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Episode 9: Hypertext as Technology and Literature with Robert Arellano

[…]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 […]
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Gaddis’s Broken Doorknob

[…]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 […]

Gaddis at Textron: From Fruits of Diversification to Financialization

[…]“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 […]
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Why We Shouldn’t Abandon “Postmodern” Approaches to William Gaddis: J R, American Antihero Traditions, and his Indian Inheritors

[…]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 […]
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William Gaddis as Philosopher: Kierkegaard, Style, and the Spirit of Hegel

[…]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 […]
Read more » William Gaddis as Philosopher: Kierkegaard, Style, and the Spirit of Hegel

Originality, Authenticity, Translation, Forgery: Why Translators and Translation Theorists Should Read The Recognitions

[…]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 […]
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Indeterminacy as Invention: How William Gaddis Met Physicists, Cybernetics, and Mephistopheles on the Way to Agapē Agape

[…]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 […]
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April 2024: Ecocritique, Fandom, Eclipses, and Gaddis, Gaddis, Gaddis

[…]Klink boldly go into the lows and (watermelon sugar) highs of fan fiction, fan culture and fan studies in Off Center‘s “Episode 8: Fanfiction as a Form of Digital Narrativity with Flourish Klink”! (The Barker takes a seat at the desk and shoves her booted feet onto it. The lighting bleaches white. A wall of shadow slowly begins sliding in from stage left.) BARKER: A total eclipse of the art! Steve Tomasula explores how his experience of the 2017 solar eclipse elevated the normal to the sublime in “Total Eclipse: A Rearview Review of Rhythms”! (A spotlight pierces through the darkness […]
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March 2024: Hyper Literary Culture(s)

[…]rises. The Barker stands alone at center stage, but we are aware of a larger editorial team working in the wings.) BARKER: Another month. Another issue. Another mailshot. (Darkness, before a hard, white spotlight pierces the gloom. The Barker stands in sharp relief.) BARKER: Data is power! Stephan Paur illuminates the issues surrounding the (in)formation of identities in Infopower and the Ideology of Extraction! (The lighting shifts, whites becoming a mix of greens and turquoises reminiscent of an affiliate’s branding. The Barker waits, arms crossed.) BARKER: HYPER. LITERARY. CULTURE. (Off stage, someone begins to box a beat. It’s as off-rhythm […]

The Most Curious Career: William Gaddis in Germany

[…]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 […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis and Other Innovative Fiction

[…]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 […]
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Total Eclipse: A Rearview Review of Rhythms

[…]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. […]

Episode 8: Fanfiction as a Form of Digital Narrativity with Flourish Klink

[…]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 […]
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Pre-written Business Correspondences and Computer Therapists: William Gaddis’s J R, ELIZA, and Literacies in Conflict

[…]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 […]
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William Gaddis at St. Michael’s College: Memoir and Photograph

[…]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 […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Translating Gaddis

[…]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 […]
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William Gaddis’s Frolics in Corporate Law

[…]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). […]

Ecocritique between Landscape and Data: The Environmental Audiotour

[…](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 […]
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Faire Exchange No Robbery: Critiques of Anthologies and Contracts in an Unpublished Gaddis Play

[…]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 […]
Read more » Faire Exchange No Robbery: Critiques of Anthologies and Contracts in an Unpublished Gaddis Play

“Honored by the Error”: The Literary Friendship of Gaddis and Gass

[…]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 […]
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An Interview with Rick Moody

[…]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 […]

“A Long and Uninterrupted Decline”: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

[…]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”. […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable – Artists in Non-literary Media Inspired by Gaddis

[…]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 […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: “Teaching Gaddis Today”

[…]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 […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable – Publishing in the Innovative Tradition: A Conversation

[…]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 […]
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"Trouble with the Connections": J R and the "End of History"

[…]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. […]
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Vaihinger’s Not So Fleeting Presence: Gaddis, Ballard and DeLillo

[…]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 […]
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The Specter of Capitalism

[…]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 […]

Infopower and the Ideology of Extraction

[…]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). […]

Episode 7: Computational Narrative Systems and Platform Studies with Nick Montfort

[…]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, […]
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February 2024: Unplugging, Litera[ture]lly

[…]Gaddis Scholarship. Want to dive deeper into post-post-modern futurology? The Futures of Gaddis Studies roundtable—featuring CRYSTAL ALBERTS, GREGORY COMNES, TIME CONLEY, BRIGETTE FÉLIX, VICTORIA HARDING, ANJA ZIEDLER, RONE SHAVERS, TOM LECLAIR, and electronic book review’s very own JOSEPH TABBI—delivers reflections, revelations, and recognitions of The Recognitions! JOIN US NEXT TIME FOR MORE ELECTRONIC BOOK REVIEW Tegan Pyke Co-editor, ebr contact@electronicbookreview.com   All listed articles come with risk of riPOSTe, re-riPOSTe, and re-re-re-riPOSTe. Authors’ views are their own. Internet connection required for access but not […]

William Gaddis at his Centenary

[…]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 […]

Writing in Flux

[…]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 […]

Gaddis-Knowledge After the “Very Small Audience” Era: Introduction to the Special Issue on “William Gaddis at his Centenary”

[…]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 […]
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New Directions for Gaddis Scholarship

[…]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 […]

Futures of Gaddis Studies: Visions for the Next 100 Years

[…]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 […]
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Episode 6: Gendered AI and Editorial Labour in Digital Culture with Lai-Tze Fan

[…]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 […]
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Expanding the Algorithm

[…]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 […]

Episode 5: AI, Computational Creativity, and Media Production with Drew Keller

[…]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. […]
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Davin Heckman Netprov Interview

[…]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 […]

Who Does Your Game Play?

[…]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 […]

Episode 4: Meme Culture, Social Media, and the January 6th Insurrection with Ashleigh Steele

[…]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 […]
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Embodied AI: An Extended Data Definition

[…]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 […]

Review of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP 2022)

[…]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 […]
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Episode 3: Artistic Research and Digital Writing, with Jason Nelson

[…]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 […]
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Automation and Loss of Knowledge

[…]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 […]

MATERIALS FOR A LIFE: “whispered conversations: beholding a landscape through journey and reflection” at Stand 4 Gallery

[…]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 […]
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Episode 2: Joseph Tabbi on the Electronic Book Review, Research Infrastructure, and Electronic Literature

[…]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 […]
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Harlin/Hayley Steele Netprov Interview

[…]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 […]