances and, like Gernsback (although often extrapolating and diverting from a tool’s or medium’s original purpose) they too aim to see beyond the conventional and familiar. They also speculate about possibilities while considering media constraints as chances to explore the unknown. In a similar way to Gernsback’s followers, they expose the layered materiality of their devices by tinkering with digits, wires, screens and metaphors. The Perversity of Things successfully examines different aspects of Gernsback’s […]
[…]as such (other than as quoted strings) and, if they could be, then the code would no longer be code. “The Code Is Not the Text” asks language artists who work in programmable media to remember what they are working with. In common with many artists who have, at some point, identified themselves as writers, I am fascinated by the surface(s) on which we write. For most of us, this resolves to a fascination with the book and its culture, an extraordinary world, with no sign of ending any time soon. Jacques Derrida’s expansive notions concerning what “the book” and […]
[…]not simply a machine for the creative generation of language, but a machine for the generation of critical, possibly evaluative, riPOSTes that are conscious of the institutional framing of the text they […]
[…]contemporary reader. In this case, we sought to take into account the layered model of platform studies (Bogost and Montfort 2009) that allows a more detailed theoretical engagement with the one new dimension, the computational dimension, of electronic literature. Specifically, this model distinguishes reception, interface, form/function, code, and platform levels, explaining how each interrelate ant that context is connected to each. As Pressman did, we also discussed how the translation process for electronic literature specifically intersects with other contextual issues: In traditional works, the translator is often invisible, a background figure, sometimes subtly credited or even not mentioned at all. […]
[…]the functions specified by the program), and intentions (it intends to compile/interpret the code and execute the commands and routines specified there). Although the human writes the code (and other humans have constructed the hardware and software essential to the computer’s operation), he is not in control of the lines that scroll across the screen, which are determined by the randomizing function and the program’s processes. What is the point of such generative programs? I think of John Cage’s aesthetic of “chance operations,” which he saw as a way to escape from the narrow confines of consciousness and open his […]
[…]and alienated by their noise. But do we understand their speech? They garble their way through unicode letter by letter.See Note 7. Code: https://github.com/jhave/Big-Data-Poetry [Comment: This section reflects on the material (technical, economic, political, cultural) situations of digital writing, positing it in a set of social conditions. More than a medium, and more than an organ, language is here understood as an externalized technology, or a prosthesis.] [Note 7: In his project Big Data Poetry (2014-2017), David Jhave Johnston uses machine learning techniques to generate strings of language. BDP uses a combination of techniques of visualization, analysis, classification and substitution […]
[…]Civil Liberties Union. 2018. Judge Allows ACLU Case Challenging Law Preventing Studies on ‘Big Data’ Discrimination to Proceed. American Civil Liberties Union. April 2, 2018. https://www.aclu.org/news/judge-allows-aclu-case-challenging-law-preventing-studies-big-data-discrimination-proceed. Bratton, Benjamin H. 2016. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke Univiversity Press. Lyon, David. 2015. Surveillance After Snowden. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity. MacCormack, Patricia. 2012. Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory. Farnham, Surrey, […]
[…]networks of interpersonal relationships but also operate through a digital network of programmed code, software, and hardware.Circle’s highly hybrid quality is grounded in how it binds code, communication protocols, software and analog objects to produce a literary experience far exceeding the confines of linguistic text and textuality. It is one of the works showing how electronic literature is not just about the letter and how it is neither (or not anymore) just about multimodality, it is rather about weaving the code into and through the tangible, the experiential, the elemental. Jessica Pressman insightfully sums up its way of operation: We […]
[…]human will (with just a little bit of nondenominational faith for good measure). It is critical that this interview is presented over the radio (the medium of Voice), and that the dancer inspires the Parkers to “personalize” their music by adding a singer. In other words, at a certain level, Ambient Parking Lot opts for a familiar configuration of human-centered agency. It is critical, as well, that this emphasis occurs in a rare (for this text) first-person narrative. The “I” in the dancer’s narration ultimately functions as an antidote to the propulsive drive of the “We”; it is a device […]
[…]Towards Preventing and Controlling Cancer with Diet and Lifestyle. NJ, Wayne, Avery Publishing Group, 1982. Kushi Michio; Alex Jack, The Cancer Prevention Diet: Michio Kushi’s Nutritional Blueprint for the Prevention and Relief of Disease. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Michael Learner, Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer. MA, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1994. Patrick Quillin; Noreen Quillin, Beating Cancer with Nutrition: Clinically Proven and Easy to Follow Strategies to Dramatically Improve Your Quality and Quantity of Life and Increase Chances for a Complete Remission. OK, Tulsa, Nutrition Times Press, 1994. The list reproduced […]
[…]that includes the remediation of forms, remixability, human computer interaction, software and code studies, narratology, trans-lingual, intersemiotic approaches, and multimodal studies in conjunction with the creative practice, and with translation as a creative practice. 3.1 The Poetry Machine One of the platforms we have explored is The Poetry Machine (PM), which is an interactive, participatory, digital literary installation (Woetmann et al. 2012).Peter-Clement Woetmann, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Martin Campostrini, Jonas Fritsch, Ann Luther Petersen, Søren Bro Pold, Allan Thomsen Volhøj, et al., The Poetry Machine, http://www.inkafterprint.dk/?page\_id=45, 2012-. CAVI & Roskilde Libraries. PM is designed to make people affectively engage with, and […]
[…]elaborate on the intertwining of four dimensions in the translating process: translinguistic, transcoded, transmedial, and transcreational. Although I agree with the necessity of bringing together language, code and medium (after all, this is a continuation of the all-inclusive approach sketched above), I don’t know whether the transcreational dimension has the same status as the three other aspects. My reservations here are twofold. On the one hand, transcreation has become a kind of buzz word, which may lack the sharp focus that is needed to make sense of translinguistic, transcoding or transmedial operations. On the other hand, the term may be […]
Daniel Schulz, studies History and English Studies at the University of Cologne. In 2016 he finished his BA with the thesis “Body, Text, and Society in the Work of Kathy Acker.” From March 7th to September 15th 2017 he carried out the inventory of the Kathy Acker Study at the University of Cologne, which he is currently […]
James O’Sullivan is the Founding Editor of New Binary Press and Digital Literary Studies, a freelance journalist, and writer. He took up a lectureship at University College Cork in July 2017, and there he will host the 2019 conference of the Electronic Literature […]
[…]Millennium. London: Vintage, 1988. Print. Cayley, John. “Untranslatability and Readability.” Critical Multilingualism Studies 3.1 (2015): 70-89. Web. Accessed April 2018. Coetzee, John Maxwell. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Vintage, 2007. Print. Coetzee, John Maxwell. Elizabeth Costello. London: Harvill Secker, 2003. Print. Coetzee, John Maxwell. Summertime. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. Print. Coetzee, John Maxwell. Giving Offense. Essays on Censorship. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996. Danielewski, Mark Z. Only Revolutions. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Print. Encyclopædia Iranica. “Censoring an Iranian Love Story,”Last modified February 18, 2011. Web. Accessed April 2018. Esty, Jed. “Realism Wars.”Novel 49.2 (2016): 316-342. Web. Accessed April 2018. Foucault, […]
[…]parasitic audience with a flexible backbone who neglect knowledge and culture, who harm the working class with a disregard for culture and live their lives, never seriously taking anything into account.» However, the fate of non-half-intellectuals was not too rosy. For example, Khvylovy shot himself in 1933, protesting against the arrests of his friends, and most of them were killed by the Soviet government in 1937 (the generation of Ukrainian artists liquidated that year is often called Executed Renaissance). The half-intellectual author at long last always became both a bad engineer and a poor writer, but when in the time […]
[…]actively promoted) that appears to have calcified and entrapped Acker herself when she fell out of critical favor. Thus, if her “life was a fable,” it was one “created through means both within and beyond her control” (14, 15). Kraus’s novelistic powers are also on display throughout After Kathy Acker. Kraus is adept at recreating particular scenes, such as the description of one of Acker’s apartments in New York: “Mornings, the sound of the boiler kicking on wakes them up early, and they go back to sleep. Steam heat moves through the pipes, but it never fully warms the room. […]
[…]framed by Ruberg and Shaw’s comprehensive introduction, which bears inclusion in any queer studies, games studies or even cultural studies class. The authors establish the significant academic contributions to the study of queerness in games, in tandem with broader queer developments in the industry and the emergence of distinct queer game cultures. Tracing the developments of queer theory and games studies, and stressing their points of intersection, their introduction expands queer game studies beyond investigations into explicit LGBTQ content in games. Queer Game Studies makes its case by sheer accretion of ideas. Cumulatively, the contributions suggest the liberatory possibilities of […]
[…]He is also the Podcast Section Head for First Person Scholar, uWaterloo’s multimedia games studies periodical run through its Games […]
[…]here for convenience but of course rules are enacted, at least for the most part, by the game by code and also partially through the game’s community in the case of multi-player games. Although code is an essential part of the game and it influences heavily our overall experience, it does so in a way that is mostly opaque to the player. Rules however, are either presented to the player directly or are learnt through interaction with the game system; testing its boundaries for what is and is not possible in the world. Rules are a crucial element of shaping […]
[…]finding yourself by losing yourself in the white-hot chemical decomposition of cell.f in all its coded glory. Can you relate? AM: No. Though I probably could. 🙂 I’ve never thought of it as primarily networked but about getting rid of this distinction between words and pictures. For me, writing hypertextually is always a postcinematic writing, and while pictures work differently than words, their different networks (to steal your terminology) or the differences in their networks are erased. But it’s one thing to talk about that kind of writing and quite another thing to actually do it. The vogs are an […]
[…]about when the words disappear and the story space becomes immersive, but this assumes certain codes in the narrative that make for a smooth delivery. By contrast, modern and postmodern works of literature and film complicate the reader’s access to narrative space, either by limiting immersive possibilities or by using techniques to activate mental activity outside or parallel to the narrative space. We don’t have a word to properly describe the cognitive space of the reader, the way a text triggers personal trails of thought and imaginary possibilities of an emerging fiction. In Terminal Identity, Scott Bukatman compares the de-narrativized […]
[…]Algorithms&oldid=1830 > [accessed 7 May 2016]. Hayles, N. Katherine (2008), ‘Traumas of Code’, Critical Inquiry, 33: 1, 136–57. Manurung, Ruli, Graeme Ritchie, and Henry Thompson (2012), ‘Using genetic algorithms to create meaningful poetic text’, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 24: 1, 43–64. Ritchie, Graeme (2007), ‘Some empirical criteria for attributing creativity to a computer program’, Minds and Machines, 17, 67–99. Rosenheim, Shawn James (1997), The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. XIII. Electronic literature is posthuman. ‘It’s not human.’ Literature’s gone to the pits – sorry, to bits (Callus […]
[…]theatrical, or random like Trump (if we separate him from the power that will annihilate many working people who supported him), emerges in loitering movements, effect becoming cause – optic nerve phenomena seemingly reciprocal between eye and brain yet perhaps not – no less prohibition but a less overt ban, yet against publish, speak, write, think, see – so the censorship can be interior, secretly disturbed, as gripping as more constructive experiences just as it may drive toward the seeming opposite of complex. As censorship commonly must to disguise instinctively its intestinally wrapped logic. Precisely what Ai Weiwei witnesses being […]
[…]a bit too much of conservative sympathies and that wasn’t in tune enough with the established codes of the in-group. Nagle, however, does identify herself as a person of the left, essentially much in line with what she calls the “materialist” leftism of a Bernie Sanders or Barbara Ehrenreich. The online brigades of Tumblr and the like, in turn, she deems to be representative of the “liberal left” of America (Kill 68). These labels seem rather accidental, however, and so we return to our initial problem of the ubiquity of underdefined concepts: It is not at all clear what it […]
[…]doesn’t necessarily recognize those without equal access to virtuous circles, or the ability to code or without sources of income other than their code. Now let us return to the curious formulation that “Information wants to be free.” According to Roger Clarke’s web page on the phrase, this truism was coined by Stewart Brand in a discussion at the first Hackers Conference in the fall of 1984. It went on to be printed in different places including Brand’s book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987). It is interesting that in the original formulation Brand contrasted the desire […]
[…]is not in the textual output which is always changing and generated through the execution of the code by the computer. It may perhaps be located in the code, which Montfort, like other practitioners of digital poetry, makes available for free for others to hack, copy, manipulate and use in different contexts and in the case of this work, countless remixes over the years. But even here, the code has to follow the scripting rules of the programme used, in this case Python, and the code needs the computer to be executed that creates the language. This brings me to […]
[…]and only 24 exceed 1 billion dollars per year in sales revenue. The most exclusive and powerful group of publishers in the world are the five companies who last year had sales revenue of 4 billion dollars or more. Sales revenue on the other side of the financial spectrum though is more representative of contemporary publishing in the United States. It has been estimated that in the US alone, there are about 59,000 publishers with annual sales revenues of less than one million dollars, and about 47,000 publishers with publishing revenues of less than $50,000. It is at this point […]
[…]“The New Cultural Geology,” Huehls proposes that an “exomodernist” strain of “post-critical’ and “posthumanist” contemporary literature has attempted to move beyond the “representational impasses” that impeded both postmodernism and post-postmodernism by accepting our neoliberal hybrid subject-object ontology. By doing so “exomodernism” ostensibly risks complicity with neoliberalism’s treatment of individuals as the “free ontology homo œconomicus, the simultaneous subject-objects of laissez-faire.” As neoliberalism is yet to codify all modes of being, however, Huehls postulates that authors can harness literature’s stylistic and formal attributes to produce new meanings and values. In chapter 1, Huehls analyses Uzodinma Iweala’s Beast of No Nation (2005) […]
[…]article…it circulates, it influences a field in the making even if it’s like William Gaddis studies, say, and then five or six years later it counts towards your tenure… SR: And that’s how they’re able to hold researchers hostage… JT: …that’s where they economize something that’s an autonomous activity for a not for profit guild type of corporation, which is what the tenured professoriat is: and that’s now being economized. SR: And then they can control tenure. They control and profit from tenure and that’s the problem, right? So, I’m thinking of those alternative structures and they can, even be […]
[…]and the growing gap between the rich and poor that has drastically affected an erstwhile white working class (and disproportionately affected other groups too, to be sure) that, in the loss of some of its once unassailable privilege, perceives (rightly, if shortsightedly) that it has been largely shunted aside by the New Economy and thus has lashed out in anger and disillusionment by helping to put Trump into office. Seen in this light, the new film’s ghosts are symbolic of the real danger that the Left-neoliberal fantasy wishes away when we recall the scene in the basement laboratory in which […]
[…]group—results from a precise combination of several factors: the number of declarations of group value and group identity that circulate internally and by which members address one another; the number of declarations of group value and group identity that circulate publicly and by which members recognize their membership or are invited to affiliate; the magnitude or intensity of this public declaration: the “mark” or memory it leaves on members or on public consciousness; hence the duration of group identity in time—the longer any entity endures as a group, the more corporate it may be said to be. It would in […]
[…]is not an objective or unmediated source; it is a certain subsection of published poetry. Working to form thoughtful critique at the intersection of technology and identity, Lisa Nakamura’s writing usefully tempers Johnston’s enthusiasm. She warns that “in order to think rigorously, humanely, and imaginatively about virtuality and the post-human, it is absolutely necessary to ground critique in the lived realities of the human. The nuanced realities of virtuality—racial, gendered, Othered—live in the body.” Though the theoretical realm of the post-human has many emancipatory possibilities, it seems useful to remind ourselves that, for now, the world writes upon our bodies, […]
[…]Author-God. Rather than pseudo-philosophical pontificating, Illegal Literature presents practical, critical, and thoughtful studies of the moments when law and economy come in to support the power of authorship. Noting that derivative use most frequently ends up encouraging the popularity—and often the sale—of the work being parodied, Roh plainly points out that these legal battles, more often than not, are born out of a desire for creative control or out of moral indignation. “The only conceivable reason an author or copyright holder might have for pursuing litigation,” he writes, “would be moral outrage; they might feel that their right to control […]
[…]of literature to consider new, post-critical ways to challenge neoliberal ontology.” Those post-critical ways, more likely than not, are given to us by the corporate structures and ontologies of the present—and not a few that have persisted from the past. America, love it or leave it? Where today would one go? Henry Turner’s advice, to “Love Your Corporation,” is again anything but satirical. In his analysis, Turner never rests with critique; he seeks rather to isolate earlier corporate entities —in churches and in kingdoms, for example, in towns, and in guilds whose purpose was to sustain specific, closely guarded trade […]
[…]“‘A scheme of echoes’: Trevor Joyce, Poetry and Publishing in Ireland in the 1960s.” Critical Survey 15.1, Anglo-Irish Writing (2003): 3-17. Print. Edwards, Marcella and John Goodby. “‘Glittering Silt’: The Poetry of Trevor Joyce and the Myth of Irishness.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 8.1, Irish Issue (Spring 2008): 173-98. Print. Engberg, Maria and Jay David Bolter. “Digital Literature and the Modernist Problem.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5.1 (2001). Web. 1 Mar. 2016. . Galvin, Mary. An interview with Graham Allen, Cultural Mechanics podcast. Produced by James O’Sullivan. Web. 20 Feb. 2016. . Goodby, John. Irish Poetry since 1950: […]
[…]entirely new forms, institutions and aesthetics. In the early days of electronic literature’s critical self-consciousness, it was actually-existing hypertext that made these demands, and the fate (or destiny) of hypertext shows very clearly how new forms and institutions are hacked into the material cultural architectures of vectoralist regimes. If hypertext was not necessarily literary — as such, or with regard to literary art — its early history was intimately involved with literature as a name for documentary and archival practice (which of course includes literary practice). Arguably the first true architecture of network culture, the World Wide Web, established the […]
[…]500 hundred-year-old master narrative of Humanism still needs to be contested.” Drawing on ecocritical conceptions of narrative agency situated in and arising from the environment and its matter, Gibson suggests that “critical posthumanism is able to offer myriad readings of humanity’s storied habitat.” Alexandra Dumitrescu proceeds in a similar vein, directly questioning what might come next or, indeed, what is already among us in “What is Metamodernism and Why Bother? Meditations on Metamodernism as a Period Term and as a Mode.” In an essay replete with literary examples, she returns to the regional context of New Zealand fiction and poetry […]
[…]Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony Appiah. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 336-57. Borges, Jorge Luis, “Kafka and His Precursors.” In Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, trans. by Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. Nealon, Jeffrey. Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. James , David and Urmila Seshagiri. “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution.” PMLA 129 2014: 87-100. Sukenick, Ronald. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. New York: The Dial Press, […]
[…]and the methodologies employed within them, by introducing the notion of disappearance into critical practice. I turn, therefore, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Tim Ingold’s anthropology, alongside Baudrillard’s theory of disappearance, to set up a methodology that places its faith in disappearance. I then move on to demonstrate how we can put this methodology into practice in the context of research into theatrical production and audience reception. To conclude, I return to postmodernism and reflect on the instructive traces that its disappearance has left for contemporary critical and methodological practices. The Vitality of Disappearance It seems paradoxical to attach vitality […]
[…]“Bootstrapping Finnegans Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 7.1 (2006). http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v7/main/essays.php?essay=dumitrescu —. “Foretelling Metamodernity: Realization of the Self in the Rosary of Philosophers, William Blake’s Jerusalem and Andrei Codrescu’s Messiah.” Constructions of Identity. Ed. Adrian Radu. Cluj: Napoca Star, 2006. 151-68. Print. —. Metamodernism – Towards a New Paradigm. Manuscript in the Codrescu Collection, University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2005. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. London: Secker and Warburg, 1985. Print. Edmond, Lauris. Late Song. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000. Elliott, Anthony. Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Print. Feldman, […]
[…]some of Winterson’s earlier works, concerned as they are with matter, might now benefit from a critical posthumanist reading. Critical posthumanism recognizes the continued hegemony of old and new master narratives, whilst at the same time rejecting any telelogically driven and technologically deterministic visions of the future. Drawing on ecological postmodernism’s understanding that everything is interrelated, and material ecocriticism’s theorization of matter’s narrative agency, critical posthumanism is able to offer myriad readings of humanity’s storied habitat. The Stone Gods suggests that storied matter, rather than master narratives, will have the last word about Planet Blue. And the home to which […]
[…]writing technology materially dependent on the interfacing of physics and mathematics (matter and code) that enabled a cascade of symbolic processes from the writing symbols through programming languages through machine language through differential voltages, and back. He conceptualized this double nature of digital code as an expression of the tension between forensic materiality and formal materiality. Screen presentation, data models and programming are formal material instantiations of processes that also have a forensic material instantiation at the nanoscale of magnetic processes. It is the allographic nature of code that enables it to represent multiple symbolic systems and multiple media materialities. […]
[…]to my emailed questions, Sutu wrote of the “magical surprise” the AR gave him when they got it working right, and the feedback he has received from readers since then that describes a similar impression: “People are foremost drawn to the magical effect of it and inquire about the story later. Which sounds a bit gimmicky, but in the aftermath of a sale I’ve received plenty of emails from happy customers who have enjoyed the story too. So that’s a relief.” One of the most intriguing ways in which form and content are brought together in the comic partakes of […]
[…]2014. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 (Winter 2002): 369-418. Elias, Amy J., and Christian Morau, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. What Is Life? Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Nealon, Jeffrey T. Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University […]
[…]planetarity matters. To these important critics and theorists, one could also add the collective reworking of modernist literary studies by a diverse number of contemporary critics including but not limited to Jessica Berman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Susan Stanford Friedman, who have contributed to a significant rethinking of modernism from a geoaesthetic perspective. Friedman’s contributions, starting with Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998), a landmark essay on planetary modernism in Modernism/modernity (2010), and a new book published this year on that topic, are critical for humanities scholars contemplating the planetary in literary studies. Other scholars […]
[…]clustered around those whom Matthew Arnold had heralded as “alien,” that is, detached from the working class, the middle classes, or the aristocracy by virtue of their aestheticized and critical sensibilities. Admittedly it was an event in philosophy, but mainly in the arts and literature. It had little or no economic or political stake. Philosophically its core figure was Nietzsche, who mounted the strongest critique of democracy and who presented a new biological philosophical anthropology against humanism. In the arts, as we know, it happened outside of popular and respectable bourgeois culture. Modernism made two key moves, each of which […]
[…]that,” manifest itself in postmodern poetry? What does that tell us about artists and writers working within the remit of postmodernism and, furthermore, what might their work then tell us about postmodernism as a moment – or a series of moments – in literary history? Stein’s “Present Spot of Time” In many ways, Gertrude Stein can be viewed as an early exemplar of postmodern literature, and many postmodern scholars have sought to claim her as such (Berry 1992; Perloff 2002; Schmitz 1986). In her early compositions we can detect a number of characteristics that would later become synonymous with postmodern […]
[…]David. “Introduction.” Medievalism and the Academy II: Cultural Studies. Ed. David Metzger. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998. 3-12. Nixon, Mark ed. Samuel Beckett’s German Dairies 1936–1937. London: Continuum, 2011. Pilling, John ed. Beckett’s Dream Notebook. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999. Spade, Paul Vincent. Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham. Cambridge: Hackett, 1994. Utz, Richard. “Medievalism as Modernism: Alfred Andersch’s Nominalist Littérature Engagée.” Studies in Medievalism 6 (1993): 76-91. Van Hulle, Dirk. “Words and Works: Transtextual Nominalism and Beckett’s ‘Missing Word.'” Text 15 (2003): 278-89. Walpole, Hugh. Judith Paris. New York: Doubleday, 1931. […]
[…]This is a problem not just of history but also of discipline. We have institutions for modernist studies and jobs in modernist studies. But for literature since the mid-twentieth century, we are often stuck with one overarching “contemporary” that refers to texts produced from last week to decades before many of today’s scholars were born. This use of the term contemporary leaves those who work on the mid to late twentieth century in an institutional no man’s land – on the job market and in publishing – between modernist studies and the study of the latest trends in literature. Witness, […]
[…]irretrievable, but our distance from their origin confers a powerful nostalgia, even to their critical reception. A digital world-weariness, too, has set in. Assertions in the late 1990s that online advertising would never catch on evoke later handwringing over blogging’s rise, which in turn sounds just as quaint as the claim (briefly popular in 2010) that the iPad would never sell with a name so polysemic. The following essays from 1995 to 2003 inhabit a utopian moment that has since been eclipsed, and a series of moments that continue to be eclipsed with increasing frequency. Central to the moment was […]
[…]mineral, artifact, idea) do not address first-order nature, they do align well with media studies descriptions of the status of humans in film representation (in Kracauer, for example). Nor is this second-order status any less important in the invention of electrate metaphysics. “Being” and the entire conceptual discourse around it is an emergent capability of alphabetic writing as technology, as Heidegger noted in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953). In Blumenberg’s “reoccupation,” we can say that electracy throws out the literate answer to the Question of Being, but retains the question itself, now undertaken within the capabilities emerging through the digital […]
Vienna Now! Recent literary studies such as Mark Taylor’s Rewiring the Real (read Vanwesenbeeck’s review); Michael LeMahieu’s Fictions of Fact and Value; and the volume Wittgenstein and Modernism (edited by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé and LeMahieu), have ushered in a return to logical positivism in literary studies, more than two decades after the perceived impasse between continental and analytical philosophy (as captured in the historical stand-off between Derrida and Searle) seemed to have been decisively settled in favor of the former (read Kellert’s essay and Michaels’ essay). Perhaps not coincidentally, this return to logical positivism is drawing renewed attention to the Vienna Circle […]
[…]the question, “How does the work happen in the traffic between people, their formation into a group, a coterie, an office, a class, an institution, a public, a counter-public, a school, a neighborhood, a network?” (27). In the case of McSweeney’s, an impetus to this formation is the effort of its founder, the novelist Dave Eggers, to create an aura, not only of “anticommercial” artistic authenticity, but also of interpersonal authenticity. Hungerford discovers this aura in the publication’s offices (35), where an active social scene merges with the scene of production, providing workers who lack Eggers’s celebrity with a valuable […]
[…]his spinning of gears, keeping body and soul together as a studio hack, constantly writing and reworking scenes for MGM and other studios that are dismissed, written over, projects stalled and discontinued. O’Nan deftly weaves in just enough dialogue scenes with familiar literary and Hollywood names to keep inquiring readers on point and alert: Humphrey Bogart and his aggressive wife, Mayo Methot, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker, Joan Crawford, and Robert Benchley, as well as the usual Fitzgerald suspects, his secretary Frances Kroll, a young Budd Schulberg, and of course, Sheilah Graham, who tolerantly and doggedly comes to Scott’s […]
[…]how intensities can become extensive, moving from the infra-individual outwards towards the group or from the group towards new members, but the volume would benefit by discussing the relational field of affect across the flows of capital as they play out in groups. That, or perhaps it’s better not to think about changing the world at all. The better part of me sees Massumi’s work as interested not in changing or reversing the neoliberal course, but instead to use joy as did the Zapatistas—to create new worlds inside the old. The third thought follows from the second. Missing from the […]
Robert Lestón is working on a book that studies autonomous communities and their relation to social movements. His work has appeared in Configurations, Kairos, Enculturation, Itineration, Atlantic Journal of Communication, and other venues. He is also coauthor of Beyond the Blogosphere: Information and Its Children (2012) with Aaron Barlow. He is an Associate Professor at CUNY, NYC College of […]
[…]the journal necessarily draw tangents to arguments and concepts running throughout EBR, such as critical and educational praxis, the posthuman, and the potentialities of electronic […]
[…]taken up and (re)defined? How might we rethink noise to allow it to play a more defined role in critical practice? Of course, the central question remains: why noise? For an answer, we might turn to Michel Serres. In a 1983 essay, Serres insists on remembering noise. This may appear as peculiar, for thinking of conventional understandings of noise—grating, loud, unexpected or unwanted—noise does not seem to be something all too easily forgotten. Still, Serres insists: “It is true that we have forgotten noise. I am trying to remember it […] I shall look for noise in the parting of […]
[…]Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (forthcoming; with Rocco Gangle). Greve is currently working on the concept of nature in the novels of Cormac McCarthy and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies of nature, in particular those of Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Lorenz Oken, and Gilles Deleuze (including the ideas these thinkers have spawned in contemporary philosophical speculation). His further research interests encompass the tradition of intermediality in American cultural practices and the history of critical […]
[…]part of system. Like a salt marsh that cleans the toxic chemicals out of water. LS: What are you working on right now? MK: I’m working on Giant Pool of Money and Tap, a project about fracking. LS: You’ve done a lot of traveling in the past year. How has it influenced your art? MK: Right now I split my time between Ann Arbor and New York City. I was on sabbatical this year, so I went to the ASA on Giant Pool of Money. I went to Russia (and was there the week their currency lost a third of […]
[…]through evacuating its inherent emotional intensity. How can writing that seeks to maintain a critical distance adequately, or accurately, she asks, express or contain engagements with affect? While Houser does not discard critical distance, she rightly insists that we “must take methodological inspiration from the literature we analyze and bring different ways of knowing—from scientific experiment to embodied feeling—to bear on each other. Following this procedure, interconnectedness becomes method and not only theme or aspiration” (224). Throughout Ecosickness, Houser (re)incorporates language, which is alternately coded as scientific or affective, in order to undo the false dichotomy between reason and emotion. […]
[…]to which flesh and blood readers can read and assign meaning (potential or delayed meaning) to any code, including machine readable codes. “The New Art [says Carrión] appeals to the ability every man has to understand and create signs and systems of signs” (61). Because they point to different material facets in BPaS, the QR codes are, thus, instances of non-figurative language that further emphasize the structure and configuration of the textual environment. Carrion’s systems of signs can too be taken to think about the textual environment at large that has been created by Borsuk and Bouse and is re-created […]
[…]of late capitalism should not be perceived as a major shortcoming of his text; his rigorous critical re-reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus along with his meticulous use of primary source material more than serves the book’s purpose. To be sure, as Timothy Yu has recently pointed out, there is no shortage of scholarship addressing Wittgenstein’s influence on literary works. LeMahieu is working alongside a number of other scholars in addressing the peculiarly literary quality of the Tractatus. These critics, in turn, have built from the shift to what Rupert Read and Alice Crary term the “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein’s text, centered […]
[…]sprite imagery’s original form is code, which is text-based, the digital apparatus translates code into image and then code is modified in order to introduce text into to the game generated sprites, which are then translated into images in a book. Chris Funkhouser, however, takes text, converts it into digital images and then returns it to book form in order for it to operate as text and yet still maintain the words in digital image form. Both poetics require effort and knowledge on the part of the reader to appreciate the expanded field of hermeneusis. Knowing where the words and […]
[…]of production for many in neoliberal economies, then in what sense can we legitimately say that a group can mobilize in the public sphere without having to rely solely on a discourse of precarious work conditions? In other words, are there other factors or elements that can function to ameliorate working conditions without having to recourse to strict economic demands? Lorey draws on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the virtuoso, or performing artist, who exposes herself to the gaze of the other. The act of performing does not have an end (tangible) product in mind but it is the performance itself […]
[…]are interested in producing a text that argues for the acceptance of videogames into an art-critical consciousness, they are also often in direct conversation with artists. These artists are presented in their own words, in lengthy articles and interviews, and, unsurprisingly, they have a different relationship to their own work than do the critics included in Videogames and Art. While the critical contributions to Clarke and Mitchell’s anthology perform much of the same labor as Salter, historicizing and theorizing videogames within accepted aesthetic frames, the artists themselves present a more provisional and shifting perspective on what is artistic about “videogame […]
[…]how history is made, lived, and not let the subject of the human subject obscure too greatly our critical thinking about the historical time we call modernity, and how it instills crucial differences between subjects and objects. Greif briefly touches upon this possibility, yet leaves out acknowledging the work of interrogating modernity already having been done by Bruno Latour. Following Latour, scholars such as Bruce Clarke and Stefan Herbrechter have found ways to harmonize literary and science studies by examining the fluid demarcations between humans and their environments (Clarke 111-38; Herbrechter 158-9). Thus it seems that a posthuman future will […]
[…]communist commitments, the only intersection possible between the two thinkers seems to be either critical or forced. If the first two difficulties make an encounter between Nietzsche and Benjamin unlikely, the third makes it rigorously impossible. A relationship between Nietzsche and Benjamin cannot be founded upon Nietzsche’s philosophy because, above all, Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot be reduced to the unified content necessary for relating it to another in any traditional sense. From one perspective or another, Nietzsche’s notoriously unsystematic writings never praise without critiquing or critique without praising. “Nietzsche’s writings,” McFarland says, “solicit with an unprecedented intensity the very possibility of […]
[…]ability to innovate and increase productivity” (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 4). Others in the second group attribute the decline not to a shortcoming in America’s ability to innovate, but to the ability of other countries to develop at a more rapid pace. The third group, those who anticipate the “end of work,” include Jeremy Rifkin, who argues in his 1995 book The End of Work that technology is bringing about these sweeping changes and will replace workers. Brynjolfsson and McAfee are not as pessimistic as those in the “end of work” camp and believe that not enough attention is being paid […]
[…]he detected some primal relationship between writing and madness” (Macey 97). While Foucault was working on Madness and Civilization, another intellectual force of the twentieth century, Gregory Bateson, was also rethinking the role of language in mental illness, exploring how common, everyday communication patterns factor into the development and manifestation of schizophrenia. Although Bateson was working with an overbroad and now somewhat outdated notion of “schizophrenia,” his ideas were revolutionary, recasting schizophrenia not as something inaccessibly and “abnormally” puzzling, but as something that should be considered, instead, in relation to familiar acts of communication and logical impasses that, on a […]
[…]“Without a high degree of ‘existential redundancy’–the constraints of the specific code of communication, codes of behavior, particular lexicons, contexts, intentions, the actual relationship between the sender and receiver, and so on—there is no signification.” (234) Information is not concerned with the systems (sender and receiver), which process it. Meaning, on the other hand, is. Thus, information is necessary for signification, but not sufficient. Tan Lin’s Plagiarism/outsource: notes towards the definition of culture : untilted Heath Ledger project : a history of the search engine : disco OS, which nominally concerns itself with the death of actor Heath Ledger employs […]
[…]a flat or object-oriented ontology] what useful work does the concept of the hyperobject do?” (Critical Inquiry). Although there are rich intersections to be explored via such studies, it clearly becomes difficult to do justice to the many nuances in disciplinary differences between the sciences and the humanities. Science is the lingua franca of our current moment, but how well do academics minimally trained in the sciences translate it? As Bianco’s videos of the eco-disaster sites appear to ask, where does this increasingly anxious conversation turn into action? We can also look at early moments in the recent evolution of […]
[…]out that posthumanism does not come after humanism; rather, posthumanism might be thought of as working through the way the privileging of the human has resulted in discriminatory practices such as colonialism, racism, sexism, and speciesism. Now, far from declaring that posthumanism is at an end, I would propose that the posthumanist project has just begun. But I am concerned with what trajectory the project takes—to suggest it is a question of global power relations is almost beyond the obvious. What is less obvious is what focal point is taken up. Which is why I would say, watch the critters. […]
[…]these functions, the data from updates is used to monitor software behaviors and scan the source code of files. These scans may occur as users open individual files or during periodic total system scans. If malicious code is detected, the system sends another ghostly signal, in the form of a pop-up notice, that it has found an infection. These signals tend to include signifiers of heightened alarm, through the heavy use of the color red, alarm symbols, and exclamation points. However, the alarm in these cases is generally directed at the anticipated future of what could have been. The invisible […]
[…]come to terms with “our” new place within the current situation and environment—but the “critical” in critical posthumanism signals that it would be equally foolish to let go of the terrain that has always constituted the humanities’ stronghold, namely language and, for want of a better word, philology. The critical expertise that is arguably needed most in such uncertain and hyper-political times is the kind of radical but also caring critique of language practiced by poststructuralism and deconstruction at their best. In short, to be critical of posthumanism (the discourse) one must pay close attention to what it says (about […]
[…]the next time the game is played. For Woods, whose computing environment required him to add code that limited access to the game during working hours, if the cave closed today, it would open again tomorrow; the dynamite blast also invites the player to think of the cave, too, as transient – something that exists only within the digital world of the computer. Caves Before Adventure Gregory Yob’s 1972 game Hunt the Wumpus presents a very brief textual description of a cave (e.g. “YOU ARE IN ROOM 13 / TUNNELS LEAD TO 12 14 20”). The player is given a […]
[…]into the Techno-Primitive.” Identity Matters: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Game Studies. Ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea Russworm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming. Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone Press, 1981: 61-172. Print. “Getting to the Core of Environmental Remediation: Reducing radiation exposure from contaminated areas to protect people.” IAEA.org. International Atomic Energy Agency, n.d. Web. 7 Nov. 2014. < https://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NE/NEFW/_nefw-documents/Environmental_Remediation.pdf>. Grusin, Richard. “Reproducing Yosemite: Olmsted, Environmentalism, and the Nature of Aesthetic Agency.” Cultural Studies 12 (3): 1998. 332-359. Web. . —. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, […]
[…]impossible to separate “data” from “code” as we struggle to interpret the “text of the code.” It is as if the code itself is the generator of text. Later in the series, we can more easily distinguish, still within the code as such, regions that we can read as “data” or “input.” These are parts of the code within which we might intervene, replacing the existing “data” or “supply text”—of the author’s, of Montfort’s—with our own. For “Taroko Gorge” this potentiality took off. The version printed here is the original, but “Taroko Gorge” has by now become as much a […]
[…]Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1970. 184-202. Marino, Mark C. “Critical Code Studies.” Electronic Book Review (2006). Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Place, Vanessa, and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009. Portela, Manuel. Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Raley, Rita. “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework.” Electronic Book Review (2002). Ricardo, Francisco J. The Engagement Aesthetic: Experiencing New Media Art through Critique. International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. New York: […]
[…]9 Sept. 2015. Web. 22 Nov 2015. . DiCaglio, Joshua. “Ironic Ecology.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 22.3 (Summer 2015): 447-465. Print. Ferrara, Mark S. “Blake’s Jerusalem as Perennial Utopia.” Utopian Studies 22.1 (2011): 19-33. Print. FWC Developer. Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission’s “Florida Gopher Tortoise.” Google Play. 2015. Web. 22 Nov. 2015. . Geocaching.com. “Beneath the Pines.” Geocaching.com. 7 Nov. 2010. Web. 22 Nov. 2015. . ——”Mr. Turtles Last Stand.” Geocaching.com. 12 Feb. 2013. Web. 22 Nov. 2015. . Gibson, William. The Peripheral. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2014. Print. Grusin, Richard. Premediation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, […]
[…]of many bodies and forces” (Bennett 21). As Bennett explains, “assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” (23-24). In The Lego Movie, one such persistent energy takes the form of what will likely motivate the film’s coming sequel: that is, the dangerously creative toddler whose vision for the Legoscape more radically reconfigures the city’s parts. Emmet’s rattling to life rises from meaningless clattering to the kind of intelligible communication that Rancière identifies […]
[…]world without the need for a curator at all. Whatever the form criticism might take—composition studies, literary close reading, digital humanities—if it doesn’t acknowledge the material base of its own production, the research obscures rather than clarifies, dehumanizes rather than liberates. How to be an Intellectual is a book that keeps that frame in focus, and contributes to our understanding of how criticism is produced by people who are themselves products of critical institutions. Work Cited Williams, Jeffrey J. How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University. New York: Fordham University Press, […]
[…]presumptions and prejudices concerning Pynchon that have manifested themselves within literary studies. Indeed, this critical stance of Eve’s book towards the main tenets of criticism on Pynchon is a freshly polemic element that should be applauded in the context of philosophically inclined readings of literary fiction in general. However, before we trace the workings of Eve’s “systematic, tripartite analysis of the interactions between the fiction and essays of Thomas Pynchon and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno” (5), there should be a caveat as concerns the only ostensibly outmoded character of the three philosophers under […]
[…]between its memory and the possibilities of loving and thinking, here and now, animates a certain critical energy. This Provincetown of memory is a place of oceanic freedom. Going to the movies, sometimes with her mother, sometimes alone. The resource that is cinema, for the young: “Everyone thinks desire is make believe when it comes to famous people and movies. In that case, you can go all the way. Go for it.” Young Masha rides her bike around everywhere, with a headphone sound track, cruising with a kind of tomboy autonomy. “I was being the kind of boy I wanted […]
[…]in my approach to language, due to the sheer amount of time I’ve spent in front of screens and working with code. My memory and conceptions of space and time are imprinted with the logics of digital systems. That statement is most likely true for many in ELO, for many in our society, and investigation of what we might mean by literature that is “conceptually” electronic, imprinted somehow with the logics of digital systems, is a productive path to explore. It is not as clear to us that we should collect “conceptually” electronic work in an ELC publication if the […]
[…]Digital Modernism shows how the close reading of a difficult digital text can lead its reader to a critical stance about the digital world in general. “Reading Code” focuses on Erik Loyer’s Chroma, a story about the quest for a universal language. In Chroma, the fantasy of universal language is revealed to be fundamentally anti-universal, itself encoded with specific ideas about race, gender, culture, and class. The story revolves around three young people who are sent into the realm of “mnemonos,” “where the things of the mind appear as real as anything your five senses perceive” (Loyer, qtd. Pressman 128). […]
[…]post-Platonic forms gesture toward a kind of cybernetic beauty (yes) for which there’s no critical vocabulary as yet. When Matthew G. Kirschenbaum speaks of the “radical aestheticization of information,” he means to suggest, I think, that the work of the artist in the “information age” is not – as hostile critics of postmodernism contend – only the critical work of resistance to informational transparency, or pure unadorned utility. The artist’s work is also the constructive work of noticing “accidental” aesthetics at play, not as by-products but as primary cultural contexts for the production of technology. Better yet, it is the […]
[…]analytical metalanguages (those deriving chiefly from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), analytic codes that only lure us into the position of the Hegelian beautiful soul, calmly dissecting things from some lofty perch while disavowing any messy entanglement in the phenomena under scrutiny. Morton’s position here strikes me as a rather too-easy evasion, since one of the main purposes of the dialectic as it developed in Marx’s hands was to re-inscribe the subject into the material processes of history as such, and to undermine the temptations of bourgeois idealism. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if Morton and his fellow posthumanists aren’t in a […]
[…]Demon” recounts Drucker’s theoretical understanding of signs and of reading. “Graphesis and Code” applies this argument to the realm of images. The case studies discussed are both theoretical and practical explorations realized through drawings, rhetoric, and software. Ivanhoe, the ‘Patacritical Demon, Temporal Modeling, Subjective Meterology, and the structure of the artists’ books digital archive ABsOnline, are all examples of outcomes from Speclab‘s work. With her main collaborators, Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, Drucker designed these projects to examine the foundations of humanities research as it encountered electronic environments, particularly seeking to understand how the “interpretative task of the humanist is […]
[…]absent: queer studies (as exemplified in the work of Carolyn Dinshaw), animal and more broadly ecocritical studies (like that of Karl Steel or Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), race and ethnicity (Geraldine Heng), and periodization. While this last topic does come up in Marina Brownlee’s essay on the Crónica sarracina and lurks, in the form of an interrogation of the term “modernity,” in others as well, from reading them, you would never have seen Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory coming. The subject of an energetic discussion in PMLA in 2015, Cole’s book locates the generative dialectics of identity and difference at […]
[…]Repair: A Reply to John Bruni, by Stefan Herbrechter Works Cited Badmington, Neil. “Cultural Studies and the Posthumanities.” New Cultural Studies. Ed. Gary Hall and Clare Birchall. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006. 260-72. Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” The Portable Emerson. Ed. Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin, 1981. 266-90. Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford and New York: The University of Oxford Press, 2014. Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London and New […]
[…]of radio and art. Radio art is radio by artists. The third example manifesto comes from PizMO, a group of sound artists working in France for over 50 years. Thir manifesto reads, We create experiences and ambiances with audio architecture. We are an anonymous collective of artists and musicians experimenting w/ audio & radio. We reactualize a drifting theory thru post-radio, sound-systems and computers. We explore portable, mobile, temporary & immersive audio spaces and campings. We favor loading forms, immaterial works and time-based objects. We experiment with micro-forms & replicas & duplicatas [sic] & palimpsests. We develop social tactics & […]
[…]the concrete to the poetic to the theoretical, the following nine short statements were made by a group of emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. This video documents a presentation developed for the ‘Future of Electronic Literature’ panel at ELO 2012: Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints June 20-23, 2012 Morgantown, WV The video was made in 2 weeks prior to conference using 123D. Voiceover was partially improvised at conference, then re-recorded afterwards. [Text voiceover from video] I have no idea What the future Will really bring I have no idea What time sings […]
[…]to the poetic to the theoretical, the following [insert number] short statements were made by a group of emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. (The following comments were delivered as part of the panel “Futures of Electronic Literature” at the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Morgantown, West Virginia. Audio of this presentation can be found at: http://harp.njit.edu/~funkhous/chercher/audio/borsuk-amaranth/borsuk-ELO_1.mp3) I’ll keep my comments brief, but I would like to preface them by giving you a sense of my stake in the future of the ELO, as both a scholar and a practitioner. There are three things […]
[…]the extra-functional, machinic history appending each and every technological inscription encoded today, we continue to simultaneously ignore and overestimate our position as the subject of history. Human consciousness, as a lens, seems at once too general and too specific to capture the magnitude and minitude of historical inscription. The future of the Electronic Literature Organization, then, is not merely contingent on the discussion generated from conference panels nor the artistic and literary intentions of its members’ projects, but is constantly co-written by computational collaborators. In some sense, works of electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital art operate according to the same […]
[…]opportunity for cross reference, and thus the dissemination and reviewing of both creative and critical works. Also the description passage in English helps open and create interest to multilingual e-writing practices. However, the KB still doesn’t allow to engage with the wider literary community interested in translating and capable of it. In this respect Translating E-lit conference at Paris 8 is a significant leap forward. Seemingly perfect solution should be found in attracting grants for translation projects, making the translation conference annual and/or including a permanent panel on translation to the ELO. However, it is only one side of the […]
[…]the concrete to the poetic to the theoretical, the following nine short statements were made by a group of emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. (This short essay has been transcribed and adapted from talk points given during the “Futures of Electronic Literature” panel at the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) conference. It reflects the views and positions of that time and context.) The academic terrain is shifting. In this landscape, how might the ELO leverage its unique affordances and constraints in order to grow, sustain and thrive? To do so, introspection is crucial. […]
