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[…]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 Cultue 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 […]