[…]the concrete to the poetic to the theoretical, the following nine short statements were made by a group of emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. As Nietzsche says on brainyquote.com, “The future of the ELO influences the present just as much as the past.” When we submitted proposals to ELO, ELO 2012 was the future. For now, it is the present, but it will soon be past. Naturally, we find the future in the present, informed as it is by the past. For this panel, I’ve been asked to offer a few ideas about […]
[…]standpoint of collective behavior, there’s a crucial junction that every successful movement or group comes to in its lifetime: what do we (the movement or group) do to meet our goal? From this perspective, there are two choices: assimilate into the institution in which you are trying to affect change, or fade into oblivion knowing that the goal–whatever it was– was completed. When looking forward to the future of ELO, it makes the most sense to me that the organization moves to become sutured into the institution of literary and media studies. While the organization is definitely (not) limited to […]
[…]it was because they did all of these things in a way that maintained a balance between creativity, criticality, and working with emerging technology. The ELO is a place where philosophical, political, and scholarly inquiry maintain a fine balance with critical making and aesthetic experimentation. And that’s not easy to do. Perhaps in another article, I will take up Stephanie Strickland’s call for criticism more directly, but what I want to advocate for in this piece is not a new or radical change to the ELO’s mission, but rather a re-affirmation of what I have already witnessed: a continued and […]
[…]an economy. Meantime, down here, sooner or later someplace deep, there has to be a horizon between coded and uncoded. An abyss. (357) This abyss, figured on DeepArcher’s splash page and so eerily taken up in the 9/11 monument’s two ‘pools,’ is the ship’s ultimate destination. As another traveler on the ship tells Maxine, in a passage that evokes Pynchon’s description of the American wilderness in Mason & Dixon as an “unlined” state of undifferentiation “where quite another Presence reigns, undifferentiate, – That whichever precedes Ghostliness” (491), the course of the ship is “the edge of the unnavigable, the region […]
[…]in my approach to language, due to the sheer amount of time I’ve spent in front of screens and working with code. My memory and conceptions of space and time are imprinted with the logics of digital systems. But all language is slippery, or course, and the term ‘electronic literature’ is a useful one. I’m not making a case for its obsolescence. Rather I’m interested in taking the above as a place to start thinking about the future of the term and organization in tandem. One complaint I’ve heard often in the ELO community, and justifiably so, is that other, […]
[…]denomination, but one who is nonetheless driven by the passion and fervor of faith rather than the critical methodologies of the moment. The fashionable term “postsecular,” which defined McClure’s book and much of the contemporary critical discourse on religion still, does not appear here. Neither is Taylor, a Professor of Religion at Columbia University, concerned, as is Hungerford, with providing a cultural genealogy of postmodern believing, its rituals and its politics. Instead, his ambitions are at once grander and more modest. His is a philosopher’s approach to literature, one that skirts the impurities of history and politics in favor of […]
[…]they can be borrowed and repurposed in a variety of ways, with no regard for who thought the code into being. Instead, the power of the code is registered by its application, and the measure of its authority is in its execution, not in the personality that sits behind it or even directs its use. A sloppy bit of code written by “Bill Gates” simply will not work, no matter how important the man might be. And, once a functional code is in use, it becomes very difficult to dispute the moral character of its outcomes because there is nobody […]
[…]within this series, along with works having little to no relation with e-lit. What do these case studies mean for critical scholarship on e-lit? Of course, these book series will continue, but for there to be a discourse and growing field of electronic literature, there must be a place to incubate and disseminate critical scholarship that emphasizes e-lit as literature. Our analysis of these examples is not to dismiss or disparage these series. Their contributions are unquestionable. Rather, we want to highlight the way the discursive framing of scholarly publications determines the field of statements possible to make about the […]
[…]gather for a brief review and reflection period. And, in fact, by the end of three days our little group of collaborators did feel something like a team in a stadium, or maybe a newsroom: working hard together on a shared goal under tight constraints. And the results were tremendous: we gathered videos, essays, and comments from contributors around the world. We divided the project into a series of discrete writing “sprints,” each focused on a theme we agreed on at the beginning of our venture. Ranging from production and editing to discoverability and the concept of the book itself, […]
[…]existence…. (237) Ryan’s observation partially reflects the electronic medium in which he is working—as she notes, “you never know if you have seen all the nodes and followed all the links” (226)—but is just as much a feature of Joyce’s handling of point of view and his use of poetic, suggestive images. In Reading Network Fiction Ciccoricco links Joyce’s claims about contours and flow to the organization of some of his electronic works: “Contours are the shape of what we think we see as we see it but that we know we have seen only after we move over them, […]
[…]and Lawson Jaramillo, Cynthia. 2007. “Dovetailing Details Fly Apart—All Over, Again, in Code, in Poetry, in Chreods.” http://www.slippingglimpse.org/pocode Strickland, Stephanie, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo and Paul Ryan. 2007. slippingglimpse. http://slippingglimpse.org/ Stoppard, Tom. 1993. Arcadia. Faber and Faber: London. Thom, René. 1980. Modèles mathématiques de la morphogénèse. Christian Bourgeois Editeur. Tomasula, Steve. 2004. [First published in 2002] VAS: AN OPERA IN FLATLAND. [Art Design by Stephen Farrell]. Chicago : University of Chicago Press. Waddington, Conrad Hal 1977. “Stabilisation in Systems: Chreods and Epigenetic Landscapes.” Futures. Volume 9, Issue 2, April 1977, 139–146. […]
[…]is a kind of agency revealed here that manifests most powerfully through the water. The poem, the code, and the reader are all very important, to be sure, especially within the context of media studies, which has tended to fetishize the technological at the expense of the natural. For this the chreod offers a powerful lesson: it is the water’s pull that powers the text. Indeed, it is the “voice” of the water that is paramount when it comes to thinking about environmental fragility. Communicating the contingent nature of ocean water is, according to Poets for Living Waters, one of […]
[…]English and other national literatures), computer science, digital culture, communications, media studies, performance studies, art, and education. This is a cross-disciplinary field where methods may vary considerably, and the shared subject matter is, largely, the discussion of creative works “with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer,” to quote the Electronic Literature Organization’s definition. In this paper, I present an analysis of 44 PhD dissertations on electronic literature published from 2002 to 2013. I used the open source network analysis software Gephi to visualise the citation networks and patterns […]
[…]alone to define a given canon for an entire field of practice is taking a bold, or even arrogant, critical position. The critical reception of a work might be the one area in which we could hope for a clearly empirical measure of canonicity. Yet Ensslin asserts a particularly privileged position with regard to reception when she writes that: The research situation with most hypertexts is such that reviews and academic papers are written by hypertext supporters. Therefore, criticism tends to be rather opinionated and to emphasize the academically interesting sides of a hypertext rather than its cumbersome attributes. Evaluations […]
[…]produced seminal scholarship on Agrippa. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Joseph Tabbi, and Alan Liu and his group at The Agrippa Files have done extensive work in tracking the chronology and cracking the code. Stuart Moulthrop points out that “Agrippa seems to me very nostalgic for the age of print. . . Second, with all respect and seriousness, Agrippa is a piece of High Concept.” What is notable, though, about this work, is the minimal interest in the poem itself. Thus, while the entirety of the text exists on Gibson’s Website, little of the scholarly investigation has focused on this: The string he tied […]
[…]Antônio, Giselle Beiguelman, and Lenora de Barros, whose records contain links to creative works, critical writings, and events in which they were involved. The bulk of the critical writings currently contained in the Brazilian Collection were extracted from three principal sources, two of which are anthologies of essays and one a monograph comprising a panorama of digital poetry from its origins to the present. They are Jorge Luis Antonio’s Poesia Digital: Negociações com os Processos Digitais: Teoria, História, Antologias (“Digital Poetry: Theory, History, Anthologies”), Jorge Luis Antonio and Artur Matuk’s (Eds.) Artemídia e Cultura Digital: Palestras e Textos Apresentados e Desenvolvidos […]
[…]away, almost from the moment of its introduction, in favor of still newer critical modes like critical plant studies and object-oriented ontologies, whose pieties claim to outdo anything else to date in their sensitivity to the wholly other. The delight in reviewing a book from 2009, five years on, is that of refusing the market’s demand always to be of the moment. The past, whether medieval or more recent, has its resources. It offers us a way to stop the smooth flow of capitalist time. And with Shukin, we must aim to be as adaptive as capitalism itself, always seeking […]
[…]cultural studies (292). Steel’s book participates in an exciting movement to “bring medieval studies into mutually beneficial critical relations with scholars working on a diverse array of post-medieval subjects, including critical philosophies that remain un- or under-historicized” (Joy 292). Such critical philosophies include posthumanisms and new materialisms of various stripes, affect, thing, and object oriented theory, ecocriticism and critical animal theory, and theories of sovereignty and biopower. Steel’s book certainly brings the Middle Ages into intimate relationship with contemporary critical philosophies, particularly those philosophies devoted to deconstructing the sovereignty of the human and elaborating an ethics of co-constitution and co-existence. […]
[…]of non-fictional texts. Social discourses are activated to provide the site of Tomasula’s critical intervention. In other words, the decision to cut off the signifier of the severing operation–using “vas” for vasectomy, or in other words, reducing vasectomy to “vas”—symbolically disables the State apparatus organizing the sterilization campaigns, literally depriving it of its capacity to contain people, vasectomizing the vasectomizers, so to speak. The morphological neutralization of vasectomy by subtraction finds a macro-structural equivalent in the strategic juxtaposition of biopolitical positions and their refutations. Such a layout desemanticizes the aggressive declarations by blocking their full deployment to avoid turning VAS into […]
[…]the differences among particular instances or events of codework, they all incorporate elements of code, whether executable or not. Code appears in the text, then, in whole or in part, in the form of a functioning script, an operator, and/or a static symbol.Rita. “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework. The Electronic Book Review, September 2002.http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/net.writing While Language poetry is largely concerned with the social construction of language and chooses to absent the “subject” from poetry, the latter concerns itself with the cybernetic construction of language – how writer and algorithm co-create text – and to that degree preserves the […]
[…]Moraru’s argument amounts to little more than labeling Iran “totalitarian” and Nafisi’s group thereby politically subversive for the very act of holding a reading group in Iran. This argument seems simplistic and decontextualized compared to the more nuanced positions taken by Rowe (whose essay Moraru briefly cites and dismisses) and Hay. Rowe points out that Nafisi gives the “impression that the Islamic revolution occurred in a political vacuum,” omitting that the shah’s regime was backed by the U.S. (258). Moreover, Nafisi completed her book in the U.S. with a grant from a the U.S.-based Smith-Richardson Foundation for a primary audience based in the […]
[…]“Information Design, Emergent Culture and Experimental Form in the Novel”. Flusser Studies 09. www.flusserstudies.net/pag/09/tomasula-emergence.pdf Zulaika, Joseba. 2009. Terrorism: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Chicago & London: University of Chicago […]
[…]what we (mis)understand as the natural language that floats on the surface of the machine screen. Codework, Sondheim’s coinage, which has become part of the working lingua franca of internet poets, refers to that esoteric language of the underneath brought to the surface and forced to integrate, bumpily and bumptiously, with natural language. Pages 53-57 detail a code named “Julu” (also the name of one of Sondheim’s many avatars), which lists seemingly random words interspersed with commands (i.e. “@noun = qw (“). It’s an old modernist trick, to show the means of production –in this case the commands –as part […]
[…]the book is well ordered and provides enough overlap between sections to stimulate several critical dialogues across essays without losing the collection’s coherence. Even better, A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide succeeds in distinguishing Against the Day as both a unique novel in Pynchon’s oeuvre and as one that helps us to rethink that very oeuvre. To begin the collection, Brian McHale’s “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching” sifts through the various, and mostly erstwhile, popular literary genres at play in Against the Day and assesses their greater meaning. The most prominent of these, McHale points out, are the boys’ adventure story in […]
[…]frame for his argument. Birger Vanwesenbeeck chastises the postmodern and posthuman turn in Gaddis studies for excommunicating religion from their critical congregations in “Agapē Agape: The Last Christian Novel(s).” Vanwesenbeeck returns to Gaddis’ comment that The Recognitions constitutes the “last Christian novel” and argues for seeing the writer as trying to “write himself loose from a religious doctrine, which [. . .] he loathed as much as he [. . .] realized its deep contiguity to the art of fiction” (88). For Vanwesenbeeck, this bind comes to the fore in Agapē Agape, as Gaddis’ views of (artistic) community are communicated […]
[…]a more profound understanding of current political, social, and cultural issues nor does it forge critical citizenship beyond the ‘critical’ decision about ‘what is best for my kids.” The importance of projects aimed at such critical citizenship becomes clear if one considers the neologisms digital media generate to indicate their impact on society: multitasking, hyper reading, power browsing, filter bubble, ambient intimacy, ambient attention, sharing culture, self-tracking, dataveillence, algorithmic regulation, FOMO (fear of missing out), etc. To address these issues DHers may (alongside students and the general public) develop projects that explore what insights seemingly banal data on social media […]
[…]brief references. It is with this aspect in mind that Melley’s book needs to be approached; the critical tradition that it operates within obviously exists in conjunction to an argument that, on the face of it, submits no clear vectors of resistance. Yet to interpret it in a light of an unhappy but exitless narrative of resignation is to miss the point, which lies less in the articulation than in an application of a process of thought that insists on a critical, uncompromising response to the state of emergency. “[W]e have institutionalized undemocratic means of preserving our democracy” (222): the […]
[…]young Townshend to “installations combining vibrant colour, lighting, TV screens, and complex coded music” (56). The American painters Larry Rivers and Ron Kitaj, both of who rejected Abstract Expressionism to create flat, parodist distortions of figuration and realism, teach at Ealing Art College, too. The most influential mentor at school is the Fluxus or Anti-Art figure Gustav Metzger; decades after his Ealing Art College days, Townshend bankrolls Metzger’s first solo show at MOMA Oxford (464). Born into a Jewish family in Nuremberg, Metzger fled Nazi Germany. As an expatriate artist in England in the 1940s and ’50s, Metzger found that, […]
[…]and conservatives. Works Cited Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1977. Print. —. The Adventures of Augie March. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1984. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press, 1984. Print. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1986. Print. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1952. Print. Hoberek, Andrew. The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Print. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper & Row, 1974. […]
[…]established hyperfiction and electronic literature writing.McKenzie Wark, “From Hypertext to Codework,” Hypermedia Joyce Studies, vol 3, issue 1 (2002).Later, artists like mez breeze and Alan Sondheim were at home in both worlds. Net.art brought a fresh air of everyday culture and the digital vernacular: the languages of spam, chat bots, viruses, browser crashes, debugging messages, blue screens and 404 codes – a language that was much more rampant in the 1990s than in today’s iPhone, iPad, Facebook and Google world with their sanitized operating systems and app stores. And it was a largely non-academic movement whereas electronic literature was, and […]
2014-2015 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen’s Digital Culture Research Group, Kathi Inman Berens works with canon formation and reception history of electronic literature. A curator and scholar, Kathi has installed literary exhibits and live performances at the Library of Congress, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and at two annual conventions at the Modern Language Association. Her shows have been reviewed in academic journals and the Huffington Post. A lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication, and member of the Annenberg Innovation Lab’s Research Council, Kathi won in 2012 an IBM Faculty Award for her work […]
[…]D. Fox. “Designing empowering and critical identities in social computing and gaming.” CoDesign 6.4 (2010): 187-206. —. Toward a Theory of Critical Computing:The Case of Social Identity Representation in Digital Media Applications. CTheory (2010). —. Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Harrell, D. Fox, D. Kao, and Chong-U Lim. “Computationally Modeling Narratives of Social Group Membership with the Chimeria System.” Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative – a satellite workshop of CogSci 2013: The 35th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Berlin, Germany. 2013. Harrell, D. […]
[…]that ask students to consider not only what they write, but how. She is currently at work on a critical book, “The Upright Script: Modernist Mediations and Contemporary Data […]
[…]A central issue for me is: what could digital forms reveal about poetic language that conventional critical writing cannot? To explore this, in the late 90s, I began to experiment with “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard,” the Mallarmé poem often cited as the forerunner to concrete and modern visual poetry. Simply put, it seemed to me proto-digital more than proto-concrete. It became an interactive CD-Rom (sounds quaint now!) containing translations and critical interventions impossible on paper, but seemingly implicit. Since then, I’ve focused on the Readers Project (with John Cayley and Daniel Howe), making poems embodying elements […]
[…]of reading and language, it also creates new ones. “Spacing Reading” aims to foreground the critical potential of the shift in dynamics and the capacity it enables to redefine language relations, such as syntax, semantics, translation, genre. I have called this “inextrinsic” because it embodies a contradiction, or tension (“in-ex”); “intrinsic” because it takes the human reader into deep or underlying structures of poetic language invisible before digital media and the virtual; “extrinsic” because this new way of reading then moves to foreground associative, or metonymic, traces. A new Subjectivity in language is glimpsed, while at the same time, language […]
[…]pleasure or pain is precisely calibrated and coded to the information. The pornographic image is coded for desire, the image of a child coded for sympathy. Intense pain is unmeasured, uncoded, and yet utterly consuming for the sufferer. The abjection or terror I feel in the face of suffering may be in response to this “sublime” distance, a sublimity that maps the edges of the network. The sufferer of intense pain who suffers in and through every image and every word is possibly a model of reference, of the mapping of the body to the network. Referentiality is precisely not […]
[…]of algorithmic organization, problem thinking, goal-oriented activity, software, interface, networking, gaming, and performance. Such a paradigm’s shift impacts e-literature as a practice, which does not mirror anything (its very nature is not in mimesis, but in poesis). As a rule, e-writers no longer begin creating a piece after being stimulated by one sensation or another derived from experience (for instance, by means of natural phenomena or social events provoked stimuli); they hardly even use their imagination with matters regarding aesthetics. That which impacts them from the very beginning is the task that is posited to them by language itself, by […]
[…]Philosophy (Aesthetics) from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1988. Since 1993 he has been working as the independent scholar and the principal investigator at national and international research projects on cyberarts, e-literature and the Internet culture. He is the author of seven scientific monographs in the fields of cultural studies, digital literature and aesthetics published in Slovenia (the last is Text and the New Media, 2007). His most recent essays written in English are included as book chapters in Reading Moving Letters (ed. by R. Simanowski et al.), Regards Croisses (ed. by Ph. Bootz and Ch. Baldwin), V sieti […]
[…]coordination with other people. The second way to play is the major netprovs that have a core group of “featured players” who are used to creating with each other, operating in a theatrical troupe model or a design studio model. All the actor/writers are assigned characters. In my netprovs I’ll often create a preliminary character back story. The writer/actors that I’m working with these days are great at coming up with more details about their characters. Netprovs done with featured players build stories that that more resemble what we’d call a story and a novel in a film, in a […]
[…]successive patterns of letters and spaces and making a “frequency table” for each character group in a document’s source text (Hartman 55).The successive patterns of letters and spaces are called “character groups” by Kenner and O’Rourke. This connection is not only aesthetic (e.g., that the output of Gnoetry and similar programs can resemble those of TRAVESTY), but also social because the two programs influenced small communities of experimental digital writers whose practice benefited and expanded due to camaraderie resulting from use of common programs; they have become mileposts for the discipline. TRAVESTY scrambles (or permutes) text by replacing each character […]
[…]electronic literature, and thus it is through interface and intention alone that texts can be grouped into this categorization. Within the App Store categorizations as of October 2014, most apps are grouped either as “Apps” or “Games.” Interactive books with similar interfaces and capabilities can be found under both of those categories, as well as in many sub-headings including Education, Entertainment, and of course Books. The “Books” label is most frequently given to works that either have no interactive component but choose to distribute through an interface outside of Apple’s restrictive iBookstore or to books with specific interactive components, such […]
[…]of computational art (387)—projects that invite, if not require, attention to various forms of code. Code-core cybertextualism has undeniable virtues: it usefully drives innovation both in poetic practice and critical thinking, and it builds a detailed foundation for understanding, and eventually teaching, next-generation digital literacy. Long may its models and schemas endure. At the same time, concentrating on the core obviously does not help at the margins, where we confront more ambiguous encounters between writing and information systems. Beyond providing a dour reminder of forsaken rigor, hardcore cybertextualism sheds little light on my promiscuous confusion of récriture and database/interface poetics. […]
[…]Literature in Europe. Bergen: September 11-13, 27 Oct. Retrieved October 2012. http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/aesthetics-materiality-electronic-literature. Bronowski, Jacob (1973). The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Carter, Paul (2004). Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research. Melbourne University Publishing. Cayley, John (2006). “Lens: The Practice and Poetics of Writing in Immersive VR.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac, “New Media Poetry and Poetics” Special Issue, Vol 14, No. 5-6. http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/jcayley.asp. –, (2005) “Writing on Complex Surfaces.” dichtung-digital 35 (2/2005) . Originally given as a paper at the 6th DAC (Digital Arts & Culture) Conference, IT University, Copenhagen, 1-3 December. de Certeau, Michel (1984). The Practice […]
[…]and the annotations and commentary surrounding it. Such a discourse remains especially vital to critical studies of electronic literature, since most works composed for digital distribution present themselves simultaneously as two very different types of linguistic structures: as programmable code, and as a separate media object or interface. The significant, if underemphasized, gap between these two levels of writing and production is especially apparent in any electronic or programmable literary work, allowing authors and users alike to view each respective project as a working database of related functions, processes and media events. Arguably the relatively new, but growing study of critical […]
[…]I might use to explicate our relationship. Within a spectrum bounded at one end by the New Critical emphasis on textual autonomy and at the other by the “virtual” text that emerges necessarily as a correspondence between author and audience in reader-response theory, I do not know where I stand. With Galatea’s invocation, I am aware that I have been identified and can therefore no longer maintain the convenient illusion of being, as a reader, either ideal or implied. I have been specified. The “text,” such as it is, has called me out. The spectrum I have identified here is, […]
[…]writing was focused on the technology of books and print. Implicit in its capacity to provoke critical thinking about the form of the book is the capacity to direct this critical attention to the broader tools of literary representation, including digital interfaces and code. However, it is against the backdrop of network textuality that the fullness of this technical estrangement can be explored. While Jakobson’s use of the word “ordinary” always carried connotations with the power to categorize, command, and declare, it is the prospect of the global, networked analytic process that produces the most potent realization of such “ordinary” […]
[…]The group psychological meaning of secrecy is a relation between knowledge and ignorance: as the group configures its group dynamics around a secret, its cohesion depends on the maintenance of an illusion (42). In this lengthy passage, Krapp illustrates that digital technologies and the types of discourse that find growth in them essentially segregate themselves from anything outside its discursive regime. If one accepts that conspiracy theory is finding itself rooted in digital discourse, the truth object pursued by these theorists will forever remain outside of their knowledge, as that is the only way for the interested parties to sustain […]
[…]Lifeon Earth (2nd ed.). New York: W.H. Freeman. Marino, M. C. (2010, September 15). “Critical Code Studies and the electronic book review: An Introduction.” EBR : Electronic Book Review. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/ningislanded Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. (1997, 98). Lucid Mapping and Codex Transformissions in the Z-Buffer. Retrieved February 9, 2011, fromhttp://www2.iath.virginia.edu/mgk3k/lucid/ Mauler, H. (2004). The Zoo « ZEITGUISED. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from http://zeitguised.wordpress.com/2004/05/24/the-zoo/ Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995). Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1st ed.). University Of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T., & Hansen, M. B. N. (Eds.). (2010). Critical Terms for Media […]
[…]not attuned to these complexities. These are insights, I’d stress, that postcolonialism, critical race studies, feminism and gender studies, and science and technology studies contribute, offering additional conceptual resources and reading practices to further expand the affirmative toolkit Post-Postmodernism recommends here. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “powers of the false,” Nealon further differentiates his intensifying approach from earlier postmodernist theories and historical materialisms, even Jameson’s, that remain more or less invested in the “weak” or mediating, interruptive force of the false and its limiting modes of challenging hegemonic truth by interrupting or suspending it. His own “post-postmodern” reading […]
[…]Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]” and Judd Morrissey’s “The Jew’s Daughter.” I will introduce a critical vocabulary for examining these works, grouped around the following concepts: “The Holy Grails of Electronic Literature,” “Six Varieties of Crisis,” and the “Surrealist Fortune Cookie.” Respectively, these describe: the contradictions inherent between paradigms of science and paradigms of literature and how they have shaped motivations by creators; the manner in which writers of electronic works can provide “non-trivial” reading experiences in the absence of standard literary paradigms premised on apocalyptic (or simply “plotted”) narrative; and a concept of the basic unit of the sentence in an […]
[…]intertextuality, dialogism and parody. Despite having articulated all these concepts, the critical-ludic-transgressive attitude of Portuguese poetry involves, in her opinion, an enhanced “operation of translation in the sense of a critical rereading of tradition” (20). To creatively explore the plagiotropic relationships between Helder and Brandão’s work, we have engaged in our own plagiarian experiment in the creation of a third work. The text generator, also entitled Húmus, draws upon its predecessors as databases, allowing readers to, once again, re-read the tradition and conceptualize the links between its historical forbears. 1. Re-reading, Re-writing The topic of critical rereading of tradition is […]
[…]and Carolee Schneemann’s ABC. Slovak artist Dezider Tóth (Monogramista T.D.) has also been working on various pieces in the form of cards containing text and sometimes images; these appear only in author’s private collection. Polish author Pawel Dunajko also published a piece consisting of 35 big black cards (out of which 34 have poetic text and one is paratextual) packed in a box with openings that display the title and several words of the top card. This work does not seem to need an exhaustive reading, since the titles refer to the individual poems underneath. Several experimental works by American […]
[…]can’t use the information you need to show that information is unusable…What have you been working on these days? ST: I’ve been hanging out in labs with people who work on insects, with the intent of learning more about the topic of the book I’m working on. The topic is […]
[…]in DNA, and a perfect bound spine in VAS. Lest the reader overlook this formal equation between coded chromosome and coded book, the novel’s pagination, on pages where the line appears, mimics the notation used to indicate the beginning and end points of a gene sequence. The ellipses before page numbers, here, and their appearance on only right hand pages, underscore the sense of the text as a continuous chain of facing pages arranged as a double helix of genetic base pairs. This sense of closed pages interlocking in genetic recombination is represented elsewhere as simple sex, with the image […]
[…]a prison? Could the situation rather be the opposite, that is, that the web is the solution to the critical situation of contemporary novels? Why doesn’t White count for the rich culture of alternative “presses” and directories that have grown up on and around digital literature and art for the last three decades? Digital literature, that is literary works that are published on the web and that must be read on a computer, has established itself as an important alternative to book literature and the book publishing press. It is on the web but outside of Amazon. You’ll find it distributed […]
[…]Interaktive Installationen. Für eine Hermeneutik digitaler Kunst). Simanowski, professor of media studies in Basel, also known for his editorship of the online journal dichtung-digital , intended to fill in the critical lacuna. Vehemently defending the necessity for professional criticism and scholarship, he emphasizes the need for a critical discourse on digital art. It is not enough to just “embrace an artifact in its phenomenological materiality” (x), we have the obligation to try and establish its meaning. The preface to Digital Art and Meaning reads as a manifesto for hermeneutics. Simanowski emphasizes time and again the importance of the mind in […]
[…]and “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” in Gothic […]
[…]a generation of poststructuralist criticism, readers are likely already disinclined to regard critical studies in this manner. Second, No Maps for These Territories contains so many errors that it becomes very difficult to trust the writing. Instead, one cannot help but suspect that perhaps the fragmentation is actually the result of error, and the sense that it might be by design comes to seem like an alibi. The volume teems with mistakes, from missing punctuation, to incompletely revised sentences, to variations in the spelling of a name or a term often on a single page (150, 202), to inconsistent page […]
[…]of Western Sydney, Australia and writes across the fields of textual, media and cultural studies with a particular focus on affect theory, mimetic communication and fictocriticism. She was Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council funded project “The Power of the Image: affect, audience & disturbing imagery” with Virginia Nightingale (2006-9) and has recently completed a second ARC Discovery Grant with Maria Angel and PI Professor Joseph Tabbi (University of Illinois, Chicago), entitled: “Creative Nation: writers and writing in the image culture.” The project includes the construction of ADELTA (the Australian Directory of Electronic Literature and Text-based Art). Gibbs’s 2010 […]
[…]via apps, from individual artists, like Christine Wilks, and small collaborative teams, like the group behind the narrative-driven audio app for runners, “Zombies Run!” The latter might not qualify as literature or art, despite being co-created by a prize-winning literary novelist, Naomi Alderman, but the work of the former, including Wilks multiple award-winning piece “Underbelly,” most definitely does. But even “Zombies Run!,” with its fantastically successful Kickstarter funding drive, shows new ways for writing and writers to make their mark – with Alderman’s literary abilities harnessed in this way, perhaps “Zombies Run!” will be included in someone’s idea of a canon, […]
[…]and body, one being metaphorized by the other throughout VAS, Square hopes to act upon his body by working on his text. “Just a little editing” is one of the recurring phrases bringing together text and body, this one aimed at belittling the consequences of the operation, seen as but an amendment brought on the manuscript of Square’s body. He tries to become more familiar with the surgery awaiting him by playing on words, their sounds and mutations, as well as by calling upon earlier examples of similar “procedures”, to use the term referring to the vasectomy in VAS. The […]
[…]back and re-adjusting them (this was, of course, the cause of the Y2K crisis). At the same time, code is also written with a view to changes likely to happen in the next cycle of technological innovation, as a hedge against premature obsolescence, just as new code is written with a view toward making it backward-compatible. In this sense too, the computer instantiates multiple, interacting, and complex temporalities, from micro-second processes on up to perceptible delays. Humans too embody multiple temporalities. The time is takes for a neuron to fire is about .3 to .5 milliseconds. The time it takes […]
[…]to manipulation. Abbott’s Flatland is something of a cult work, long unacknowledged in literary studies and, until fairly recently, nearly owned by the mathematics community where it is prized for its elegant use of analogy to introduce students to the concept of unperceivable dimensions beyond the familiar directly measurable three. Based on discussions with fans of the book, it seems that many young students in middle school mathematics classes beginning in the late 1970s-1980s were introduced to the work as part of the class curriculum. Others came across the Dover thrift edition or possibly heard a reference to it in […]
[…]contractions and expansions of time, in the narrative’s process time. While earlier when working with doubly deictic subjectivity, process disrupts the traditional model of narrative frequency, here it distorts duration. As such, two of the fundamental categories of narrative time are unsettled somewhat by the kinds of interaction that TOC, as a new media novel, encourages. The Logic of Chronology: A Conclusion The differing experiences offered by the Chronos box and the Logos box can be linked to the character’s names. Chronos is a well known Greek god of time, and thus it seems apt that his box was a […]
[…]constructs indistinguishable from the ones that are built in. In essence, a macro is a block of code that exploits homoiconicity by temporarily treating another code block as if it were data (before passing it back to the compiler as code). You are not expected to understand this. You know what would be really great? If people took a piece of a live coding performance — this one or another — recorded their own live commentary over it, and then put that in the comment thread. It’s easy! Even the simplest video editor will let you do this. And really, isn’t […]
[…]Elisha Scudder. Boston, 1899. eBook. The Cambridge Poets. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Routledge Classics. McLuhan, Marshall. “Playboy Interview: ‘Marshall McLuhan – A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.”The Essential McLuhan. Ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. New York: Basic Books, 1995. 233-269. Print. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Trans. Roger Ariew. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 2005. Print. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage 1990. White, Curtis. “The Late Word.” Lapham’s Quarterly: Roundtable. Oct. 2011. Web. January […]
[…]work in framing contemporary writing. Let’s recall Matthew Fuller’s gloss on the popular critical concept of the media ecology: “‘Media ecology,’ or more often ‘information ecology,’ is deployed as a euphemism for the allocation of informational roles in organizations and in computer-supported collaborative work” (3). An interest in media ecology has, of course, been an important element of thinking about contemporary literature at least since Tabbi and Wutz’s 1997 collection Writing Matters, but the change in critical attitude is dramatically evident in this collection of essays on Danielewski. Interest in the “allocation of informational roles” prompts us to look not […]
[…]of print are indistinct, one can perceive a relative desire for manipulability at the level of the codex, the verse, the word, and the letter. While it is critical to note the integral role of computation in the restitution of the digital text, it is difficult to dispute the embedded ideal of analytical manipulation present, for instance, in this relatively conventional scholarly format. Citations and references, arranged and controlled, performing the work of analysis in a manner that aspires towards its hypothetical restitution in the minds of others. And it would, perhaps, be a mistake to overlook the function of […]
[…]the spot. While something of a special case, then, livecoding raises broader issues for Critical Code Studies, especially questions related to the definition of programming and the visibility of code. As John Bell pointed out, livecoding further applies pressure to the valuation of “scripting” over “coding”: the former is not considered “real” programming because of the use of high-level languages for small tasks. The Ruby on Rails framework was promoted using an “amazing and carefully scripted series of demo magic tricks,” in Jeremy Douglass’ words: on a terminal window projected for an audience, a few scripts generated a basic but […]
[…]copyrighted and write-protected: the notes, the links, the generous, freely offered historical and critical scholarship with which we had meant to begin, are all stripped from the commercial versions. Nietzsche discussion groups abound. I have tried to describe a feeling which has often enough tormented me: I take revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the general public. For this work is to set down why, in the spirit of Goethe’s words, we must in all seriousness despise new media textual production, knowledge which enervates activity, and new media as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, […]
[…]of Victoria, Canada. She teaches courses in the areas of contemporary cultural theory, Animal Studies, and Canadian Literature. The author of Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minnesota 2009), she is presently working on a manuscript that examines how animals labour affectively in therapeutic economies of late […]
[…]Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell University Press), appeared in 1999. She is working on issues of poetry and space, now, as they concern the poetry of Susan Howe (see ebr for an example). She also studies online communities for which she received a small NSF […]
[…]Cruz, where he codirects the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a technical and cultural research group. He is the author of How Pac-Man Eats (2020) and coeditor of The New Media Reader (2003), among others. Computational media projects on which he has collaborated have appeared in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the IndieCade festival. Noah Wardrip-Fruin […]
[…]review, “Mister Squishy, c’est moi: David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion,” is posted on ebr‘s Critical Ecologies thread. Kiki Benzon is an assistant professor in English and a student in neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. She edits the Fictions Present thread at ebr and has published essays on mental health, new media, and contemporary literature. Her review, “Mister Squishy, c’est moi: David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion,” is posted on ebr‘s Critical Ecologies […]
[…]a collaboration with Mark Amerika and Rick Silva. Trace is Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver, and the graduate director of the M.A. in Digital Media Studies. More on Trace […]
Lori Emerson is Associate Editor for ebr. Her critical work can also be found in The Emily Dickinson Journal, Postmodern Culture, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and Cybertext Yearbook. She’s co-editor of The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader (Coach House Books, 2007). Emerson is Assistant Professor of digital media in the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Lori Emerson is Associate Editor for ebr. Her critical work can also be found in The Emily Dickinson Journal, Postmodern Culture, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and Cybertext Yearbook. She’s co-editor of The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader (Coach House Books, 2007). Emerson […]
[…]in American literature of the post-Bretton Woods era. His research interests also include global studies, media theory, and science fiction. Aron Pease is a Brittain Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His book manuscript uses scale to analyze representations of production in American literature of the post-Bretton Woods era. His research interests also include global studies, media theory, and science […]
[…]Media, which received the 2001 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies, also from the Modern Language Association; and of Avatars of Story: Narrative Modes in Old and New Media (2006). A native of Geneva, Switzerland, Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, which received the 1992 Prize for Independent Scholars from the Modern Language Association; of Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, which received the 2001 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies, also from […]
Brandon Barr is currently working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in New York, where he teaches classes on digital technology, poetry, and composition. He is the founder of the Banner Art Collective (http://bannerart.org), which collects net.art and poetry constructed and disseminated within the limitations of WWW advertising. Brandon Barr is currently working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in New York, where he teaches classes on digital technology, poetry, and composition. He is the founder of the Banner Art Collective (http://bannerart.org), which collects net.art and poetry constructed and disseminated within the limitations of WWW […]
[…]Institute for Law & Environment (BAILE); Distinguished Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College; and Visiting Professor at Federal University of Bahia, […]
[…]and co-editor of the first Electronic Literature Collection. She has also published a number of critical papers and interviews. As the McEver Chair in Writing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Strickland created and produced a TechnoPoetry Festival. Strickland’s work across print and multiple media is being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University. For more on her work, […]
[…]account of the In.S.Omnia collective, Sleepless in Seattle, an essay in the “grey” section of Critical Ecologies (ebr4) titled HYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionary, and an early reflection on electronic literature entitled Constrained Thinking: From Network to Membrane. His most recent reviews are of three re-released novels by Harry Mathews and the online on-the-road narrative, Rude Trip. Paul Harris teaches at Loyola Marymount University. His contributions, dating from the start of ebr, include an account of the In.S.Omnia collective, Sleepless in Seattle, an essay in the “grey” section of Critical Ecologies (ebr4) titled HYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionary, and an early reflection […]
[…]Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford, 2002). He is working on a book project, Systems Cultures, examining the discourse of systems since the […]
[…]Center typescript of Pynchon’s V. Herman founded an interuniversity Belgian MA in American Studies and is now prospecting for a Belgian Institute of American Studies. He co-published Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Nebraska, 2005) with Bart […]
[…]jazz, and pragmatist philosophy. Muyumba teaches American literature and African American studies at the University of North Texas. Walton Muyumba is a writer and critic living in Dallas, Texas. Muyumba’s essay on Amiri Baraka is forthcoming in College Literature (January 2007) and he is completing a book manuscript on African American intellectual history, jazz, and pragmatist philosophy. Muyumba teaches American literature and African American studies at the University of North […]
[…]Dana College in Nebraska. His work has appeared in Western American Literature, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and the electronic book review. His article on chaos and complexity in Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations appeared in the Fall, 1996 issue of Critique. Scott Hermanson teaches English at Arizona State University. He received his degree from the University of Cincinnati and taught previously at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Dana College in Nebraska. His work has appeared in Western American Literature, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and the electronic book review. His article on chaos and […]
[…]in the areas of political theory and public law and serves as associated faculty in the Women’s Studies and Legal Studies Departments. She specializes in late modern and contemporary continental political and social theory. Her research examines the political and cultural construction of identity. Her current project examines the relationship between marriage and the liberal […]
[…]environmental discourse. With Katherine Acheson, also of the University of Waterloo, he has been working on a project called In Multimedias Res: Towards a Rhetoric of the Digital Humanities, which analyzes strategies for conducting scholarly argument using multimedia. He is the author of Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature (2003). Andrew McMurry is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo. He specializes in environmental discourse. With Katherine Acheson, also of the University of Waterloo, he has been working on a project called In Multimedias Res: Towards a Rhetoric of the Digital Humanities, which analyzes strategies for […]
[…]Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana UP 2010). She is currently working on a book tentatively titled: Sea Creatures and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, […]
[…]fiction. He is at work on a book tentatively entitled “Mediating Narrative. Literary Case Studies in the New Media Ecology.” Michael Wutz teaches in the Department of English at Weber State University. He is the co-editor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (with Joseph Tabbi, Cornell UP 1997), the co-translator of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Stanford UP 1999), and the author of numerous essays on American and British fiction. He is at work on a book tentatively entitled “Mediating Narrative. Literary Case Studies in the New Media […]
[…]poetics in programmable media, with parallel theoretical interventions concerning the role of code in writing and the temporal properties of textuality (bibliographic links are available from the shadoof […]
Justin Haynes is a graduate student and is currently working on a collection of quasi-humorous stories. He is often astonished, but always from Trinidad and Tobago. Justin Haynes is a graduate student and is currently working on a collection of quasi-humorous stories. He is often astonished, but always from Trinidad and […]
[…]Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He is the author of After Utopia: The Rise of Critical Space in Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Nick Spencer is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has published articles on twentieth-century American literature in Angelaki, Arizona Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He is the author of After Utopia: The Rise of Critical Space in Twentieth-Century American […]
[…]University of Bergen, Norway. Prior to moving to Norway in 2006, Rettberg directed the new media studies track of the literature program at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel-length works of electronic literature including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, and Implementation. His work has been exhibited both online and at art venues, including the Beall Center in Irvine California, the Slought Foundation in Philadelpia, and The Krannert Art Museum. Rettberg is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, where he directed major projects funded […]
[…]World’s Most Popular Parlor Game (Nebraska, forthcoming). Dr. Schneiderman is Chair of American Studies at Lake Forest College. Davis Schneiderman is a multimedia artist and author of Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil 2006), as well as co-author of the novel Abecedarium (Chiasmus Press, forthcoming) and co-editor of the collections Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto 2004) and The Exquisite Corpse: Creativity, Collaboration, and the World’s Most Popular Parlor Game (Nebraska, forthcoming). Dr. Schneiderman is Chair of American Studies at Lake Forest […]
[…]to the emergent literary genre known as “Afro-Futurism” for the journal Science Fiction Studies, with Mark Bould. At present, he is co-editing, with Eric Dean Rasmussen, a collection of critical essays on and around American Genius: A Comedy, by novelist Lynne […]
[…]media and technology projects. He lives in New York City. Sven Philipp received his B.A. in Media Studies from Sussex University (UK) and holds an M.A. in English and American Studies from Bayreuth University (Germany). He currently is a Visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Education Research and Evaluation, working on various interactive media and technology projects. He lives in New York […]
David Golumbia teaches in the Media Studies program and the English Department at the University of Virginia. David Golumbia teaches in the Media Studies program and the English Department at the University of […]
Tiziana Terranova teaches media and cultural studies at the University of East London. She has published her research on digital cultures in New Formations, Science and Culture, Derive e approdi, and the on-line journal The Difference Engine. She is currently holding an Economic and Social Research Grant to research the role of Web design in the development of the Internet and is completing a book on postrepresentational analyses of digitalization. Tiziana Terranova teaches media and cultural studies at the University of East London. She has published her research on digital cultures in New Formations, Science and Culture, Derive e approdi, […]
Andrew Walser studies and teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is currently editing a special issue of the electronic book review (www.altx.com/ebr) devoted to the work of Joseph McElroy. Andrew Walser studies and teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is currently editing a special issue of the electronic book review (www.altx.com/ebr) devoted to the work of Joseph […]
John Monberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. His research examines the ways that large scale technologies act as social infrastructures, the pathways through which global economic imperatives reconstitute local natural and social ecologies. John Monberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. His research examines the ways that large scale technologies act as social infrastructures, the pathways through which global economic imperatives reconstitute local natural and social […]
[…]of English at the University of Maryland, where his research and teaching includes digital studies, textual theory, and applied humanities computing. His current project is entitled Mechanisms. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (http://www.glue.umd.edu/~mgk) is Assistant Professor of English and Digital Studies at University of Maryland, College […]
[…]Lang Publishing. Kembrew McLeod is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His book Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership and Intellectual Property Law will be published within the Toby Miller-edited series “Popular Culture and Everyday Life” through Peter Lang Publishing. In addition to publishing a number of chapters in edited volumes and articles in scholarly journals (Journal of Communication, Popular Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies), he has written extensively about popular music and popular culture in Rolling Stone, SPIN, The Village Voice, […]
[…]and Art History. His books on hypertext and digital culture include Hypermedia and Literary Studies (MIT, 1991), and The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities (MIT, 1993) both of which he edited with Paul Delany, and Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Hopkins UP, 1992), which has appeared in various European and Asian languages and as Hypertext in Hypertext (Hopkins UP, 1994), a greatly expanded electronic version with original texts by Derrida, reviews, student interventions, and works by other authors. In 1997, he published a much-expanded, completely revised version as Hypertext 2.0. He has also edited […]
[…]of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the author most recently of The Politics of Education: A Critical Introduction (Paradigm 2014) and The Failure of Corporate School Reform (Paradigm […]
[…]include information design and digital arts. He has seven years experience in the design industry working as an information designer and has worked for clients in the diverse fields of telecommunications, finance, education and the arts. He is currently the Programme?s Web editor. Molloy is an Assistant Professor in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests include information design and digital arts. He has seven years experience in the design industry working as an information designer and has worked for clients in the diverse fields of telecommunications, finance, education and the arts. He […]
Gregory L. Ulmer is Professor Emeritus, English and Media Studies, University of Florida, and Joseph Beuys Chair at the European Graduate School. His work with the Florida Research Ensemble (FRE) is coordinated through the EmerAgency consultancy http://emeragency.electracy.org/ (see Miami Virtue, http://smallcities.tru.ca/index.php/cura/issue/view/5). His most recent books are Avatar Emergency (2012), and Electracy (2015). Ulmer’s current project is a collaboration with the FRE developing a pedagogy (Konsult) native to the electrate […]
[…] He teaches courses on phenomenological sociology, visual sociology, sociology of the body, and critical theory and cultural politics. Among his current research projects are a continuation of his research on Dali, first presented in his book, This is Not an Essence: Dali and Postmodernism, a phenomenological exploration of loss, and a study on the irruption of the uncivilized body in everyday face-to-face interaction. Marc J. LaFountain is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Criminology at the University of West Georgia. He teaches courses on phenomenological sociology, visual sociology, sociology of the body, and […]
Lisette Gonzalez is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago working in the areas of cyberculture, film, and contemporary American fiction. Lisette Gonzalez is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago working in the areas of cyberculture, film, and contemporary American […]
Martin E. Rosenberg is an assistant professor of critical theory in the Department of English at Eastern Kentucky University. Martin E. Rosenberg is an assistant professor of critical theory in the Department of English at Eastern Kentucky […]
[…]as a researcher at the Center for Computer Game Research in Denmark. He is Editor of the Game Studies journal, as well as writing Ludology.org and co-editing WaterCoolerGames.org. Frasca is also a game developer who co-founded Powerful Robot Games, a videogame production studio responsible for the internationally acclaimed Newsgaming.com project. Gonzalo Frasca works as a researcher at the Center for Computer Game Research in Denmark. He is Editor of the Game Studies journal, as well as writing Ludology.org and co-editing WaterCoolerGames.org. Frasca is also a game developer who co-founded Powerful Robot Games, a videogame production studio responsible for the internationally […]
[…]cognition, and digital media, as well as management, computer science engineering, performance studies, genetics, endocrinology, and physiology. In addition, she has used neurocognitive methods for teaching writing to faculty and graduate students in virtually every discipline and profession. Douglas is the author of “I Have Said Nothing,” a short story that appears in Post Modern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, The End of Books or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives (University of Michigan Press), and Your Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer (Cambridge University Press). She provided guidance as an expert in the amicus curiae […]
[…]a social interaction game; and Excalibur, an Arthurian game. He also ran the Games Research Group for Alan Kay. Following the collapse of Atari in 1984, Crawford took up the Macintosh. After teaching physics for several years, Chris Crawford joined Atari as a game designer in 1979. There he created a number of games: Energy Czar, an educational simulation about the energy crisis; Scram, a nuclear power plant simulation; Eastern Front (1941), a wargame; Gossip, a social interaction game; and Excalibur, an Arthurian game. He also ran the Games Research Group for Alan Kay. Following the collapse of Atari in […]
[…]in the realm of pain. Dr. Gromala is the founding director of the Transforming Pain Research Group, an interdisciplinary team of artists, designers, computer scientists, neuroscientists and medical doctors investigating how new technologies—ranging from virtual reality and robotics to social media—may be used as a technological form of analgesia and pain management. Gromala holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Yale University and the University of Plymouth, England, and misspent her youth in the 1980s working in the Silicon Valley, mostly at Apple […]
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer who has been working in the game industry for more than twelve years. He is the co-founder, with Peter Lee, of gameLab, a game development company based in New York City that creates experimental games on and off the computer, including BLiX, Arcadia, and Diner Dash. Eric is also the co-creator with Word.com of SiSSYFiGHT 2000. He has taught courses at MIT, New York University, and Parsons School of Design. Eric Zimmerman is a game designer who has been working in the game industry for more than twelve years. He is the co-founder, with […]
Jon McKenzie is Assistant Professor of English and Co-coordinator of Modern Studies at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Jon McKenzie is Assistant Professor of English and Co-coordinator of Modern Studies at University of Wisconsin […]
Henry Jenkins was the founder and co-director of the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and now serves as the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has published more than fifteen books on various aspects of new media, popular culture, and public life, starting with Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture in 1992. His most recent books have included Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the Literature Classroom; Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture; and the forthcoming By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth […]
[…]Theory & Critique, Screen, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Popular Culture Review, Studies in Popular Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Currents in Electronic Literacy, Science Fiction Studies, and in the anthology Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto Press, 2004). He is also co-editor of the anthology Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (University Press of America, […]
[…]to Hitchcock (Cambridge, 1994) and Ideology and Inscription: ‘Cultural Studies’ after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge, 1998). [outdated] THOMAS COHEN currently chairs the English Department at the State University of New York, Albany. His books include Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge, 1994) and Ideology and Inscription: ‘Cultural Studies’ after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge, […]
[…]spaces and online systems for massively collaborative play. She is a PhD candidate in performance studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is also a member of the Alpha Lab for Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. She teaches game design (San Francisco Art Institute) and contemporary games culture (UC Berkeley), with an emphasis on how these two fields intersect with live performance, social networks, and public policy. Jane McGonigal is an academic games researcher and pervasive game designer. She specializes in multiplayer games for public spaces and online systems for massively collaborative play. She is a PhD […]
Elyce Rae Helford is professor of English and director of Women’s Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research and teaching have to do with representations of gender, race, and feminism in contemporary literature, television, and film. Elyce Rae Helford is professor of English and director of Women’s Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research and teaching have to do with representations of gender, race, and feminism in contemporary literature, television, and […]
[…]. His publications revolve around the fields of American literature, poststructuralism, media studies, and literature and science. Hanjo Berressem teaches American Literature and culture at the University of Cologne. He is the author of Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text and Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Fiction with Lacan . His publications revolve around the fields of American literature, poststructuralism, media studies, and literature and […]
Karim A. Remtulla is a doctoral student at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the impact of the virtual, multimodal, and framgented on adult learning and identity. Karim A. Remtulla is a doctoral student at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the impact of the virtual, multimodal, and framgented on adult learning and […]
[…]Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. She’s currently working on a book on young feminist cultural productions. Alison Piepmeier examines the differences in postfeminism and third-wave feminism. Bio.: Alison Piepmeier is director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. She’s the editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century and author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. She’s currently working on a book on young feminist cultural […]
[…]Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (U Delaware P, 2011) and William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2010). Christopher Leise is assistant professor of English at Whitman College. He is most recently the co-editor of Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (U Delaware P, 2011) and William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays (McFarland, […]
Ara Wilson is an anthropologist who has taught transnational feminist studies at the Ohio State University since 1997. A former managing editor of Socialist Review, she is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the World City (California 2004). Ara Wilson is an anthropologist who has taught transnational feminist studies at the Ohio State University since 1997. A former managing editor of Socialist Review, she is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the World City (California […]
[…]and Canadian literary histories. He is editor-in-chief of the Review of International American Studies. Michael Boyden is a visiting scholar at the Harvard University English Department. He received his PhD in April 2006 from the University of Leuven with a dissertation entitled “Predicting the Past: The Functions of American Literary History.” His current research focuses on issues of language and multilingualism in American and Canadian literary histories. He is editor-in-chief of the Review of International American […]
[…]on Pynchon and Postnationalism. Sascha Pöhlmann is a Ph.D. student and lecturer in American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is currently working on a dissertation on Pynchon and […]
[…]The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616-1619 by Anne Clifford (Broadview, 2006). She is presently working on a book called Visual Rhetoric and 17th-Century English Print Culture. Katherine Acheson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her research areas are seventeenth-century English literature and culture, and the circulation of scholarly knowledge in multimedia forms. Her most recent publication is an edition of The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616-1619 by Anne Clifford (Broadview, 2006). She is presently working on a book called Visual Rhetoric and 17th-Century English Print […]
[…]the Joint University of Denver-Iliff School of Theology PhD Program in Religious and Theological Studies. Francis F. Seeburger is the author of numerous articles on contemporary continental European philosophy and the author of three books, including one on the philosophy of addiction Addiction and Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Addictive Mind (Crossroads Press, 1995). He is currently chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Denver, and Director of the Joint University of Denver-Iliff School of Theology PhD Program in Religious and Theological […]
[…]the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, as well as a short critical volume on Led Zeppelin IV. Davis contributes to scores of magazines, and his essays have been included in over a dozen books. He won a Maggie award for his San Francisco Magazine profile of the Internet entrepreneur and UFO contactee Joe Firmage, while The New Yorker has recognized his expertise in the works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Erik Davis is a San Francisco-based writer, culture critic, and independent scholar. He is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, […]
Janet Neigh is a writer and scholar currently working on her PhD in English at Temple University. She received her MA from the University of Calgary in 2003. Her writing can be found in Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury Press 2005), HOW2, Filling Station and West Coast Line. Janet Neigh is a writer and scholar currently working on her PhD in English at Temple University. She received her MA from the University of Calgary in 2003. Her writing can be found in Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury Press 2005), HOW2, Filling Station and West Coast […]
tobias c. van Veen is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy & Communication Studies at McGill University and a practitioner of the technology arts. He writes on the technics of philosophy, wordbots in Derrida and machines in Deleuze, technoculture, & AfroFuturism. He is contributing editor at FUSE & e/i magazine and Concept Engineer at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), where he curates Upgrade Montréal. tobias c. van Veen is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy & Communication Studies at McGill University and a practitioner of the technology arts. He writes on the technics of philosophy, wordbots in Derrida and machines […]
[…]based on Lovecraft, he purchased a copy, and CoC soon became the game of choice with his gaming group. Born in Detroit in 1949, Keith designed his first game at the age of eleven – a board game featuring popular movie monsters of the time. It was also about this time he discovered H. P. Lovecraft. Introduced to the RPG hobby in 1978, via Dungeons & Dragons. He was an experienced gamer by the time Call of Cthulhu appeared in late 1981. Fascinated by a game based on Lovecraft, he purchased a copy, and CoC soon became the game of […]
[…]Games, which works to build a vibrant, innovative, and viable independent games industry. He began working in the game industry at the age of fourteen, in 1974, when he was hired by Simulations Publications, Inc. to ship and assemble games. Two years later, he moved onto SPI’s design staff, and his first game, based on the Battle of Alamein, was published. Greg Costikyan is CEO of Manifesto Games, which works to build a vibrant, innovative, and viable independent games industry. He began working in the game industry at the age of fourteen, in 1974, when he was hired by Simulations […]
[…]and Director of the Critical Media Lab. His published research, including E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities (University of Toronto Press, 2006) is concerned primarily with the fate of the humanities in a digital culture. O’Gorman’s most recent work investigates the “collusion of death and technology.” This is the topic of his most recent book, Necromedia, published in the Posthumanities Series at University of Minnesota Press in 2015. As an advocate of research/creation, O’Gorman is also a practicing artist, working primarily with physical computing inventions and architectural installations. Samples of his work may be viewed at […]
Teri Hoskin is an independent researcher, writer and artist and is currently working as program manager at the Experimental Art Foundation. Teri Hoskin is an independent researcher, writer and artist and is currently working as program manager at the Experimental Art […]
[…]Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Christian Moraru specializes in critical theory, contemporary American literature, and comparative studies. His latest books are Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001), and Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism […]
Geneviève Brassard has published articles and reviews in journals such as Women’s Studies, NWSA, and Modernism/Modernity. She teaches and directs the Writing Program at the University of Portland. Geneviève Brassard has published articles and reviews in journals such as Women’s Studies, NWSA, and Modernism/Modernity. She teaches and directs the Writing Program at the University of […]
[…]edited the special issue of the journal Biography on “Online Lives” (26.1, Winter 2003) and is working on a book about the intersection of digital animation and literary texts. John Zuern is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where he teaches literature, literary theory, and rhetoric. He edited the special issue of the journal Biography on “Online Lives” (26.1, Winter 2003) and is working on a book about the intersection of digital animation and literary […]
[…]is Associate Professor of digital aesthetics at Multimedia, Institute of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His latest books (in Danish) are “Interface – Digital kunst og kultur” (“Interface – Digital Art and Culture” – with the Interface research project) and “Ex Libris – Medierealistisk litteratur – Paris, Los Angeles & cyberspace” (“Ex Libris – Media Realistic Literature – Paris, Los Angeles & Cyberspace”). Soren Pold is Associate Professor of digital aesthetics at Multimedia, Institute of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His latest books (in Danish) are “Interface – Digital kunst og kultur” (“Interface – […]
Angela Szczepaniak is working on her doctoral thesis, reading and writing about comic books, innovative detective fiction, and poetry. She also writes fiction and poetry, spitz and spatz of which can be seen in the journals Mad Hatters’ Review, Pilot, P-Queue, LOCCAL and others. Angela Szczepaniak is working on her doctoral thesis, reading and writing about comic books, innovative detective fiction, and poetry. She also writes fiction and poetry, spitz and spatz of which can be seen in the journals Mad Hatters’ Review, Pilot, P-Queue, LOCCAL and […]
Van Leavenworth is a PhD Candidate at the English section of the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University in Sweden. His dissertation will investigate individual interactive fiction works in the Gothic mode. Van Leavenworth is a PhD Candidate at the English section of the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University in Sweden. His dissertation will investigate individual interactive fiction works in the Gothic […]
Canadian writer Jeff Bursey’s reviews and critical articles have appeared in American Book Review, Books in Canada, Literary Review (England), Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System (co-authored paper), The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Quarter After Eight. His fiction has won awards and two of his plays have been performed. He was also an early member of the Jeff Gaddis-L online mailing […]
[…]and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, have sold millions of copies and received worldwide critical acclaim. He is also the director of two award-winning short films, Waiting for Dark and Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story. Mechner received his BA from Yale University. Jordan Mechner is one of the world’s best-known videogame creators. His games, including Karateka, Prince of Persia, The Last Express, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, have sold millions of copies and received worldwide critical acclaim. He is also the director of two award-winning short films, Waiting for Dark and Chavez Ravine: A […]
[…]began his gaming pursuits in the role-playing world, founding and running the Seasons of Darkness group, a 5 1/2 year live action project featured on Showtime, and writing for tabletop role-playing titles. Nick Fortugno is the Director of Game Design at gameLab, where he has participated in the design of a variety of digital and non-digital games, including serving as lead designer of the downloadable hit Diner Dash. Nick began his gaming pursuits in the role-playing world, founding and running the Seasons of Darkness group, a 5 1/2 year live action project featured on Showtime, and writing for tabletop role-playing […]
[…]at the University of California, Irvine, where he serves as Affiliated Faculty in the Visual Studies Program, and as co-director for the Art, Computation, and Engineering (ACE) Program. Robert Nideffer researches, teaches, and publishes in the areas of virtual environments and behavior, interface theory and design, technology and culture, and contemporary social theory. He holds an MFA in Computer Arts, and a PhD in Sociology. He is an Associate Professor in Studio Art and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where he serves as Affiliated Faculty in the Visual Studies Program, and as co-director for the Art, Computation, and […]
[…]in computer games with a main focus on MUDs, text-based online games, from a background of media studies, and maintains a Web log. She is an Associate Professor at the Media Department of Volda University College, Norway. Torill Mortensen studies online cultures as expressed and formed through Web logs and computer games. She has a PhD in computer games with a main focus on MUDs, text-based online games, from a background of media studies, and maintains a Web log. She is an Associate Professor at the Media Department of Volda University College, […]
Adriene Jenik is a telecommunications media artist who has been working for over fifteen years as an artist, educator, curator, administrator, and engineer. Her works – including El Naftazteca (with Guillermo Gomez-Pena), Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation, and Desktop Theater (with Lisa Brenneis and the DT troupe) – use the collision of “high” technology and human desire to propose new forms of literature, cinema, and performance. Adriene Jenik is a telecommunications media artist who has been working for over fifteen years as an artist, educator, curator, administrator, and engineer. Her works – including El Naftazteca (with Guillermo Gomez-Pena), Mauve Desert: […]
[…]wrote and appeared in two solo shows, 10,000 Comic Books and Michigan Disasters. Additionally, he studies, performs, and teaches improvisational theater, having worked with the Brave New Workshop, Stevie Ray’s, and the Scrimshaw Brothers’ Look Ma, No Pants, among others. He can also be seen performing 300 Comic Books, a solo-improv structure of his own creation. Tim Uren is a Twin Cities actor and comedian. As part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival he wrote and appeared in two solo shows, 10,000 Comic Books and Michigan Disasters. Additionally, he studies, performs, and teaches improvisational theater, having worked with the Brave New […]
[…]social transformation of adult and child participants. In these environments, Robert engages in studies of the microgenetic development of intersubjectivity between undergraduates and children as they participate in activities that mix learning and […]
BRUNO ARICH-GERZ is Juniorprofessor of American Literature, Media and Communication Studies at the TU Darmstadt. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 2000 with a thesis on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and reader response theory (published in 2001). His publications include a monograph on media technology, trauma theory and literature (2004), a collection of essays on Namibia’s double colonial past and their reverberations in present-day post-colonial literature in English and German (2008), and various articles on e-Learning. BRUNO ARICH-GERZ is Juniorprofessor of American Literature, Media and Communication Studies at the TU Darmstadt. He received his PhD from […]
[…]Representation (U of Nebraska P, 2007). Marco Abel is an assistant professor of English and film studies at the University of Nebraska. His essays have appeared in journals including PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Angelaki, and Senses of Cinema. He is the author of Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique After Representation (U of Nebraska P, […]
[…]media theory. John Durham Peters is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Professor of International Studies at the University of Iowa. Author of Speaking into the Air (Chicago, 1999) and Courting the Abyss (Chicago 2005). He has written on a variety of topics, including German media […]
[…]and media history in the contemporary novel. Paul Benzon teaches contemporary literature, media studies, and critical writing at Temple University. He is currently at work on a project on formal experimentation and media history in the contemporary […]
[…]and New Media at De Montfort University where she co-founded TRG, the Transliteracy Research Group. Kate Pullinger writes for both print and digital platforms. In 2009 her novel The Mistress of Nothing won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes. Her prize-winning digital fiction projects Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel have reached audiences around the world. She is Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University where she co-founded TRG, the Transliteracy Research […]
[…]Jacket Magazine, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, Shampoo, and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Louis Bury is an English Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, at work upon a constraint-based dissertation about constraint-based writing. He teaches literature at NYU and plays poker semi-professionally. Recent dissertation work appears in Jacket Magazine, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, Shampoo, and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance […]
[…]fiction, comics, and television has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Canadian Review of American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and Southern Literary Journal, as well as the anthologies Violence, the Arts, and Willa Cather (2007) and The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking […]
[…]late fiction of Cormac McCarthy for publication. Anthony Warde recently completed his doctoral studies at the University of Sheffield and is Associate Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Critical Theory at Sheffield Hallam University. He is currently preparing his monograph on narrative themes and stylistic techniques in the late fiction of Cormac McCarthy for […]
David Haeselin is a PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation examines how the search engine comes to dominate the American cultural imagination over the course of twentieth century. Accordingly, his research interests include media theory, twentieth century American fiction, the history of information science and science fiction. For more detail, please visit davidhaeselin.com. […]
[…](Dalkey Archive, 2004). In 2005 he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive and Cultural Studies in St. Petersburg, Russia. Joseph Conte is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. His book, Debris & Design: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction, received the Elizabeth Agee Prize from the University of Alabama Press in 2002. He also contributed to The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction (Dalkey Archive, 2004). In 2005 he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive and Cultural Studies in St. Petersburg, […]
Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP, 2009), Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of How to Watch Television (NYU Press, 2013), as well as numerous essays about film and media studies. He runs the blog Just […]
[…]The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (winner of the 2004 Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts. She is now at work on a book to be called Strategic Formalism: Shape, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Caroline Levine is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s the author of two books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (winner of the 2004 Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts. She is now at work on a book to be called Strategic Formalism: Shape, […]
[…]wagons in the medieval city of York and a detailed analysis of the previously unpublished source code to Will Crowther’s original “Colossal Cave” text-adventure game. He has published a video course with Packt Publications, “Building Games with Scratch […]
[…]of Oregon. Her research interests include ecofeminism, the environmental humanities, disability studies, and comics studies, with a particular emphasis on graphic […]
[…]these three books – inclusive because it subsumes the private and public foci of the first two studies, and sophisticated because its perspective is essentially philosophic and self-reflexive. Van Wyck, as humanist, has mastered (for good or ill) the language of cultural studies that Kroll-Smith and Floyd bumbled so heavy-handedly and uses it as the medium for analysis of the crippling deficiencies of deep ecology as a type of environmentalism. Van Wyck’s prose, however, is far from exemplary, blighted by numerous obscure passages (endemic to cultural studies), occasional solecisms and syntactical blunders, and deficiencies of copy-editing. Still, if you can […]
[…]for that matter (Perloff’s example) architectural theory. The essay compares two reviews as case studies, both from the Times Literary Supplement. One review is devoted to four fairly complex studies of recent trends in architecture, and the other review covers eight unrelated volumes devoted to contemporary poetry. This comparison allows Perloff to demonstrate an important point about poetry and public spheres. The TLS, a review from a major cultural capital with the word “literary” as its middle name, treats books on architecture more seriously and thoughtfully than it treats poetry. Turning to recent years in the New York Times Book […]
[…]just a different calendar (?) – smaller portions, even individual units published at a time (no critical mass? individual attention?) – all essays “current”? – conceptually, the journal becomes a whole, its past is its present – the growth, history, and activity of the journal actively contribute to its appearance – this issue of the journal being whole – the journal itself becomes a corpus, a library, a larger work built of inter-related parts – are we making the whole too dominant? – nothing is replaced by more current versions – greater continuity between themes (?) – opportunity for reconfiguration […]
[…]“critifictional” responses to the issues of the day, for example, the ETOYS vs. ETOY fight now working its way into both the net art/theory community and the mainstream e-commerce media cycles) – it means the journal is wholier-than-thou, always expanding, monster-like, unpredictable, but with editorial vision – it means this editorial process becomes more focused on our theme of “gathering threads” and involves a more dynamic interweaving process that is faciliated by the database/machine/application Ewan’s idea of creating an interface that would “begin to reorganize the connections and groupings in ways other than those intended by the editors” so that […]
[…]address of every person who has contrbuted to ebr. out of that core group (of readers who are also critical writers), we may want to tag each one with a “thread” or group of threads defining that reader’s unique set of interests (green or gray ecology; poetics; image + narratve, etc). this way, when a new essay is posted on a given subject, i (or my collaborating editor) can “automatically” identify readers with a demonstrated interest in a given subject. in other words, the threading concept might be used to help us articulate structures in our audience that answer to […]
[…]being variable, and visible according to different organizational rubrics: theme, language group, discourse style, real world geography, “Joe’s Favorites,” “Users’ Favorites.” Many different ways to view the Table of Contents, or Field of Contents. Different views for different uses, different moods. 3} — Many programmers have made it a Holy Grail to devise a nest of algorithms to…automatically…link new pieces of designwriting together in a meaningful way. The results are sometimes interesting, but most often dull. My counsel: try that, if it interests you, but don’t leave ALL the linking functions to the machine. Have machine-linked views AND Human-DJ-Linked views. […]
[…]Laurie Becklund (HBJ 1991) wears out its claim as Nike’s unauthorized biography by being less critical of the sneaker giant than Just Do It manages to be. Take away the feud between CEO Phil Knight and J.B.’s husband Rob, who left the company in 1986, and Swoosh is no more unauthorized than a pledge raid on the frat house. two tales of one Nike Author, authorized, unauthorized, authority, authoritarian: terms laid waste by postmodern discourse attain recuperation in the business world of letters. Some of the respectable journalists I name may resent being identified as authors of authorized corporate histories, […]
[…]though (and I’m having trouble coming up with ways to talk about this without sounding critical, which I really don’t feel). You are proposing that questions will be posted that aren’t too restrictive and that will stimulate response by anyone, right? How will these responses differ from a listserv (other than that they will be more permanent and will interlace with one another through the warp and woof of the linkages)? Will all writing on the web become the expression of a moment rather than the production of contemplation inspired by the desire to speak about something? Is writing about […]
Hello, everybody– As probably the most troglodytic of the group (or certainly bottom ranked), I find myself grouping the questions raised into crude categories, two of which (opposed) I just want to briefly mention. The first is form, and I am tremendously excited by the careful thought and attention I find here towards the notion of “emergence.” This is a great experiment somewhere between trad. categories of communication and collaboration that will no doubt dwarf my already humbled imagination. The other question I don’t think I’ve seen directly mentioned (although indirectly in several of Anne’s points): the question of death. […]
[…]experimental writing; scholarship with attitude – work that requires readers to bring to it more critical vocabulary and theoretic understanding than is required by magazines for a more general audience, and yet is way cooler than the kind of academic writing that appears in most journals. A hip academic journal, is one early oxymoron model, as I recall. Right now, so much of ebr fits this (even if that isn’t the primary goal of the piece). I would hate to see this fall by the way side and become an elaborate listserve, or what may amount to the same thing, […]
[…]twenty four hours. American Online shut down the site, but in that time, hundreds of copies of the code were made by computer geeks around the world. This code is being been collaboratively updated and improved by freelance programmers, much as the Linux operating system has been developed. I suspect that there soon will be Gnutella sites for various types of music, and the program, which I understand is tricky and far from bug-free, will become increasingly user-friendly over time. Gnutella will ultimately be worse for the record companies than Napster ever could be, as Gnutella can grow and develop […]
[…]a kind of writing, which is then retroactively revealed to have been “noisy” all along. Working from the perspective of sound as one of the “spatial arts,” future contributors to this thread might raise the question of how one should navigate through the rhetoric of noise (while filtering the noise of rhetoric). Who wants to remix this noise into pseudo-autobiographical narrative? mystory? critifiction? Why did Progressive Networks change their name to Real Networks in the year 2000? And what about the Senator from Washington state, the 42-year-old Maria Cantwell who funded her campaign with moneys cashed in from her job […]
[…]a kind of writing, which is then retroactively revealed to have been “noisy” all along. Working from the perspective of sound as one of the “spatial arts,” contributors might raise the question of how one should navigate through the rhetoric of noise (while filtering the noise of rhetoric). Who wants to remix this noise into pseudo-autobiographical narrative “mystory” critifiction? Why did Progressve Networks change their name to Real Networks? And what about the new Senator from Washington state, the 42-year-old Maria Cantwell who funded her campaign with moneys cashed in from her job at Real Networks? What’s up with all […]
[…]this time, given the convergence of our timeline with the turn of the year, we decided to impose a working constraint on ourselves: we asked for essays between 1999 and 2000 words in length. That requirement was accepted, in good spirit, by Paul Braffort, Bernardo Schiavetta, and issue editor Jan Baetens. It kept everyone aware of the conditions under which, and the year toward which, we were writing. As the deadline approached, however, and our file organizers automatically adjusted to accomodate our first double-digit issue, we became conscious of another constraint that has silently shaped the ongoing development of the […]
[…]States to play. Despite our language barrier, I feel an unspoken cross-cultural alliance with this group. Our collective desire to reach beyond the parameters of music, the language we actually do have in common, has brought us together to this rare occasion in Kyoto, and although none of our shows have garnered an audience of over 50 people so far, this little tour feels oddly important, as if we are members of a larger cultural movement in the process of forming. I always find it strange when people say that music is the most “abstract” of art forms, not because […]
[…]asserts the importance of visual aesthetics to e-poetry; and the last two lines – “grep -i code * /*” (a Unix program command) and “HTTP Error 404” (the error code for a broken link on the Web) – point to the shortcomings of traditional hypertext and the possibilities of programmed texts. If the arc from hypertext to programmable media serves as the background for Glazier’s arguments, then the main focus of the text can be derived from the larger red text. The acrostic text invites multiple readings. If “Dig[iT]al Poet(I)(c)s” is the natural first reading, then it doesn’t take long […]
[…](1985). But as early as 1981, building on Oulipo’s work on combinatory literature, the ALAMO group had been launched. JR The aim of Raymond Queneau and FranÁois Le Lionnais, when they founded Oulipo, was to unite mathematicians and writers who were interested in literary creation under formal constraints. The Oulipians, while acknowledging their “plagiats par anticipation” (lipograms, palindromes, etc.), strived to define and moreover to invent new literary forms using non-trivial mathematical structures. Among the various existing sources, Oulipians were naturally attracted to the writings of Jean Meschinot (1490) and those of Quirinus Kulhmann (1660) who tried quite early to […]
[…]of taking something apart and putting it back together directly relates to Wenk’s method of working, and therefore complements Wilson’s insights into the artist’s work. Additional documentary photos of multiple uses of tape in the real world – duct tape holding broken windows together – offer graphic reinforcement of Wilson’s observations, “The tape, as viscous, is dangerous, for it threatens to stick to one like glue or like honey…” A smart group of texts, Wilson’s writing reveals the complexity of Wenk’s seemingly innocuous actions and prosaic material. In his next publication, Wenk would be better served in attempting not to […]
[…]has said that he believes his core audience will be “younger readers used to working with web pages with multiple texts,” and he said he persuaded his publisher to serialize House of Leaves on the Internet. This is an interesting experiment because the future medium for monstrous fictions may well be electronic, where space is cheap and distribution can be world-wide. Because of its mass and excess, House of Leaves will probably make its publisher some money, but most novelists complain about decreasing outlets for experimental work like Danielewski’s. monstermedia And that’s why I want to discuss two hypertexts, Shelley […]
[…]Their collaboration also became the springboard for John Matthias’s “Working Progress, Working Title [Automystifstical Plaice].” In what some have called his richest poem, Matthias allows the factual details of the Lamarr-Antheil story to expand into a meditation on the “progress” of sound-and-noise, film, film history, history generally — and how the “frequency hoping” of technology, representation, systems of constraint, and sources of power go into the composition of what we call culture. A discussion of “Working Progress” and other Matthias poems can be found in the current issue of Samizdat. Click here to go to the […]
[…]a river will sort out pebbles of different size and weight and deposit them in homogenous groupings at the bottom of the sea; subsequently, certain substances in the water will by way of penetration, percolation, and crystallization cement the pebbles together into a new entity, such as a sandstone layer, with emergent properties of its own. Genes, in turn, are sorted out by a host of different selection pressures, but only those accumulations that are “cemented” and isolated from the rest of the population by closing the gene pool to further reproductive exchange will survive in the shape of a […]
[…]now two years old, titled “electropoetics.” The same can be done for new contributions to “critical ecologies,” “internet nation,” etc. – so that, over time, readers may come to recognize groupings across issues as easily as they can read around in a new issue. This simple device not only makes the journal more hypertextual, but it also works against (without subverting) the periodic nature of journal publication. [thREADs will be re-installed for ebr version 4.0. – ed.] Combining graphic arts, literary genealogy, and standard html coding, ebr employs the hypertext apparatus as a way of tightening the journal structure, not […]
[…]not bode well, since it threatens that readers will be transported back to the dark age of media studies when “media” were seen exclusively in terms of mass media; mass media, in turn, were conflated with television; and television, to top it off, was routinely denounced as the prime instrument of a culture industry bent on deluding, homogenizing, and Americanizing cultures that had hitherto enjoyed the lively interaction and emancipatory splendour of spoken words and printed books. To be sure, there are occasional echoes of this Frankfurt School-type regression in some of the contributions, but it is only fair to […]
[…]resources for resistance, and they remained so until the abstract colonizing system reached a critical level of efficiency, a threshold attained only recently. As Bauman puts it, The so-called “closely knit communities” of yore were, as we can now see, brought into being and kept alive by the gap between the nearly instantaneous communication inside the small-scale community (the size of which was determined by the innate qualities of “wetware,” and thus confined to the natural limits of human sight, hearing, and memorizing capacity) and the enormity of time and expense needed to pass information between localities. (15) What’s changed […]
[…]of MUDs (environments that have received a good deal of attention from the perspective of cultural studies and computer mediated communication), the semiotics of an arcade-style computer game (a form seldom discussed even by game designers, which so far lacks even a critical vocabulary), and the nature of the “cyborg author” and Eliza-descendent Racter (representative of an underexplored form, but one that has benefited from the examination and development done by Janet Murray). These discussions are useful, although not strikingly insightful. The chapter on MUDs, for instance, does not convincingly describe these environments as mainly literary, mainly ludic, or even […]
[…]and books ought to be capable of joining with digital media in the work of mapping, rewiring, renetworking the same old pool of elements in new ways (to cite the Seattle collective, In.S.Omnia, reviewed in this issue by Paul Harris). In this spirit of recombination, ebr will go on reviewing books in print (preferably before they are out of print. By taking advantage of the more streamlined electronic production process, an electronic journal should get around to covering small-press, scholarly, fringe, and other small-run titles within the period of their limited shelf life). Yet the term book in our title […]
[…]address of social and kinesthetic intelligence. In Sage Walker’s novel Whiteout , a group of friends run a virtual company described as: a mosaic….an interactive group of ideas and personalities,…a collection of disparate talents that can define answers and then come up with questions for people to ask about them. We want to work with the psychology of attractions, with the science of spin-doctoring, with virtual realities that can compact and condense amounts of information that would have staggered us in our childhood. ^2 Walker, Sage. Whiteout. (New York: TOR Books, 1996): 83. Of course, science fiction isn’t the only […]
[…]“language writing.” Writes Bob Perelman in The Marginalization of Poetry, one practitioner’s critical account of this movement: “language writing is best understood as a group phenomenon…whose primary tendency is to do away with the reader as a separable category.” Creeley’s collaborations offer various points of entrance: through artist or poet; in gallery, text, or internet; with one or the other exchanging the roles of artist and reader/viewer and offering ways we can do the same. They break down the disciplinary boundaries that define how we regard the arts, that herd us into singular designations as “readers” or “viewers” or “practitioners” […]
[…]Allegory, Benjamin argues, is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities. While working on the never completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for the Arcades Project. What was recovered after WWII from its hiding place in the Bibliotheque Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly from 19th century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses. The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting […]
[…]one is that postfeminism is a term in popular use and the other is his lack of awareness of a group of women which he really should be scared of – those in the grrls movements (in which I would place the Guerilla Girls, even though they precede the real grrls groups by a decade at least). When Gay Lynn Crossley and I started to work on this issue of ebr, we spent a lot of time discussing the inherent difficulty in developing definitions of postfeminism and questioning its currency in certain communities, not merely academic ones. At one point […]
[…]and strike and spit and refuse to shop. As official culture promotes bumper stickers for the working class, it promotes the Internet with its commercial websites, bulletin boards, chat groups, and subscriber lists for the middle class. The idea is: displace your anger and passions onto the Net so that you won’t be inclined to actualize them in real time in a context that might conceivably effect change. Moreover every communication we make on the Net is subject to monitoring, and in the process these communications make money for computer, software, and online corporations, as well as profiting paid Net […]
[…]intervention, makes the project, for me, absolutely contemporary. One encounters two groups of signs in different settings – by the asphalt road leading to the entrance, and along a footpath that leads viewers through the heavily wooded park – that are spaced exactly 55.6 meters apart. By placing the components in this way, Hunter initiates a critique of any naturalized or abstract concept of space (of the sort, for example, that would be invoked to sustain the concept of “the nation” or, closer to aesthetic home, “landscape”), referencing it instead immediately to the specific situation of the viewer (including but […]
[…]for Powers’s kidnapped American to cast himself in the role of the victim. Although the group that has abducted Taimur Martin, “Sacred Conflict, a unit fighting for God’s Partisans” (150), proves itself to be just another contender for geopolitical clout – “the terrorist group of the hour, just now enjoying their moment on the geopolitical stage, their suicidal, scene-stealing walk-on” (151) – it has nothing on its declared enemy, the United States of America, and everything it represents. Plowing the Dark, like Powers’s earlier novels, shows a sense of moral outrage at the price exacted by whatever historical force dominates […]
The second ebr special to employ the concrete poems of Daniel Wenk, working typographical variations on the term, “electropoetics.” Guest edited by Joel Felix, who in 1997 was an undergraduate Lit major at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The original design for ebr5, “electropoetics,” can be viewed by clicking here The scope of these essays include the honeycombed structure of contemporary poetics, that stack of cells of poetic demography which poses as multiplicity but, like the storehouse of the bee, locks into hexagons from the weight of the grid. It may be no stretch to link those hexagonal cells […]
[…]the wondrous Gravity’s Rainbow, the “project” Thomas Pynchon had been secretly (what else?) working on all those seventeen years in between. Vineland was just another novel – trademark Pynchon ideas, for sure, with its movie-dimensional characters, episodic plot that nevertheless hints at paranoiac connectedness, flaring out here and there with a rock-n-roll sensibility in the form of the death-cult Thanatoids – but surely this was not the book Pynchon spent all those years in producing. I would venture to say that Mason & Dixon IS that book. It has the scope of Gravity’s Rainbow and more; a story about drawing […]
[…]unity. It falls victim to overambition, missing attainable goals in the pursuit of a new ecocritical understanding. The first section of the book examines the history and future of wilderness and features essays by R. Edward Grumbine, Denis Cosgrove, and Max Oelschlaeger. Each writer treats the dual concepts of “wilderness” and “wildness” but there is little common ground among them as to definitions or methodology. As a result, the authors’ collective efforts to illuminate these terms serves instead to obfuscate an already vexing issue of terminology. Differentiating between wilderness and wildness forms a crucial subtext throughout the book, but only […]
[…]of America offered from these mostly European critics, the collection poses a local problem for critical writing: Under circumstances of simulation, working in the nonspace of Baudrillardís hyperreal and the virtual reality of cybernetic media, what’s left for criticism itself to do? When literature’s most compelling historical fictions have “long given up the binary concept of fact versus imagination” and when mass media imagery has made “the very concept of ‘representation’…problematic,” it makes little sense to think of criticism as a mediation between fiction and reality, or as a guide to the imaginative life of great and distant authors. Close […]
[…]we’re ready, at last, to put an end to the construction of periodical issues. Instead of working within an unconsidered paradigm inherited from print media, we intend to construct our own ends, over time and on terms that we set for ourselves (within the constraints of the web environment). Over the coming months and through the summer of 2002, the editors will be adding new content as well as re-introducing essays, reviews, and web projects from past issues into the new design. Hence, as Anne Burdick proposed in her initial in-house post (“New ebr Interface”; lettercode: “introductory”), the entire ebr […]
[…]longer scale of narration, destabilizing the fixed bounds of “now” and “here.” An artist working differently still is Eduardo Kac, whose complex work, Time Capsule, I’d like to evoke for you. Kac, a Brazilian whose family arrived in Brazil from Eastern Europe, makes telepresence work that combines robotics and telecommunications. On November 11, 1997, inside a room with parquet floors and ornate plaster ceiling in the Casa das Rosas Cultural Center in São Paulo, Kac constructed an inner room of movable white walls. On one of those hung seven sepia-toned photographs that his grandmother brought from Poland in 1939 – […]
[…]of traditional Chinese stories, myths, American grade school recitations, American cultural codes of femininity, and more – acts of recitation that always take place with modifications. As he concludes that these oppositional acts of recitation never lose their attraction to the discourse of the American dream, Douglas argues the extent to which the narrators employ ideological material [by which they position themselves in the larger social body] as a language that fundamentally enables reflection, affection, and action — albeit in certain established paths and trajectories. (13) Hence, Reciting America shows a keen appreciation for the consequences of engaging in politics […]
[…]– not to mention a keen and often devastating wit. These traits have garnered his work critical acclaim and some amount of commercial success, including the recent feature motion-picture version of his graphic novel Ghost World. David Boring, Clowes’s most recent long-form comics project, was initially serialized in three issues of his comics series Eightball, but its hardcover publication by Pantheon Books has broadened its potential audience from comics-shop devotees to casual bookstore browsers. The book’s slick design work (and its puff quotes from mainstream media mavens Time and Newsweek) may help entice non-comics-readers into picking up a copy. And […]
[…]“Thorow,” Susan Howe explains how she spent the winter and spring of 1987 in the Adirondacks, working at the Lake George Arts Project in the village of Lake George, New York. Her disgust with the town’s tawdry tourism, a commercialism rendered especially vulgar by Lake George’s pathetic off-season appearance, turned her away from the town itself and toward the still relatively intact wilderness of the lake and surrounding mountains. Doing so, and recuperating the “gaps and traces” left by her own and other histories, Howe examines what happened to this wilderness after the Europeans transformed it from a land scarcely […]
[…]system and method using a network of re-usable sub-stories.” Jorn Barger, an AI researcher who studies interactive fiction, says of Crawford’s work: It’s very easy to list hundreds of features that a story engine should offer, but Crawford’s great genius is that he’s narrowed these down to a rich “starter set” that delivers maximal story interest, while still being programmable within a finite length of time. He adds, One of Crawford’s most daring simplifications was to eliminate continuous space, replacing it with a small network of points. From the perspective of naturalism, this is a significant sacrifice, but for the […]
[…]style, a more elaborate plot, a distinct athmosphere. Yet these two novels have often been grouped together, not only because of the same period and the theme they depict, but also because of the authors’ age and, even more importantly, their desire to break the invisible barrier of silence and tacit compliance. Serbia of today has been through considerable change, but freedom of expression is still a utopia. Arsenijevic and Jokanovic tackle the problem of literary creation from the tested direction: from within. By examining themselves and their peers, they imbue the whole ordeal of a country condemned to misery […]
How can artists working along the blurry boundary of music, sound, and noise let the language speak itself? How can they charge language with meaning to the utmost possible degree? Network Voices is an mp3 compilation that features the work of a variety of interdisciplinary artists and critical theorists playing with audio signals. This cluster of digital language investigations pursues the idea of writing as sound, writing as event, writing as experience, and writing as performative gesture. If, as Wittgenstein suggests, the self is grammatical, if it punctuates its own meaning in the space-time-matter of targeted compositional methodologies as executed […]
[…]lack of movement strongly emphasizes a reading mode which both underlines the global reading of groups of panels and manages to do away with the panel as the central unit of narration and reading. What happens in Ware’s fiction is a phenomenon of semiotic “articulation”; i.e., of dividing a unit into its smaller, meaningful components on the one hand, and of integrating this unit into an element of a superior level on the other. Articulation is often considered more characteristic of verbal language than of images. Indeed, one of the most popular stereotypes of the semiotic interpretation of an image […]
[…]one might ask Ferré to consider the concept with stringent logic, if only because materialist studies, Holocaust studies, and other theoretical conversations recently have raised serious and troubling issues concerning the conflation of the ethical with the aesthetic. Yet when Ferré outlines PMPO, he tends to slip from logical proof to the declarative. In the last three chapters, for example, where readers are led to expect a full working out of this ethical schema in the natural, technological, and political worlds, they get instead very general narrative summaries about space, social problems, and issues in cultural politics with statements about […]
[…]cultural analysis of the institution of literature. In the context of literature, Siegert joins a group of critics often lumped together under the dated and misleading term New Historicism, who examine the frequently forgotten material conditions under which modern concepts such as “novel,” “lyric,” “character,” or “literature” itself emerged. It is impossible to overestimate how radically such work has transformed literary studies. In the transmission of clay tablets in the sixth century B.C., Siegert observes the earliest manifestations of postal relays, but his study focuses on the transformation of this official system of information exchange into a system of exchange […]
[…]the process whereby initially undifferentiated neurons cluster into functionally specialized groups. Early interaction with the environment induces neurons to link up in circuits, and these circuits link up in groups. This process continues up several different scales: selection processes determine nascent neural patterns or configurations that take shape over time; such emergent configurations on one level become components in a substrate at the next level, from which another emergent configuration is selected, and so on. Each successive layer/loop of selected patterns results from what Edelman calls the “recursive synthesis” of prior patterns into more complex neural mappings. Neuronal groups connect […]
[…]and media cultures” (8). He does this by trying “to describe computer media’s semiotic codes, modes of address and audience reception patterns” (7). Manovich is self-consciously making a first theory of new media, aware that his views will be highly critiqued as soon as the dust-jacket ink has dried. The author believes that cinema is the key cultural form of the twentieth century (9). Furthermore, cinematic ways of seeing the world have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data (xv). This intellectual debt to cinema results in some interesting observations. For example, […]
[…]the mind’s self-knowing and their inter- penetration. If God had left off speaking, once code was stated, briefly, then Rhetoric should too. The tangible world intaken: intelligible. The fact of experience, a shadow of God: the act of cognition a moment of fusion in which a thing finds its concept – and is found. This is a mind of snow in Connecticut. This is a Snow Mind knowing as if None knew. Exhilarated. Brilliant. An eagle at the breast of the whitening world. (True North 53) The emotional reduction that Gibbs the Puritan made of his life, and the material […]
[…]– seems unlikely. The mass media, finally, a “super-system” (N. Binczek) with a “super-code” information/non-information working against the cherished functional differentiation at the heart of Luhmann’s theory? At times, Luhmann himself implicitly seems to point in that direction. Acknowledging the similarities of the proposed code to the new/old distinction (information is new only once; its consecutive redundancy insists on newness!), he discusses the almost neurotic longing for innovation and “the new” as a general trait of modernity. He even proposes new/old as a possible code for the system of art. Thus, newness, innovation, information, actuality – the sheer temporality of […]
[…]of some “post-revolutionary” writing). History spares no one, and can hardly produce great critical minds that can distance themselves from events less than a decade past. This is not a place where Baudrillard’s dictum about the arrival of the end of history holds (not to speak of Nietzsche’s antecedent dictum of similar refrain). While shepherds continue to roam hilltops in an almost photographic semblance to the last century, history will continue, feverishly even. When these shepherds begin to chat with their local sheep cloner over satellite linked cellular phones we can in turn begin to look for and analyze a […]
[…]of this structural and historical threshold may be debatable, but an acknowledgment of some such critical point facing Polish poetry now must be made. This threshold is generational, political (or rather geo-political), social, and certainly, in terms of the trade itself, technical and formal. The alliance of the poets and the poetics of the oppressed-the proximity of the leading Polish poets to the poetics of Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky – illustrates the historical context in which these factors are aligned. This ethos is characterized by personal sensitivity, high lyricism, vatic pretension, and obsession with empirical history. This obsession, which […]
[…]to investigate to what degree hypertext and democratization are linked or not (nowadays, it is uncritically assumed that hypertext automatically produces a more democratic functioning of writing and reading processes). Here, it is not completely useless to remember the very critical remarks an author such as Enzensberger made on the rapid spread of pocket books, which, mutatis mutandis, in the ’50s and ’60s meant a revolution of literary culture and habits not unlike the transformations which have resulted from putting literature on the web in the late ’90s, and which Enzensberger precisely called a pseudo-revolution, even a counterrevolution, since the […]
[…]cover which remains stubborn in signaling incongruities: printed in small type, adjacent to the barcode, is the word Fiction. In order to respond appropriately to these issues, the critical convention of rarely quoting from paratexts – references to dedications and epigraphs are the commonest exceptions – needs to be transgressed here. There is not the scope to do justice, unfortunately, to all the extensive paratextual cues in the novel. One might have dwelt, for instance, on the odd frontispiece in the novel, depicting a man, or deity, around whose body play the smaller bodies of animals which appear to have […]
[…]desires,” Miller writes, here echoing the long-standing complaint that scholars have created a critical language so specialized that it excludes “actual readers.” There is, of course, some truth to this. Most scholars acknowledge it, some regret it, but hardly anyone believes we can (or should) turn back the clock. The “old” critical language, after all, was a kind of jargon, too. And having largely devoted itself to exhalting (the same) favored authors time and again, it was exhausted or nearly so. Indeed, Miller’s criticism, which borrows its attitudes and language from this lexicon, is a case in point. At any […]
[…]years in anonymity and asceticism. During that time he “devoted” himself to beating carpets, working in a potter’s workshop, at a building site… Eventually, in 1981, he got involved in art again. According to the words of film director Dusan Makavejev, Miroslav Mandic is the “creator of new trends.” He is by all means one of the most influential figures for young artists. Working with film, the visual arts, and literature, he uses walking as his chief method of expression. Complete devotion, according to him, is the “everyday involvement in a perpetual present.” In reality, he seems to be weaving […]
[…]bumper-sticker and t-shirt narratives are easily monitored outlets for the otherwise silenced working-class. Without bumper stickers, fastfood, Super Bowls, televangelism, and the lottery, the working class might just recognize its chronically oppressed condition and strike and spit and refuse to shop. ménage-à-quatre online As bumper stickers and t-shirts are promoted for the under classes, the “information superhighway” with its websites, bulletin boards, chat groups, and online monickers, is obsessively promoted for the middle class. Minute by minute, the official online narrative, called virtual, is encroaching on real time. In that previously-suspended, increasingly hyperreal space, the airport terminal, for example, the […]
[…]of poststructuralism’s shortcomings with respect to technology, reads like a working-through. The book’s structure has a quest romance quality where each of the philosophical trajectories Hansen covers looms up to be defeated by the sword of technology ITSELF, that is, by an agent exterior to culture and cultural inscription. Science studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and (I know no appropriate label) Deleuze and Guattari all loom up, only to be beaten back, beaten down by a very similar series of strokes. The hero proves himself in trial with a serially returning repressed. For the reader, as for the psychoanalyst, the scene seems […]
[…]and auditory – on the Internet. As such it might now be the object of a globalized “cultural studies” by scholars who are themselves more and more transformed, in part by their use of the computer and by their inhabitation of cyberspace, in their relation to the culture of the book. This is the case even though it is still a primary goal of literary history and literary criticism in the modern languages to understand and interpret that culture of the book. The electronic form of Ayala’s Angel in the Oxford Text Archive has one tremendous advantage over the printed […]
[…]fashion of critical theory (labeling is dangerous if one wants to produce “dangerous” and critical writing). But as “play,” it’s the perfect booby trap for traditional writing. Federman A to X-X-X-X is such a hypertext too, but the interesting part of it is that it avoids any naive imitation of electronic hypertext, at least in the stereotyped and uncritical vision of it as an unstructured set of labyrinthine linked lexias which are not very motivating to read in themselves. McCaffery, Hartl, and Rice on the contrary have had the courage to make a readable, and even a very readable, print […]
[…]– it often clogs the port. It is often sugared” are employed to describe the intricate workings of machines or customs; they seem at once serious and mock-serious. And as the writer/narrator finds it his utter duty to inform readers of this world, he calls to us across a chasm, abstracted or disassociated by the stark weirdness of the place and by his own observations. There is a small wan quality in the prose as well, with its locales recalling towns in the grassy Midwest: “Mind the hill. Throw the water. Pull the wood. Crack up the fires. Fix their […]
[…]This our gospel, go(d)spell, good news. We all know that the Torah was written in Secret Divine Code, God’s Code. Accordingly, the language in Mosaic Man is densly gnomic, i.e., salted with gnomes, i.e., short, pithy expressions of general truths, aphorisms. A gnomic writer, Reb Suk rewrites the “wisdom” poetry of the Bible. You know: “the only gospel / the hand writing” (38). After the creation of the world and the word, what does it mean to be Jewish? What does it mean to be a Jew and a writer? A Jewish writer? A writing Jew? Reb Suk doesn’t need […]
[…]of DeLillo’s preceding novel Mao II, and his obsessive chronicle of bodily decay and infirmity. Working on his “great novel,” the book to transcend all the inadequacies and miseries of his personal life, Gray becomes morosely preoccupied with the failing of his own body. He picks dandruff and hair out of his typewriter’s keyboard, discusses the symptoms of internal bleeding after a car accident with a group of strangers, revels in his own slow physical decay. Meanwhile, there is the transcendent purity of the text he is trying to transform himself into – the book that will never get finished, […]
[…]as a result, too much estrogen (or the other way around). Soon addicted to a variety of recovery groups for a medley of fatal diseases he does not have, Jack sleeps “like a baby.” Until – another “tourist” shows up, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter). Jack knows instinctively, with the clairvoyant intimacy of an evil twin, that Marla, like himself, has no life-threatening, mutilating disease. Especially since she first appears at the testicular cancer group. Jack is sleepless again. Until – he is suddenly, catastrophically homeless, a mysterious explosion having blown all his thoughtfully selected furniture out of his something-teenth floor […]
[…]“games.” While a few chapters, particularly those on right-wing militia and Christian groups, are more reportorial than analytical, and hence less interesting, most offer new primary materials and theoretical approaches. One of the best chapters treats conspiracy narrative as a form of hyperactive semiosis. Fenster argues that conspiracy narrative is motivated by a paradoxical desire both to unearth the motive cause of complex social effects and to keep that cause at arm’s length. “If satisfaction is defined as the proof and public recognition of the ‘truth’ of conspiracy and the efficacious remedy of the crisis,” he argues, “then conspiracy theory […]
[…]of both professions is the need to mask the truth from outside observers. Or, more bluntly, both groups are paid to lie. This is what journalism has come to: the messengers, at the most, are converts to the straight and narrow, repentant sinners, asking for our trust. (And print journalism is only marginally better, as these books all attest. Isikoff, who in a more tawdry way than Woodward has become part of the story [his subtitle: “A Reporter’s Story”]. Which is why we are reading his story. Isikoff understands the difference between print and television all too well. Given the […]
[…]informatic colossus. Such an all-determining and inescapable imago of media induces a productive critical paranoia. The media are always already watching us, putting their needles into our veins: “humans change their position – they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface” (210). Neuromancer ‘s Wintermute is everywhere, or as Kittler phrases it, “data flows…are disappearing into black holes and…bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands” (xxxix). At the same time, he enables one to see the particular and pandemic pathologies of modern paranoia precisely as psychic effects driven by the panoptic reach of […]
[…]nonlinear novels, the implications of a self-conscious, networked aesthetic for the practice of critical writing. If, after twenty years of formalized science-and-literature studies, critics in North America have remained partial to a set of major texts, the cause may be in part a tendency, understandable in excursions into the unmapped territory between disciplines, to let the borrowed disciplinary structures and terminology serve a normative function. Strehle, for example, arranges counterintuitive elements from the new physics alongside their experimental analogues in fiction, in order to distinguish the offbeat realism of her chosen writers from “the intentionally aesthetic narratives of metafiction.” She […]
[…]most significant method of critique behind postmodern, postcolonial, subaltern, and cultural studies approaches” (vii). This thesis is questionable for it exaggerates deconstruction’s critical impact, and in a book that already attempts to accomplish a veritable number of tasks, it only diminishes the strength of the text’s primary arguments. Subsequently, the book tends to oscillate between a reassuring discourse about the importance of deconstruction and a paranoid discourse regarding the conflation and collusion of other theories with deconstruction. Nevertheless, the author is at least self-reflexive about his contradictory relationship to Derrida. Although many of Roman de la Campa’s critiques of theories […]
[…]electronic space, access information of all kinds, and communicate with diverse individuals and groups, regardless of their physical location. At the same time, individual identity diminishes due to the separation from one’s name and material body. Wonderfully indifferent to race, gender, beauty, and station in life outside the Web, the network absorbs the individual into an interactive dialogue in which the conversation assumes a life of its own and threatens to eclipse the participants who provide its content. (xiii) However, the discussion becomes more animated when it gets to hyperfiction and more particularly Michael Joyce’s self-proclaimed hypertextual classic Afternoon, a […]
[…]Practice (1980) by Catherine Belsey – come to stand for everything that is bad under the critical sun. However, for readers with a host of daring authors such as Joyce and Pynchon under the belt, Guyer’s Quibbling (1991) or, for that matter, any other existing hypertext fiction fails to subvert anything but our material habits of literary consumption. The change of habits is unmistakable, but let’s not overestimate its implications. As far as I can tell, up to this day only the Internet presents a digital textual form which seriously manages to undermine the expectations of readers versed in the […]
[…]– ought to be a key element of any historical method, genealogical or otherwise, that critics working in new media studies bring to bear. Let me suggest that the start-up work of theorizing digital culture has by now largely been done, and that serious and sustained attention to archival and documentary sources is the next step for new media studies if it is to continue to mature as a field. Freidrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900 already does some of this work. And we could also do worse than Internet Time for a summation of the pace of scholarship in new […]
[…]each part itself composed of five parts, or “pages.” Each “page” acts as a prosodic unit, working in a fugal manner as the poet cycles through history, politics, art, popular culture and intensely personal memories, his pages riffing off of chance encounters with pages from the past: This year Raymond Chandler died and so did Abbott’s friend Costello. It’s hard to think of Abbott all alone his eyes upon Costello’s derby hanging on the hatrack in the hall. For days you keened in grief for Errol Flynn your only child’s Robin. General Marshall, Admiral William Halsey also on the list. […]
[…]Institute assembled a program of codes to replicate themselves in the environment of a computer, codes with a built-in mutation element. The codes both altered and replicated at a spookily unanticipated rate, producing in the lab what cyberpunk produces in novels: a sense of life “out there” in cyberspace, beyond the control of its human inventors. Given this general scenario, speculation on the relation of organic life to putatively silicon-based life splits in two directions. One, represented by Hans Moravec and his book Mind Children, sees the potential of computers as much more oriented to artificial intelligence – to AI, […]
[…]each other, without having to overwhelm each other or let ourselves be overwhelmed. thREAD to critical ecologies While not wanting to burst these paradisical bubbles of foam too quickly, I would like to suggest that the metaphor of “foam,” just like Lyotard’s metaphor of the “archipelago,” implies a higher vantage point from which the totality of pluralisms can be brought into view. As congenial as the postmodern preference for pluralistic metaphors may be, these metaphors also reveal that reason has hardly given up the task of once more transcending all spheres and of taking up a privileged, bird’s-eye perspective beyond […]
[…]does resemble Austen in that he penetratingly probes the formative relationships in a specific group of people: upper-middle class New Yorkers involved in business, horse racing, and the art world. He also creates unexpected empathy for characters who are sado-masochists, alcoholics, liars, cheaters, vain, or just ambitious. But the novel is completely different in tone and form from Austen; it has a distinctly modern, acentered quality. It is episodic and recursive in structure, and makes its impact through implication and juxtaposition. The role that constraints play in shaping the plot might be inferred from this passage in Cigarettes: “Morris was […]
[…]Oprah’s Book Club any time soon, more critical attention is directed at him than ever before. Critical attention is not only directed at what is between the covers of his books, but also at what type and shape they are. A new DeLillo novel is an “event,” that fateful intersection of publishing hype, marketing strategies, and reader expectations. The book as object and event carries significance. Thus, much of the public reception of The Body Artist was geared toward the shape of the novel, that is to say, its length, a paltry 124 pages, with large print and generous margins. […]
[…]pathways located at the heart of the journal, and this project will be realized by publishing a critical edition of our back issues alongside Alire 11 on CD-ROM. But here, one could offer an initial statement about the past ten years, a statement which will complete an earlier French article published in 1994 as “Poésies et machinations” (Revue Larousse #96), and which was reprinted in English as “Poetic Machinations” (Visible Language 30:2, 1996). Though the journal has always been a site for perfectly out-of-the-ordinary, independent creation circulated instantly everywhere, one could nonetheless single out the following characteristics of the Alire […]
[…]at last, the genuine thing: the cabala of my hate, of my irreconcilableness. (216) The voice is critical. With such a style, the character needs time to expand. Elkin’s short stories in Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers, are finely crafted, but his is a style that needs the breadth, the expansion of the novel for his abundant voice to stretch to its fullest. Ben Flesh, Jerry Goldkorn, and the multiple, fragile, doomed children of The Magic Kingdom can no more be contained in the short story than Elkin’s voice can be bounded by traditional notions of well-wrought sentences. He […]
[…]and the wall of the prehistoric cave, all treated as earlier “screens,” as the site of codes that have both formal and emotional significance. I take it that Lascaux and similar caves were sites of cultural instruction about the most important forms of orientation for a nomadic people, whose path intersected with their main food supply but a few days in each year. The fact that their winter temperatures were lower than minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit also put a premium on springtime birth, both of humans and animals. These people needed a practical astronomy that tracked weather and timed their […]
[…]fathom the stakes of the argument, both for my own critical-theoretical agon and for the agon of critical theory itself in this technological era. By describing the book as a “working through” of poststructuralism, Brigham astutely characterizes its “function” for my own intellectual development in a way that foregrounds its particular situatedness; she also finds words to represent what, for me, cannot but remain in some sense or other a lived “drama” of apprenticeship. Brigham’s invocation of the Freudian vocabulary of working-through, trauma, and translation recalls to me my time in graduate school, when I was very much under the […]
[…]only by being retroactively posited as “original” and “natural” by the contingent and diacritical system of the Symbolic itself. As Zizek puts it, the phallus-as-signifier thus operates – against the clichéd notion of the phallus as “the siege of male ‘natural’ penetrative-aggressive potency-power” – as “a kind of ‘prosthetic,’ ‘artificial’ supplement; it designates the point at which the big Other [the Symbolic], a decentered agency, supplements the subject’s failure,” its “lack of co-ordination and unity.” ^14.Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 135-6. Further references are in the text. Zizek explores this theme in any number of […]
[…]Shatner was otherwise engaged.) The greater problem is that all of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text is rendered in a jaggy, monospaced font – fine if you’re reading a paragraph but a killer if you’re trying to read the whole of von Helmholtz’s Ice and Glaciers. The fluidity of cut-and-paste, the immense time-saving of computer searches, the minute physical volume holding enough words to fill a library: great benefits of the computer age which provide little comfort to the person reading a screen while nursing a giant headache. If, in publishing on the computer, you aim […]
[…]with the cover image (unlike the inside of the book) we were offered full-color reproduction. In working that out with the designer we were digging out various images and I think we had it narrowed down to three… Joris: There was an [Guillaume] Apollinaire, there was a [Kurt] Schwitters, and I think there was a [Max] Ernst. Clearly we were looking for someone from that part of the century in whose work intersections happened, specifically where art intersected with poetry. We didn’t want an “illustration,” just a nice picture on the cover to sell the book. We wanted it to […]
[…]improve my clumsy rendering, sure that at every step, with the source text as my goal, I shall be working in native English. All I have to do is edit my own writing until I eventually reach a finished version. Think of the writer’s object of desire – vision, situation, whatever – as his source text. Like the translator, he learns everything he can about it. He then abandons it while he chooses a home ground. Home ground for him will be a mode of writing. He probably knows already if he should write a poem, a novel, or a […]
[…]reading Joyce’s Moral Tales and Meditations: Technological Parables and Refractions while working in Mt Isa for a few days, a mining town in western Queensland’s ruddy hued desert. Mt Isa’s technological scape is impressive with the scaffold and steel, smoke stacks and sulphur of the mine complex dominating the flat town’s gentle sprawl of suburbs. The technosphere of this place is at once industrial and informatic. It was hot as I lay in a motel room, watching cable television, endless video shows, and cartoons. Run by an Aboriginal media organisation, Imparja Television broadcasts throughout central Australia, a local voice in […]
[…]and law breaking. In an era of “electronically coordinated swarms” (209), movements of groups of people are coordinated on an ad hoc basis according to changing conditions; thus friends can rearrange group meetings and protestors can evade police barriers. Democracy can be a frightening thing for the authorities who have, in some instances, shut down networks to curtail citizens’ behavior. Sometimes the cornucopia of Mitchell’s examples makes it difficult to distinguish significant trends from fads. Me++ often has a rather techno-utopian tone. While the techno-utopianism can become a bit exhausting, it gives scope for Mitchell’s best rhetorical prose. At the […]
[…]reading depends, therefore, upon how effectively the writer’s artistic impulses and vision are encoded in machine language – quite a different matter from encoding the products of these in verbal form. Needless to say, the poetics of programming are less developed than those of the more familiar variety. As an expressive medium, executable binary code has managed to reach a state of development roughly equivalent to writing when it was preserved on unwieldy clay tablets, understood by few, and incapable even of representing the entire vocabulary of spoken language. Just as no one could have foreseen the full flowering of […]
[…]three sections, which help to identify three dimensions of his work or rather three domains of critical intervention with it. In the first section “Aesthetics,” the essays engage with “formal” aspects, which in the case of Gombrowicz entails not merely the pre-existent concept of literary form but rather various critical approaches to Gombrowicz’s interrogation of form itself. Tomislav Longinović focuses on the strategies at play not in Gombrowicz’s literary works but in the series of interviews he did with Dominique De Roux towards the end of his life entitled A Kind of Testament. The intimate relations between Gombrowicz’s work and […]
[…]a critical talk about this “fire poetry,” including my own work, at the 1991 American Studies Association Conference. San Francisco poet Carol Tarlen showcased this “fire poetry” in a reading commemorating the Triangle Fire in March, 1996; I was one of the poets who read. At the reading Tarlen announced there was a small storefront sweatshop three blocks away in Chinatown. Listening to her, I felt I could no longer just write about the past as a poet or a critic. I felt I needed to act in the present. Returning to Los Angeles, I joined Common Threads, a women’s […]
Introduction by Joseph Tabbi Trace Reddell’s “Litmixer: The Literary Remediator” is what critical writing could look like once scholars and critics begin making use of the performative possibilities within networked environments. With his software groovebox, Reddell applies the tools and strategies of the DJ to the performance of literary interpretation and critical speculation. Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Plato’s Pharmakon,” becomes in Reddell’s hands not so much a master text as a set of recording masters, less a source of supporting citations than a sampling source to be played off against related discourses – on music, drugs, technology. And it’s all presented […]
[…]code writers respond to the wishes of commerce, a power to control may well be the tilt that this code begins to take. (546) Furthermore: The code need not be balanced in the way that copyright law is…. Trusted systems, therefore, are forms of privatized law. They are architectures of control that displace the architectures of control effected by public law. (528) Lessig believes that “the law needs to protect intangible property only in order to create the incentive to produce” (“The Law of the Horse” 525). This principle might translate into a lower level of regulation and sanction than […]
[…]vanguard of postmodern geography. Soja’s 1989 Postmodern Geographies made a strong pitch that critical geography needed to look beyond the resources of Marxism, a central critical force at that time, to a social theory informed by postmodernism. (Whether this is an accurate portrayal of the state of social theory in geography is debatable). The chapter “It all comes together in L.A.” was the cornerstone, indicating how this postmodern city changed the critical landscape. Drawing from Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and John Berger, Soja argues postmodern social science must abandon the “modernist myth of linear narratives” by emphasizing locality and particularity through […]
[…]At the same time, I hope to give some indication of why we might do well to continue to turn our critical and creative attention to the ways in which the literary constitutes a valuable site through which to understand our works and days. Richard Powers is an accomplished novelist whose five (soon to be six) novels plumb the controversies, latent and teeming, inherent to our highly technological milieu. I daresay that, for most of my readers, Louis Zukofsky, though an equally accomplished poet, will be a somewhat less recognizable, and more inaccessible, figure. I hope to show why both […]
[…]organized body, recapitulated in the hierarchical organization of each of its members, nomads, a group to be sure, a body to be sure, are not organisms, not organizations, neither as a whole nor in terms of individual components. They comprise a field rather than a set of individuals. Members of the state have “feelings,” nomads have “affects;” members of the state “communicate,” nomads “signal” – all of which is to say that members of the state, like the state itself in its executive dimension, have a complex interiority whose nature is, in the process of state function, made manifest, the […]
[…]with the field which it represents — even as the theory of the physicist might not include the workings of the brain or mind which conceives and commits itself to that theory and holds it to be true. The truth of the representation or judgment of the Universe is something additional to it, so that the One, and the representation of the One, add up to two. The point here is that acts of representation and of judgments are alienations. McElroy thinks about both the Earth, and Skylab, as “those self-renewing life-support systems,” and then suggests that self-renewing life-support will […]
[…]have to spend (and Schlictmann did) staggering amounts of money on expert witnesses, groundwater studies, medical examinations and other scientific investigations. Schlictmann gambled that the dead children and common sense circumstantial evidence would lead to a large jury verdict which would enable him to recoup his expenses. He did so against his better judgment and that of his partners. Their caution was well-founded. A Civil Action opens with the trial in its final stages and Schlictmann watching hopelessly as U.S. Marshals repossess his car. The defense, meanwhile, could fall back on the principles of pharmacokinetics. While toxicology measures the effect […]
[…]sexual orientation is no doubt a complex phenomenon” (195), they repeatedly refer to case studies of female gulls nesting together and studies that have indicated that DES daughters “have higher rates of homosexuality and bisexuality than do their sisters who were not exposed to this synthetic estrogen before birth” (195). Nowhere are such abstract speculations more pernicious than around the book’s controversial claim that male infertility is increasing as a result of “feminizing” pollutants. As Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner note in The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present, despite the general cultural assumption that […]
[…]to maintain its organization by continuing to process communications according to this particular code; it sees the world according to that Manichean formula ó and that is all it sees. How a theory of social systems (such as the one adumbrated here, developed by the German social scientist Niklas Luhmann) can help us see the limitations of Livingstoneís call for dramatic forms of consciousness-raising is by forcing us to consider the relationship of individual to social system. What Livingstone despisesóeconomic, legal, political, and scientific blindness to the health of the environmentócannot be overcome simply by a renovation in conscious, individual […]
[…]or Crozier. Crozier, not only a librettist, but a founding father of both the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, felt that Britten always had “a particular favorite upon whom he would lavish affection, while foreseeing with a grim kind of pleasure the day when that special friend would be cast off.” Britten told Crozier that Montague Slater was “one of [his] corpses,” adding that Crozier himself would “be one, too, one day.” Even Auden, to the end of his life, referred to Britten’s break with him as “a permanent grief.” Instead of the sense of generous inclusion that […]
[…]both cultural feminism and poststructuralist feminism, Plumwood proposes a feminism of “critical affirmation” that treats “woman’s identity as an important if problematic tradition which requires critical reconstruction” (64). She criticizes the “dissolution of gender identity through destabilization and the definitive act of parody recommended by poststructuralists” because it “amounts to the formation of anti-identities which become further identities. But these identities are not independent. They are still defined essentially in relation to the objects of parody which originate in the problematic of colonisation” (63). In a footnote, Plumwood misreads Butler’s concept of performative identity as assuming a great deal of […]
[…]it can be passed on to the next generation. Thus we find that while the various chimpanzee groups that have been studied in different parts of Africa have many behaviors in common, they also have their own distinctive traditions. This is particularly well-documented with respect to tool-using and tool-making behaviours. Chimpanzees use more objects as tools for a greater variety of purposes than any creature except ourselves, and each population has its own tool-using cultures. One can only imagine that Ferry’s response to this would be to raise the bar once again, so that only those who have read all […]
[…]ecology would seem a particularly debased version of this failure. Such a reading echoes in the critical backlash to Cagean eco-politics, focused on the reactionary fetishism in claims “to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories of expressions of human sentiments” (Silence 10). From this point of view, Cage’s claim to non-intentionality is a happy-face elitism of the avant-garde. The chance compositions appear naive decontextualizations, and in the resulting inertia and insistent banality is read the citation of former contexts. De-crypting and animating a specter of media’s historical sediment is the commonplace of new media studies. It […]
[…]Paris, Munich, and Moscow) enabled modernism’s divergent impulses to coalesce into a formative critical mass. Marsden’s London comprises a rich field of intellectual currents – ranging from feminist and philosophical to scientific and popular discourses – from which her evolving thought draw substance and sustenance. The mosaic of Marsden’s thinking contains elements from Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Carpenter, and Otto Weininger, among many others, which she composes into a distinct intellectual trajectory of her own: beginning with an early feminist and suffragist phase, Marsden eventually developed a philosophy of egotism that subsumed her earlier concerns about gender and politics. […]
[…]Moretti, “the ambition of the narrator of Moby Dick is precisely this: to take the multifarious codes of nature and culture, and to demonstrate that they are all to be found in the moral super-code.” Or again, take Whitman, who declares “I am large, I contain multitudes,” and calls for a “rhetoric of inclusivity” that can encompass all creatures large and small. But “contain,” as Moretti notes, also implies “control and surveillance”; like the voice in Moby Dick, Whitman’s is a “monologism that is ashamed of itself, and dresses itself up as polyphony.” The failure is not the individual writer’s […]
[…]studies of bodies, bodiedness, and gender with a cultural assessment of the meanings and workings of technology. And despite its critical sophistication, Balsamo remembers to tie her observations and insights to the real world and to social and political movements for change. Thus she succeeds in showing us the following: As is often the case when seemingly stable boundaries are displaced by technological innovation (human/artificial, life/death, nature/culture), other boundaries are more vigilantly guarded. Indeed, the gendered boundary between male and female is one border that remains heavily guarded despite new technologized ways to rewrite the physical body in the flesh. […]
[…]to a delightfully appalling world of wanton sluts, gender ambiguity, and nuclear-age propoganda studies, including her excellent Atomic Cafe and WWWench sites. Always, though, Loader maintains an intellectual rigor both in her own writing as well as in her selection of hotlinx to other writing. As you might know, Loader’s provocative, disturbing film The Atomic Cafe (1982), which she made with Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, is an unnarrated docudrama about our “love affair with the atom” as Loader puts it. But it is also “a movie about propoganda, culled from material produced by the U.S. government.” In fact, Loader and […]
[…]of America offered from these mostly European critics, the collection poses a local problem for critical writing: Under circumstances of simulation, working in the nonspace of Baudrillard’s hyperreal and the virtual reality of cybernetic media, what’s left for criticism itself to do? When literature’s most compelling historical fictions have “long given up the binary concept of fact versus imagination” and when mass media imagery has made “the very concept of ‘representation’…problematic,” it makes little sense to think of criticism as a mediation between fiction and reality, or as a guide to the imaginative life of great and distant authors. Close […]
[…]the metalanguage’s quest is defined at the last possible moment as a new language object” (Critical Essays). For academic readers, the presence of an intellectual, scholarly register in IN.S.OMNIA discourse marks its difference from most iconoclastic groups seeking to bring writing out of its ivory tower of babble. (Invisible Rendezvous dog-ears pages from Influential French of the ’70s (Derrida, Barthes)) and aligns itself alongside hypertext champions from within the institution (Jay Bolter and George Landow), but it also differentiates itself from either set of writings by its joyful pragmatism and savvy. For instance, while they embrace the Derridean aphorism that […]
[…]still concerned to maintain the domination/resistance paradigm as a mark of old school cultural studies loyalty, for feminists in particular, this re-engineering has not just been a matter of theoretical innovation but also a task of massive urgency. When flesh is becoming increasingly protean, those who have historically been considered morphologically dubious share the doubled situation of facing both immense opportunity and of becoming increasingly subject to alteration and “improvement.” Given this urgency (one that can only be accelerated as those vectors of the cyborg condition such as genetic engineering and biotechnology, which appear below the level of general visibility, […]
[…]theories can slip into totalitarian imperatives, or falsely generalize by excluding oppressed groups, or abstract away from the very practices that make meaningful experience possible. Bioregionalism and deep ecology champion the importance of local context in matters both political and epistemological. But what if the Logical Positivists weren’t that bad? What if they were onto something–something worth keeping hold of? And what are the dangers of the contextual and the local? The Logical Positivists have received a very bad reputation among some environmentalists and other progressives as defenders of the decontextualized scientific knowledge that sanctions and makes possible the domination […]
[…]contrast to the strident, earnest feminist, the “postfeminist” is fun, indifferent to or even critical of “politics,” cheerfully apathetic, sexy, and independent. She has no need for liberation or solidarity with other women, and she’s far too busy having orgasms to worry about such issues as comparable worth, daycare, or abortion. In contrast, feminists are viewed in much the same way one might view one’s parents: as arbitrary despots clamoring about insignificant, petty concerns, as un-evolved. Uncool. Hopelessly “pre” and clueless about “post.” For the bad girl, the problem with feminism is that it has an agenda: the “postfeminist” woman […]
[…]Sokal accuses the humanists and social scientists who populate the burgeoning field of science studies – scholars who tend to be critical of contemporary technoscience and its effects – of ignorance masked by the jargon of fashionable theories. He claims that this ignorance allowed his original article, filled with obviously erroneous scientific claims, to be passed unchecked into the pages of Social Text. Stung by his criticisms, the editors of Social Text, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, responded swiftly with a broadside questioning Sokal’s change of heart, his ethics, and his understanding of his target. One gets a certain illicit […]
[…]Fish finding it easier to say why the proffered solutions – e.g., new historicism, cultural studies, interdisciplinary studies, and so on – are not the answer. Here, his most forceful rebuttals are offered in lectures three, “Disciplinary Tasks and Political Intentions,” and four, “Looking Elsewhere: Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity.” In the first of these, Fish stresses the need to “distinguish between the general (and trivial) sense in which everything is political – the sense in which every action is ultimately rooted in a contestable point of origin – and the more usual sense of ‘political’ when the word is used […]
[…]it is we want to know and learn. If I had one of these ultra-intelligent, hot and nasty slaves working for me right now, I would immediately send it out on a mission to locate all of the start-up web sites that are currently making money by regularly publishing innovative content that actively challenges the banal info-spam usually delivered to us by the Military-Industrial-Infotainment Complex. Like a scene from the Neuromancer trilogy or Snow Crash, I’d talk to my techno-appendage, perhaps a little friendlier and more colloquial than Case or Hiro, and I’d say ” Alt-X has been publishing all […]
[…]feckless sense someone who has any sort of role in the various debates over theory and cultural studies. I’d like to take up Bérubé’s comments on “selling out.” When I was younger, in “the days that used to be,” as Neil Young put it on Ragged Glory, “selling out” really meant something, but it really meant something in only a very general sense. Selling out was not something one could be accused of as the result of a rigorous scrutinizing of one’s “Position.” At the time, 1968, say, you were either for corporate/militarist culture (them) or you were for communal/pacifist […]
[…]of the unborn. I want to point out that this little exercise in rhetorical analysis and critical legal studies was undertaken not by a cultural studies theorist, nor by someone dependent on the knowledge industry run by bourgeois sellouts like me, but by an ordinary citizen of these United States, operating in extraordinary circumstances not of her own making. But more important, I want to pass along to you what this exchange has taught me: first, that sometimes, the cost of selling out to the discourses of policymakers is too steep to bear, particularly if it means disavowing the languages […]
[…]agents for generative hypermedia and interactive editing, and Jean Pierre Balpe, a poet and editor working on generative fiction, who missed the panel itself but made the conference later – and one researcher from the MIT media labs, Kevin Brooks, working on the automatic generation of filmed storytelling. On the same panel, I spoke of writing as programming, where the process of writing itself (which may include the readers’ interactions) may be seen as a ‘prior writing,’ as inscription prior to performance (in codexspace or cyberspace or anyspace). An emergent theme of the panel was the convergence of ‘engineered and […]
[…]written book as a reference and a starting point for undertaking some of the more particular case studies I mention above. Ah, but who will these “other scholars” be? Philosophers? Specialists in the computer sciences? Renegade literary critics? Students trained in newly formed media studies departments? In a slightly different context, Coyne writes: [I]n spite of the deeper understanding promoted by Heidegger that to think is to contemplate things without asking why, without looking for causes, and that we are not in control of technology, the rhetoric of our disciplines indicates an unashamed concern with intervention. It may be a […]
[…]imagistic, any sense that dog and father are the same and the father’s condemnation a sort of coded self-accusation of abuse: dog and father appear as separate and distinguishable characters in the “Shushing the Father” section. Another possibility is that Marcus is intentionally resisting resolving the book with a “boy and his dog” plot-line, but the effect for this reader, which cannot be intended if the lyrical sections are to be in any way meaningful, is to flatten the book’s central consciousness, make it less full and comprehensive. What is suggested in one sense by Lance Olsen’s term, “a postmodern […]
[…]of the writing and/or (college) teaching profession. Such discussions can address issues of working conditions, salaries, and job availability, issues that I, as part of the sub(if you will)-professional class of English studies in the university, find especially relevant. In the university, I am a Writing Associate laboring under one Director of Writing Assessment and one Writing Center Director. Both PhDs and both men. We (three women) Writing Associates have a “(.50 FTE), academic year assignment” with “a salary of $7,972.20 plus benefits” – reason enough to continue to seek full employment. Still, it’s the first time my family has […]
[…]a problem as the teaching or reading of poetry and fiction. There is such a thing as an uncritical relation to critical discourse. We must learn these pedagogical praxes together or we won’t learn them, but there’s no justification for making either the gateway to the other. It may be the case that Amato/Fleisher would agree with this sentiment. It is hardly original. As so often, I am far from sure against whom, if anyone, I’m arguing. If engaging with theoretical texts of a particular stripe has the desired effect – i.e., results in a more politically engaged and productively […]
[…]the point by the so-called Englit department in deference to the heady new world of Cultural Studies. Indeed, most assistant professors hired at even the top institutions like my own no longer have the slightest idea what literary analysis might entail. They’ve heard of an old-hat technique called “close-reading” — a technique they know they don’t want to use even though they have no idea what it might accomplish. The dirty word “formalism” is associated in their minds with the New Criticism even though the New Critics were not formalists at all but, by and large, moralists. I am always […]
[…]difference, and negotiation between competing petit recits. He also asserts a rather outdated critical narrative about what postmodernism is, reducing it not only to a marxist tributary but also limiting its appearance in literature pretty much to metafictional texts and specific kinds of political literature. The idea that postmodernism is a discourse that exists simply to knock things down without asserting anything – the mantra of “denaturalize,” “decenter,” “deligitimize” being now nearly a critical cliche – is not only a limited understanding of what postmodern critique does (Pynchon asserts values, as do Jameson and Baudrillard). It also ignores the past […]
[…]Electronic literature comprises a tiny percentage of texts that can lay claim to the close critical attention and careful reading that Montfort wants to gain for interactive fictions. Trying to kill off either parent, literary or computational, is more apt to result in infanticide rather than parricide. Literature and computer games are both doing very nicely these days; it is their hybrid offspring that is in danger. To see critics argue against either of this offspring’s parents reminds me of Freud’s analysis of the “narcissism of minor differences.” The phrase describes a common tragedy: a small group, infinitesimal compared to […]
[…]with the “link,” that this new organization “frees the new category from the chains of a critical-theory-influenced and essentially non-computational perspective.” And it is but a sheet-drop from there, it seems, to declaring that “the old collection called hypertext cannot continue to hold our interest as a critical category or as a category describing what literary efforts should be considered valid and worthy.” While I applaud the inclusion of more categories into whatever term we use to identify literature with a multilinear structure, I fail to see how that frees us from further consideration of Hypertext as “valid and worthy” […]
[…]project them in inadmissible ways. Representatives of the political system always tie the power code to the moral code and stylize themselves as representatives of the common interest. In aesthetic discourse, it is a favorite rhetorical strategy to promote oneself as the mouthpiece of authentic experiences which are then generalized across systems.” Indeed, Bérubé would seem to admit as much – and thereby recognize the fact of functional differentiation – when he quite rightly observes that “The 104th Congress is going about the business of dismantling social programs despite the fact that one radical conservative claims natural, biological sanction for […]
[…]by Ted Nelson. The platform seems similar to the type of interface that Apple computers has been working on for several years. (See Steven Johnson’s discussion of Apple’s Project X, now called HotSauce, in Interface Culture 94-98). Since Nelson’s Xanadu has pretty much fallen into obscurity, evidently others need to take up and concretize his causes. Indeed the authors conclude that the difficulties they face, those of expressing Nelson’s ideas accurately, are the same challenges that have plagued much of his work preventing its widespread circulation. In the spirit of the cyber-trait of recursivity, I return in closing to Yearbook […]
[…]what we see in most codework writing and art practices is less code per se than the language of code: codework that integrates elements of code into natural languages and brings code to the surface as a medium for literary, artistic, and experimental composition. The codework practice of “netwurker” Mez, which again involves the use of a made-up code language as a mode of artistic composition and everyday communication, is paradigmatic. An overview of Mez’s work can be found in her recent JavaMuseum solo show (February 2002), commemorating her nomination as “Java Artist of the Year 2001.” For a sample […]
[…]the unconscious, materiality, “pictures,” or simply ourselves. In general, our established critical vocabulary is itself too implicated in their repression to help identify them. But what seems clear is that acknowledging their presence will demand new practices of reading and writing, practices that are still poorly understood and that presuppose a fundamental reorientation of attention, feeling, commitment, and perception. For as Requiem and “Melanctha” both show, our problem is not that we need someone to tell us what we’re doing to ourselves. On the contrary, our problem is that we can’t need someone to tell us this, necessitating ever greater […]
[…]computing and technoscience – and his explicitly chosen media keep him immediately allied with codeworking colleagues, Sondheim’s work must also be read against earlier and contemporary writers working within or with a sense of the formally and aesthetically innovative traditions of poetics, and not only the poetics which intersects with Burroughs and Acker. With the implication that Sondheim’s writing needs to be judged as such and should not necessarily be granted a special credit of affect or significance because of its instantiation in new media. In the necessity to read the work in both a programmatological context and in the […]
[…]media, it’s still clear that almost all the knowledge we can gain from traditional literary studies is based on literary objects that are static, intransient, determinate, impersonal, random access, solely interpretative and without links. The same goes for literary values as well. I’m not downplaying the importance of this knowledge or the flexibility of the traditional print format; I’m just saying we can now see and describe its limits more clearly (to our own benefit). From the broader perspective it will be extremely interesting to see what will happen in and to attempts to combine the realm of non-exhaustive interpretation […]
[…]by now why such poems by Fisher might be respected by poets from both the Cambridge and London groups, and indeed there are moments when he might be thought of himself as a member of one group — But it is precisely with a poetics of the sublime – and Keith Tuma’s original fisher by obstinate isles thought he might “maintain ‘the sublime’ / in the old sense…Unaffected by the ‘march of events'” – that I want to leave this Fisher of the latter-days and all but conclude this essay. I am not alone in thinking that A Furnace may […]
[…]and linked to further references on the Web — if you’re comfortable leaving the room. Old working video games by Atari are there, as are working versions of Adventure, Eliza, and Spacewar! (the first modern video game). Be prepared to spend several hours playing the old Atari 2600 games, alone. Lev Manovich, in a companion introduction, proposes that the developers of human-computer interaction are the “major modern artists.” Manovich writes: “…in my view this book is not just an anthology of new media but also the first example of a radically new history of modern culture — a view from […]
[…]to respond rather than contribute. Rita Raley (“Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework”) remarks about the political implications of radical codework writing, which hopes ìto awaken us to ñ also to comment upon and recompile ñ the varied and various data streams that we engage, filter, and disregard while multi-tasking.î Despite the radical goals she describes, Raley locates codework poetry in the artistic traditions of e.e. cummings and Dada, and suggests that codework is one in a long line of textual and art objects. We may do better, however, to think of making art in this medium as producing […]
[…]is the bella figura, “the attention to form of presentation governing social situations and the code that expresses an individual’s public utterance and social script.” Bella figura “governs oral communication and shapes its social pragmatics while providing its theatre” and, coincidentally, looks a lot like what elite critics might call professionalism. Most important is the maintenance of an impeccable coolness in the eyes of others, “especially in public appearances where indirectness and forms rule over frank exchange. For a Corleone to become impetuous, imprudent, impatient, to ‘not get the message,’ is to place the family at considerable risk and its […]
[…]shared by many critics. What LeClair championed in DeLillo: ” The Names first seems to obey the codes of domestic realism, but it broadens to a multinational systems novel” (In the Loop 204) is what he has tried to simulate in his Greek theatre of basketball but like so many other novelists coming to sport in this century, he has not quite believed that basketball could carry its own weight, to stand adequately for what needs to be represented. Yet at times Keever stands his jock ground against the evil internationalists with only his sporting doxa to protect him. “Athletes […]
[…]That Scott complicates these historiographical assumptions with a romantic nostalgia is well-trod critical territory, Elias notes, but what’s important for her argument is that in doing so, the historical romance summarizes and anticipates this tension within many postmodern novels. Whereas Scott had his sights set on the historical real but stumbled over romance, the postmodern metahistorical romance has its sights set on romance, but sometimes stumbles over the real. There are other issues at work in the book, and one of them is that postmodern writers are as influenced by contemporary historiography as Scott was by the historiography of his […]
[…]and he devotes an entire chapter to unpacking multiplicity’s “technical background,” lucidly working out three mathematical concepts vital for understanding the virtual: the manifold, the vector field, and the theory of groups The manifold originated within the differential geometry of Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann when the former tapped into differential calculus to express rates of change and find instantaneous values. Applying these techniques to geometry, Gauss made it possible to study a two-dimensional curved surface as a space in its own right, without reference to a higher dimension. Whereas in the previous Cartesian methodology, such a space had first […]
[…]Trade Center as figures for the dominance of a binarism that includes digital culture, the genetic code, and the duopoly of liberal capitalist states. Developing this analysis, Baudrillard, in “Requiem for the Twin Towers,” suggests that the towers suffered two attacks and two deaths that constitute a critical extension of such binary logic: the effect of the attacks is to suggest the possibility of the overthrow of the power embodied in the towers. As well as physical destruction, Baudrillard states that the towers endured a symbolic collapse that was due to their inability to sustain the image of contemporary capitalist […]
[…]should speak of hypertexts or cybertexts, and whether games or texts should be the object of critical attention) toward more general issues concerning the creation, preservation, and archiving of electronic literature. Because its form is integral to the html-based form of the earlier version of the electronic book review, we present Parker’s essay as a free-standing project, available here. Rettberg’s and Kirschenbaum’s entries can be read in their original formats as ebr riPOSTes or they can be accessed in the current interface. All are included under the blue thREAD, […]
[…]fame of the tallest buildings attracting tenants into expensive offices, explain nothing. The many critical statements that the buildings symbolized capitalism overlook the need for a building to produce a revelation from within its structures and functions. Such a revelation is not a meaning imposed on the exterior of buildings, it is the advent of a concept within the sensory experience. Let the meaning of a building as a symbol emerge from its specific materials, colors, and shapes, and from the style of life toward which the building summons people. If the architects get the right architectural combination of structures […]
[…]involves a tacit complicity with capitalist power. Wilson’s essay appears to legitimize this critical position. For much of his essay, Wilson argues that unlike the closed systems of Islamic art, the World Trade Center exemplifies the open systems of secular American art. It is this sense of openness that engenders the multiple possibilities associated with the WTC. Wilson’s celebration of this open system relies on a departure from an economic opposition to the towers, but on several occasions he alludes to an economic defense of their properties of openness. He speaks of how the users of the towers respond to […]
[…]“cheating,” operating against the implicit code of mystery-reading behavior. The implicit code of reading most types of fiction in codex book format favors starting at the first page and moving to the last. Hypertext readers rarely have such a developed implicit code of behavior to react with or against. A Storyspace hypertext generally provides the reader with choices to move from any given lexia only to those other lexias the author has linked. The link in any case is a predetermined avenue of navigation. Whether the link has been directly chosen by the author, randomly determined by the computer, or […]
[…]of older textual forms is a misplaced gesture, symptomatic of the general extent to which textual studies and digital studies have failed to communicate. If we acknowledge that printed texts do not “stay themselves,” we should also ask what it means for electronic texts to “replace themselves.” The critical discourse surrounding digital technologies – often taking its cues from post-structuralism – has embraced their putative ephemerality, as if we must surrender ourselves to the eventual loss of our most precious data in order to realize the medium to its full potential. I want to suggest that there is a kind […]
[…]creates a great opportunity for synergistic collaboration among editors, designers, novelists, critical theorists, programmers, and the like. Our goal is not to repurpose the past of print, but, rather, to invent new forms of rhetoric that intervene in our dynamic present. Admittedly, the standards for doing this are still developing. And, for some time to come, it will be necessary to publish writing whose form is transplanted from print to web. But in the meantime, the least that a journal can offer is an alternative to the single-minded, linear reading that keeps critics like Shaughnessy from seeing what’s in front […]
[…]in various interactive spaces does not necessarily allow for a greater range of exchange. The group dynamics that hamper exchange in “live” settings have colonized our electronic interactions. & you can never completely rid yourself of this virus but you can be a more or less hospitable host. Decentralization allows for multiple, conflicting authorities not the absence of authority. Authority is dead; editing begins. Mass culture is not the same as popular culture. Fostering dissent on the Web requires the invention of new formats. Authority in the defense of liberty is not linear. The destruction, in the U.S., of TV […]
[…]search by job title, search by location, search by a menu of political issues, even your own zip code, and find the right official to e-mail your suggestion or grievance. As an afterthought, we decided to add interactive petitions, a suggestion of our 19-year-old Russian programmer. (Max was an Ayn Rand fan: his version contained one Darwinian feature we later dropped: the Bad Idea Pile, a section of the site where all the weak petitions that couldn’t get signatures would go to die of ridicule.) When we started, I thought the job was relatively simple and would take Max a […]
[…]of September 11, a painter named Vanessa Lawrence and a sculptor named Michael Richards were both working in their studios. Lawrence escaped when the plane struck the building, but Richards did not.” http://commemoratewtc.com/history/artwork/synopsis.php The meaning of a building emerges from its appearance in relation to its uses, and to the experiences of people using it. The WTC functioned as a Post-modern structure inviting people to live Post-modern lives. Of course my thoughts are distorted: I want the lives of the people who were working in the buildings to have been happy and useful. However, since for me consolations are false […]
[…]I believe to make of Ground Zero what they could. A photograph, a mark, a memory, a silence. A group of groups of which in many respects (certainly from the limited point of view of the terrorists) I am a part. Crowds passing under my window. Many from overseas. Yet mostly they are terrorist’s Americans I know alive or dead; still more really they have been, when they reach the ramp, more like Robert Frost’s people on the beach, who “cannot look out far…/ [and] cannot look in deep./ But when was that ever a bar / To any watch […]
[…]is one of the only ways in which young people can make a “fine” living. Polleros: organized groups in charge of the exportation of a Mexican cheap labor force into the USA. Their activity is treated as if highly illegal, although it is obvious that these persons are structurally permanent within the system. A few years ago their primary methods consisted of crossing people through the desert, but they have evolved in many ways, particularly the use of technology to make false ID papers. Students: kids who decide to spend extra time commuting in order to get a U.S. education. […]
[…]is intended to give its reader some sense of what we talk about when we talk about New Media Studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum reviews what is undoubtedly the most important publication in New Media Studies released this year, The New Media Reader, published by the MIT Press and edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. The Reader is an 800-plus page tome (with CD-ROM) that aggregates articles, papers, and creative work developed in the formative years of the new media from the 1940s until the development of the World Wide Web. The Reader ‘s publication is an important event, as it […]
[…]greatest gift, however: the published volume also comes packaged with a CD-ROM, which contains “working versions of some of the most important new media artifacts ever created…games, tools, digital art, and more — with selections of academic software, independent literary efforts, and home-computer era commercial software.” I had an opportunity to preview some of this material along with my advance copy of the Reader, and it is indeed an embarrassment of riches: Spacewar!, Weizenbaum’s Eliza, Will Crowther’s Adventure, Atari and Apple games (Karateka, anyone?), early hypertext including lost poems by William Dickey, an anatomy of Stuart Moulthrop’s “Forking Paths,” the […]
[…]stated clearly, and early. The book is to be …an experiment in forging a vocabulary and set of critical practices responsive to the full spectrum of signifying components in print and electronic texts by grounding them in the materiality of the literary artifact. (p 6) After experiencing literature in a different way, engaging with the electronic interface of links and mouse clicks and constantly refreshing screens, a materiality unlike print, young Kaye skips backwards to see what in the past she overlooked. And she sees that the material qualities of print were also there all along. She concludes that a […]
[…]treatment of Lexia to Perplexia is at its most rewarding when she deals with the computer-code-laden Creole discourse, the way the computer code “shines through” the English language, like “cell…f (and cell.f), homophones for self that conflate identity with a pixilated cell and the notation for a mathematical function.” It is, however, not quite as convincing when Hayles concludes that Lexia to Perplexia tells “new stories about how texts and bodies entwine.” Her skillful interpretation of the linguistic and intertextual aspects of the work seems to fight against her own conclusion: even a work like Lexia to Perplexia still mainly […]
[…]as thoughtful critique of the “faux posthumanism” of postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha. After working through these chapters, the reader might be wondering what the ethico-political purchase of this volume is. If Wolfe is critical of the limits of current animal rights theory, does he have anything to offer in its place? In short, the reader might ask, what is the ethics and politics of a posthumanist thought of the other animal? Wolfe attempts to answer these questions in his conclusion, “Postmodern Ethics, the Question of the Animal, and the Imperatives of Posthumanist Theory.” As we have already seen, Wolfe is […]
[…]are now in excellent condition. Let’s write! Bibligraphy Cayley, John, “Pressing the Reveal Code Key,” EJournal, Volume 6 Number 1, 1996, http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-6-1.txt. Marshall, Catherine C., Halasz, Frank G., Rogers, Russell A. and Janssen, William C. Jr., “Aquanet: a hypertext tool to hold your knowledge in place,” Proceedings of Hypertext `91, ACM, New York, 1991, pp. 261-275. Marshall, Catherine C., Shipman, Frank M. III, and Coombs, James H., “VIKI: Spatial Hypertext Supporting Emergent Structure,” European Conference on Hypermedia Technology 1994 Proceedings, ACM, New York, 1994, pp. 13-23. Park, Seongbin, “Structural Properties of Hypertext,” Hypertext ’98: The Proceedings of the Ninth ACM […]
[…]effective strategy of www.McSpotlight.org which is focused on research, outreach, and activist networking was never repeated on the same scale. Why not? Should we continue to make the distinction between good content and networking projects and “bad” criminal hackers? (No, but people still do.) Ricardo Dominguez: Geert’s breakdown of net.activism into a binary of good activism (www.McSpotlight.org), or digitally correct activism, vs. the bad hacktivism of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) strikes me as far too simple. EDT’s work was and is tactical theater; McSpotlight.org was a long-term strategic action. So to compare one with the other disregards the context […]
[…]‘cultural studies’ style arguments are incomplete in Writing Machines. A cultural studies perspective would discuss the territorialization of critical inquiry itself. For example, is Hayles predisposed to talk about materiality because her meta-project is to develop territory in which ‘electronic writing’ is on a continuum with print literature? A successful synthesis of this putative continuum would be in the interests of a Professor of English and Design / Media Arts. Hayles includes visual media and programmed environments in MSA. Their relationship to ‘literature’ needs much further exploration, and whether this approach can be reconciled with existing disciplines is yet to […]
[…]the spate of recent work by or about Burroughs since the advent of Timothy S. Murphy’s landmark critical work, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997), followed soon after by the James Grauerholz- and Ira Silverberg- edited Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998), the locus would still be adding information about the most recent titles: Naked Lunch: The Restored Text edited by Grauerholz and Barry Miles (March 2003), Oliver Harris’s William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination from Southern Illinois University Press, and the Harris-edited 50th-anniversary edition of Burroughs’ first novel, Junky, from Viking Press (both […]
[…]historical specificity, its present fix. A second confusion has to do with the avant-garde’s uncritical enthusiasm for any and everything that calls itself innovative, regardless of an “innovation’s” sterility, irrelevance, or just plain stupidity. Cavell speaks of this tendency as the avant-garde’s “promiscuous attention” to newness, a phrase intended to suggest both indiscriminate coupling and infidelity. The idea is that the avant-garde habitually conflates novelty with change, imagining that artistic advance results from mere unconventionality, from difference as such. Call this the “farther out than thou” syndrome. And the third confusion is a tendency, already implicit in the avant-garde’s military […]
[…]that more enemies were attacking in front…But when the shouts grew louder and nearer, as each group came up it went pelting along to the shouting men in front, and the shouting was louder and louder as the crowds increased. Xenophon thought it must be something very important; he mounted his horse and galloped to bring help forward. As he rode he heard the soldiers shouting “Sea!” “Sea!” and passing the word along in waves. Derrida Consumed by Crabs 1966. Derrida arrives in Baltimore, twenty-nine city blocks north of where we are now, to deliver, for the first time on […]
[…]impulse, as well as by the hybrid forms emerging from women writers of radical representation working today. The methodological field which I would like to project has at its center a reading body. In place of citations I have cast quotes from others as reverbs within the play of the text. Reverb Gertrude Stein: The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of […]
[…]Yet my point of contention is that Jaffe’s solution to this crisis, his attempts to illustrate critical, cultural resistance when reading a text – and then seduce the reader into doing the same – only works if and when the reader is made aware of the political underpinnings of his quite strategic textual moves, and the stories in this collection (what can rightfully be described as the articulation of his ideology in a fictional form), do not reveal enough about the author’s intentions to carry their desired weight, to produce any sort of ideological effect at all. The stories written […]
[…]of removing from cognition itself “the multiple, variant approaches to social reality encoded in the many thousands of human languages over time.” Similarly: Matt Kirschenbaum ‘s study of the rise and fall of VRML provides a focused instance of the linguistic and cognitive paucity of actual networked experience. As Paul Smith observes, the process of global capitalist dominion produces a “third world” within the First, and a “first world” within the Third, a southern hemisphere of “underdevelopment” within the borders of industrialized liberal democratic Northern-hemisphere nations, and a slice of northern-hemisphere liberal democratic lifeways in the global South. This means, […]
[…]to harass Web authors to remove images, corporate logos and even corporate names from websites critical of their activities. In order to highlight the absurd extremities to which IP police powers have been extended, McLeod took out a trademark himself–on the phrase “freedom of expression.”TM He owns it. You do not. The efforts of absurdist media pranksters such as ®TMark are the subject of Caren Irr ‘s essay, which seeks to describe ways in which their efforts to use the system of socio-ideological reproduction to send new messages can be linked to a more capacious opposition to dominant forms of […]
[…]seven thousand dollars a year (and rarely more than fifteen), by adjuncts (former grad students) working at similar rates of pay, and nontenurable instructors with huge workloads and no research agenda. Similarly, research is increasingly performed by a corps of assistants, technicians, and grad students under the supervision of a tenured member of the faculty (who takes the credit, and a better paycheck, but whose own life may well be diminished by the compulsion to serve as a manager, rather than a teacher and scholar). My own contribution to this section discusses the “information university” as a place where grad […]
[…]and communities. Chris Carter ‘s interview with Greg Ulmer traverses many of these themes of critical, experimental, and progressive pedagogy. Exploring the relationship between writing technologies and the formation of critical/resistant subjectivities, Ulmer’s various pedagogical experiments startle but also rebuild, dislodging students and teachers from the ossified relation of discipline and assessment, but preparing them also for a new relationship in shared commitments to social transformation. In such projects as the Florida Research Ensemble, the MeMorial, and the EmerAgency, Ulmer hopes to support the emergence of project identities both collectively conscious of collaborative commitment to emergent issues of justice and […]
[…]Barthes’ jouissance calls up a rapturous, climactic, or even violent bliss in which cultural codes and forms are fractured or transgressed. Joyce, by contrast, invokes Contour to feel the forms we create but cannot see: “I had in mind…the sense of a lover’s caress in which the form expresses itself in successiveness without necessarily any fixation” (167). Both seek a pleasure devoid of intention – from the text as it exists, not as it intends. But Joyce plays more to the tune of the never-ending story in that, unlike Barthes, the pleasure of his text comes without necessarily any climax, […]
[…]us something that only the novel form could tell us?” (“Traffic” 32). The acerbity of these critical attacks is startling, given the strong connection between Cosmopolis and other works by DeLillo, some of which have received euphoric critical praise. DeLillo’s mega-novel Underworld, hailed by many critics as a contemporary American classic, begins its haunting Epilogue with a meditation on the sublime shaping powers of technological capitalism: Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, untouched money […]
[…]in larger rivers or split into deltas. (34) Cultural and technological convergence requires critical and theoretical convergence and the above passage is a kind of manifesto in miniature for Culture and Technology. Its supple and interlacing critique makes a decisive incursion into the philosophy of the contemporary. What at first appears to be a review of familiar debates, theorists, and ideas converges into applied analyses of the signature themes associated with cyberculture. But even here, discussions of digital art, virtuality, cyberspace, and the networked society extend previous and ongoing academic discussions to a broader, meta-critical space, in which cybercultural concepts […]
[…]So does the Web’s ability to draw into interaction communities from many different language groups, including groups whose languages have not been part of the standardization process but who nevertheless wish to use the network to speak in other registers. See Crystal, Language and the Internet. To some extent, then, what seems on the surface least political about the Web may be what is most important: providing raw bandwidth to those whose voices and languages have been pushed away by standardization. (However, the relative difficulty of sustaining broadcast media technologies in nonstandard languages such as low-power radio and television stations […]
[…]such as Cygnus have convinced the market that you do not need to be proprietary about source codes to make a profit: the code might be free, but tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades, office applications, and hardware are not. In 1998, when Netscape went “open source” and invited the computer tinkers and hobbyists to look at the code of its new browser, fix the bugs, improve the package, and redistribute it, specialized mailing lists exchanged opinions about its implications. It is an established pattern of the computer industry, in fact, that you might have to give away your […]
[…]just the accumulation of “fixed capital” with advanced machines. Some of the writings of this group can be found in the collection edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, 1996). Rather, it is the variable potential of human subjectivity that continues to be critical for the creation and operation of this high technology apparatus – although often as indirect and heavily mediated, rather than direct, hands-on, labor. This subjective element they variously term “mass intellect” or “immaterial labor.” See Paulo Virno “Notes on the General Intellect,” in Marxism Beyond […]
[…]fragmentation is produced. Yet, the interview holds together with snippets of linearity, code, idiosyncratic vernacular, enjambment, the human voice, and what seems to be non-sequiturs – if viewed from the perspective of print conventions. The interview does not explain who is the interviewer and who is the interviewee: readers confront uncertain attribution. The medium is the message. Form follows function. The play is the thing. Amerika says, “I am intrigued with the idea of exploding the standard model for narrative construction.” New Media demands its own aesthetics of Informatics situated in the political to disturb complacency about artistic production, distribution, […]
[…]but with walls to slam themselves against, this wild, disciplined rough-work straight-faced group” (359). Gravity itself, the novel suggests, is a source of injury, but art may seize it, mold it into “great paths, curves, inertial, intersecting” (418), and hand it back to us as a conscious experience, stripped of some of its ominous force. 4. It was somewhat decentralized, how it all networked While the elegantly curved surfaces of Actress in the House move the reader forward and backward along thematic lines, McElroy’s experiment with narrative structure nevertheless induces a sense of interpretive paranoia. Not for a moment does […]
[…]and product/advertisement/community as complex chains created for a given purpose by one set of groups are adopted and modified over time by other groups. Planned urban streets no longer separate social classes; here relevant social categories may be as explicit as the data fields coded into marketing databases or as implicit as the global audience for a popular World Wide Web site. This analysis is sympathetic to and complements media studies efforts that trace the multiple, ongoing ways that the cultural technologies of media situate audiences. The forms of life congruent with the adoption of the printing press, highways, and […]
[…]I. Schiller in the early seventies. Reflecting its origins, the department had a reputation for critical studies and support of free speech. The courses utilize texts such as Paolo Freire and Robert McChesney which emphasize the need for community empowerment and access to communications resources. Those very issues were to come home in late spring of 2000, as the department became embroiled in a struggle around freedom of speech that put to the test some of the theoretical concepts regularly featured in the midterm exams of undergrads and dissertation drafts of the graduate students. This struggle was over the Burn! […]
[…]let this pass. Commerce is commerce. From Adobe to Chank Diesel, most creators of typefaces were working in the commercial sector when last I looked. I fail to see how banner advertising protects the “free” status of electronic publishing. By this analysis, network television is “free.” Felix tasks me particularly for not providing “a specific economic framework for… new media paradigms.” This too is perplexing, since it seems that Felix’s entire critique stems from his objection to a very specific economic framework – access to electronic texts by subscription. To be sure, Felix does not like the model I advocate. […]
[…]and the journal will also be, in large part, a review of electronic books: CD-ROMS, hypertexts, critical art ensembles, archived talk lists – whatever comes to be written (and not just typed and slung around) in digital and electronic environments. So yes, this suggests that ebr, in title and in spirit, does like to have it both ways. In the contour essay, I can say that my attempt was to speak more as a contributor than as an editor. Regardless, these remarks by Tabbi constitute “the casting vote.” [For more on ebr ‘s evolution, in particular in contrast to that […]
[…]of PMC, as Moulthrop says. But PMC ‘s (and ebr ‘s along with any other provider of independent critical thinking) contents have a meta-role as critical information, in my view, whether it take the form of hypertexts which dis-order and restructure the role of reader/writer, content/form, and in doing so resist commodification (as Moulthrop sees it) or traditional leftist critique. In either case (and there are other forms available), content needs free dissemination as counterbalances to totalizing corporate control, as much as bug patches need distributing, and are distributed freely. Think of it as tips on how to use the […]
[…]resources over the long term. But there’s no need to suggest that PMC ‘s fate is the fate of critical content on the Internet, be that content peer-reviewed or not. I doubt that Moulthrop was intending the anti-advertising quote as an interdiction on would-be electronic-scholars, but extra care should be taken to ward off such an implication, especially from an editor at the very influential PMC. For the record, I too know the particular difficulties of editing hypertexts, contrary to Moulthrop’s suggestion. ebr 5, which I guest edited, includes two, one of which is authored by John Cayley, whom ebr […]
[…]always situated within absolute zones of material and ideological circumstance. What is software studies then? Software studies is what media theory becomes after the bubble bursts. Software studies is whiteboards and white papers, business plans and IPOs and penny-stocks. Software studies is PowerPoint vaporware and proofs of concept binaries locked in time-stamped limbo on a server where all the user accounts but root have been disabled and the domain name is eighteen months expired. Software studies is, or can be, the work of fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories, and the cultivation of the critical discipline to […]
[…]Yes, it does, and it seems to me to explain why your work has been taken up particularly by critical studies of technoscience, people who are working in English, or rhetoric, or cultural studies. D Or performance art. L Performance art, exactly. D Yeah, I get taken up much more by artists in the broad sense, who often get what I’m doing both critically and in terms of more life-affirming stuff, not that criticism isn’t life-affirming, but that it isn’t the whole story. I get much more taken up by artists in that double way than I […]
[…]faculty intellectual property rights in “the coming battle.” Few people seriously engaged in critical information studies would necessarily jump to the conclusion that defense of faculty IP rights can serve as a core strategy for combating informationalism, This is not to suggest that there aren’t circumstances where the notion of intellectual property rights, as in the struggle to resist the exploitation of indigenous knowledges, can’t be mobilized with great tactical effectiveness (Coombs). but the real issue is the sudden swiftness with which Noble’s informatic struggle seems to have opened and closed. If academic informationalization isn’t just another Hundred Days’ War, […]
[…]we have learned from the Frankfurt School how devastating the culture industry is for working class and other democratizing movements, it behooves us to understand the potentials of the technology, to learn how they may be deployed in constructing cultural forms more appropriate to a democratic lifeworld, and not to become obsessed with every outrage perpetrated by the ruling class. Such an attitude of creative appropriation is encouraged by the discourse of cultural studies and by countless artists and creators across the globe. Certainly cultural critics need to attend to the moves of the establishment, but we must equally be […]
[…]images on his site. He promptly removed the images, though the content of the site still remained critical of the Bush campaign. Exley’s actions pushed the campaign to buy 260 other domain names, including the hilariously paranoid registering of such addresses as “bushsucks.com,” “bushsux.com” and “bushblows.com.” Anderson, M. “Bush-Whacker, Meet Zack Exley: Computer Consultant, Online Satirist, Pain in the Ass.” Valley Advocate. July 1, 1999: 12, 19. (If you type in the domain names bushblows.com, bushsucks.com or bushbites.com, it sends you directly to the official Bush-Cheney web site. In fact, many derogatory adjectival combinations will send you to the campaign’s […]
[…]independent essay “Writing as Hacktivism: An Intervening Satire”) draws attention to the group’s status as cultural producers, the media generally represent ®TMark as political pranksters or innocuous saboteurs. In other words, the media have focused on ®TMark’s anti-corporate content. At rtmark.com, the group provides its own statement of goals, a rhetorically complex statement fusing and confusing the claims of activism and art. In answer to the FAQ “What is ®TMark, anyhow?,” for instance, we find the following definitions: “®TMark is a brokerage that benefits from ‘limited liability’ just like any other corporation; using this principle ®TMark supports the sabotage (informative […]
[…]an interdisciplinary approach and a disciplinary approach. Gaming programs should integrate gender studies, film and television theory, computer science, sociology, digital art, and cultural studies into computer gaming curriculums, (and allow for different emphases.) We also need to discover what would be specific to a discipline of game design and gaming studies. Developing such an interdisciplinary and also disciplinary program would allow for a common language to be shared among programmers and artists, as well as informing gaming culture in general. There is much territory yet to be explored and we should prepare our students to better understand both the […]
[…]1993) both of which he edited with Paul Delany, and Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), which has appeared in various European and Asian languages and as Hypertext in Hypertext (Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), a greatly expanded electronic version with original texts by Derrida, reviews, student interventions, and works by other authors. In 1997, he published a much-expanded, completely revised version as Hypertext 2.0. He has also edited Hyper/Text/Theory. (Johns Hopkins UP, 1994). Harvey L. Molloy is an Assistant Professor in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His […]
[…]to the company, “Nobel Learning Communities’ programs are targeted towards the working families of America.” Why do America’s working families need private schools? “Analysts believe the opportunity to build an education company into a significant and profitable business is huge and is fueled by the Nation’s need to reform a system that is getting failing grades.” Are the “Nation’s” schools really in need of reform or are only some of the nation’s citizens’ schools in need of reform? Certainly Nobel is not targetting the larely white suburban schools populated by the children of the professional class. Nobel schools could certainly […]
[…]expectations, however, are insurmountable obstacles in changing the nature of online learning. Working in new registers of medium-scale, team production or large-scale, corporate production undoubtedly can transform the current understandings of job control, working conditions, and career development shared by many academics toiling away in contemporary research universities. The development of disciplinary-software systems, such as Mathematica, Web CT, and Blackboard Course Info are leading to a curricular economy that is no longer one tied to handicraft work. Instead, these corporate innovations suggest that distance and distributed learning will become embedded in more factory-like, industrial organizations, involving integrated teams of labor, […]
[…]organized labor in the United States. Yet the voice of these workers has perhaps never been more critical than today. This group, as one of the largest and most highly educated segments of the work force, is uniquely suited to challenge the rhetoric of technological determinism that passes off choices based on expediency as inevitable consequences of the new economy. Although computer networks and high-speed telecommunications technology have made it easier for decision makers to restructure how labor is defined, deployed, and compensated at the turn of the millennium, as Manuel Castells points out, “technology per se is not the […]
[…]everyday life and working relations? As a very junior faculty member participating in a women’s studies faculty study group in the mid 80’s, when I tried to explain that I was investigating the politics of making distinctions between what has been called “the oral” and “the written,” a more senior historian impatiently insisted, “Something just is oral or written!” Although each feminist there cared about and taught the importance of denaturalizing cultural categories feminists critiqued, to no one was it obvious that orality and literacy were variations on nature and culture. When I was a postdoc in another university a […]
[…]MOOzymandias. The Ivanhoe Game was developed ‘to use digital tools and space to reflect critically on received aesthetic works (like novels) and on the process of critical reflection that one brings to such works’ (McGann, Ivanhoe). Players of The Ivanhoe Game not only engage with aesthetic works in performative ways, but intervene in them within an environment which puts their ‘critical and reflective operations on clear display’. In playing the game, the players in effect, perform the novel, making critical and aesthetic decisions about the text which, in fact, creates a new and evolving narrative. The Ivanhoe Game thus becomes, […]
[…]preoccupation with content. Beyond this, of course, there is little agreement between them. One group tends to see free verse, or at least the exclusive cultivation of it, as a temporary aberration in poetic history, while the other sees it as a vital revolution that got momentarily stalled, one that they are now themselves carrying to its next logical stage. Historical and ideological considerations? No doubt. But what, one might ask, do they have to do with the making of poetry? With what gets made they clearly may have a lot to do, but as to how good any of […]
[…]can act to change the world – the question of agency. Employing theories from both cultural studies and media studies, we problematize the mass media’s role in the ideological side of social control and investigate possibilities for resistance. Students study the media’s techniques of persuasion and manipulation, as well as activist attempts to use the media’s own conventions (such as those in advertising) for subversive ends. Course assignments build upon one another throughout the semester and all assignments contribute elements to the creation of the final project hypertexts. The course is structured so that we address its two threads – […]
[…]what we know as the discipline specialist, prefaced here by the parenthetical but increasingly critical prefix, multi. Without going into too much detail here, I want to suggest that the role of the unidisciplinary specialist is in many ways uniquely tied to print culture and thus imperiled in this `late age of print'” (120). The fan site is the first new form of scholarship to appear on the Web and provides us with a guide for how to transform our students into active researchers. The fan occupies a marginal position in popular culture and is often represented as a socially […]
[…]in the U.S. and abroad. Forming the FRE grew out of dissatisfaction with the old “reading group” approach to collaboration. I had always participated in one reading group or another, organized around theory. The practice is familiar: an interdisciplinary group of scholars would agree on a list of books, usually works of French theory, and we would meet regularly to discuss and argue. I learned a great deal from these sessions, and if anything they died of their own success, in that the groups tended to become too large. The chief source of dissatisfaction, however, was the homogeneity of the […]
[…]that matter. The significance of this piece also lies in its being representative of a number of group discussions that Bataille, much like the Surrealists, pursued on a regular basis. Participating in the discussion on sin were the usual suspects associated with Bataille – Klossowski, Blanchot, Leiris, Paulhan. Also there were Sartre, Camus, de Beauvior, Merleau-Ponty and Hippolyte. A third group was comprised of priests such as Father Danielou and Father More, who hosted many such meetings at his home, and Gabriel Marcel. The “Discussion” not only presents “propositions” from Bataille’s lecture, but also a response from Father Danielou, as […]
[…]seemed to be an unusually high population of pierced and tattooed Librarians who frequented the group. And a few who were working on Library Science degrees as well. Does a nice job of breaking the stereotypes of both who Librarians are, AND who tattooed people are. One of those Librarians, who lives in Columbus Ohio, posted telling us all about her latest work. She had gotten the Alphabet tattooed across her back. Twice. Upper and Lower cases. The font was Bryn Mawr. She even typed up a sketch of what it looked like. I thought that was SO cool. Not […]
[…]the essays also touch on earlier threads, in particular “Writing Postfeminism,” “Critical Ecologies.” Recalling that Donna Haraway’s Cyborg was never meant to be a wired, blissed-out bunny, Bousquet and Wills recover the political dimension in socialist-feminist thought. “The Politics of Information” brings class back into cultural studies, considers the Web as crucial to the expanding “informatics of domination,” and recovers the cyborg as a key figure for an entire world of labor and lifeways. The authors in this wide-ranging collection, most of them pioneers in the development of Internet content, address the concerns not only of designers and users, but […]
[…]would be delighted to see the manifesto on the World-Wide-Web and to go ahead and mark it up (i.e. code it for hypertextual interplay). He probably regrets ever having sent me that message and agreeing to do it, because now, as Alt-X’s site manager, he helps me encode and design an average of 300k worth of new data (not including images) every month! By the Fall of 1994 things were moving very fast in the global vaporware market (otherwise known as the new media industry), and this caused some real critical reflection on my part. Being digitally-networked seemed to provide […]
[…]classes. Hypertext is making its way into the law school at the University of Trento, in literary studies at the University of Modena, and in social studies at the University of Urbino. A Professor in occupational medicine at Modena has recently published a hypertext essay on his discipline. These are but a selection of examples meant to show that, despite a general atmosphere of resistance, a vital component within academia is already pursuing possibilities opened by hypertext. These people have to overcome enormous difficulties, including lack of funds and the chronically shortsighted attitude of our Ministry of Education. Nonetheless, judging […]
[…]of certain mental gymnastics, or, rarely, through the use of constrictive form as with the Oulipo group whom I consider creative cousins. Mental gymnastics: ways of blocking the already formulated in pursuing the unformulated. I try to write in that mental space of 30 seconds where the past claws at the future to produce what we call the present. That helps me get past the premeditated. Remember the future. That helps me avoid the prefabricated. The best things write themselves. I like to set my mind on autopilot. I find it takes me in interesting directions, probably reflecting the structure […]
[…]of code, he adds as an afterthought, “Hey, I didn’t mean to scare you back by using the word code. I’m not now, nor have I ever been a code junkie” (183). Adobe LiveMotion is opposed to Macromedia Flash, in that Flash becomes a prime example of a tool that is unworkable by the masses of artists, of one that gets caught up in the hands of “code-snorting geeks” and has a “big, steep bourgeois learning curve.” Because the possibility of popular struggle relies on the production of a communal identity, Pell’s Little Red Book acts as a call to […]
[…](“private”) time to the revival of grass-roots progressivism – by joining the New Party, working for proportional representation, joining The Nation Associates, buying a radio station (with pooled resources), running for local office, you name it. That’s what terrifies the Right on slow news days when Billy Kristol worries about tenured radicals: they fear that thousands of us, with our decent prose styles, solid typing skills, and compelling pedagogical practices, will actually get our act together and behave like the intelligentsia behaves in other industrialized nations – like a thorn in the side of the forces of privatization. The problem […]
[…]“are two important ways of being public…but what I want to call for is a practice of cultural studies that articulates the theoretical and critical work of the so-called public intellectual to the movements of public policy” (12). Bérubé is right to criticize “cultural studies theorists of the left [who] often express outright disdain for the policy implications of their work” (11), and to locate the source of this disdain in our tendency to value most in our intellectual work and indeed in ourselves whatever we assume is so unconventional, transgressive, or “cutting edge” that it can be used to […]
[…]frame for assessing the options available for meeting Bérubé’s goal of bringing critical studies knowledge to bear on policy making. Bérubé’s decision to work within the mode of journalism, the magazine medium, makes perfect sense in the apparatus of literacy. My response, however, is to reconsider this decision in the light of the shift in our apparatus from literacy to electracy. I am basing my speculations about the nature of electracy on a poststructuralist epistemology. …A further quandary for the poststructural consultant wanting to influence policy using the electronic media has to do with the dissolution of the communications model […]
[…]and choice dominate the inflated rhetoric of addiction that sells so many self-help books, groups, experts, and luxury rehab centers. Sedgwick’s Foucauldian subjects’ discursive genealogy has culminated in a postmodern consumer paradox; exhorted to muster moral fiber – “just say no” – the universe of addicts responds by accelerating their consumption of therapies. Incidentally, the subjectified revolving door of responsibility and compulsion protects producers like tobacco companies from misleading, obsolete, oversimplified reifications like “addictive substance.” Compulsion, a “force” that couples body with object, and in turn keeps alive the system of social flows that structures and supports this coupling, translates […]
[…]the potential for radical change can go unrealized for centuries. The shift from parchment roll to codex form, for example, did not result immediately in the production of large codexes containing a large number of diverse texts; rather, “[d]uring the first centuries of existence, the codex remained of modest size, composed of fewer than one hundred fifty sheets.” In addition, among non-Christians, “mastery and use of the possibilities gained ground only slowly. It appears to have been adopted by readers who were not part of the educated elite…and initially it was texts outside the literary canon (such as scholarly texts, […]
[…]unity. It falls victim to overambition, missing attainable goals in the pursuit of a new ecocritical understanding. The first section of the book examines the history and future of wilderness and features essays by R. Edward Grumbine, Denis Cosgrove, and Max Oelschlaeger. Each writer treats the dual concepts of “wilderness” and “wildness” but there is little common ground among them as to definitions or methodology. As a result, the authors’ collective efforts to illuminate these terms serves instead to obfuscate an already vexing issue of terminology. Differentiating between wilderness and wildness forms a crucial subtext throughout the book, but only […]
[…]students, all insisting that they “must” get into the class. Weeding it out, we ended with a group of twenty-eight, including about ten grad students in fields as diverse as Philosophy, Psychology, and Slavic Studies. It has been an exciting class but sometimes discouraging when we realize how little background our students have. Thus a very bright and successful senior Modern Thought and Literature major came in to see me to explain his less than outstanding performance thus far. “Baudelaire,” he told me, “is the first poet I have ever read.” Once exposed, however, this student and others like him […]
[…]much that is admirable in Bérubé’s piece (originally delivered in March 1995 at the Cultural Studies Symposium at Kansas State), particularly his discussion of the Right’s negation of the “public” in the name of the “people,” I would like to sketch briefly an alternative to the politics of selling out by putting pressure on the term “intellectual,” the blind spot in many romantic calls to action by left cultural critics. A crucial point: nobody cares about intellectuals, except other intellectuals. More to the point, unless intellectuals have another source of income, most of them wind up subordinating intellectual interests to […]
[…]the zine buyer for Tower Records and Tower Books: “Barnes & Noble is now selling zines with bar codes.” So there it is in a few bytes. What once-upon-a-time used to be called “selling out” is, here in Cyberville, just a matter of selling. Or is it? A bit later in the article a zine publisher, described as “bursting to sell out,” is quoted as saying, “Capitalism is weird. I’m celebrating all the stuff we can purchase, but I’m extremely suspicious of it too.” Caveat hacker! The relations between cyberzinia and the so-called mainstream in Post-postmodern culture are a lot […]
[…](in general, i mean), i think he does an excellent job in his article of demonstrating why english studies has become anguish studies, and what english faculty might do about it – that is, how to act without repression, and with a sense of solidarity… but what happened next was, in retrospect, to be expected… ———– Subject: Re: Poetry and the Academy i really do think that the alternatives are not simply the “professional” as currently construed over and against the “hobbyist”… and although one may locate oneself outside of academe per se (thankfully) the reality is that academe per […]
[…](via a[ndrew] r[oss] on www) that they knew all along it was a ‘sophomoric’ piece of cultural studies by a naive scientist; that st is never ‘refereed’ (what is the in-house critical collective but a set of primary discrimination makers of the in/out, enacting [sure, informally] the rules for what passes as any “social text” text?); and that the sokal essay was going to be dropped from the expanded book edition at duke u p (this would be an unusual post facto decision to make, as duke u p usally runs all the essays and whatever else the editors choose […]
[…]like lava. I remember a detailed description of taking off a woman’s bra and an orgy where a group of college students were lying on the floor in a circle. Since I was so naive about the birds and the bees this didn’t strike me as kinky, merely as information. All sex was equally arousing and this book was great. Then I heard my mother’s key in the back door – I crammed the paperback in the bookcase and rushed to the living room, sprawled on the couch like nothing had happened. Dropping her purse on the coffee table my […]
[…]are always becoming, which are associated with the emanation of local cognitive processes, and coded female. This interpretive tactic raises important concerns: how can the “minortarian” philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (with Felix Guattari) be applied to feminist praxis? While in the writings by feminists about Kiki Smith one may find references to the works and writings of Alice Jardin, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, among others, there is no question that Gilles Deleuze in particular is practicing grand philosophy, attempting a philosophy of marginality applicable to a range of those politically marginal, including women. […]
[…]Marie-Laure. “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media” in Game Studies, volume 1, issue 1, July 2001, http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/ Simon, Herbert. “Literary Criticism, A Cognitive Approach,” Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, volume 4, issue 1: “Bridging the Gap,” Updated 8 April 1995, online at http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/simon1.html Trippi, Laura. “Networked Narrative Environments,” Oct. 2003. […]
[…]toys ó about whom the player could not really suspend disbelief. A number of people have been working very hard over the years on ìnonlinearî or interactive narrative. It is my contention that these efforts cannot move forward to merge film and games, and that we will not be able to find a way to create an intermediate agency that will allow the viewer to find their way into caring about characters, until we provide a way that characters can act well enough to embody an interactive narrative. For this reason, and to lay the groundwork for interactive media that […]
[…]Michael (1997). “Computational Subjectivity in Virtual World Avatars.” In Working Notes of the Socially Intelligent Agents Symposium, 1997 AAAI Fall Symposium Series. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. —. and Andrew Stern (2000). “Towards Integrating Plot and Character for Interactive Drama.” In Working Notes of the Socially Intelligent Agents: Human in the Loop Symposium, 2000 AAAI Fall Symposium Series. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. McKee, Robert (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper Collins. Murray, Janet (1998). Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Norman, Don (1988). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: […]
[…]system of classicism, he yet found it to be melancholic and depressed. The recent upsurge of critical interest in Benjamin’s work reinforces the sense that contemporary fiction is once again allegorical in its return to history, and that we, too, are experiencing a decay like that of the German baroque period and postwar Germany with their accompanying depression (note the current extensive use of Prozac). Even though historical novelists are trying to revise history, to bring it into accordance with the full experience of previous lives, they keep falling into the trap of what the art historian Benjamin Buchloh refers […]
[…]theme; sharing the trauma but providing a glimmer of hope, an inspiration, a feel-good reason for grouping together stories about certain types of personal and/or intimate tragedies. Let me stop right now and say: YES, THEY ARE ALL TRAGIC, UNDESERVED AFFLICTIONS AND ALL POINT TO SOMETHING GONE TERRIBLY WRONG WITH HUMAN SOCIETY Since FC2 is a publisher of non-commercial fiction, it certainly wouldn’t seem apt to do an anthology with a selling hook, especially a popular one, no matter how noble the editorial motivation for choosing the particular victimization as a motif. So an anti-theme anthology seemed […]
[…]of passage” (the preceding is from the “Feminism” chapter of a recently published college critical theory textbook). Do women write about, or only about, nurturing and mothering? Or is this what they’re expected to write about, and thus what gets noticed and published? In her groundbreaking introductory essay to Chick-Lit, Cris Mazza says she used the word “post-feminist” in her call-for-manuscripts without defining it, to see what it would produce. Mazza acknowledges that she took a risk in using such a word, and realizes that the project could have thus been construed as “anti-feminist.” But the risk was a necessary […]
[…]exploration of the new genres. But I think our best contribution as scholars would be to provide a critical theory of games, with a discerning and analytical vocabulary. Such a theory would help both game designers and ourselves understand and respect the unique potential of the rich and diverse field of gaming. Bryan Loyall responds Janet Murray […]
[…]between stories and games, but rather to recombine and reinvent their primitive elements. In working to build these systems we have found that this is not just useful, but necessary. Interactive drama allows us to tell stories that we couldn’t tell before. It combines strengths and elements of stories and games, and is both and yet neither. If we are to reach the potential of expression that it offers, we must work directly in the new medium to explore, experiment and build. Janet Murray […]
[…]has proven to be an extremely productive approach, and the successes and near-misses of this group are worth serious attention from ludologists and game designers. It is significant that this group has again discovered that computer glitches can be unintentionally expressive, sometimes more expressive than explicitly programmed behaviors. In his seminal article on emotion in believable characters, Joe Bates described an earlier character who elicited sympathy by a programming glitch that caused him to twitch in a way that viewers interpreted as frustration [Bates, 1994]. The issue here is one that can be found in other computationally ambitious, agent-driven projects, […]
[…]early game genres (Multi-User Domain, and MUD, Object Oriented, respectively) were successful in working with the player’s imagination, allowing for identification to happen on the basis of world-building and interaction with an online community. MUDs and MOOs are excellent examples of using words and stories that come from conventional literature in such radically different ways that an entirely new form of literature, if it can be called this, emerged. Games are intrinsically different in their mode of address and almost always lose their magic when trying to assume the narrative rules of movies. Equally, movies are rarely able to give […]
[…]way of dealing with the limitations of the current state of a medium. I am looking forward to (and working on) an interactive medium which contains virtual actors capable of greater fidelity in the direct representation of a character’s mood, personality, and intentionality. I am also quite eager to see what Will Wright will do with such tools in The Sims III or IV. I suspect that he will find ways to use his non-linear botanical garden as a vehicle to allow people to explore character in new and fascinating ways. back to Cyberdrama […]
[…]The Johns Hopkins University Press Eskelinen, Markku (2001) “The Gaming Situation” in Game Studies 1. http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/ Frasca, Gonzalo (2001) “Ephemeral Games: Is it barbaric to design videogames after Auschwitz?” in Cybertext Yearbook 2001. Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä. Also available at: http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ephemeralFRASCA.pdf Kelso, M.T., Weyhrauch, P. & Bates, J. Dramatic Presence. PRESENCE: The Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, Vol 2, No 1, MIT Press. Also available at: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/papers/CMU-CS-92-195.ps Brenda Laurel responds Michael Mateas […]
[…]upon which to build a theory of interactive media. Ludologists generally come out of game studies [e.g. Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971], take the computer game as the paradigmatic interactive form, and seek to build an autonomous theory of interactivity (read: free of the English department), which, while borrowing from classical games studies, is sensitive to the novel particularities of computer games (this is sometimes described as a battle against the colonizing force of narrative theory, as Eskelinen does in First Person). Both camps take issue with an Aristotelian conception of interactive drama, finding it theoretically unsophisticated, an impossible combination of […]
[…]Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä. —. (2001b). “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1, no.1 (July 2001). http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. Avedon, Elliott M., and Brian Sutton-Smith (1971). The Study of Games. New York: Wiley. Bénabou, Marcel (1998). “Rule and Constraint.” In Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Warren J. Motte, Jr. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bordwell, David (1984). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bremond, Claude (1980). “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities.” New Literary History 11 (1980): […]
Eskelinen makes some compelling points in “Towards Computer Game Studies” that traverse ground that has remained virtually untrammeled, surprisingly so, given the recent, explosive growth of PC and videogames — in 2001, Americans began to lay out more cash for interactive games than for evenings at the cinema. And Markku’s uses of both Genette and Aarseth help make games like Tetris and Civilization III intelligible in theoretical terms. In the end, treating all computer games as if they fell tidily into a single genre is a heroic gesture, intended to lay the foundation for a sound critical understanding of what […]
It seems that Jane Douglas never got as far as the title of my piece. Otherwise she would have understood that I was addressing computer games, not interactive art. I don’t think Richard Schechner’s “I don’t think” carries the intellectual weight it was perhaps intended to carry. In fact I don’t think it even qualifies as a commentary. Together these two cases of non-communicative self-promotion show the current sad state of discussion on and around computer games: you can say pretty much anything you like if you don’t care to define the concepts you use. Douglas and Schechner won’t or […]
[…]“Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment?” Game Studies 1, no. 1 (2001). http://gamestudies.org/0101/bringsjord/. Cawelti, John (1976). Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cayley, John (1995). Speaking Clock. http://www.shadoof.net/in/incat.html#CLOCK. Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1, no. 1 (July 2001). http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/. Hayles, N. Katherine (2001). “Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide.” Electronic Book Review 11 (2001). http://altx.com/ebr/riposte/rip11/rip11hay.htm. Joyce, Michael (1991). afternoon. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. Juul, Jesper (2001a). “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” Game Studies 1, no. 1 […]
[…]by Jordan Mechner (1997). (Jordan Mechner, Phoenix Licensing) back to Towards Computer Game […]
[…]know stories and storytelling,” he writes, telling a tale very much out of school. “So why be critical when we can be important instead?” There is a wonderful, naked-emperor-outing cynicism in this jibe, an audacious move against humanism’s unacknowledged strategies of self-promotion. At the same time one may also detect a touch of critical reflection, at least if one is a certain sort of lapsed narratologist (like Aarseth) or misbegotten fiction writer (like me). The ironic “we” implies reciprocity, and with it a sense of history. Though now we assume the mantle of wisdom, we may have played our own […]
[…]radically different position can be invaluable simply by forcing the rest of the field to do more critical thinking. If we “naturally” assume that games are cultural texts without questioning that assumption, then we will have very little chance of finding out what is unique about them. We might as well be studying the use of computer graphics in advertising, or the latest Star Wars episode. Only by asking ourselves what games are not, or what they need not be, can we find out what they really are. There are of course reasons why we might not want to do […]
[…]subconscious is invented by a genius scientist called the Professor, which makes it possible to code and decode information through one’s brains while its owner is unconscious: birth of the ultimate cryptology. Yet, among the twenty-six on whom the new system is experimented, the hero of the novel is the only survivor, which is the governmental secret. No one can find the reason the rest have died; suggested is that the hero’s fitting to the system concerns the contents of the rearranged story of his subconscious. Its title “The End of the World” – a quote from the song, “Don’t […]
[…]be the case that Buffalo, where I’m presently writing this essay, is the home of a significant working-class identity that is not necessarily defined by income; the moment any one of my Buffalo-bred undergraduate students speaks up in class I’m immediately aware of how much more than simply money informs their thinking. On a less mundane level, Hardt and Negri are hardly simply proposing to ontologize poverty in the way that de Man seeks to ontologize texts – they are proposing, at the very least, that there is a new proletariat (distinctly different from the industrial working class who were […]
[…]its purported subjects. First published in France in 1986 and culled from manuscripts Genet was working on when he died, Prisoner of Love, in a translation by Barbara Bray, has been republished by New York Review of Books. Hailed by Edward Said as a “grand and fearless” account of a struggle that even before the intifada of 1987 has seemed doomed, Prisoner of Love moves seamlessly between polemical deduction and poetic meditation. Genet’s narrative is more philosophical than psychological, flashing back in time from his first two-year “visit” to the West Bank in 1971, during King Hussein’s offensives against the […]
[…]its scope to any one media form. In fact, the term ludology was introduced to computer game studies in the Cybertext Yearbook According to Gonzalo Frasca, who is credited with introducing ludology and operates ludology.org. Markku Eskelinen is coeditor of the Cybertext Yearbook, with Raine Koskimaa. — named for Aarseth’s term — and has been partly popularized by the community around the journal Game Studies, of which Aarseth is the general editor. Aarseth’s theoretical positions were influenced by those of Stuart Moulthrop, whose work as a critic and artist (which rose to prominence with the dual 1991 publications of the […]
[…]they probably do not see the same outcome for this struggle. Indeed they should not, if game studies have any critical value. Do Not Immerse Murray’s approach to new media seems both culturally and technically conservative; for some indeed this may be its main virtue. Like the design theorists she most admires, Laurel and her mentor Donald Norman, Murray assumes that new media should provide highly efficient, minimally obtrusive tools. She seems to agree with Norman that the best computer is an invisible computer, at least where narrative is concerned: Eventually all successful storytelling technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness […]
[…]to continually reinscribe the mind/body split. Sensorial immersion, I argue, can also be a form of critical awareness. Such complex experiences in simulations may not be games in the strict sense, but are certainly configurative practices, and configurative practices that engage our bodies in very direct ways—and in ways that question the social and material conditions of our felt experience. Yet this strategy is reliant on a sense of immersion. What then is the relation of such a form of immersion to the notion of transparency? It would be easy to dismiss “immersive” virtual reality (VR) as simply an example […]
[…]a cultural object generates undisputed affect and significance in an unfamiliar way, then familiar critical schemata are not going to help us either to understand or make more of it. Narrative, closure, and pleasure are only any good at helping us to see why bad stories are bad. The formulation: configuration for the sake of interpretation = art/work; interpretation for the sake of configuration = game/play is highly suggestive and useful as an articulation of distinct practices. However, the formulation itself implies and necessitates both an interplay of these overarching “user functions” (as they are called in the Aarseth/Eskelinen schemes) […]
[…]I do with the native strain. This is not to say, however, that my respondents have failed in their critical duties. Both complain with some justification about the characteristic lack of subtlety in my polemic. Cayley worries that my provocative title sets up an absolute division between its two terms: “I think we have to play more on the ambiguities of ‘play’ here,” he writes, and goes on to argue for “transitional cultural objects” occupying ambiguous positions between market categories and art genres. This is an important and enlightening correction to my dualism, and one which I am inclined to […]
[…]body’ in a VR environment is the same as ‘the body’ in the real world?” This kind of critical questioning is immediately generative of critical and experimental artworks. The places where dataworlds and the material world intersect, referred to in Europe as “mixed reality boundaries” and in the US more often as “augmented reality,” is a littoral zone, which is and has been a key site for exploration by artist-engineer types for a quarter of a century at least, with key works by Myron Kreuger, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw and many others. (I hesitate to employ the simple term “artist,” […]
[…]addressing complex social, political, and personal issues. · To improve our understanding of and critical vocabulary for analyzing, playing, and creating games. My favorite aspect of the essay is that Frasca actually proposes specific design strategies for realizing these goals. His pragmatic synthesis of theory and practice is a rare delight in the mushy swamp of new media criticism. I am underscoring my support of his goals to clue you in that the criticisms that follow are coming from the heart. I’m not the enemy: I’m the loyal opposition. The engine which fuels my critique, more than anything else, is […]
[…]mainstream media. “Biohazard Pikachu” is mostly about humor, pleasure, and play, but is also a critical commentary on Nintendo’s production of sanitized cuteness. This kind of appropriation and remaking seems to be at the heart of what Frasca envisions for the videogame community, and is something that cross-cuts media genres, as studies of fan communities have amply demonstrated (Penley 1991; Jenkins 1992; Tulloch and Jenkins 1995). The productions of fan culture are just one piece of the dead serious economic and social negotiations around popular culture, and the ongoing political struggles between producers and consumers. For example, adult action entertainment […]
[…]“videogames of the oppressed” but the top-down approach is also needed. We will not see critical videogames until major games are developed by biased authors that understand that fun is not the only thing that can be conveyed through this medium. back to Critical Simulation […]
[…]Rather, E-AI is a stance or viewpoint from which all of AI can be rethought and transformed. Critical technical practice Both SS-AI and E-AI are instances of what Agre calls critical technical practice (CTP). Agre defines CTP to refer to a scientific and technical practice which engages in a continuous process of reflective critique of its own foundations. This reflective critique consciously constructs new, contingent myths to heuristically guide the practice. No fixed-point is ever sought or found. A CTP is in a continuous state of revolution. A critical technical practice would not model itself on what Kuhn called “normal […]
[…]increasingly insurmountable problems of integration for me as reader. Two larger fragments — a critical project and the account of an agent system — sit side-by-side in uneasy (dis)association. As a reader I find myself following with growing interest the unfolding narrative of schizophrenia and its implications for AI, when I’m suddenly thrown without warning, like Alice through the looking-glass, into a world of agent systems-building, motivated by that world’s characters, problems, projects, and prospects. The latter narrative becomes increasingly incomprehensible until I realize that this is not a story that can be resolved into any single, familiar frame. What […]
[…]matter ” (Agre, p. xiii). Important to note here is the primacy of the technical over the critical in a critical technical practice. One must first start with a technical problem, then one can take a critical or philosophical approach, by which one finds a technical solution. This is, in fact, true of SS-AI, at least the work on expressive agent architecture which I describe in First Person. It is not, however, true of Expressive AI. In Expressive AI, the opposite situation holds: the technical problems that the artist chooses to tackle are a consequence of the artist’s vision of […]
[…]as the resulting cognitive differences, Jenkins runs the risk of reducing his comparative media studies into repetitive media studies: seeing, seeking, and finding stories, and nothing but stories, everywhere. Such pannarrativism could hardly serve any useful ludological or narratological purpose. Jenkins’s text is entertaining, but his criteria would turn Zelda into a musical instrument, gardening into a spatial narrative, Picasso’s Guernica into a bombing, and every novel and film describing games into a game. Players, readers and spectators usually need prior knowledge, but there’s no reason to privilege any particular source for that information. Jon McKenzie responds Henry Jenkins […]
[…]First Person essay: So if there already is or soon will be a legitimate field for computer game studies, this field is also very open to intrusions and colonizations from the already organized scholarly tribes. Resisting and beating them is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence. One can’t help but note that Eskelinen’s position is significantly more rigid than the one adopted by Frasca and Aarseth. Far from seeing ludology as a “complement” to narratology, Eskelinen wants to barricade the gates against any […]
[…]collecting can be studied with intellectual ferocity. Those who look at games need to draw upon studies of communities in sociology and other areas, cognitive psychology, and studies of interaction and use patterns in fields such as industrial design and architecture… Unfortunately, calling for new language and methodologies with which to consider computer games is not the same thing as writing them. Now we begin the “dirty work” to articulate exactly what types of intersections of theories we can use to explore games. Certainly questions concerning authorship, individual and collective action, game world time, perception, and positions in between audience […]
[…]that to a certain extent, games have evolved in isolation from other media. The practice of using critical theory tools from literature and film to discuss games is a fairly recent phenomenon. Indeed it has really been the mainstreaming of the computer game that has caused these other disciplines to sit up and take notice. In spite of the enormous role of games in popular culture, the vast majority of critical theorists from these disciplines still take the more typical stance of regarding games with either disdain or indifference. Nonetheless, it has become trendy in some circles to throw literary […]
[…]Tom Ray’s Tierra attained early notoriety. Around the same time, some robotics researchers were working with emergent paradigms of robot behavior; many of these were grouped around Luc Steels in Belgium and Rodney Brooks at MIT. Since the late 1980s, the notion of semi-autonomous software entities has proven a rich catalyst for experimentation in both the fine and the applied ends of the electronic arts. In recent years, complex autonomous entities called agents have been a subject of much excitement, and subgenres of research such as “socially intelligent agents” have arisen. In my presentation at one such gathering, the 1997 […]
[…]of their designer and players. Pennyís and Frascaís approaches could be characterized as Critical Technical Practices (CTP) ñ procedures incorporating the working methods of both technical research and cultural critique ó though neither essayist uses the term. Phoebe Sengers, in this sectionís final essay, characterizes her work explicitly as CTP. Sengers attempts to formulate new designs for AI agents; such agents, although central to much AI practice (and to many cyberdramatic visions), have customarily engaged in intricate internal behavior that can be difficult for an observer to interpret. Sengersís solution to this problem may be viewed as the inverse of […]
[…]Design. London: Kogan Page Limited. Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1, no.1 (July 2001). http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen/ Eskelinen, Markku, and Raine Koskimaa, editors (2001). Cybertext Yearbook 2000. Saarijärvi: Publications of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä. Frasca, Gonzalo (1998). “Don’t play it again, Sam: One-session games of Narration.” http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/papers/frasca.html. —. (2001). “Videogames of the Oppressed.” M.A. Thesis: School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (2001). http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/thesis/. —. (1999). “Narratology meets Ludology: Similitude and Differences Between (Video)games and Narrative.” Parnasso 3: 365-371. http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm. Freire, Paulo (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. […]
[…]and evaluation, which includes the explicit and implicit goals of the project creating it, the group dynamics of that project, and the sources of funding that both facilitate and circumscribe the directions in which the project can be taken. An agent’s construction is not limited to the lines of code that form its program but involves a whole social network, which must be analyzed in order to get a complete picture of what that agent is, without which agents cannot be meaningfully judged. 2. An agent’s design should focus, not on the agent itself, but on the dynamics of that […]
[…]machine, simulated on the reader’s computer, which the reader must learn to operate and decode. All three approaches received substantial critical applause, a lasting following, and (perhaps most importantly) have inspired numbers of subsequent hypertext artists. Joyce’s lyrical hypertextuality finds recent echoes, for example, in Chapman’s (2001) Turning In, Strickland’s (1998) True North, as well as Arnold and Derby’s (1999) Kokura. Moulthrop’s hyperbaton is key to Coverly’s (2000) Califia, Cramer’s (1993) “In Small & Large Pieces,” Eisen’s (2001) “What Fits,” and Amerika’s (1997) Grammatron. McDaid’s artifactual approach, dormant for some years, finds recent expression in Bly’s We Descend, Malloy and […]
[…]a reading experience. He says: Much of my work is lettristic in the sense that rather than working with words and extended texts, I work with individual letters. Part of my attraction to working this way is philosophical and sonical… but part of it is also out of interest in treating literary objects/material, and individual letters are quite well suited to such treatment. Individual letters are graphically more interesting than whole words… [they] take up less memory, and are thereby manipulated more quickly. And they spin nicer than words do, for instance, because of their shapes. There is more variety […]
[…]Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1, no.1 (July 2001). http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen. Frasca, Gonzalo (1999). “Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences between (Video) Games and Narrative.” http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm. Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins (1994). “Nintendo and New World Narrative.” In Communications in Cyberspace, edited by Steve Jones. New York: Sage. Gunning, Tom (1990). “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. London: British Film Institute. Jenkins, Henry (1991). What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press. […]
[…]Experience. New York: Harper Perennial. Juul, Jesper (2001). “Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies 1, No.1 (2001). http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/. Marjanovic-Shane, Ana (1989). “`You Are a Pig’: For Real or Just Pretend? — Different Orientations in Play and Metaphor.” Play and Culture 2, yr. 3 (1989): 225-234. Myers, David (1992). “Time, Symbol Transformations, and Computer Games.” Play and Culture 5 (1992): 441-457. Osborne, Scott (2000). “Hitman: Codename 47 review.” Gamespot (2000). http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/reviews/0,10867,2658770,00.html. —. (2000). “Giants: Citizen Kabuto review.” Gamespot (2000). http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/reviews/0,10867,2664536,00.html. Rau, Anja (2001). “Reload — Yes/No. Clashing Times in Graphic Adventure Games.” Paper Presentation at Computer Games and Digital Textualities, Copenhagen, March […]
[…]at them from a play-centric point of view, gain some perspective as to why they have been both critical and popular successes. The first genre I’d like to look at is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or, in game culture parlance “MMORPG.” The two most popular of these are Ultima Online and EverQuest, and second-tier games include Baldur’s Gate, Asheron’s Call, and Diablo. Although they differ in some significant ways, what all these games have in common is that they create fantasy story worlds in which players improvise narratives in real time. These games, all of which share the […]
[…]remarks, which to me do not seem incompatible with his own appeal for a Foucaldian turn in media studies. True, the media history (essentially the “new media” history) as rewritten by Bolter and Grusin is not chronological at all. Yet in spite of all declarations it remains thoroughly teleological. Behind every change since the Renaissance, the authors see indeed one major drive, the desire for a more direct contact with reality. Of course, the discussion on most of the new media (think of “virtual reality”) enables them to offer some convincing examples of this logic. Besides, the very idea of […]
[…]from the urban ghettoes, Rose’s study was one of the first, and still probably the best, critical studies of rap. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction. New York: Ungar, l988. Zorn. John. “John Zorn on his Music” [Liner notes]. Spillane. Electra/Nonesuch, 1987. ____________. The Big Gundown: John Zorn plays the music of Ennio Morricone. Icon Records (Electra/Nonesuch), 1976. Lester BOWIE. I borrowed the term “avant-pop” from the title of a 1986 album by Lester Bowie, the great jazz trumpet player and composer best known for his work with the wildly inventive Art Ensemble of Chicago. Listening to the […]
[…]Critique of Cyberhybrid-hype,” in Jan Baetens and José Lambert (eds), The Future of Cultural Studies. Leuven: Leuven UP, 153-171. Jan BAETENS (2003). “The Book as Technotext: Katherine Hayles’s Digital Materialism,” in Image and Narrative , 7. n.p. Jay David BOLTER and Richard GRUSIN (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Katherine HAYLES (2002). Writing Machines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Matt KIRSCHENBAUM (1999), Media, Genealogy, History, in ebr. Rem KOOLHAAS (1995) S.M.L.XL: O.M.A. Rotterdam: 010. Peter LUNENFELD (2000). Snap to Grid. A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Jakob NIELSEN (2000). Designing Web Usability. Indianapolis: New […]
[…]kind, with constant interruptions, embedded interfaces requiring attention, requests for response, codes to remember, and the constant need to back up and track versions of the document being read, composed, or read-as-composed. The electronic disturbance is creatively disruptive, to be sure, but not in the way that literature is disruptive. Writers seeking to break from established forms and hierarchies have always, it is true, worked against the “line” of print. In postmodern fiction nonlinearity (of plot, design, and sentence construction) has been the rule rather than the exception, as Conte points out (following George P. Landow in Hypertext 2.0: The […]
[…]definition of future studies’ goal echoes the general goals of academics engaged in cultural studies and critical theory. However, this futurism, both “optimistic” and “realistic,” is undercut by the collection’s coda, Mark Dery’s “Memories of the Future: Excavating the Jet Age at the TWA Terminal.” Reviewing the shabby remains of JFK ‘s TWA Terminal, Dery pronounces that the Jet Age “is well and truly gone, and with it the belief that we are cleared for takeoff to a brighter tomorrow, master-planned by social engineers and watched over by technocrats who will ensure that the monorails run on time” (300). His […]
[…]and anti-systemic thought. As he explains in his introduction, the challenge of contemporary critical theory is to imagine “a nontotalizing structure that nonetheless acts as a whole” (11). Taylor’s critique of deconstruction and other forms of “post-structuralism” is that they have failed in this task. Deconstruction, he argues, has focused exclusively on the Kierkegaardian critique of totalizing systems, demonstrating the ways in which systems presuppose but cannot contain the unpredictable, that which is wholly other. The problem with this position is that it assumes that all systems aim for perfect self-closure and thus repress difference. Hence, deconstruction can never imagine […]
[…]directly addresses the game/story formulation. Well-known for his work with comparative media studies, Jenkins describes a middle ground between narratologists and ludologists, while also focusing attention on the dynamics of space, which he believes neither camp fully appreciates. Jesper Juul, by contrast, is identified with ludology. His topic here, the operation of time in games, is one that he has previously utilized to differentiate between games and narratives. This essay moves further than the basic distinction, beginning to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive understanding of game time. Celia Pearce, a familiar figure in the game development and location-based entertainment […]
[…]concepts in ways that bring insight to their interrelations, with the larger aim of providing critical tools for others who are attempting to create or study the conundrum of the game-story. Four Naughty Terms Play. Games. Narrative. Interactivity. What a motley bunch. Honestly, have you ever seen such a suspicious set of slippery and ambiguous, overused, and ill-defined terms? Indeed, they are all four in need of some discipline, just to make them sit still and behave. Before I roll up my sleeves and get to work on them, however, allow me to lay some of my cards on the […]
[…]in their dramatic fight” (108). The panorama thus suspends the viewer’s ability to reflect critically on what they are seeing, as “the picture was designed to arouse, or even create, nationalistic and patriotic feelings in the audience” (112). Because virtual image spaces produce even more powerful immersive effects, Grau adds that they exercise an even greater degree of control over the observer: “In virtual environments, a fragile, core element of art comes under threat: the observer’s act of distancing that is a prerequisite for any critical reflection” (202). This is most clearly illustrated in Grau’s discussion of Charlotte Davies’ Osmose […]
[…]Current political analyses of digital being cannot even figure out how to apply existing criminal codes to Internet MUDs, or intellectual property laws to ordinary software piracy. Historical awareness of digital beings, even if one adopts the omnipresent pose of De Landa’s robot historian, clearly pales next to their anonymous proliferation in the workings of informational society. Perhaps some future historical preservationists will unpack the hard drives of old PCs to chronicle the doings of digital beings as telecommuting, cybersexed, hyperreal-estated lifeforms. Perhaps they will work to save the codes of some major personage’s PDA as his or her biotronic […]
[…]it is a matter of the advance of technology. Qua philosopher, Kolakowski possessed no privileged critical capacity and was in no position to deliver a decisive judgement of Lem’s speculations, which is why Lem is right to mock the notion of infallibitas philosophica. The situation is not, however, as simple as Lem suggests. It does not follow from the points I have just made that Lem’s speculations about phantomatics truly have been confirmed by any of the recent developments in virtual reality technology. Not only do those speculations not constitute any single and univocal thesis susceptible to a straightforward empirical […]
[…]Person contributors Phoebe Sengers, Michael Mateas, and Warren Sack combine approaches from both groups.) Yet in general AI and hypertext theorists do not simply diverge, but in fact begin their practices from radically different points. For the authors in this section, Nelson and Engelbart’s hypertext concepts are not simply an unspoken background; these essayists are well-known for their engagement with hypertext, and have directly addressed Nelson and Engelbart’s work, as well as that of hypertexts both preceding and outside of the Web. Thus we have our hypertexts. We find “interactives” in this section’s third essay, by J. Yellowlees Douglas and […]
[…]have most curiously “done” for years now is what most marks the scientists’ reports of studies at Mt. St. Helens since the eruption of 1980. What the earth has done and (we like to think reciprocally) what we have done. It is new growth out of the ashes and mineral-grained mudslides the research reports correctly measure. *** My family – we are tourists and campers. Travel is in our heads as well as all this. We’re together. *** The Pacific plate is forced under the much heavier American continental plate, this subduction generating heat and pressure enough to melt the […]
[…]lays out all the textual loops for the bit-player to click through in advance. To fabricate a critical ecology in the context of hypertext writing, one seeks to maintain a certain duplicitious relation to the medium. On the one hand, one manufactures the critical ecology according to some of the rules of the hypertext game. (It is especially necessary to simulate the medium when the text is appearing on the Net, of course.) On the other hand, the critical ecology comes designed with an infrastructure that enables it to play itself out of some of the hypertext game’s constrictions. The […]
[…]to know the Huorani who were in this middle-space: already blighted by the Christian identity-codes, they existed away from the traditional villages (about five miles walk into the jungle, forbidden unless you bore the appropriate gifts), yet not yet in the town system. They were at a peculiar, in ways stereotyped scenario, more interesting for me than the river trip I had planned. Living still off the forest, from which they would daily bring in birds and pigs, they were constructing a wooden building in the clearing, in which there would be a canteen – furnished by the family business […]
[…]of course, this has already occurred. Can we intervene by taking up what has been called a “critical technical practice,” a critical technical artistic practice? back to Hypertexts and Interactives […]
[…]Press. —. (1997a). “Nonce Upon Some Times: ReReading Hypertext Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no.3 (1997): 579-597. —. (1997b). Twelve Blue. http://www.eastgate.com/TwelveBlue/. Landow, George P. (1992). The Dickens Web. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. —. (1997). Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, 2nd edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Langer, Suzanne (1953). Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner. Larsen, Deena (1994). Marble Springs. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. Laurel, Brenda (1991). Computers as Theatre. New York: Addison-Wesley. Lynch, Kevin (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Marshall, Catherine C., and Frank M. Shipman (1993). […]
[…]of literary phenomena is trivial and that “digital” is a redundant term (in cultural studies at least). It is used for media that would be better characterised as “literal.” This may present itself as a ironic circumstance. I may appear to be proposing that we apply critical tools and criteria from a world of relatively conservative cultural authority, from print culture, from alphabetic minds, and attempting to use them to overdetermine our brave new world of networked and programmable media. However, it should be clear from what I’ve said so far that I am concerned with addressing the materiality of […]
[…]of binarism.” However, there is no sense in which I would care to discourage practice or serious critical engagement at any position in the fields and structures of culture. It is simply that when certain kinds of cultural production are seen to be privileged or are given the gloss of novelty, as compared with other practices, because they are characterized or instantiated as “digital,” this calls us to re-examine both the sense of this term and the implications of its usage. On the one hand, I claim, the sense is ill-defined; on the other, its use downplays existing cultural practices, […]
[…]the linear perspective used in three-dimensional rendering, or the various forms of computer code itself. In my digital works my strategy for this exploration has been to develop interfaces that honor and engage more of the body than just “one eye and one finger.” Interfaces, by providing the connective tissue between our bodies and the codes represented in our machines, necessarily engage them both. How and to what extent new interfaces may engage the body, however, is up for grabs. Practical interfaces are about maintaining the user’s sense of control. In this scenario representations on screen must respond to the […]
[…]elements INGESTED into the body via emerging forms of biotechnology and there are many artists working to utilize them in their art, which often becomes politicized as a result. That is to say, these aren’t simply experiments in biotechnology, they are statements about our relationship with machines, computing, and the world. As early as 1997, in his work Time Capsule, Eduardo Kac implanted a microchip in his ankle. The microchip isa transponder…. Scanning the implant generates a low energy radio signal (125 KHz) that energizes the microchip to transmit its unique and inalterable numerical code, which is shown on […]
[…]narrative structures than others. Even in these instances, the structure of the narrative is critical to the content of the work. In See/Saw, my collaborator Adam Chapman developed a narrative with a structure that is hinged to the physical action of the see-saw. The narrative consists of a cyclical audio monologue that loops without a logical beginning or end, as long as users see-saw continuously. For each phrase in the monologue, Chapman also wrote a split narration – a phrase told from a position of power and a phrase told from a position of compromise. When users stop the see-saw […]
[…]machine of perfectly definite form. (Hodges 1983, 104) The varying symbolic properties of computer code become compressed, and function in a pun-like manner, inwardly enabling the functionality of a code-driven conceptual machine within specific hardware environments, while outwardly presenting media and physical process variables. The body becomes enmeshed experientially. A participant exploring such media-spaces becomes structurally coupled with the authored artifacts of computational media elements and processes. Maturana describes this as a linguistic domain. Yet we are just beginning to experience the fruits of how someone uses this potential functionality of computer-based authorship, when they draw upon a cogent field […]
[…]exploring interface, virtual and physical spatiality, and the potential operativeness (read: code-driven manipulation) of media-elements of which text is just one. 2) “How can we use new technologies to provoke us into a more sensually engaged relation to text in ways that don’t immediately re-inscribe these longstanding practices of repressing sensual response?” Computer-related environments open many potential new qualities of media authorship. This new authorship can be more or less embodied, but we must be clear that the body always becomes implicated in the cybernetic loop. The physics of these environments work through matter/energy exchanges — human/machine/human interaction. The question […]
[…]need a map of the group in order to find their current or desired position in the group. Groups need a map to reflect on their limits and internal structure. This map can be either a metaphorical or a literal map. Maps have historically been very important for geographically circumscribed groups. On a country’s map, citizens can find their homes, their proximity to the capital, their range of travel experience, and so forth. Maps usually incorporate several kinds of information; e.g., political boundaries, roads, and elevations might be included on one map of a region. No map can incorporate all […]
[…]as problems. The map above (17.5a) represents about a month’s worth of messages posted to the group sci.environment. The map below (17.5b) represents the same newsgroup one month later. By comparing the two maps you can get some idea of how the group has changed over time. One thing that has remained stable between the two maps is the connection in the semantic networks between the terms “people” and “problem.” This is a clue that perhaps, in this newsgroup, people are seen to be one of the main causes of environmental problems. But a hypothesis like this that one can […]
[…]that provides for a potential point of agreement between the participants; is it likely that newsgroup posters using the Conversation Map to read their newsgroup come to the same conclusion? I don’t know. It does seem that this perspective could be fruitful for continuing work – how can the Conversation Map be restructured and extended to serve as well as possible the goal of helping to make very large-scale conversations more self-reflective? And, to share in Sack’s refreshing optimism, I hope that critical technical practices like his may make such cultural changes possible. Rebecca Ross responds Warren Sack […]
[…]critical technical practices: it entails having one foot in an AI Lab and the other in science studies or cultural studies. I.e., the other foot needs to be in an area that can give one perspective on the limits of what one is doing back at the lab. Perhaps, following Noah (Wardrip-Fruin and Moss, 2002), one needs three feet to participate in a critical technical practice. That may be the case, but my point is simply that those of us who right now call what we do a critical technical practice have all, at one time or another, found our […]
[…]As Richard Coyne notes: “Information is thought to be the essence of life, as in the DNA code. To record and break the code is to have mastery over life” (Coyne 1995, 80). The most common organizational pattern identified in all systems is networking. All living systems are arranged in a network fashion. Since the 1920s, when ecologists began studying food chains, recognition of networks became essential to many scholars, in different forms. Cyberneticists in particular tried to understand the brain as a neural network and to analyze its patterns. The structure of the brain is enormously complex, containing about […]
[…]her work, but I think the thermodynamic-based thought of Fuller is more prominent than the chaos studies. It would be interesting to test the n0time system for sensitive dependence on initial conditions, that human input which has been so abbreviated, and in part unknowing. The other difficulty, for me, are the memes. The trouble with memes is they can’t be thought—they, rather, present themselves as units of thought. As with genes, blasts of energy must be brought to break them up. A project that interrogates the meme “clone,” not to propagate it through recombination, but to destroy it, so that […]
[…]translates the universal flashing LED, the lingua franca of the peizo electric squeal, the date code, the bar code, the telephone ringer adapter that translates that familiar ring, the tingling insistent trill of an incoming call, into “a well-known phrase of music”Patent #5014301 (May 7, 1991). (an approach that has since become popular in cell phones, where this function is useful in differentiating whose phone is ringing), or the unrelated patent that translates the caller identification signal into a vocal announcement. Within the translators there are distinct attitudes; for instance, the impassive reporting, almost a “voice of nature.” This is […]
[…]she draws on various theoretical resources, including the speech act theory of Searle and the studies of situated cognition by Suchman that have been so influential in HCI and post-AI. Appropriately, her analysis is grounded in Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which speaks in terms of human/animal/object hybrids and confounds conventional notions of human agency and mastery (voice chips give some of these non-human actors a “voice”). This drawing from diverse theoretical resources is an essential part of any interdisciplinary study. It is a richly productive strategy, and one that will reveal contradictions and unsuspected voids. The resolution of such can […]
[…]creole is not, however, made up from two natural languages but rather from English and computer code. Code erupts through the surface of the screenic text, infecting English with machine instructions and machine instructions with English, as if the distinction between natural language and computer commands has broken down and the two languages are mingling promiscuously inside the computer. In addition to these linguistic strategies are rewritings of myth. Drawing on a range of classical references from the story of Echo and Narcissus to Minoan funeral practices, Memmott reenvisions this material to make it enact narratives about how human subjects […]
[…]be expressed, while severely limiting their actual expressiveness. The command-line, programming code interface can conflict with the literary aspirations of the author. In online MOOs it is common to see verbose descriptions of spaces, whose tone and length evoke bookishness if not literary merit, combined with the restricted code of the command line. These two very different modalities create a discord, which is further heightened if the interactor is engaged in conversation with a character within the story. So IF has certain intrinsic design difficulties, a built-in awkwardness in the way it represents spatial navigation and the inconsistency with which […]
[…]make, really, if a “personality” we meet online has a single body, or instead, a computer or a group of authors behind it? If we assume that the relationship between body and personality (or role, or whatever we call it) is arbitrary (as has been argued of the relationship between sex and gender, for instance), it is surely irrelevant whether Caroline, or indeed Jill Walker, have bodies and hair. The Turing test was devised in 1950, when bodies were thought to determine our lives and the ways in which we act. Bodies and roles weren’t commonly thought of as arbitrary […]
[…]is always tension, dynamism, and a certain ambivalence in this relationship between flesh and code. To extend Hayles’ reading of Lexia to Perplexia, we might take this mediated relationship between bodies and technologies a little further: If the body of the subject engages in a kind of distributed agency in “reading” works such as Lexia to Perplexia, then what happens to the specificity of the embodied subject as marked by gender, race, language, and cultural difference? In other words, Lexia to Perplexia, in articulating a relationship between flesh and code, also puts a challenge to us: to what degree does […]
[…]2001, Los Angeles, August 17, 2001. Juul, Jesper (2001). “Games Telling Stories?,” Game Studies 1, no.1 (July 2001). http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts. Laurel, Brenda (1986). “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System,” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University. —. (1991). Computers as Theatre. Boston: Addison Wesley. Lebling, P. David, Mark S. Blank and Timothy A. Anderson (1979). “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” IEEE Computer 12 no. 4 (April 1979): 51ñ59. Nelson, Graham (2001). The Inform Designer’s Manual, 4th edition. St. Charles, Illinois: The Interactive Fiction Library. Pinsky, Robert (1997). MIT Media Lab Colloquium, February 5, 1997. Prince, Gerald (1973). A Grammar […]
[…]that is likened to the concept of creole through the environmental neighboring of image, text and code, where the “code” operates on multiple levels. This creole embodies a circulation of “codes” and their disruption including the textual, the imagistic/graphical, and through computer-based code-related text and symbols. This “creolization” is accomplished through a series of textual puns and visual word/graphic/code plays as well as through the operative nature of the interactive encoded environment. The narrative that one gleans through navigation of this environment is associative and generates a rich conceptual field. The operative, mixed-semiotic nature of the environment enables the exploration […]
[…]and perhaps even a framework for integrating what we know about IF – assuming such a game studies theory does not react against “story” so strongly as to not admit something like IF, which generates narratives in response to typed text. To see IF as “new media,” and to add “play” and “conversation” to the ten perspectives I originally mentioned, offers thirteen ways of looking at interactive fiction, perhaps enough for a clear vision of sorts. The thirteen ways Wallace Stevens offered are, after all, also one way; they build on and speak to each other. Seeing IF as riddle […]
[…]positions appropriate to emerging textual forms – for although there have certainly been critical discussions of responsive texts in the past, much of these discussions have focused on concepts not appropriate to the works discussed here. The first text under consideration is Talan Memmott’s (2000) Lexia to Perplexia – which N. Katherine Hayles, in her essay, describes as her “tutor text,” for exploring ways that computation and network technologies are “fundamentally altering the ways in which humans conceive of themselves and their relations to others.” Lexia to Perplexia is a work built on and of the web, pushing web techniques […]
[…]John Tynes; Pagan Publishing. 1997. Dungeons and Dragons. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson; Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). 1974. GURPS. Steve Jackson et al.; Steve Jackson Games. 1986. Unknown Armies. Greg Stolze and John Tynes; Atlas Games. […]
[…]&Now was a refreshing turn from that. Steve Tomasula did a great job of bringing writers working on margins together in South Bend. The conference also got me thinking that one thing the ELO should do is help people like Steve who are interested in putting together such festivals to mobilize an e-writing contingent. While folks like Miekal And, Stephanie Strickland, Rob Wittig, Mark Marino, and The Unknown were present at &Now, Steve mentioned to me that he was hoping a few more electronic writers could show up. And it would be interesting to see other combinations: a festival of […]
[…]Christians, we believe in peace and turning the other cheek, we seek to bring others into our group). Such communities might be called centrifugal. Their energy flows outward. Others, at other times, think of themselves in opposition to something (we hate America, we are against America, our hatred of the evil is what binds us together in communal purpose, we must keep our group pure). These might be called centripetal communities, with the energy of their values and ideas pouring in toward their center. The problem with these categories is that they are ambiguous. Is light a wave or a […]
[…]version. Notice 1) The tone: you can hear the earnest “writer” trying to choose details, working to set the scene, to elicit emotion through the crude tactics of fiction writing. Here, it’s the writer as doe-eyed manipulator, so busy looking for the “meaningful detail” that the kid’s name, something that is an actual fact (arbitrary as a name is, in non-fiction) might be wrong. 2) You can see the difference a detail makes, especially when the next paragraphs read: Crystal was petite, just five-feet-one in her stocking feet. Crystal was petite, just five-feet- two in her lizard skin line-dancing boots. […]
[…]distinction between elements that are transferred and elements that are not. While he calls for a critical attitude towards computer games, he seems to believe that we uncritically introject integral virtual experiences. When acting in a simulation, we acquire skills. We will become better players and our reaction time, tactical insight and self-control may improve. Some of these skills will be transferred to the real world and there they can be used for better or for worse. However, I really do not see how killing a monster in Doom will make it any easier for me to kill another person. […]
[…]of depth or hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure, that has been such a staple of critical work of the past four decades’ (8). This is because there is a certain `ease with which beneath and beyond turn from spatial descriptors into implicit narratives of, respectively, origin and telos’ (ibid). The crucial issue here is that the task cultural theory sets for itself is both unenviable and unnecessary: Beneath and behind are hard enough to let go of; what has been even more difficult is to get a little distance from beyond, in particular the bossy gesture of […]
[…]be true: neither is there `fiction.’ The categories of fiction and non-fiction belong to the critical system which I argue is found wanting in the context of `participatory media.’ Van Looy here is attesting to the significance of ongoing experiential engagement in participatory media. This is precisely the argument I make in my paper. Simon Penny, May 2004 back to Critical Simulation […]
[…]in First Person in the first person, trying to make sense of what happens when simulation becomes critical, and trying to make sense of it in the sinewy suspensions of First Person. What does it mean for simulation to become critical? In Penny’s conception, it relates to how criticism becomes embodied, how it encompasses and accounts for physical interactions with a work. Penny rightly points out that if embodied involvement in military simulations trains soldiering, then embodied involvement in desktop shooter games must also train something. Another way to frame this idea is like this: if we want to claim […]
[…]opportunities for dialogue about their emerging ubiquity in our everyday lives and support public, critical awareness of new media and technologies in a highly accessible way. Here, I think of the Citywide Project and the Equator Project, groups that have for several years now argued for the importance of staging public, technological performances as a design research tactic. In short, cyberdrama could make digital media and computer technologies visible in a way that has nothing to do with computer graphics. In conclusion, I believe that the dramatic story-game can be performed not only on PCs or consoles, as Murray, Mateas […]
[…]of gender politics as they are represented in the mass media (what we might call empirical studies of postfeminism); critical elaborations of feminism in relation to other prominent literary and cultural theories (what we might call theoretical postfeminism); and finally, the search on the part of women creative writers for new narratives that make sense of women’s lives beyond those already identified by feminist scholars (what I will call literary postfeminism). Feminist media studies scholars have long been interested in depictions of women in television, film, and, more recently, on the Internet. Over the past decade and a half, scholars […]
[…]studies over the last two decades. Originally from Mumbai, India and today living and working as a professor of Women’s Studies at Hamilton College in the United States, Mohanty has added much to the debates on feminist epistemology and the politics of location. I enjoyed re-reading many of these texts, and their collection in a single volume is highly illustrative of the contribution and the challenges Mohanty has made to cross-cultural feminist scholarship. The arguments in these texts will be familiar to many feminist researchers, whether they are re-reading them or encountering them for the first time. Indeed, at times […]
[…]project. Had she abandoned her earlier style under critical pressure? Had the often hyperbolic critical discourse surrounding her work contributed to this break in style? My reading of her essay is, in a sense, polluted by questions like these, which stem from the reception of her work. Regardless, the essay rewards on its own terms, offering a gracious discussion of Forché’s activism, her entrance into motherhood, the philosophical traditions that sustain her, and her evolving writing practices. Forché’s particular poetic progression – from the centralized to the decentered – seems representative, in many ways, of the volume’s theoretical base. Throughout […]
[…]go go…home,” “Stay, don’t leave/ I need you to/ make my frontiers weaker” – and many critical remarks to us (the “you” on the page) – “You will never be me” and “You will never be able to understand me.” One of the commands says to go away; the other says to stay. One is asking, demanding even, that the viewer keep physical distance from her. The other is saying in a needy kind of a way that the viewer must stay close by. These commands nag at us. The first one says that being me is better than being […]
[…]the interactive entertainment world is high, meaning that every few years an almost entirely new group encounters and attempts to address the same craft-language deficit, with little or no success. (I have seen this happen myself at least three times in the past ten years, and my fear is that the academic community – through essays like Murray’s – is now embarking on a fourth iteration.) Worse, significant problems can arise when new definitions ignore (or are oblivious of) practical lessons that have already been learned. For example, here’s Murray at the end of her essay, talking about ‘agency’: “But […]
[…]of philosophical thought from Marxism to deconstructivism, not to mention communication and media studies, semiotics, gender studies, cognitive science, postcolonial studies etc. etc.? The field of game studies is now large enough to welcome these migrants from other theoretical discourses to its own area. Clearly, this process of integration will not be an easy one; it will require tolerance, diplomacy and patience. However, Markku’s attempt to “use the theories of colonizers against themselves” (36) runs counter to such an integrative strategy as it pours gasoline into the embers of the fiery debate between narratologists and ludologists. Not that we need […]
[…]Theory and Cultural Forms. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Critical Art Ensemble. http://www.critical-art.net/ Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund. http://www.caedefensefund.org/ Cassel, David. “Hacktivism in the Cyberstreets.” AlterNet. 30 May 2000. 16 June 04. http://www.alternet.org/story/9223 Griffis, Ryan. “Tandem Surfing the Third Wave: Part 3, interview with subRosa.” YOUgenics. 2003. 16 June 04. http://yougenics.net/subRosaInt.htm Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. [1985] 149-181. Harmon, Amy. “`Hacktivists’ of All Persuasions Take Their Struggle to the Web.” New York Times on the Web. 31 Oct 1998. 16 June 04. http://www.thehacktivist.com/archive/news/1998/Hacktivists-NYTimes-1998.pdf Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: […]
[…]be difficult not to be drawn to the idea that there is enough equality in our culture not to need group efforts for social change, it is difficult not to be drawn in to the postfeminist playfulness of Tank Girl as she caresses and sits (in parodic seductiveness) on the barrel of a tank, aims it at a group of male aggressors, and asks, “Feeling a little inadequate?” Tank Girl is all about the seductiveness of postfeminism, especially its “do-me feminist” elements. Women are powerful, the film proudly announces: we have only to use what we’ve got. Sadly, of course, […]
[…]animate and inanimate are illusional, differentiated only by a length or arrangement of code. When translating these arrangements, the processor sees no hierarchy between the coded cluster that will represent the microwave and that which will represent the wooden spoon. Although these digital representations can mimic cycles and flows within the domestic space, there is no differentiation between high and low technology as all objects are constructs of high technology. In the language of rhizome, hierarchical structures are neutralised because all structures are fabricated. This observation of “digital equality” can be extended in that, although it might be argued that […]
[…]and language for private communications beyond the male domain. My appropriation of programming code had taken on ontological elements; not only did the code create a programmatic, computer based universe which users could interact with, but it referred to, and reprised interesting traditions in women’s spirituality. The medieval mystic tradition that Christine alluded to seemed to have come full circle in the semi-medieval narrative of The Princess Murderer. Fear of reifying the machine as an entrée to metaphysical hermeneutics aside (which, as Victoria Nelson (280-284) points out, is an element of recent rhetoric surrounding the Internet and other computer-based media), […]
[…]as if Bond is a kind of agent of Anthony Giddens and other sociologists who claim that there is no working class. But you see my point. What these “post”-theories don’t take into account radically enough is that this split is structural. In order for the United States to function the way it functions today, you need China as the ultimate communist-capitalist country. What do I mean by this? Everything hinges on this symbiosis between the United States and China. China is an ingenious solution. It’s a country where, yes, you have political control by the communists, but everyone in […]
[…]matter. Fuller examines three types of software that represent useful interventions into software studies: critical software, social software, and speculative software. The first of these, critical software, is software that investigates software. Fuller describes two modes by which critical software operates. The first looks at evidence of normalized software in order to disclose how the process of normalization becomes manifest. Critical software works “by using the evidence presented by normalized software to construct an arrangement of the objects, protocols, statements, dynamics, and sequences of interaction that allow its conditions of truth to become manifest” (23). Critical software, then, engages the […]
[…]Adams, Jefferson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 135. but of revolutionary group-dogma power (which, it’s been recently suggested, by 2020 may “make governing our democracy… impossible without Mormon cooperation”), Harold Bloom, The American Religion. The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Touchstone. Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 90. their canals, irrigation ditches, and earthen dams put a different value on water from that of other western settlers who, in the absence of clear ownership and by a “first in time, first in right,” doctrine of appropriation called “cowboy economics,” made it property, like land. In fact, river […]
[…]take away Cyrus’ first pages while he hides behind a curtain. Perhaps I am following Dom’s Code of Welcomed Interruption, which “sprang from [his] sense that our state is now a Field-State of InterPoly force Vectors multimplicitly plodding toward Coordinate Availability and away from the hierarchical subordinations of the old tour-de-force antropols…” (141). For a long time, I had difficulty articulating what it was about McElroy’s writing that I found so captivating, so important. I found some help in an unlikely place: the introductory note to the second book of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Balthazar. “Modern literature offers us no […]
[…]Americans and Europeans, and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) investigates code-makers and code-breakers in World War II and the present day. While all of these novels possess the breadth, scope, and length of earlier postmodern historical novels, such as John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), they neither reflect their predecessors’ disinterest in character nor their primary concern with using fantasy and, in David Foster Wallace’s words, “rebellious irony” to criticize American society and expose its historical assumptions and hypocrisies (66). These recent postmodern historical novels, rather, simultaneously share their predecessors’ […]
[…]of McElroy’s handling of scientific knowledge and cross-disciplinary information systems. Critical readings of Joseph McElroy’s work, so often compared to, say, that of Thomas Pynchon, tend to overlook how much McElroy has in common with Grace Paley, herself a rigorous, avant-garde practitioner of complex fractured fictions. Paley, like McElroy, is a savvy surrealist of New York’s mental neighborhoods and a proponent of how, as she says, “history happens to you while you’re doing the dishes.” Sixteen of the “stories” that make up Women and Men appeared independently in literary magazines over the course of ten years (during the 1970s heyday […]
[…]and so forth are well documented in this work. These are the same problems confronting those working in networked screen based media more broadly and the misrecognition of hypertext as being little more than point and click branching structures shows that the division between text and image in our community is perhaps as profound as that in C.P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” thesis. Bernstein and Greco’s “Card Shark and Thespis” is illustrative in this regard. It offers a thumbnail sketch of the three major forms of literary hypertext, derived from their deep knowledge of the history of hypertext literature. From […]
[…]the kidnap, visit the pier by the hospital” (1). The definite article of “the” kidnap is critical, for now Hind’s solicitousness comes into sharper focus. Seven years before, a small boy, Hershey Laurel, was kidnapped from his country home under rather unusual circumstances. Jack Hind is not a sleuth, nor a police specialist or social worker, nor even a member of the extended Laurel family. Hind supports his unusual lifestyle by recording conversations, audio vèritè -style, for a radio program entitled “Naked Voice” (although it is never clear whether he is an engineer, a journalist, or simply a radio personality). […]
[…]for Beauty – ed. ] By the most conservative estimates of the London Institute of Strategic Studies, terrorist groups stand a better than 70% chance of detonating a nuclear “dirty” bomb in a major American city in the next ten years. The oil-rich royal family of Saud could soon be dethroned, giving way to the political ascendancy of Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia. The collapse of the Mid-East peace process owes as much to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as is it does to Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon. These are not postings from a conspiracy nut’s weblog. Malise […]
[…]sublime as a dream come true for the individual and as an analogue for the nation (cf. Wilson). As studies such as Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity and N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman show, at the core of much theorizing about the posthuman still lie those same dreams – informed with a technological determinism which figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have updated and popularized for the contemporary age. From the science-fiction field the responses to this finalistic narrative have been more nuanced, exploring the cyborg identity in detail, with a keener awareness that both personal bodies […]
[…]presence as his father’s voice slowly becomes unvoiced and yet reiterated as a general social code. As I say, all of this is encoded, if you will, into the structures of the sentences in the novel. Let me offer just the opening sentences of the novel as a paradigm of what I have been arguing. As the novel opens we read: The woman holding, then handing over the letter to this poised, dumbfounded fifteen-year-old: is the letter also hers? She’s been busy, her hands are anything but idle here in a room of a city apartment, but today what belongs […]
[…]more about the life that goes on at the Laundromat where Zanes meets with Seemyon Stytchin and a group of young punks that disturb the community. Zanes starts a friendship with Lung, a member of this group. However, this summary contradicts the story’s original presentation of Zanes’ world because it reassembles what is purposefully fragmented in “Canoe Repair.” We only achieve this vision of the story retrospectively because it is not told linearly. Our expectations as readers are challenged, as David Porush notes when associating the technique of “de-automatization” provoked by the unsettling language of McElroy’s novel Plus. Plus ‘ […]
[…]I see my three-year-old niece learning her ABCs sitting in front of the PC. Is anyone out there working on children’s software in the context of the history of literacy? I hope so. Third, Darnton asks us to look to records of reading, in a variety of documentary forms. Here we are in luck, since electronic media are self-documenting to an extent that should make historians of pervious eras weep. Bookmark files, cookie caches, server logs, and the like are a treasure trove of raw data, conveniently already machine-readable and ripe for analytical crunching. Obviously the trick is to do […]
[…]rhymes with our occluded sense of things even when we know it’s only partial, or even wrong, working on it to work against it, to make something else of it, not more durable but springy, tensile, elastic. Draft back at what springs, at what springs back, as what bounces back against the springs, against the giant of gravity. A rebound that calls attention to the screen on which you view what is taking place, and yet the screen or blocking-out preceded the rebound. There is a sense that what’s first arises out of this secondhand, ” off hand” version of […]
[…]to something decidedly un-intellectual: that is, the new breed of light, commercial urban-working-girl-looking-for-love novels the industry calls “Chick-Lit.” In my Chick-Lit anthology introduction, I referred to my use of “postfeminism” in the call-for-mss as a joke, and I thought the title Chick-Lit carried obvious satire. Thus my new essay, “Who’s Laughing Now / A Short History of Chick-Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,” which should appear in the winter 05 issue of Poets & Writers. (And I must thank my co-editor Elisabeth Sheffield for the first three words of this title, as it is the essence of her comments […]
[…]perspicacity and linguistic cunning. What distinguishes Oblivion is its pervasive (often deeply encoded, implicit) didacticism – another dubious word, especially nowadays, but bear with me – about how fundamental ontological puzzles may be made less crippling, less horrible for those who would (as many of his characters do) rage against or succumb to or remain improbably ignorant of what one moribund character calls “the fraudulence paradox” (147). Life is fake and empty, but we go on living it as if it weren’t. It’s not the case, Wallace’s tales suggest, that one can be “emancipated” from the paradox, but rather that […]
[…]the more sophisticated concatenation of “signal” and “purpose.” However, in the critical environment in which this process occurs with organic smoothness, its clear-cut causal relations rapidly become skewed by the interference of a non-causally-explicit affect: It is a silent flash in the great city’s grid […] From my height the detonation noise is a signal of light only. My cabin responds by at once easing its forward motion […]. We have a new purpose. […] Up in the cockpit the flash has been seen and the man in the right-hand seat is reporting it. But something is happening to our […]
[…]of disbelief. But it would seem too that any reading or viewing that occurs in a remotely critical mode (beyond but not exclusive to that of popular entertainment) would yield a consideration of not only a story but also its story-producing mechanisms. After all, as countless theorists of the postmodern have pointed out, we live in a society in which artifacts both cultural and commercial insist on calling attention to themselves, to their artifice, whether it be a work of kinetic poetry online or the billboard down the road. The billboard down the road from me: an ad for a […]
[…]and analyzed by theories uncritically imported from other fields (including literary and film studies). This uncritical tendency of ignoring and downplaying dominant game-specific features, and not interdisciplinarity, was what the ludologists opposed and did so rather fiercely in 2001 when I wrote my First Person essay as a response to the first wave of narrativist nonsense. It was and it is clear to me that also the premises and presuppositions of reception studies and “generations of audience research” should be modified before they could be used in computer game research. This is based on three modest observations: first, by definition […]
[…]a particular meaning. It draws on a deliberately impure and hybridized methodology that blends a critical engagement with the complexity sciences with a critical engagement with French post-structuralist thought. The example of raciology demonstrates that it is possible to take possession of the profound transformations of thought made available by structural transformations in the discourses of the sciences and the humanities and “somehow set [them] to work against the tainted logic that produced [them]” (15). Refusing the logic of fragmentation that separates and isolates categories of knowledge in order to establish hierarchies of meaning, Gilroy demonstrates the value of instantiating […]
[…]to bring complex behavior within the scope of rational analysis. Analogous theories in literary studies, by contrast, are often embraced because they are seen as resisting totalizing theories” (xiv). She further claims that I argue “the convergence of interests must be evidence of a singular event which shifts the singular epistemic structure from which both disciplines are produced.” Although she then goes go to use two phrases central to my argument – “cultural context” and “feedback loop” – she apparently does not know what these terms imply. The very idea of a feedback loop, which I use to show that […]
[…]of the agrarian and the environmental, which is still a fundamentally neglected aspect of ecocritical and environmental thought, becomes the centerpiece of Smith’s reading of Berry’s oeuvre, and it colors all of his writings. So Berry’s agrarian politics become a lens through which we all might achieve a more environmental vision. The problem, of course, is that when we think of agrarianism, per se, we naturally think of farming; and Berry does to. Berry may “insist that the family farm is the chief repository of virtues critical to the republic,” but these values are “ecological rather than political” and are […]
[…]and transparency of the process. Stuart Marsh, of the British Geological Survey Remote Sensing Group, talked about Geohazards and the IS. He noted that citizens are the ultimate beneficiaries, and suggested that there are three main user groups of geohazards information: “responsible authorities”, scientists in monitoring and government agencies, and research scientists. They have different needs, e.g., baseline inventory of hazards, monitoring, rapid dissemination of information during a crisis, etc. He noted, as did the others in the session, the need for an integrated approach from surface to space, and the need for but difficulty in bringing together the different […]
[…]-ism, from feminism to postmodernism, from postcolonialism to structuralism, from Marxism to queer studies, had found in Stevens’ work fodder for their particular theoretically inquiries, and Serio did not think that would change in the near future, even if we are entering a moment where, as Terry Eagleton has pronounced, theory is dead. Bacigalupo spoke to the gradually growing interest in Stevens’ work in Italy and in continental Europe. Admittedly, according to Bacigalupo, Stevens was caviar, a rarefied flavor that the common reader could not afford. Nonetheless, he had found that translating Stevens’ work, even though it was replete with […]
[…]Warhol nightclub denizens, plastic action figures) evoked prosaic leather-and-fatigue ordinary working-class Joes, fellas, a latter-day waterfront of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, with self-critique-as-self-congratulations in another homage to New York, “City of Blinding Lights,” where “They’re advertising in the skies/for people like us.” And in the blogs and discussion swirling around the new disk and the critical and media junket, we hear that Boy’s raw existential tone might have been partly Bono’s response to the death of his mother when the writer was fourteen years old, and Bono, performing at the Grammy’s in February 2005, made clear that Atomic […]
[…]Communist factories, an attempt to reify an experience just in case you forgot that you weren’t working for a classless Utopia. This kind of writing demonstrates a lack of trust in letting words do what they can do, and which music and images can’t do, such as be contradictory, paradoxical, and – as the famous Eliza program demonstrates – psychologically ventriloquistic, suggesting the presence of another human in the room – in your head – when there clearly isn’t one. Visual paradoxes such as those of M.C. Escher will never be more than analogies for the power of a paradox […]
[…]marked increase in high-end ads with sophisticated dynamic textuality. We need tools for its critical reading. The major exposition of Saul Bass’s graphic and film title work at London’s Design Museum was, therefore, essential. Saul Bass was the first film title designer to be given a screen credit by the Director’s Guild of America (for Preminger’s Carmen Jones 1954) and remains an all but uniquely name-checkable artist in the film titles field. Yet his fame derives equally if not in greater measure from his related, more purely graphic work, where he is a central figure in that late-50s, early-60s school […]
[…]ago, theorists such as Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen felt an urgent imperative to distinguish game studies from narrative studies of new media, that work is by now well accomplished. Yet we still are left with the question of where electronic literature fits both within the academy and within the culture at large. In recent years, as the discipline of English has engaged in its continuous process of self-redefinition, English and literature programs have become more welcoming to the study of electronic literature, digital textuality, and to the larger notion of “digital humanities.” The mission of English programs is to examine […]
[…]That is, there is no longer meaning in the strict phenomenological sense but rather a semiotic code for meaning (perhaps Barthes’ hermeneutic code), just as there is no intentionality but rather a code for intention. Michaels recognizes that the result is necessarily a certain indifference to intention, for if intention is one code among others, there can be little point in arguing that we should be concerned with the beliefs of Howe or Dickinson or any other author. The seemingly generous claim that intention remains one textual code among others is cold comfort to the phenomenologist. Michaels’ point is that […]
[…]philosophy has shaped up-and-coming fields such as film, electronic literature, and new media studies; influenced pathbreaking intellectuals (e.g. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Brian Massumi, Manuel DeLanda, Barbara Kennedy, and Steven Shaviro) and informed contemporary debates concerning a wide range of topics including: the problem of accounting for eruptions of the New within interdependent systems, the emergence of a networked multitude, the political status of nomadic and schizophrenic subjects, the brain’s ability to process and cognize moving-images, the impact of various technologies on our sense of time, and the contested relationship between the virtual and the real. Unfortunately – and […]
[…]homology between the theological and political makes clearer what’s at stake: Jews map onto the working class (both social groups retaining an ontological, empirically verifiable component) whereas Christians map onto the proletariat (both being defined solely by their members “assuming a certain subjective stance”) (Ticklish Subject 226-7). For Žižek, the latter groups are – in theory – more inclusive and more liberated and therefore preferable. Christianity: The Perverse Core vs. The Subversive KernelSo much for the allusive title. Now what about that scandalous subtitle? “The perverse core of Christianity” has nothing, necessarily, to do with widely stigmatized behaviors or aberrant […]
[…]technologies, and of programming and its hardware, is missing. When Hardt and Negri describe media studies, they refer to ideology critiques and sociological studies of corporate media, contrasting the latter’s apocalyptical tone with the Birmingham school’s more sensible recognition that public opinion – the new civil society – is a cramped space defined by relations of power but potentially traversed by two-sided communication. In short, these studies remain at the level of content. Missing from Marxist theories of immaterial labor and post-Fordist technologies, like Multitude or Paolo Virno’s A Grammar for the Multitude, is a media theory. There is No […]
[…]into a conceptual crisis – though not exactly a juridical one. Alluding rapidly to a sort of Critical Legal Studies approach that evacuates the conceptual foundation of the property right, Hardt and Negri imagine a (near?) future in which “A new notion of ‘commons’ will have to emerge” (Empire 302). In other words, where for Locke or Hobbes a barbaric and violent commons preceded the enclosures that established real and rightful proprietary relations, for Hardt and Negri it is the post-natural concept of private property that is in danger of becoming “ever more detached from reality” (Empire 302). For Hardt […]
[…]Negri refer to the organizational significance of the use of the Internet by anti-globalization groups. As a result, their formulation remains enmeshed in the appeal to the cyborg and thus the model of general intellect as immaterial labor. Here is a typical formulation from Multitude: “The networks of information, communication, and cooperation – the primary axes of post-Fordist production – begin to define the new guerilla movements” (82). Throughout the book Hardt and Negri insist that the domain of immaterial labor is as exploitative as any other form of capitalist command and at least their notion of the network cyborg […]
[…]in our heads). The horizontal is associated with the immanent and the lateral, as with two authors working side by side passing ideas from brain to brain. H&N’s methods of thinking, their style of writing, and the content of their thoughts all imply each other, as with their openness to hybrids and miscegenation. Their books are self-exemplifying, and as such stand as autonomous poetic structures. They write from within, and in behalf of, a world-design that is radically different from the world-designs of most of their critics. Their materialist world-design should be thought of as their world-poem, surely reflecting their […]
[…]that particular character seems to body forth a universal concept. Newscasters confronted with a group of people after a disaster pick the beautiful or most beautiful available person to interview. In the classroom when the supervisor enters, the teacher calls on the beautiful student. In the military funeral, the honor guard consists of the handsome, not the ugly. In some circumstances, Ugly can add pain to pain, while Beauty can subtract horror from horror. In ugly events, Beauty is the promise of the excess energy for which Beauty will be the conduit. The tragedy of situations like that of the […]
[…]to correct these metaphors in literary theory, criticizing them from the perspective of hypertext studies. His work goes well beyond the familiar criticism of the structuralists’ spatial, three-layered model because Aarseth questions the world as it is construed by structuralist narratology at the level of the fabula. In order to resolve the problem of the importation of inadequate terms for the study of hypertexts, Aarseth develops a pragmatic model in which texts are no longer conceived of as worlds but as communication processes. This brings us to the second crucial characteristic of hypertexts: the importance of the reader, who often […]
[…]the while on acknowledgment, much like the nodes that Carolyn Guertin describes in the feminist group, The Old Boys’ Network.“Another cyberfeminist collective, the Old Boys’ Network,” Guertin argues, “defined its local chapters as ‘nodes’ that ‘collide, disintegrate, regenerate, engage, disembody, reform, collapse, renew, abandon, revise, revitalize, and expand'” (OBN FAQ 7). The waves produced by the electronic book review are of this nature – small, insistent, eroding efforts to make a difference, to inch feminism in the direction of its own demise, a terminus coinciding with the end of discrimination against people on the basis of gender, race, class, ability, […]
[…]in feminism … characterized by a sustained interest in reassessing feminism through the critical lens of poststructuralist and postmodern thinking.” I take this to mean that the implementation of the hacktivism, that is `how’ the hacktivism is carried out, is what is more important than whether I belong to a cyberfeminist collective or not, and furthermore, must be demonstrative in someway of the `critical lens of poststructuralist and postmodern thinking’, whether in reference to the discourse on feminism, or society as a whole. Two central premises, however, must still hold true: cyberfeminists are not anti-technology nor are they anti-feminist (Guertin). […]
[…]and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. de Lauretis, Teresa. Ed. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Derwin, Susan. The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Docherty, Thomas. After Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Frye, Joanne, S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Geniwate. “Language Rules.” Electronic Book Review. 28 Jan. 2005, 3 March 2005. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, […]
[…]culture” is through the establishment of a creative commons exemplified in the actions of such groups as the nonprofit group Creative Commons. He writes that the aim of the Creative Commons is “to build a layer of reasonable copyright on top of the extremes that now reign” (282). Under such a system authors (construed broadly) decide what protections they want their works to have. “Content is marked with the CC mark, which does not mean that copyright is waived, but that certain freedoms are given” (283). The Creative Commons website states that they “use private rights to create public goods: […]
[…]viruses, spyware, or other threats. By comparison, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is closed-code. Only Windows employees are allowed to see the code that makes the browser work and as such only a limited number of individuals are able to make improvements to the code. While one might think that the open-source Firefox is more vulnerable to attack than Explorer (because hackers have access to the code), this study by Brian Livingston on the website TechRepublic demonstrates the speed with which Firefox is able to respond to perceived threats as opposed to the glacial pace that Microsoft addresses security flaws in a […]
[…]what David MiallMiall, David. 2004. Reading Hypertext: Theoretical Ambitions and Empirical Studieshas described as the “additional complications that the digital medium places on the work of interpretation”; what poet John Cayley has called the “literal art” of “networked and programmable media”; and what the electronic book review has probingly called electropoetics. My own insistence on attending to forms of digital writing that not only maintain but also perhaps intensify the interpretive role of reader as audience, viewer, or critic should not detract from the overall contribution of this review, which clearly has a divergent focus. All in all, the authors […]
[…]to say that the transnational feminist organizing offers an enticing model of radical efficacy. Working through the liberal discourse of human rights and in conjunction with states risks accommodating global powers, as Gayatri SpivakIn a series of talks and essays since 1995, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has criticized global feminist projects that take place through the UN or NGOs. See “‘Woman’ as Theater,” Radical Philosophy January/February 1996. For a more sympathetic analysis of feminism in the UN orbit, see Ara Wilson’s “The Transnational Geography of Sexual Rights” in Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights. Eds. Mark Philip Bradley and Patrice Petro. […]
[…]once comfortably removed, now interfering at every turn of every written phrase. A novelist working in print can seek (either unconsciously or, like Berry, with fertile self-consciousness) a more lasting, more consistent basis for exploring the fictions, inconsistencies, and less than frank expressions of everyday communication. But the result will be more reflective than creative. The frankness of communication is not, and cannot be, the truth of fiction. To be meaningful, fiction needs to dissemble, and it needs to revel in the awareness that nothing—literally, nothing—can stop the production of meaning, and still different meanings, from spoken words and written […]
[…]recently established generation. The tourism coming to Riga has a much different look about it. Groups arriving from Germany, from Italy, from Sweden – these are mostly old people, often traveling by bus. Their excursion to the Baltic capitals and the coast might be their only getaway of the year. These are people who, for most of their working life, might have driven a C class Mercedes or Series 4 BMW and counted themselves fortunate. They know nice neighborhoods, at home. What do they think, when they look down from the newly renovated Jugenstil facades and notice that none of […]
[…]Its underlying faith is that human subjectivity, both collective and individual, is self-critical. Because reality as we presently live it—what Tabbi characterizes, in words from Frank, as “living too peacefully in THIS NOW HERE”—is so self-defeating, humans simply must overcome themselves. I can see two ways of understanding Tabbi’s reservations about this Hegelian metanarrative, one associated with Lyotard, the other with Wittgenstein. In Lyotard’s famous characterization of postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (The Postmodern Condition [1979; translation 1984]), any representation of “an untamed America” or of anything else our culture has “cast out” would depend for its legitimation on Hegel’s […]
[…]does not need to be the solidarity of mass culture. Group identity doesn’t have to promote group-think along racial, gendered, or nationalist lines, not when the identity that writers do share, generally, comes in the first place from membership in (or aspiration to) the professional classes that maintain the current world-system. Wallerstein, no less than Wittgenstein, should be required reading in literary seminars and writing workshops because the loss of an “outside” and the appearance of new constraints on creativity are not exclusively philosophical propositions. (See Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction [2004].) Rather, the discovery of a “surprising,” “untamed,” […]
[…]and external (the marketing), might just as well be found in a larger subset of bibliographic codes (copyright notices, author photos, margin size, etc.), since blurbs, of course, migrate craftily onto covers, and, in certain trade paperbacks, to the inside leaves. Let us now jump quickly from “blurb” to “font,” another impossible nexus place of crass intention and pure meaning. The word ‘font’ derives from the Middle French fonte (think: fondue): a melting together in both the casting of type and the smelting of external occurrence with internal transmission. In the space of the “font,” the real and the unreal […]
[…]That is, either Slade is a man working for a medium-sized U.S. business, a medium-sized man working for a U.S. business, or a businessman working for a medium-sized U.S. The ambiguity appears to be intentional, and each reading can be supported. The beheading of Brent Marshall is described as not going very smoothly “because of Marshall’s exceptionally thick neck.” Thus the brutality of the slaying is blamed on Marshall, a Virginia “thick-neck” of the type we have learned to feel less compassion for over the years because a thick neck represents a “dumb jock,” “a red neck,” “a hick.” “Big […]
[…]and critical practices; as such, both books add to the on-going conversations in American Studies and American literary studies. Along with recent scholarship such as Brent Hayes Edwards’ Practicing Diaspora, Penny Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World, and Scott Saul’s Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, Soto and Martinez’s books confront the centrality of ethnic and racial experiences to the narratives that make up American identity. Rather than erasing those experiences, they examine the crucial role that race and ethnicity play in our understanding of the Lost and Beat generations and thus the role that both play in our cultural identities. […]
[…]and preempts interpretative moves” (140). In so doing, McHale’s chapter takes the risky critical position of employing an analytic framework in order to demonstrate the failure of all critical frames imposed on Ashbery’s work, an ironic position that is perhaps not acknowledged as explicitly as it could have been. Nevertheless, he convincingly shows how Ashbery’s work encourages critics to take certain parts of his poems as “keys” to the work as a whole while simultaneously undermining the idea that anything is “central” in his work. Ironically again, if anything is “key” to McHale’s approach to postmodernist poetry, it is this […]
[…]Editions compilation entitled Magnified Section. This book features work by, among others, Critical Art Ensemble, a group with one member, Steve Kurtz, currently enmeshed in legal difficulties, with charges filed against him by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security Joint Terrorism Task Force for illegally trading in biological substances that actually are legal for trade, a prosecution that is widely seen in the artistic community as ideologically based.For more information see the CAE official website. In short, Magnified Section is one of those great publications one can only find done by a micro-press: simultaneous art object and slapdash, cheap […]
[…]prose invites careful examination, a gradual, rigorous state of attention designed to produce critical intelligence rather than a commercial transaction. Even if many of the characters are psychologically trapped in one way or another, the multiple space of their juxtaposed and intersecting thoughts and feelings indicates that a crucial aesthetic transformation has taken place, a demonstration of what fiction at its subversive best can offer, a rehumanized model of time. A media capitalist like Milo Magnani may be delighted that so many people can be herded into controlled environments like the mall and the theater, where their behavior can be […]
[…]How has your academic work fed into your fiction? Siegel: My academic training is in Indian studies and has served me in writing about India in both Love in a Dead Language and Love and Other Games of Chance. I haven’t given up academic endeavors. I’m currently translating a long Sanskrit love poem, the Gitagovinda, for the Clay Sanskrit Library. Burn: How is that going? Siegel: I took on the translation because, although I have some ideas for a new novel, I don’t really want to write fiction any more until I see the fate of the Ponce de Leon […]
[…]stuck in an inextricable web of intrigues, whereby he apparently becomes the plaything of radical groups both on the left and the right who, in the apparent knowledge that he is a fake spy, try to scapegoat and even eliminate him to equalize their mutual debts (or is all this a pathetic joke of his Paris friends?). His life as a double agent, his supposed grand scheme which was going to dispel the idea that he was working for the CIA by paradoxically exposing his intelligence activities, eventually entirely robs him of the possibility of individual agency. “My game had […]
[…]but not exactly on the way I write. Many years ago I spent an evening in the company of a group of bright young Dutch writers, decidedly not main-stream. When I remarked that we were all part of a community working towards the same ends, one Dutchman smiled and asked, “How would you feel if you knew you would never have more than a hundred readers?” I saw what he meant. David Bellos has stated: “la traduction normalise, et normalise peut-être trop en français.” Do you agree? Do you think that some languages translate easier than others, or would you […]
[…]please look hard at these two short passages in Pagolak. Each points to narakaviri, to this critical moment in namele. The first enacts the way up to it (pakanu), and the second the way down from it (plot). You can enter these passages. What I propose is not reasonable, not unreasonable. Enter these two passages. You have no need for more knowledge. Your awareness is equal to the task. This is a task: like all tasks correctly performed, it leads to revelation. Move (as I did) through the first passage to the last, become the bodily metamorphosis that this movement […]
[…]as confidence men – des arnaqueurs); at the end of the book he is convinced that his wife is working with them and against him. In frequenting these criminals, he has gradually picked up their jargon, and in his last letter to his wife he denounces her in terms drawn entirely from that jargon: This chump never blowed you were turned out to hopscotch. You let him find the leather, and he copped you for the pure quill, when you’re nothing but a crow. It took a long time to bobble him but now you’ve knocked him good and he […]
[…]a fellow theorist to describe his right ear’s tendency to be self-absorbed, he offers a metacritical/critifictional commentary on self-enclosure and withdrawal that is very much at odds with his postmodern ethos of outreach, boundary breakdown, and immersion. The right ear, he says, “invaginate[s] herself, if I may borrow a word from Derrida. One of his better inventions. L’invagination de texte” (92). Thus, by replacing the ground rules of L’Academie Française – the French linguistic border patrol forbidding verbal transgressions – with his own rules of jouissance and playgiarism, Federman demonstrates the cross-pollinating effects of bilingualism or, if you will, his […]
[…]“Yes, yes,” he said, waving the tickets, parrying imaginary thrusts and attacks. “We’re working on it… It’s under control… I’ll be in Paris on Friday… Yes, yes, next Friday.” The telephone was a messenger, the distant twitter of the other’s voice like surf or like birds. He was afraid the Indian would sit on the floor again right there, in front of his desk, and look at him. The expression on the Japanese family’s faces haunted him too, as if they wore Noh masks, expressive but unchanging. The afternoon passed without further incident and he began to relax. It would […]
[…]Corrections Corporation,” “HLM Justice,” “Tindell Concrete Products,” “The Dick Group of Companies.” David Matlin’s book brings before us startling evidence from Prison Inc., like this pitch, a promotion by the “American Correctional Association,” which gleefully reports to potential investors that: The prison industry continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. With the number of inmates incarcerated in our nation’s prison’s jails and detention rates approaching 1.5 million the need for…new products and services continues to be an industry priority…and unlimited opportunity for your company to profit from this multi-billion dollar industry (61) So is this sick industry just another example […]
[…]of novelists but also those critical writers who keep the discussion of novels going. We present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions. In gathering critical writing by imaginative authors, our aim is not to review books instantly. Reviews in print media often arrive much faster than the more considered treatment one finds in ebr. An appearance in print generally does not mean that current writing is going to remain available, or up for discussion, for long. So rather than attempt to pace our own writing with the narrow shelf-life […]
[…]“Oh, don’t worry, my Toby never bites!” every critic warms to his subject, feels what he studies or the way he studies it is good in the way belief. But I think the rest of us should be leery of Toby. He’s descended from wolves; it’s in his nature to bite. So there is something to be said for a critical stance that refuses to make nice right up to the bitter end, keeps its distance from that which it can’t help but admire. Anyway, the new physiocracy can take care of itself. Leave the note of hope to the […]
[…]in the context of the historical development of copyright law. Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is a reworking, or perhaps a collaborative twin, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and as such illustrates and enacts the inherent multiplicity of authorship. Hayles brings out its concomitant critique of authorship as a fiction created by the institution of copyright, a device used to channel cultural and capital revenues to an individual regardless of how many amanuenses, muses, spiritual guides, cooks or chambermaids sustain that individual and participate or even collaborate in that individual’s “work.” In this same section, Hayles presents a fascinating account of Neal Stephenson’s […]
[…]bone covered with leather, soon swept away by time. For 30,000 years or so men lived in small groups, wandering a known landscape bounded by focal points of natural landmarks – mountain peaks, lakes, rocks. They followed animal migration routes and salmon runs and ripening fruits and nuts. When the ice advanced, they retreated, and when the ice retreated they returned to fill the ecological niches for which, by their intelligence and adaptability, they were increasingly well suited. They adapted to circumstance without forcing the world to adapt to them. Of course, technology was already changing in the upper Paleolithic. […]
[…]in learning Flash or Dreamweaver, the multimediatization of the written word suggests that a working knowledge of design theory could at least help one know what one was looking at (and whether it was worth looking at). So what to make of Acheson’s illuminated critique itself? For wordsmiths, images are pleasant distractions or even, occasionally, dangerous supplements; in any case, they are best ignored once we begin the heady process of mentally tagging and bagging text. But as visual beings, we cannot ignore these chopped, cropped, and photoshopped images that surround and suffuse Acheson’s text, putting twists on the plain […]
[…]claims that the sublime is “itself a system, one that morphs and adapts to each period’s critical caprice” (5). While I believe that stretches the definition of system, I am well-persuaded that the ecosublime is, as he argues, an efficient term for describing an alertness to holism often found in contemporary represented or mediated environments. Less so am I convinced, however, that the sublime or the ecosublime bodes much for non-fictional worlds, i.e., our own. Rozelle argues that “there is no effective difference between the natural sublime and the rhetorical ecosublime; both have the power to bring the viewer, reader, […]
[…]opportunities offered by the interaction between computer power, digital technology and literary studies. The earliest are preoccupied with defining the impact of computer tools on literary studies, particularly historical and editorial work. The middle section reverses the question: what can the objects of literary studies – recursive, cumulative, difference-generating, perpetual motion machines – teach digital technology? The concluding section imagines a convergence of the previous two: how can computer technology be used to create generative and multiplicitous space within which to exercise critical intelligence – within which to instantiate the imaginative energy existing between works of art, other works of […]
[…]the way we might explicate a work of literature in a new field of inquiry that I call Critical Code Studies (CCS). Codework critics and artists have operated on the cusp of this analysis. Cayley’s emphasis, for example, is “the role of code in literal art” but not the role of code in all software objects, even those not intended to be literary. The focus of CCS is not literature made of code or code that is literature, although these may benefit from its techniques. Rather, I propose that code itself is a cultural text worthy of analysis and rich […]
[…]another game, presumably (given the terms of the criticism) one where the stakes are not merely critical, or merely academic. The gamble in Environmental Renaissance is that systems theory is the right game to rescue cultural studies in the humanities from irrelevancy, just as once poststructuralism was considered the cure for New Criticism’s irrelevancy. But in order to reconnect ecocriticism to a meaningful politics, McMurry argues that we must come to grips still more fully with our disconnection from the object of our critical inquiry – in this case our environment, or environments. The task McMurry announces in the introduction […]
[…]most recent inheritors of Smith and Flynt’s practices, and that of ethnopsychedelia, are a group of musicians in Seattle working under the name of the Sun City Girls, who play and record, and also run a world music label, Sublime Frequencies. The term “world music,” or for that matter “world” is of course as fraught as “America” was in the time of Smith and now. “The equator runs through ten countries and I bet you can’t name all of them without looking at a map,” writes Sublime Frequencies co-founder Alan Bishop in his sleevenotes to Folk and Pop Sounds From […]
[…]very quick and sure about something. It’s more deliberate. It’s more like you’ve been working in the light of day and then you see one day that it’s getting dark early, that it doesn’t matter where you are – it won’t do any good. It’s a reflective thing. Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door – something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it [as seeing and hearing Mike Seeger did for Dylan, in this account]” (Dylan 2004: […]
[…]components of writing’s conditions: why write with any assumption that you are making some critical extension outwards from your own person, some glorious annex to your personality? Words are conditioned by and toward their own occasions. Why write thinking you will be rewarded for it, encouraged to continue, given money, sex, and fame? “If I Were Writing This. . .” has the immediate effect of showing that “The Invoice” was indeed a direct appeal for encouragement of an immediate sort. Both poems affirm that communication cannot easily effect what is desired (money and sex), though one chafes at the feeling […]
[…]The Beat Generation and America (New York, Random House, 1979). Nicosia, Gerald, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). Podhoretz, Norman, ‘The Know-Nothing Bohemians’, in Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was The Beat Generation ed. by Ann Charters (USA: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 479-493. ‘Romandson’ ‘Who Gives Form to Noise? Interactive Music’ in Noise, catalogue to accompany Kettle’s Yard exhibition, March 2000 (Great Britain: Kettle’s Yard, 2000). Sargeant, Jack, ‘Towards the Medical’ in The Torture Garden 2 (Great Britain: Creation Books, 2001), pp. 36-40. Shapcott, John, ‘I Didn’t Punctuate It’: Locating the Tape and Text […]
[…]in an analog – as opposed to digital – fashion on magnetic tape (today’s high-end studios encode music as distinct digital bits rather than magnetic “waves”). Dubmasters saturate individual instruments with reverb, phase, and delay; abruptly drop voices, drums, and guitars in and out of the mix; strip the music down to the bare bones of rhythm and then build it up again through layers of inhuman echoes, electronic ectoplasm, cosmic rays. Good dub sounds like the recording studio itself has begun to hallucinate. Dub arose from doubling – the common Jamaican practice of reconfiguring or “versioning” a prerecorded track […]
[…]retrieve a realist attitude”: To retrieve a realist attitude, it is not enough to dismantle critical weapons so uncritically built up by our predecessors as we would obsolete but still dangerous atomic silos. If we had to dismantle social theory only, it would be a rather simple affair; like the Soviet Empire, those big totalities have feet of clay. But the difficulty lies in the fact that they are built on top of a much older philosophy, so that whenever we try to replace matters of fact by matters of concern, we seem to lose something along the way. It […]
[…]internally elaborating, writerly persona that is distinctive of ebr – unafraid of sustained critical thought (aka ‘theory’), attentive to current events (aka ‘ideology critique’), professional in presentation but never for a moment forgetting that we’re writers here. Generally when I ask people to write for ebr…well, they write for ebr. I personally don’t know of any good reason to read a review or critical essay in any medium, if in the process I don’t learn something new about writing. I don’t mean just finding out about a work under review, or informing oneself about what’s current in media, academia, and […]
[…]Tom Raworth. Both Niedecker and Raworth may be characterized as mavericks. Both have strong group affiliations but are loners, working in isolation. Both are obsessed, in their condensed, “minimalist” lyric, with the grammaticity and paragrammaticity of language, both are intensely “personal” and yet intensely oblique and constrained love poets. To read Creeley against Niedecker and Raworth suggests, in any case, that in making genealogies, it is high time to go beyond nation and gender boundaries, high time to cast a wider net so as to capture, in Creeley’s words, “whatever is.” Works Cited Creeley, Robert. Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971. […]
[…]conscious, their poetics of indeterminacy opens itself to all possible manifestations of semiotic code. These are not poems so much as environments outside of, perhaps astride, the contingencies of system. As Raworth intones, playing with categorical statements obviously offered with a mischievous grin: “the object of art is no longer to be outside and to be thought about – but to stick the electric wires into the dead dog of language and get a twitch” (“Notebook” 99). In less graphic terms, he also offers that “It is now known […] that our knowledge is as the memories of the blind” […]
[…]to the absent author of late-century avant-garde poetics), Montreal’s ‘fiction/theory’ group took issues of writing-in-the-feminine (l’ecriture au feminin) in response to French formalism’s death of the author” (11). Both groups foreground the writing subject as a subject-in-process in order to examine the ways identity can be formed and (de)formed by narrative. By dispensing with the ideology of national literatures, Biting the Error removes the borders between Canadian and American writing to engender a consideration of the commonality between fiction/theory and New Narrative. What makes Biting the Error exciting is that it explores how urban literary communities form and prosper within […]
[…]‘transparency’ of intent. Rhythm science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again” (004-005). Which is to say, the structures of authority in this text sustain a narrow sense of writing, as the encoded sonic, as a name, to which design is subservient, and to which returns the authorial problematic. Feedback loop to the author function. This loop permits us to further scratch into this text. Rhythm science isn’t just about sound, of course. Imagery, whether presented on canvas or seen as a series of […]
[…]characters. This step helps players develop their characters more thoroughly and engages the whole group in each player’s story. For the gamemaster, however, it’s an opportunity to be sure that the free-form nature of character creation hasn’t left the character missing important details. Question and answer is important for: – Engagement: Listening to a player talk about their character is widely recognized as dull. It’s like listening to someone recount a dream: it means a lot more to the talker than to the listener. The Q&A process, however, turns the monologue into a dialogue. It makes character exposition much more […]
[…]1981, but personal experience and anecdotal evidence would tend to indicate otherwise. Gaming groups do not tend to adopt “Raid on Innsmouth”-style multiple-character play for Call of Cthulhu despite (or perhaps because of) the timid exhortation of the rulebook concerning the utility of multiple characters (Call of Cthulhu 2004, 28 – 29). Even scenarios designed to be run at gaming conventions, while allowing for wildly variant character groups or settings (since they need not support an ongoing campaign) seldom tamper with the established “horror mystery” narrative structure, although they may compress it to fit in a four-hour time slot.One example […]
[…]in reality” (Chainmail 1971, 7).Page reference taken from the 1975 third printing by Tactical Studies Rules. Chainmail‘s Fantasy Supplement introduced many concepts that have endured through all editions of Dungeons & Dragons, including monsters like elementals and the chromatic dragons and spells like fireball, lightning bolt, and polymorph. Magical swords and arrows appear for the first time, as does the concept of dividing creatures by their philosophical alignment to law and chaos. Yet, despite these creative innovations, Chainmail is not a role-playing game, but rather a set of brief rules specifically meant to be used to simulate battles between large […]
[…]present players with a series of challenges – with one, and only one, solution (generally hard-coded) for each. To open the gates to Hell, you must use the bell, the book, and the candle in a prescribed order. To get past the level boss, you must kill it, and there’s some little trick to doing so. As you move away from hard-coded systems to algorithmically driven ones (games set in 3D spaces with skill-driven combat, for instance, and games with physics engines), it becomes increasingly possible for players to discover ways to interact with the physical environment to solve problems, […]
[…]you as well; to pick only one example, Jonathan Tweet’s Over the Edge tells us: This game is a coded message. You will decode the message in your dreams and execute its instructions in the spaces between moments of will. Neither you nor I will ever know the contents of the message. (Over the Edge 1997, 2) The authors, artists, and theoreticians in Second Person address the exigencies of playable media in a number of ways, and in a number of voices. Some essays are informal in tone, some academic, and some highly technical; this polyglot speaks to the varied […]
[…]world – like, let’s get out of this confinement, Thoreau kind of thing. Seems to be a theme working its way in from the fringes. MZD: And looking for real sources of empowerment, real sources of freedom. Not simply becoming part of the rock-n-roll revolution, which has already been corporatized by these cannibalistic groups that orchestrate and entangle teens, sell them this idea that they’re liberating themselves. KB: Punkwear at the Gap. MZD: Exactly. KB: Commodifying the rogue. MZD: What’s the album again? KB: Funeral. “If my parents are crying, then I’ll dig a tunnel from my window to yours. […]
[…]is the eloquent phrase “eternal networks”). This DJ/VJ writing style makes way for a kind of critical overwriting that, at its core, is underwritten by the creative unconscious. Think of it as a mash-up of open content, social software, critical media literacy, and manifest hackerdom. It’s fully invested in narrative thinking, in processing the digital art persona as a distributed political fiction. Rosi Bradiotti, in the introduction to her book Nomadic Subjects says: The nomadic subject is a myth, that is to say a political fiction, that allows me to think through and move across established categories and levels of […]
[…]characters who must work together to solve a murder that one of them committed. The members of the group are assigned characters, each of whom knows certain key facts about the others. They take turns to present pieces of evidence that can be canceled out or combined to form chains of means, motive, and opportunity, until one character has their guilt “proven” to the satisfaction of the group. Each Youdunnit case is about a specific murder – the specifics of the crime and the various potential murderers are all detailed – but can be played multiple times with different outcomes, […]
[…]to enable U to see what she sees, and vice versa. Craig Saper, in The Two Ulmers in e-Media Studies: Vehicle and Driver, ingeniously interprets Ulmer as an object of study, as both a vehicle and driver of signification. Ultimately Saper’s goal is to offer a critical approach to understanding Ulmer’s work, particularly in relation to its historical development. How he does this is an act of invention that adapts Ulmer’s peripatetic ‘philosophy over lunch’ motif (also glimpsed in Jon McKenzie’s piece) as a way of analyzing Ulmer as Ulmer analyzes his subject matter. Written in the style of a […]
[…]body counts, gratuitous obscenities, and treacherous women. ‘[S]tandardized formulas were grouped around equally standardized themes, such as the council, the gathering of the army, the challenge, the despoiling of the vanquished, the hero’s shield, and so on and on’ (Ong, 1982:23). Even so, street-level credibility did not guarantee memorable, dramatic performances. Words had to flow. Bards, across the globe, were duty-bound to rock a house party at the drop of a hat. Their skills and exploits were later documented in printed accounts such as The Mwindo Epic (West Africa), The Tale of the Heike (Japan), the Bible (for example, in […]
[…]outside the patriarchial, if patriarchy is the source and means of your oppression, in order to be critical of what’s determined the range and facility, and set the agenda, of your thinking – if you’ve been taught to think yourself (always unknowingly) only as the oppressed? How, in other words, to think otherwise? Which isn’t quite Oedipa’s dilemma, of course. But close. Her problem is that she can’t decide whether an occult postal system called the Trystero, whose operations may have determined the course of Western history, is real or not. If it’s real, then our history isn’t – for […]
[…]of theories must first be invented: Marx, Freud, de Beauvoir – all had to first create their critical, analytical theories. Theory has thus become, for me, a form of applied conceptual art: theory creates concepts applicable to the critical problems of our time. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari: if you’re not creating concepts, you’re not doing theory. And to paraphrase Marx: theorists have thus far critiqued the world, the point is to change it – to create something else. A second “lesson” Ulmer taught me was to approach the classroom as a performance space, a site where materials (bodies, ideas, […]
[…]files. I spent my year as a Creative Writing student assembling infinite hypertext networks of critical theory quotes in which nearly every word was “hotlinked,” as we said back then. SCULD: [n] Goddess of fate: Future. See also: Norn. My education in theory, then, was classical, acquired by a word-for-word transcribing of “the masters” from print to screen. Longinus himself would have approved of this method, which also describes how I learned HTML, “stealing” code from the web pages of others. This writer shows us, if only we were willing to pay him heed, that another way (beyond anything we […]
[…]Twofers or conjoined twins are sufficiently present and visible that they form a distinct minority group, demanding civil rights and proclaiming pride in their identities – San Francisco, in particular, is a haven for twofers, just as it is in actuality for gays and lesbians. Half Life is narrated (or, more accurately, written, since the process of writing the text we read is itself narrated within that text) by Nora, who feels alienated both from the twofer community, and from “singleton” (i.e. “normal,” unicephalous) society. Her twin, Blanche, has been asleep since childhood (since puberty? this is hinted but not […]
[…]resembles Hollywood movies in both form and content. Counter to the prevailing sentiment in film studies, Ulmer reads the later work in terms of the earlier work to both confound the apparent opposition and to suggest a model for applied grammatology. Ulmer’s reading resembles Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1974), a re-reading of a Realist story to recover a visual and semantic montage of the fragments with which the story emerges. Ulmer re-reads Eisenstein’s last completed film as a picto-ideographic (visual semantic) montage. Lesson two: modeling My own work, in Artificial Mythologies (1997), used a similar strategy to read Roland Barthes’ earliest […]
[…]turns into an event – writing is an event, a play upon the process of “is,” a working that cannot (at any given moment) trace, catch, relay, or dwell upon the physicality and temporality of an “is” as “is” is worked on by so many things seen/unseen, solid/phantastic, past/present (the event, this writing event, has no decided purpose, no pre-set outcome, no lesson or demand – although, as a loving of what happens as one goes along, it might bring a fragile calm): ‘Making an event – however small – is the most delicate thing in the world: the opposite […]
[…]Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of Transparency,’ Cultural Studies Review 9(1) (May, 2003): 103-123. Mitchell, W. J. T. ‘Diagrammatology,’ Critical Inquiry, Spring (1981): 622-633. Morris, Meaghan. ‘Crazy Talk Is Not Enough,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14 (1996): 384-394. Speaks, Michael. ‘It’s Out There… The Formal Limits of The American Avant-Garde,’ in Stephen Perrella (ed.) ‘Architectural Design Profile, No. 133: “Hypersurface Architecture,”‘ in Architectural Design, 68 (5-6) (London: Academy Editions, 1998): 26-31. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Spivak corrected edition (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins […]
[…]plagiarism” (214-15), highly mediated discourse where consistently, if oftentimes ironically and critically, one builds up a textual corpus by writing and working through other bodies of works. This is precisely what Kathy Acker, one of our most famous plagiarists, acknowledges in her own Bodies of Work. “I never write,” Acker discloses there, “anything new… I make up nothing” (12). For, she explains, “I never liked the idea of originality, and so my whole life I’ve always written by taking other texts, inhabiting them in some way so that I can do something with them” (27). Acker’s notorious plagiarisms mount an […]
[…]Cayley, Raley, Marino, and others, “Dovetailing Details Fly Apart – All Over, Again, In Code, In Poetry, In Chreods” by Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo carries the debate into the analysis of specific poems and poetic practices, both written and spoken, graphic and sonic, alphabetically and digitally coded. The essay also introduces a new reference for the debate – namely, the work of Gregory Bateson, who is cited not just as a supporting ‘theory’ or philosphical framework, but in the spirit of differential discourse that distinguishes Bateson’s work. This essay-meditation is itself ‘poured over code’; like several image/text collaborations featured in […]
[…]transposition that views literature itself as history – the position of contemporary cultural studies, which is committed to the demolition of such “obsolete” categories as poetic autonomy, poetic truth, and formal and rhetorical value. (9) Whether or not one agrees with Perloff’s representation of cultural studies, her arguments for treating poetry (in the largest sense of the term) as itself worthy of close study on its own terms, of practicing what she calls poetics, are interesting and valuable. By pointing to examples of the kind of criticism she admires (some of the early studies of Ulysses, The Pound Era, for […]
[…]becomes virtualized and knowledge militarized, particularly under the aegis of so-called “area studies”. It’s hard not to see this as a Pacific version of the notorious argument that the Gulag and/or the Holocaust reveal the exhaustion of modernity. And the first thing one has to say is that this interpretation of war as no longer “the physical, mechanical struggles between combative oppositional groups” (33), as now transformed into a matter technology and vision, puts Chow in some uncomfortable intellectual company: like that of Donald Rumsfeld, whose recent humiliation is a timely reminder that wars continue to depend on the deployment […]
[…]looked at him curiously, let go of the pendant and nodded. “The ad was very explicit. It’s a code, you know. I don’t lie in the ad. I said who I was and what I wanted. I’m divorced, have been for eleven years. I don’t want another husband, nor do I want a Long Term Relationship. Secret encounters, occasionally, purely physical. Only one requirement.” “Well-endowed,” Kenneth managed, still leaning forward into his frozen smile. “Exactly. These ads are sometimes successful, sometimes not. This time, I fear, not.” Kenneth didn’t really want this woman, but he couldn’t stop now. “You haven’t […]
[…]that nothing is simply, or “naturally,” what it is? These are big questions, both for cultural studies, which has been guilty in the past of reducing the world to words, and for science, which, apt to see things otherwise, is perhaps only now becoming more seriously aware of the limitations of representation. But such questions beg another, more immediate question. Whose performativity theory is this? Livingston glosses over the divisions and differences within the realm of theory regarding the limits of performativity as a viable ontology. There is a lot of discussion and debate that is happening now, though we […]
[…]again to her main quarrel with a book she “admire[s] very much”: her claim that composition studies has tilled Graff’s field. However, instead of regretting the neglect of “the extensive body of contemporary work in composition studies on the social construction of knowledge” (Bizzell 322), I wish a spirit of generous collegiality rather than petty turf wars could govern critical readings of our colleagues’ scholarly endeavors. Bizzell could have focused on the wide range of scholars and bodies of research Graff does not neglect such as Robert Scholes, David Damrosh, Howard Gardner, Mike Rose, Joseph Harris, Deborah Meier, Kurt Spellmeyer, […]
[…]and pre-Kantian and post-Kantian. Which parts of these structures are which? What those of us working in the humanities might learn from contemporary scientific disciplines is that knowledge can be collaborative even when a chemist works by himself in his laboratory, or when a philosopher reflects on the problem of time, if, after one has reflected, one assumes the responsibility of communicating what one has observed. It is sometimes necessary to introduce new terms, to employ figurative language, and to write in a way that is not immediately completely comprehensible to readers of any and all backgrounds. Readers must therefore […]
[…]empty or formal (7). They are said to stand for thought or action (6). Highly sophisticated social codes are formed from such signs: expressions or gestures have the power to convince those present of one’s status, or otherwise to expose oneself as out of place. As we know, they point to no origin; they appear sterile, pointless. The signs of love are actions between bodies, but human beings construct, also, massively complex systems of strictly formal signs, which seem to have nothing to do with love and nothing to do with art. Deleuze nevertheless insists that they are crucial, that […]
[…]from his theory-building project in Cybertext, as well as the important contributions to our critical discourse from the textual studies of Jerome McGann and Matt Kirschenbaum. For a compelling argument on the value of textual studies to the criticism of electronic literature, see Kirschenbaum’s “Materiality and Matter and Stuff: What Electronic Texts Are Made Of.” To some extent, Hayles’ command of the fields of cybernetics and information science, which she brings to bear with such panache in her critical writing, has also steered our focus toward pragmatic concerns, despite Hayles’ repeated plea that we strive for balance. To give requisite […]
[…]emergent structure, but still everybody can propose tags and groups, decide on the openness of the group, and, in the open groups, join and post what they wish. Nonetheless, the open folksonomic taxonomy potentially leads to heterogeneous collections and impossible classifications like Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia, which opens Foucault’s The Order of Things – classifications that are not ordered with stable relations and categories . As in language, semantics, and culture, the categories and their relations are dynamic, emergent, and created by context, contiguity and poetic plays on words, as well as on hierarchy, similarity, and the preconceived, lexical meaning of […]
[…]Children’s Literature, Collaboration, combinatorial, conceptual, constraint-based, procedural, critical/political/philosophical, database, documentary, essay/creative nonfiction, fiction, flash, games, generative, hacktivist, html/dhtml, hypertext, inform, installation, interactive fiction, java, javascript, locative, memoir, multilingual or non-english, music, network forms, non-interactive, parody/satire, performance/performative, place, poetry, processing, quicktime, shockwave, squeak, storyspace, stretchtext, TADS, textual instrument, text movie, 3D, time-based, translation, viral, visual poetry or narrative, vrml, women authors, wordtoy. All of the major types of digital writing (automatically generated works, visually-oriented works, hypertexts, sound, and many hybrid forms) are represented. Because digital literature has for more than three decades resisted, as if by definition, the need to embody […]
[…]– an intuitive grasp of algorithmic operations; to watch Giselle Beiguelman’s “Code Movie 1” is to begin to appreciate code as it operates in the construction of digital meaning; to engage the playable space of Donna Leishman’s “Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw” is to start to grasp the weird, uneven transitions between sovereign, disciplinary, and control societies and the mutating subject positions available to the players within them. “History,” Wark suggests, “is the virtual made actual, one hack after another” (009). What seems to matter most to the poets and programmers who constructed the Electronic Literature Collection‘s thinkertoys and […]
[…]each of which positions Kac as a bio artist (be it in the fields of art criticism, cultural studies, science studies, or, most recently, in animal studies).. But I would argue that Kac’s work actually has very little to do with biological life or the life sciences. Certainly my position goes against what appears to be the impression that Kac himself is fostering. But a glance at Kac’s earlier works reveal another set of concerns: telematics, robotics, and communication broadly speaking. Telepresence and Bio Art offers a trajectory of Kac’s artistic evolution through texts, images, and documents pertaining to Kac’s […]
[…]together for the first time in September of 1960 to discuss the potential for literature. This group had two goals: “Analysis” which consisted of the revival of “older, even ancient (but not necessarily intentional) experiments in literary form” (1). Flaubert and Joyce provided the group with examples of such an experiment; their literary experiments provide “the potential layers of the novelistic onion” for Oulipo (72). The second goal, “synthesis,” involved the furthering of new forms which can be seen in One Hundred Trillion Poems, a project that exhausted every possible way in which the poetry of this collection could be […]
[…]when, say, you’re being tickled. In one respect, of course, they’re the same. You could do studies of what proportion of the population laughs in response to being tickled in a certain spot and, of course, you could also do studies of what proportion of the population laughs at which jokes. Hence the question of whether a joke is funny is in the end either a statistical question, answerable by the number of people who laugh, or a personal question answerable only in the form of “it made me laugh.” The question of whether a joke is good or bad, […]
[…]and Walter Benn Michaels) this electropoetics release proceeds from the premise that literary studies must come to terms with the fact that it is no longer business as usual – No matter how you look at it, speed is a morally coded concept. With its etymological roots tied at the groin to success, to think speed is to invoke a java applet alternating flashing SPEED / All Others Pay Cash. that writing in the information/digital age both upsets humanist assumptions and makes clear the ways in which the information/digital age upsets many of our assumptions about time and space, body […]
[…]between human exploitation and animal exploitation: “In both cases, members of a more powerful group arrogate to themselves the right to use beings outside the group for their own selfish purposes, largely ignoring the interests of the outsiders. Then they justify this use by an ideology that explains why members of the more powerful group have superior worth” (pp. […]
[…]than the (sometimes quite distant) approximations Jackson unearths from comparative religious studies. Here’s a quotation from philosopher of science Bas Van Fraassen that says it more clearly: There is a reason why metaphysics sounds so passé, so vieux jeu today; for intellectually challenging perplexities and paradoxes it has been far surpassed by theoretical science. Do the concepts of the Trinity, the soul, haecceity, universals, prime matter, and potentiality baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space-times, event-horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models. (258) This, in short, is the problem that Jackson has. Religion is presented alongside mathematics, […]
[…]However, I think it’s very likely that story-game designers will eventually discover that it’s critical for the former (emotional investment in character and story) to be different and separate from the latter (investment in winning). If they are not discrete, one or the other – probably the story – becomes the redheaded stepchild. That is to say, we will be exactly where we are today, with story-games whose narratives consist of nothing more than accounts of connected events. Perhaps the most interesting tension that could arise in a story-game would be a tension between a player’s ego-based interest in winning […]
[…]to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. . . . I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety – those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot. (160-61) King is a lone writer, with total control over the outcome of his story. Many Storytellers fancy themselves to be a kind of “performance novelist,” acting out […]
[…]the interface that displays the text after it goes through a series of translations from machine code to digital code to natural language displayed on screen. The appearance and disappearance of diagrams of star constellations, an integral part of accessing the electronic text, add other interpretive layers. One wonders if the dual existence of sonnets in print as well as electronic space reflects the poet’s need to retain the direct experience of the text for the reader, even as she uses the electronic media and its varied navigational functionalities as well as design possibilities to re-imagine these sonnets. In an […]
[…]described in the book, but also indicative of the hybridizing work Kac performs. The notion of networking humans and rabbits, for example, refers to Kac’s best known piece, “GFP Bunny,” yet most description and criticism of this piece focus not on networking humans and rabbits but on the story of the rabbit, and render the humans invisible. We are all familiar with the travails of Alba the transgenic bunny bred with green florescent protein. The human component of the network – the scientists, Kac’s intervention, the history of human-rabbit interaction – are taken for granted while at the same time […]
[…]in a fairly undefined order does not necessarily weaken the possibilities for a more Dramatist group. After all, the adventure begins with the players going to the house and most climaxes will involve a battle with the haunt. (I suspect few groups will explore the rest of the house after dealing with the haunt, just to have a look.) However, that there is no defined shape to the story between these points does make it harder to adapt the scenario for the less-gamist group. The haunted house is there to be investigated and exorcised, it is not there to be […]
[…]dimension. Perhaps the disinclination that players have to experiment with “variant character groups or settings,” or to adopt a “‘Raid on Innsmouth’-style multiple-character” model stems from the lack of interest in switching from one cipher to another. In a game where revelation of the forbidden knowledge is paramount, player character traits – cherished and nurtured in other RPGs – hold little long-term attraction beyond what they contribute to discovering the forbidden knowledge. I admit that this point is debatable since players have individual reasons for playing an RPG, but if all Investigators exhibit an ability to ascertain the Mythos there […]
[…]truths honestly: the arguments are complex, tightly woven, and based in indisputable realities of critical discourse. Her prose is imaginative and her arguments are logical in sometimes impressive ways. Unlike much contemporary work in cultural/race/ethnicity/gender criticism, which often suffers from disciplinary myopia, Dubey ranges widely through postmodernist theories of space, cities, architecture, urban development, and cultural studies; central to her study are works by David Harvey, Guy Debord, Edward Soja, Marshall Berman, Hal Foster, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Andreas Huyssen, and others. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990) and The […]
[…]equally consistent with the information the game provides. For these reasons, the setting that one group plays in is not the setting that another group plays in. In effect, role-playing games in their static published form do not describe a specific fictional world or story. They describe a large multidimensional space of fictional worlds and stories organized by unifying data. Here is an example. In the canonical Exalted setting, the Scarlet Empress disappeared in Realm Year (R.Y.) 763, five years before the story begins. Every group using the canonical Exalted setting stipulates this datum. This is a constraint on all […]
[…]on faults in its organization or its limits (Vollmann’s self-limitations, one could also say). Critical writing, or academic writing, works to explain how Poor People (and Expelled from Eden) doesn’t work, or does work, or how Vollmann tries and succeeds at getting this or that right, falls down here and there, and so forth. These purposes have value at all times, but they are not the only values. Critical writing will rarely get anyone excited about a work, or be taken up by it, except, possibly, philosophically or as a text to be treated with theories. The excitement will be […]
[…](Imps, Mancubi, Pinky Demons, etc.) Marines Mars base Moving through corridors Opening doors Color-Coded keycards Triggered events Different levels With these lists, I was able to focus in on the things that board games were good and bad at, and the things I needed to retain the Doom “identity.” Obviously the board game wasn’t going to be able to rely on any sort of animated graphics or sound. Additionally, there was no way to capture the freewheeling adrenaline blast of the computer game – board games simply played too slowly for that. However, board games had their strengths. They were […]
[…]but nonetheless, as the player solves subplot after subplot, he always has the feeling that he is working toward it by increasing his character’s skills. Hence, in a role-playing game, an obstacle is never just an obstacle, but also an opportunity to reach a higher level or find a magical sword which will later serve to finish the ultimate quest. Turnau (2004) notes that the growth idea is also present in Tolkien’s work, especially in Lord of the Rings which he describes as a “sort of cross between Arthurian legend and the Bildungsroman.” However, he notes a profound difference between […]
[…]the media artifacts they study as a black box, losing the crucial relationship between authorship, code, and audience reception. Code is a kind of writing; just as literary scholars wouldn’t dream of reading only translated glosses of work, never reading the full work in its original language, so new media scholars must read code, not just at the simple level of primitive operations and control flow, but at the level of the procedural rhetoric, aesthetics and poetics encoded in a work. New media practitioners without procedural literacy are confined to producing those interactive systems that happen to be possible to […]
[…]35, otherwise known as “The Harem”): Table2 The NPC design documents are written in “pseudo-code” – less precise than actual computer code, less poetic than a screenplay – for the AI programmer, who will use it as a sort of blueprint to write the actual code that will make the characters move and speak in the game. Looking Back Overall, I’m delighted with the way POP turned out and the various ways we succeeded in weaving the story into the gameplay. I’m particularly happy with the voice-over narration and story-within-a-story; they offer a special satisfaction and reward for those who […]
[…]developed to implement systems that output narratives in response to user input. The first case studies built using GRIOT generate interactive poetry. GRIOT is based on an approach to computational narrative that builds on research from cognitive linguistics on metaphor and conceptual blending (Lakoff and Turner 1989; Fauconnier and Turner 2002), sociolinguistics on how humans structure narrative (Labov 1972; Linde 1993; Goguen 2003), computer science on algebraic semantics and semiotics (Goguen and Malcolm 1996; Goguen 1999). A focus in the development of the GRIOT system was on developing computational techniques suitable for representing an author’s intended subjective meaning and expression. […]
[…]and inject some new event guaranteed to get the story moving again. I conclude with a small but critical observation. Most researchers working on interactive storytelling technology use the term “drama manager” for the system of algorithms that I call “Fate.” Their term is technically superior, because it more precisely describes the function of this software. However, bridging the gap between artist and programmer will require terminological compromise, and I find “Fate” a snappier and more recognizable term than “drama manager.” Here is a partial list of technical terms used by the Erasmatron; note how often I steal from the […]
[…]life is a worthy one, in my opinion. I’ve presented here only one example of story and gameplay working together, instead of being segregated. Gameplay and story need not be at odds with one another. And story need not be confined to the ghetto of cinematics. Reference And Then There Were None. Awe Games. […]
[…]to operate incorrectly. There are limits to what this proceduralism can accomplish. A competent group of Dungeons & Dragons players can simulate any eventuality and deal with any action or communication attempted by the players, while even the best computer RPG can barely prevent the dialogue of computer-controlled characters from becoming painfully repetitious. Any action too far outside those already imagined by a computer game’s design team is usually either met with an uninteresting response or is simply impossible to carry out. But this is only to say that given our current state of technological advancement, there are things that […]
It’s official: the field of game studies is obsessed with storytelling. One can’t argue with Costikyan’s summary of the Game Developers Conference. This year’s GDC included literally dozens of panels, presentations, and roundtables in which everyone from career developers and academics to players and fans discussed the role of stories in games, including some very familiar arguments. Is there a place for storytelling in game development? Which is more important, narrative or game design? Can you have good stories and good gameplay at the same time? At one point, during a particularly fractious argument between two developers, the person sitting […]
[…]However, I think it’s very likely that story-game designers will eventually discover that it’s critical for the former (emotional investment in character and story) to be different and separate from the latter (investment in winning). If they are not discrete, one or the other – probably the story – becomes the redheaded stepchild. That is to say, we will be exactly where we are today, with story-games whose narratives consist of nothing more than accounts of connected events. Perhaps the most interesting tension that could arise in a story-game would be a tension between a player’s ego-based interest in winning […]
[…]the use of the term “person” in language studies does not correspond to its use in visual studies. Most games studies discussions use “person” in the visual style, corresponding to the viewpoint of the player. The first-person camera is the most immediate, providing a view from the eyes of the avatar with little more than a hand of the avatar-self encroaching on the image. The third person camera is more mediated and distancing, in that the separate self of Lara Croft or Master Chief is displayed on screen and followed through the game world by a cinematic crane shot. The […]
[…]modes of play are not always part of a D&D session, such play is undertaken at times, and some groups of players value making decisions that are “in character” even more than they do successful progress through a story, environment, or series of puzzles. A single character is typically played over the course of many adventures, and the players typically have some freedom to define their character’s traits, although randomly determined abilities provide a basic idea of what the character is like. Also, a player character’s relationship to other characters in the party is quite important. Similar sorts of play […]
[…]level, the materiality of the keys is not what you want either – you need the information encoded in them, the patterns that allow them to mesh with the patterns encoded in the lock of your car, your office, and your apartment door. The keys are the material substrate for the articulation of information within patterns of presence and absence (the notches and grooves cut in the keys); but also, their absence is an event articulated within a pattern that forms the superstructural information of their presence. You may assume that their loss has not been articulated by randomness, and […]
[…]our clever regimes? Or to turn the lens outward, how can we continue to satisfy that irresistible critical impulse, situating ourselves within a moment, a history, and a history of resistance? How can the calling of the writer be responsible to a common experience that seems increasingly consumed by war, catastrophe, and indeed revolution, however we choose to define that most slippery term? As always, questions are the simple part. Answers come harder, and as I have previously apologized, this piece is far too easy. The remarks that follow come at these big questions only in dim and cursory ways, […]
[…]and some puzzles – often quite hard – that needed to be solved to advance the game. I began working on Planetfall in September 1982. At that point, Infocom had released five text adventures. These games were minuscule by today’s standards, driven by the capacity of computer floppy drives; the original release of Planetfall was only 108 kilobytes – about as many bytes as a medium-sized image on a Web page. In those early games, there were numerous NPCs (non-player characters), such as the Wizard and Demon in Zork II or the various suspects in the mystery game Deadline. One […]
[…]has stopped, and other bits of routine maintenance; it finishes with diagrams of a clock’s inner workings that are almost embarrassingly intimate and far too complex for you to follow. >reverse link lavori to repair Bending your will and all your attention, you manage to make a reverse-link between The Lavori d’Aracne and Clock Repair, feeling their properties begin to merge together. >read repair The book now turns out to be all about how to construct different types of time-keeping device and false clock using nothing more than household objects and the power of the Lavori. How often this is […]
[…]in such broader systems. In spite of his focus on postmodern fiction, LeClair thus situated his critical perspective and eventual novelistic aesthetic within a tradition of critical realism stretching back to Georg Lukács. Whatever metafictional games or linguistic play the author engages in, the purpose of the systems novel is to enable the reader to connect his or her personal problems to world-historical economic, ecological and social processes. However, for much of Passing On, Terminal Tours seems to close off, rather than enable this perspective. This is, after all, a novel about a series of relatively privileged middle-class Americans struggling […]
[…]of his metaphorical schema: Conservatives know that politics is not just about policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate. They have learned that politics is about family and morality, about myth and metaphor and emotional identification. They have, over twenty-five years, managed to forge conceptual links in the voters’ minds between morality and public policy. They have done this by carefully working out their values, comprehending their myths, and designing a language to fit those values and myths so that they can evoke them with powerful slogans, repeated over and over again, that reinforce those family-morality-policy links, until the connections […]
[…]writer seems to be much recognized in green literary circles. More than anything this lack of ecocritical attention results from their respective writing styles and critical focus. Both writers are particularly concerned with literary formalism, giving prominent consideration to textual techniques that enlist the reader in consideration of language as much as the physical world. Such aesthetics are anathema to traditional nature writers and critics who have seen postmodern textual experimentation as dangerously disconnected and symptomatic of our alienation from the natural world. Indeed, the resurgence in nature writing and the relatively new field of ecocriticism has been labeled as […]
[…]– even though the publication of The Liquidators means he has written twice as many novels as critical studies – his criticism still provides a useful entrance to his fiction. In particular, it’s worth considering a lecture, entitled “False Pretenses, Parasites, and Monsters,” that LeClair gave at Illinois State University, and which appears now in the electronic book review. Discussing both print and electronic fiction, LeClair defined “parasitic” novels as works that “rely on and admit within themselves to relying on earlier novels.” Beginning with an epigraph from Absalom, Absalom!, and embedding multiple references to Faulkner’s book, The Liquidators is […]
[…]“‘Who Are You, Literally?’: Fantasies of the White Self in White Noise.” Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999): 755-787. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2006. —. “Author Response.” Resource Center for Cybercultural Studies. Oct. 2007. 1 Mar. 2008 Franzen, Jonathan. “Perchance to Dream.” Harpers Apr. 1996: 35-54. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992. Möckel-Rieke, Hannah. “Media and Memory in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” […]
[…]a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.” Comparing media forms is a natural critical impulse in an increasingly transmedia world. Ryan rightly notes that certain types of plot better lend themselves to various modes of narration, and that the failure in Murray’s original example is really the failure of immersion. The myth of the Holodeck exists in part because the Holodeck is presented as a non-mediated environment, a truly immersive world, lacking interfaces of control Outside an invisible oral/aural call and response to the computer at the borders of the narrative.: truly in all respects the […]
[…]The emphasis on the doubling of utopia in the following comments is meant to highlight points of critical convergence and divergence among these and other doubles that continue to permeate utopian critical discourse. Since it can generate new and timely perspectives on the relation between politics and culture, the assessment of these doubled relations is one of the most fruitful ways forward in considerations of the politics of literary and cultural texts. II. By writing about utopia’s textual double, the manifesto, Martin Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes provides a useful means of approach to the […]
[…]resists this traditional reading of literature, for even if one were to crack open the internal working of Pax and independently read the database of textual pieces Moulthrop has coded, such an action would in no way approach the event of reading his work – not only would it eliminate the chronological borders and flow of the work, but, as per Moulthrop’s description, Pax relies upon a random value generator, and so could not be ultimately ordered (153). Thus he has ensured that Pax only exists as a literary event, a textual instrument being played in a literary way, rather […]
[…]books like Tabbi and Wutz’s Reading Matters, Fuller’s Media Ecologies, and the ebr‘s own “critical ecologies” thread, this “medial turn” is not usually seen as a fundamentally ethical issue. Critics are most likely to appeal to the media ecology to analyze the novel’s struggle to remain culturally relevant, or perhaps to invoke McLuhan and claim that changes in media transform the nature of subjectivity and perception. Instead of being merely a matter of media history or some abstract change in the contours of the self, Lethem shows that how we engage with the range of contemporary media is a way […]
[…]in question is Frans de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Cavalieri’s critical review centers the book around de Waals’ claim “that all the social animals, humans included, are ‘good natured,'” and that the traits of “empathy, sympathy, a sense of fairness and an appreciation of right and wrong” (Cavalieri) are taken from and shared with the animals around us. Cavalieri is critical both of this “Veneer” theory of ethics and of de Waal’s apparent lack of boldness regarding both his claims and his willingness to look at empirical data provided by comparative psychology or cognitive ethology. Springing from […]
[…]and John Tynes; Pagan Publishing. 1997. Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson; Tactical Studies Rules. 1974. Empire of the Petal Throne. M. A. R. Barker; Tactical Studies Rules. 1975. Kuma\War. Kuma Reality Games. 2004. Max Payne. Remedy Entertainment. 2001. Millennium’s End. Charles Ryan; Chameleon Eclectic Entertainment. 1993. Oregon Trail. Paul Dillenberger, Bill Heinemann and Don Rawitsch; Carleton College. 1971. Power Kill. John Tynes; Hogshead Publishing. 1999. Unknown Armies. Greg Stolze and John Tynes; Atlas Games. 2002. Unreal. Epic Games. 1998. Waco Resurrection. Mark Allen, Peter Brinson, Brody Condon, Jessica Hutchins, Eddo Stern, and Michael Wilson; C-Level. […]
[…]early adolescent (ten- to fifteen-year-old). Play is a powerful impulse for students to engage in group activities, to grow, and socialize. However, a student must see success, particularly as part of a group effort to grow a positive sense of self. Finally, to understand each other a little better, they must be able to exercise understanding outside of themselves. Most importantly, developing such understanding must be an act freely engaged upon by the early adolescent. I believe that I saw my students reaching their writing potential in Puppetland because they were engaged with their imagination, and reaching deep within to […]
[…]of our lives in consumer society. A lot of your neighbors feel that they spend all their time working at jobs they hate, in order to get the money to buy things that are supposed to make them happy, but don’t. Do you ever feel that way?” “Yes, I sure do.” “Great. Well, the solution we are working on with the support of you and your neighbors is to create a new society, based on sharing and mutual aid. But to do that, we will first have to smash the State and bring down the capitalist system. Does that sound […]
[…]to implicate the participant as a charged body in public space whose movement and presence become critical agents in structuring the meaning of the work. The primary theme of alienation and the plight of the social outcast is played out through a series of physical tableaus and boundary crossings enacted by the participant as she walks through the urban landscape listening to a patchwork of location-specific spoken narratives delivered in different voices. My hope was to cast the participant into a cycle of alienation and ambivalence as the point of view in the story shifted across narrator, creature, doctor, and […]
[…]out of sight while the players attract the limelight. This off-stage design team is composed of a group of shadowy, often anonymous figures working behind the scenes as the writers, programmers, directors, and stage managers of the live gameplay. They are the first real-time digital game designers, and they are called the puppet masters. The Rise of the Puppet Master If you’re the puppet masters, what does that make the players? Your little puppets? – Anonymous audience member at the Game Developers Conference lecture, “I Love Bees: A Case Study” (McGonigal 2005) This essay is a response to two sets […]
[…]She also has a blog-based link to a Web page associated with the key object, which contains a key code that will allow her to gain access to critical game-related information. Once accessed, her initial quest is completed, her stats are updated, and a new blog post and quest are made available. Next time she thinks she may even want to try the 3D client. But for now, she’s had enough of Guy and his chaotic […]
[…]is limited to WotC products. The association sponsors gaming events and provides individual player groups with role-playing scenarios. Member groups are expected to play the scenarios in a certain timeframe and report back the results to the RPGA. The events that occur most commonly among the player groups affect the campaign world and are reflected in the next group of scenarios released by the RPGA. So, for example, if a majority of the participating player groups succeed in defeating a particular villain, that villain’s defeat becomes canonical, and he will not play a part in future RPGA adventures. If, however, […]
On December 16, 2003, popular Web magazine Slate published an article by journalist and author Steven Johnson (2003). Reviewing simulation games that engage problems of social organization, Johnson posed a question: “The [2004] U.S. presidential campaign may be the first true election of the digital age, but it’s still missing one key ingredient. Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004?” Upon reading this article, we smiled at its perfect timing: at that very moment we were developing The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first official video game ever commissioned in the history of U.S. Presidential elections. Former Vermont […]
[…]terms at arm’s length. For Stefans, the instantaneous nature of electronic discourse creates a critical challenge that needs to be met. With materials and methods this fluid, we may not have the luxury either of a long critical overview or staying in permanent attack mode. When surfing the Internet, the original context of a work of art has a way of being subsumed in the flow, morphing into other forms, and being sampled in various contexts having nothing to do with what the artist intended. Instead of bemoaning this centerless state, Stefans lets “Before Starting Over” be a similarly multi-centric, […]
[…]the ways the scene builds to another choice. For example, the audience enjoys watching the scene code-named “Seduction.” However, they are also elated when the woman announces that, if the man doesn’t stop wooing her, she will either kiss or slap him. The “cruel” part of the fate role is exemplified by the audience’s delight in controlling whether or not this living human being – separated from them only by a stage and the social constructs of traditional theater – is embraced by soft lips or repeatedly smacked across the face. The nature of the show caused a great deal […]
[…]whose movements are constrained to emulate karate chops. However, the gestures ARE in the code, coded in by a number entered in the script at the end of each robot response. reasmb: Please go on with whatever it is you are inadequately expressing.5 reasmb: Do you feel strongly about discussing arcane and peculiar things?2 reasmb: It seems inconceivable that you would lie to me.4 reasmb: Tell me more about that, but hurry up.7 reasmb: Does talking about this bother you? More than it bothers me?6 reasmb: Let’s just pretend I don’t have feelings.8 That number corresponds to pre-programmed arm, eye […]
[…]also occasionally have individual goals that cause them to cooperate or compete within the group. The Gamemaster (GM) – the person who is responsible for setting up and administrating the game progress and often telling the story as it develops – influences the process by choosing which NPCs may appear and by giving the different characters different challenges and goals, and can ultimately determine the entire outcome of the game, depending on how much power the group has agreed to put in the hands of the GM. If our dwarf tries to stab the human he has been paid to […]
[…]abundance of stories I discovered and the tight network between the quests in the series. As I was working on helping Maybell and Tommy Joe to get together, other members of their families asked me for help. One had lost a necklace, which led to my having to slay boars so that she could bake a pie for the horrid little boy at the neighboring farm, who refused to tell me where he’d lost the necklace he’d stolen from her, unless I got him that particular pie. Finally, he told me that a vicious kobold in the nearby mines had […]
[…]anthropology that build on non-Western concepts of the relationship between the individual and the group (Jackson 1998). Not only was the group part of the individual identity and vice versa, but the individual persona was further articulated and differentiated over time through an emergent process of social feedback. Players enacted individual agency for the benefit of the group or as a means of personal expression. Positive social response prompted further actions, ad infinitum. Various players emerged as leaders and creators through this process of improvised emergent identity formation, and many discovered and developed new talents and abilities as a result. […]
[…]space, rehearsals in this medium were the equivalent of a micro performance, as we practiced working with our avatars and lines, as well as responding to folks (in character) who come there to be social. Being “inside” the piece (and the culture of the online public arena) and being “outside” of this culture in the physically proximal public space produced an utterly different experience of the piece. Projecting the output from the shared virtual space into an auditorium, and scattering live performance-ready terminals throughout the audience, completely shifted the space of creative play. The initial instincts of the people who […]
[…]as a natural result of what was already there at the beginning. Actors in scripted theater are working to reach a point where they are not recalling memorized dialogue and actions, but know the characters and the material so well that their responses are compelled by what is happening on stage. At that point they may not be able to recall their lines in the play without the stimulus that provokes such a response. Improvisational theater, then, relies on an implied playwright, an imaginary author who has written every conceivable story it is possible to write. Each performer is simply […]
[…]that are the foundation of computational expression’ in their forthcoming series on Platform Studies. See link below. or a critical reflection on how one studies games through practice. Instead, this implementation of CTP reflects on some of the meta-communication challenges designer-academics face: how their insights are communicated and interpreted. These ruminations begin with a consideration of these issues in McGonigal’s essay, and then progress with general and at times personal reflections on the topic. Perception & Application All research is in some way an articulation of the world view of the researcher, but when we witness an articulation of a […]
[…]a bit too hard only in the catch-all chapter on Marx, Locke and Smith, which bridges superb studies of Swift and Rousseau. From the beginning, Farrell shows, critical thought has involved imagining the world as illusory and riddled with error. Thus, although he doesn’t say so, what Farrell actually documents is something like the critique of ideology before the letter. Don Quixote, for instance, does not simply mock its protagonist; it uses Quixote’s complaints to mount a vigorous critique of mass media and the ideology of chivalry. Cervantes mocks Quixote’s absurd sense of victimization to show that he has been […]
[…]studio: 24.00 Dinner and taxis would have been for six, but I passed on the food and let the group go on without me to the Zhou brothers’ loft on the South Side. Daniel’s invitation said, Black Tie “optional,” but the Wicker Park group were received kindly in their jeans and work shirts. Zhou bros. were happy to have “real people” show up. Nothing here of the art world politics in a Woody Allen movie. The curators know their work; the artists know their own worth. Politics, though present, is neither paranoid nor pushy. Fortunately for Daniel, his new friend […]
[…]experiences of Façade. Conducted as part of my final project for the seminar in computer game studies, this informal study involved video taping participants as they played Façade (see Figure 1) and post-game interviews in which we watched and analyzed a recording of the Façade session the player had just completed. Reasoning that differences in the amount and quality of experience with computer games in general would lead to differences in game playing strategy, and, relatedly, differences in player experiences of high agency, I selected two participants with little experience playing videogames (“non-gamers”) and two participants from the computer games […]
[…]that has given way to an as yet undefined post-postmodern sensibility. For this reason, new studies of postmodern fiction face an enormous burden – the need to establish new categories, different strategies for grouping together and reading postmodern texts in an already crowded disciplinary field. This is a challenge that two recent studies – Gerhard Hoffmann’s From Modernism to Postmodernism and John McClure’s Partial Faiths – confront in different ways and with varying results. Hoffmann’s book provides a totalizing account of literary postmodernism, systematically charting the similarities and differences between it and its modernist predecessor. McClure’s study, by contrast, grapples […]
[…]of pathos and curiosity. If Pynchon’s is a prose that goes against the grain, and if these critical examples likewise overtly or covertly oppose the prevailing standards of literary studies, the Munich conference saw astoundingly many scholars backlashing and falling back into speculation about possible sources (or intertextual connections) and biographical criticism. This may sound like the outbreak of a new era, or a (re-)turn in Pynchon criticism. Yet one needs to differentiate, and admit that the tactic of seeking shelter under the roof of established and well-known models, if not always entirely fruitful traditions, may be perfectly in order […]
[…]as possible at every point. So much for suspense. That would be a fair statement of Klein’s working procedure. Regarding Newman, this is more exact: he is saying, I believe, that the truth of corporate power, despite the obfuscation that Evan is professionally in charge of, is already limpid; there is no call for Pynchonesque paranoia. That is why Evan must be professionally in charge of obfuscation. At the beginning of the novel, Chano, tired and hopeless, tries to discourage direct action against water privatization and depletion. Ayalo responds: “Speak truth to power, pinto? You think power don’t know?” (13). […]
[…]sociological, and even archival research. Granted, after the heady days of literary and critical theory (of all flavors, e.g. Yale school deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, the “against theory” trend), there was a sense that, in the midst of it all, a little thing called “literature” was being forgotten. Now, everyone loves a good book (especially if it is also literature), and one would certainly bemoan its death or disappearance – which is nevertheless continually being reinvented, reproduced, and contested today via a range of new media. So the idea that a direct engagement with literature would necessitate a direct refusal of […]
[…]can generate these dreams (a trivial side product of the bodies’ real purpose, which is to go on working, and to expand their networking endlessly). We see it in The Sims and numerous other computer games, in which players conduct virtual characters through career choices, commodity purchases, and social networks. What we don’t get in these highly developed simulations is the cultivation of any capacity to imagine an alternative to the operations of simulation and commodity consumption. Hayles is of course right to point out how, since the telegraph technology of James’s late nineteenth century, information has penetrated ever further […]
[…]new form of behavior. Bogost even uses the idea of unit operations to try to address how game studies should be positioned in academic disciplines, agitating for interaction between the study of videogames and the study of other creative disciplines. This attempt to situate game studies among the humanities is in reaction to those schools of videogame study which are functionalist (thus preoccupied chiefly with the way games work rather than with their expressive potential) and exclusive. While Bogost may have a point here, trying to tell academic departments how to organize themselves is a little like showing cats a […]
[…]And thinkers from Lawrence Lessig to William Mitchell have emphasized the authoritative role of code and coders in cyberspace, paving the way for a new form of elitism. There are others, hackers and gamers among them, who cultivate elitist enclaves that are exclusive to network culture. The same network culture has given rise to its own supra-national language: “Leetspeak” or “Leet.” Arguably more cipher or code than language, Leetspeak uses combinations of the ASCII character set in place of letters, and the substitution bears a visual resemblance; LEET, for example, is rendered as “1337,” and the language goes by this […]
[…]many but, at least in my view, both a necessary and inevitable attribute of such experimental, masocritical encounter. Masocritical suspension constitutes an immanent mode of response that heeds the event’s irreducible singularity, whereas representationalist judgment itself begins from outside the object or event to be judged, and the judging subject sits itself safely situated afar or above – seemingly unaffected and allegedly objective. The central question to ask of an event is not what one’s judgment of it should be but how response-ability itself is configured by the affects inhering the event – the answer to which is always singular […]
[…]effectivity can be a trap, particularly if scholars imagine self-reflexivity, understood as a critical distance toward one’s subject position and critical judgments, to be a mode of political resistance. Literature inevitably falls short when it’s evaluated primarily as political discourse, and critics waste energy on moralistic hand wringing when they assess fictional texts by the same representational criteria as they would a piece of investigative reporting, an op-ed essay, or a piece of legislation. Fictions, by definition, don’t refer to self-same world in which readers actually exist. They project virtual worlds, materialized in words, which readers actualize through acts of […]
[…]no mention of more contemporary elit pieces. That “net art” became the name of choice for some working in the area of web-based elit should come as no surprise under these circumstances since the term “literature” in the name of elit may have limited its inclusion in media art festivals, exhibitions, and art scholarship. So, the irony is that the electronic aspect of elit creates suspicion for traditional English departments just as the notion of literature does not fit well for the visual or media arts. Despite this unsettled position in academe, thousands of elit works are collected by such […]
[…]what Eleni is,” POff 169) into providing courier services to what appears to be an ecoterrorist group he suspects plans to blow up the Parthenon. Having barely extricated himself from direct complicity with the group and its shady representative, he now carries a bundle of cash so large that it would get him arrested while trying to cross the border. Considering that Eleni has information she has threatened to make public – information that would expose a lie about his ancestry he and his agent have fabricated in order to gain eligibility to play pro-ball in Greece – his slipping […]
[…]durée of the current world-system. Consenstein, Peter. Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. A “cognitive approach” to literary analysis that does not lapse into facile explanation. Consenstein might productively be read with The Work of Fiction (Palgrave 2003), a collection edited by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, and my own Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota 2002). These books are useful for anyone wishing to know where literature and the cognitive sciences intersect (and also how to recognize the much larger area of motor and perceptual concerns where the two fields have nothing at all in common). Consenstein, like […]
[…]scholars who can add their own entries and further annotate the existing ones from our MLA group. Not least, networked media are used at the point where in-depth scholarly work today is done, not in 20-minute presentations at over priced, climate controlled rooms using proprietary technology whose requirements, more often than not, distract from the written and visual concepts being presented. The majority of annotations contributed by our panelists continue, not surprisingly, to reference books in print. Where websites are referenced, however, these are not just presented as links but, using the database designed by ebr site architect Ewan Branda, […]
[…]some poems, some mini-essays. One even sent a power-point presentation. This enactment of net-working across diasporic distance was a way to generate creative energy, which I find is most stimulated through conversation and interaction; hence the need for collaboration in the last decade or so. I asked specifically that they comment, if they could, on the “textuality” of the pieces: that is, how they could be “read.” But I also stipulated that any kind of response – a photograph or a drawing – would be acceptable. I got wonderfully varied answers from a range of poets, friends, and colleagues. Ed […]
[…]Carey, Communication as Culture 13-36. —. “Communications and the Progressives.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 264-82. —. “Configurations of Culture, History, and Politics: James Carey in Conversation with Lawrence Grossberg, part 2.” Packer and Robinson: 199-225. —. Introduction. Carey, Communication as Culture 1-12. —. “Marshall McLuhan: Genealogy and Legacy.” Canadian Journal of Communication 23 (1998): 293-306. —. “Political Correctness and Cultural Studies.” James Carey: A Critical Reader. Ed. Catherine Warren and Eve Stryker Munson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 270-91. — . “Reconceiving ‘Mass’ and ‘Media’.” 1982. Carey, Communication as Culture 69-88. —. “Space, Time, and Communications.” […]
[…]that particular aura from becoming a reality. In some sense, The Companion to Digital Literary Studies cannot succeed anymore than this review could succeed in addressing all the issues relevant to digital literary studies. The topic is broad, the landscape expansive, and the change rapid. A fair amount of the collection is about classification, distinguishing digital literature as apart from regular literature. In essence, it is a taxonomy. But it is also a narrative, one that tells a story that ends at the moment of digital literature’s potential ascendance. Liu calls for good new media narratives that envision “whole imaginative […]
[…]one does not perceive when one perceives it” (in AR 204). The paradoxical logic of a system’s code (for example, the legal system, Wolfe remarks, operates on the code: “legal is legal”) can only be detected by an act of observation beyond the system, an act that cannot discern its own paradoxical system code. What Wolfe calls “the paradoxical identity of difference of any given first-order observation in a second-order plurality of horizontally distributed systems” pressures the distinction between reason/human and non-reason/animal. As Wolfe puts it, “[T]he human makes way for the animal, but only by means of the human […]
[…]Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Myers envisions an interdisciplinary effort to use “critical race studies and ecocriticism” to “make ecology a site upon which an egalitarian racial paradigm can be grounded” (8). He critiques the alienation of the individual from nature that he sees in Jefferson, Thoreau, and other Euro-American authors, arguing that this “human/nature duality [lies] at the root of ecological and racial hegemony.” He goes on to celebrate the antiracist, egalitarian ecocentricity that he sees in the works of such writers as Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala-Sa, and Eddy Harris. Outka, Paul. Race and Nature: From Transcendentalism to the […]
[…]academic disciplinary formation: here, the intractably cultural First Worldism of digital media studies. Where the appeal of McGurl’s critical persona rests in its attentive modulation of the polemics attending its topic, that of Golumbia’s lies in its more elementally mercurial access of rhetorical double writing, in the directed embrace of diplomatic intemperance. Where McGurl’s graceful balance of point and counterpoint reconstructs the plausible equipoise of the object-model he takes as his own, Golumbia’s hyperbolic entrainments enact the epistemic violence just as plausibly providing that model’s symbolic foundation. Golumbia argues programmatically that computers are cultural “all the way down,” and that […]
[…]also animated the scientistic wing of the culture wars, which have combined with bona fide science studies to remind us how inextricably entangled the lines between physical, natural, social, and philosophical ideas and convictions have become, or for that matter, have always been. Here, too, religion and politics still thrash about like many-armed creatures of the deep perpetually locked in mortal struggle. In particular, the psychosocial consequences of evolutionary biological discourse continue to be wrangled over by the “neo-Darwinist” advocates of sociobiology and its cognitive sibling, evolutionary psychology, on the one hand, and the “post-Darwinist” challengers to adaptationist evolutionary dogmas, […]
[…]in words and images, of key concepts in “resilience thinking,” together with case studies and an extensive bibliography. The site is sponsored by the Resilience Alliance, “a multidisciplinary research group that explores the dynamics of complex systems.” Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. 994-1003. A key essay for establishing Stengers’ use of the term “cosmopolitics.” Most of her important work on this topic remains to be translated into English. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and Other Writings. Ed. William Rossi. New York: Norton, 2008. […]
[…]Is there a process or algorithm at work? I know you are thinking this: can this book be called “codework” and fit in a genre and practice that applies code processes to text? Does this genre even exist, which I doubt? Can we discover the pathology at work here, the underlying complex? Can we analyze the text and distinguish machine and author? Can we read the clever complex of the author in the wash of writing? Can we presuppose a semiotic that bookends and references the partially-sourced emissions at work in Meatphysics. [Figure 1] How about this: Jake Chapman, of […]
[…]throughout the book is, what if the future of the university is a future without cultural studies? What if cultural studies has no future? For all the earlier insistence upon rethinking the University, about not prejudging or determining its future iterations, the one thing that seems without question is that cultural studies will/should have a role. Cultural studies seems to serve here as the place of “justice,” that which is beyond critique. In the end I remained unconvinced of the centrality of this discipline; perhaps the future University has no disciplines, as Mark Taylor suggests, or at least none that […]
[…]On the contrary, I believe McGurl is daring us to agree with him. The Program Era, while critical of the constitutive inequities of capitalism, nevertheless disavows the declension narratives that have tended to dominate studies of both creative writing and the university, and asks us instead to appreciate, if not indeed to celebrate, their combined literary achievement. And this resistance, not to the system but to the temptation to analyze it in transcendent terms, could in fact be the basis for a certain rapprochement between academic critics and creative writers, but it can’t for that very reason derive from Lennon’s […]
[…]on writing in electronic media. No doubt, rebranding such as the turn to Web 2 or Critical Code Studies provide added descriptive precision to the discourse. I am not making the banal point of questioning the value of these approaches, nor the value of what I call the literary critical discourse on electronic literature. Rather, I say our question should be, instead of the existence or essence or thing of electronic literature, I say we should ask: What is electronic literature after? By this I mean at least two things. Firstly, what does it desire? What do we want with […]
[…]tension, which we might see at work in any number of fields, is particularly fraught for media studies. Critical anthologies within media studies necessarily raise questions of temporality along two axes, namely in terms of the institutional and the material parameters of the field. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, numerous critical collections appeared on the market with the implicit intent both to crystallize the contemporary intellectual, cultural, and political concerns of the then-emergent project of media studies and also, in the same gesture, to legitimize media studies as an academic field. These attempts at legitimization, efforts to ground […]
[…]giving him too much credit. Let Glass sit down and work through The Program Era with a seminar group of ten M.F.A. candidates in creative writing, for two weeks – then tell me again about its non-reductive and ideology-free use of systems theory, in rendering critical illustration. II For me, Glass’s “Getting with the Program” confirms that McGurl’s and Golumbia’s perspectives map a productively sustained conflict in the discipline, which not one of us is yet genius enough to dissolve. In the dialectic of contemporary criticism, McGurl’s book needs Golumbia’s, and Golumbia’s book needs McGurl’s: and both of them need […]
[…]Sometimes code is reused by an individual programmer or software company, where the same bit of code might be used in different projects. The concept of code reuse is built right into modern programming languages. These languages each have what is referred to as a standard library of commands, types of data objects, and functions. This library is usually so large that all of it is not automatically included in every program; instead, programmers have to issue some command to copy the parts of the library that make the necessary objects and functions work. Here for example is a very […]
[…]the first two, the sociologist or historian of literature cannot be sure of the object he or she studies. What anyone calls the institutionalization of literature could turn out to be a fraud. Honda produces cars, but who can say whether any creative writing program produces literature? Criticism is the discipline of uncovering rational bases for saying it, and sociological and historical explanation, if they are to be coherent, necessarily presupposes criticism. This raises a fundamental question of whether McGurl, Lennon, and Glass are, in fact, talking about what someone concerned about the present of literature is concerned about. Every […]
[…]more and more towards the idea that artists had to start becoming ecologists, they had to start working with scientists, and they had to start working with people who had done mining, strip mining, coal mining. So, he spent the last couple years of his life writing to many different companies, including the Bingham Copper Mine to turn disused areas – these areas that had been marked by humans and then marked as waste – into artworks. He saw that as one way that he could make a real serious impact. By writing to everybody and then advertising the fact […]
[…]Research Report.” De Montfort University, April 24, 2008. Web. Montfort, Nick. “Obfuscated Code.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008. 193-99. Print. Mateas, Michael. “Weird Languages.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008. 267-75. Print. Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print. —.‘Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework.’ Electronic Book Review 2002. Web. Rettberg, Scott. “Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature.” Fibreculture Journal. 01/01/2008. Web. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “What Has the Computer Done for the Word.” Genre XLI, 2008. 33-58. Print. Schechner, […]
[…]and Bell 2007) with an awareness of close reading as a historical medium specific practice. code: As critics primarily and coders peripherally, we recognize the importance of code in digital fiction, and we do so on a continuum. On the one end, the incorporation and recombination of elements of programming language, binary code, and mark-up conventions implicitly affects the semantic space of the text. On the other end, the same codestuff can be used explicitly, infecting and inflecting the text to defamiliarize the work of art. cybersomatics and corporeality: We believe that the reading of digital fiction involves a different kind of […]
[…]text, adopting – as in this essay – a version of that text’s constraint in his own critical writing. Not an impossible constraint, but an insistent one. Cumulatively, characters and events come to be defined by what they are not, as in this description of the housewife Susan Griffin: “the cut of her clothes wasn’t so domestic that a guy didn’t want to keep looking at her” (147). Each negation, in addition to asserting that something is not the case, also implicitly asserts Nufer’s allegiance to writing under conditions of deprivation and duress. Like an ascetic, he will not permit […]
[…]Author, “I had lost an entire African legacy including invaluable diagrams and cuneiform code books” (121). A German logician called Ludwig claims, approximately: linguistic limits demarcate an I’s entire available extra-linguistic domain, an I’s imaginative and earthly habitat. Do arbitrary, astringent linguistic boundaries also limn a distinct atmosphere? A cosmos? M: Maps. Alphabetical Africa frequently mentions maps, but does not contain many maps for inexperienced adventurers. Geographical hot-spots are mentioned, as are African continent’s disappearing landmass. Blueprints and drawings, however, are entirely absent. A book-incident map – charting characters, actions, events, etc. – could be infinitely helpful. Maybe I can […]
[…]is a kind of hyper-rational way of winning the game) * Madoff’s two chief programmers played a critical role in his own huge “Ponzi scheme,” not because they wrote programs, but because “they used their special computer skills to create sophisticated, credible and entirely phony trading records that were critical to the success of Madoff’s scheme” (“Madoff’s Former IT Experts Arrested”) * I put “Ponzi scheme” in quotation marks because it’s now clear that much of the entire market bubble was due to a different kind of computational deception. As Frontline recently reported, CFTC Chair Brooksley Born alerted Congress to […]
[…]in the early- and mid-twentieth century as being a key argument for the biological equality of groups (and, often, the relative equality of group cultures). This was not to say, however, that “racial” populations did not sometimes craft, nurture, and pass on, distinctive cultural traditions. One of Boas’s students, the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, worked to record such cultural traditions among African American populations in rural Florida and Afro-Caribbean populations in Haiti and Jamaica. She found folktales and religious traditions of hoodoo that were particular to some populations of African Americans living across the South; likewise, to her eye, Haitian […]
[…]Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine, The Collected Research Reports of The Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992): 60. * * * Around 1650, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer devised an ingenious ballet. It’s simple: first, give each dancer a board inscribed with a letter of the alphabet; then watch as new words or phrases emerge from dance. The very movement of the dancer’s bodies will act as a combinatory mechanism from which language springs.Jan C. Westerhoff, “Poeta Calculans: Harsdörffer, Leibniz, and the Mathesis Universalis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60.3 (1999): 465. There is no evidence that Harsdörffer […]
[…]critique and revision of aesthetic conventions, a task that is just as necessary in literary studies now as ever. Aside from television, a chief medium for serial narratives is comics. In his reading of Superman, Umberto Eco finds in seriality a mix of the novelistic and the mythic that seems to correspond roughly to O’Sullivan’s “necessary” and “possible.” Serial comics place contradictory demands on their characters: a figure like Superman must remain unchanged from issue to issue, but he must also vary his adventures enough to keep an audience interested. Eco describes this mixture of the eternal and new as […]
[…]217). With the significant exception of Deadwood, HBO’s glamour serials – those that garnered critical acclaim, and that the network made synonymous with its brand name – have always had their final season announced prospectively, so that the structure of valediction could be built into both the making and reception of that narrative. These “glamour serials” would include The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, The Wire, and (perhaps less prominently) Oz – all of which aired for at least five seasons. So instead of a sense of expansion stretching to a distant point on the horizon, the […]