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The development of Internet Fiction in China, from Internet sub-culture to mainstream literature

[…]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 […]
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Response to John Cayley’s ‘Modelit’

[…]“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 […]

Textpocalypse Now?

[…]– 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. […]

Erroneous Assumptions: Steve Tomasula’s Ascension

[…]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 […]
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On Digital Aesthetics: Sense-Data and Atmospheric Language

[…]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 […]
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Thoughts on the Textpocalypse

[…]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 […]

A review of My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence (2022)

[…]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 […]
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Scott Rettberg Netprov Interview Oct 2022

[…]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 […]

Alex Mitchell Netprov Interview Nov 2022

[…]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 […]

‘A Shifting Surface World’: The Techno-Graphomania of David Jhave Johnston’s ReRites

[…][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): […]
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My Month with Midjourney

[…]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 […]

machine-writing

[…]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 […]

March 2023: Exploring Collaborative Storytelling and Italian E-Lit

[…]to literary traditions and contemporary aesthetics. It begins by describing the recent surge in critical attention to Italian e-lit, reviewing differing approaches of two recent essays that aim to reconstruct the history of the genre, which began with Nanni Balestrini’s works and Enrico Colombini’s Italian textual adventures.  We also have two interviews from Rob Wittig that share a common focus on the experience of participating in collaborative storytelling–or “Netprov”. In Wittig’s interview with Johannah Rodgers, Johannah describes her involvement with Netprov, beginning with her participation in the Monstrous Weather netprov at the 2017 Electronic Literature Conference in Porto. She discusses […]
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Open, but not too much. A review of Emanuela Patti’s Opera aperta. Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present

[…]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, […]
Read more » Open, but not too much. A review of Emanuela Patti’s Opera aperta. Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present

Johannah Rodgers Netprov Interview, Oct 2022

[…]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 […]

J †Johnson Netprov Interview, Oct 2022

[…]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 […]

Claire Donato Netprov Interview, Dec 2022

[…]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 […]

‘More of a performer than a listener’: Reading Hazel Smith’s Ecliptical

[…]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 […]
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Joy Wallace

[…]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. […]

Writing as a life form: A Review of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: A Biography (2021)

[…]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 […]
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December 2022: Remembering Jeremy Hight; on The Lab Book; glitch poetics

[…]of contemporary e-lit and AI enhanced writing. In a book that is both aesthetic and machinic, critical and creative, Jones explores the nature of writing itself “and, indeed, reading, in an environment saturated by the rhythms and predilections of digital code.” * Lastly, we would also like to remind you that Issue 03: Counter-Works of The Digital Review, edited by Carlota Salvador Megias and Ian Hatcher, has a call for works that is NOW DUE Wednesday, February 1st, 2023. Submit using this form.  – Lai-Tze Fan Editor and Director of Communications, […]
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A Loving Screed for Jeremy Hight

[…]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, […]

Generative Unknowing: Nathan Allen Jones’ Glitch Poetics

[…]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 […]
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Review of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies

[…]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 […]
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November 2022: Write Fast and Break Theory

[…]Sondheim’s eclectic and stylistic meditations on the limits of philosophy, language, and code, expressed through the author’s hybrid art and research projects. In “United Forces of Meme in Spontaneous Netprov,” Anna Nacher explores the emergence and spread of the viral hashtag “Kralovec,” a satirical Czech language meme protesting the Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory in September 2022. In discussing the social and political impact of memes as collaborative sites of making meaning through media, Nacher analyzes the “creative frenzy” that emerges when protest becomes memetic. In this month’s interview, “Riderly Waves of Networked Textual Improvisation,” a companion of sorts to […]

Review of Broken Theory by Alan Sondheim

[…]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 […]

United Forces of Meme in Spontaneous Netprov (or how many tweets it takes to transform #Kaliningrad into #Kralovec)

[…]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 […]
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Riderly waves of networked textual improvisation: an interview with Mark Marino, Catherine Podeszwa, Joellyn Rock, and Rob Wittig.

[…]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 […]
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Weirding Winona: iDMAa 2022 Weird Media Exhibition

[…]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 […]
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Lines of Sight: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a System (Organism, Poem, or Otherwise)

[…]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 […]
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September 2022: TDR issue 02 “(digital) performance”; interview with Mark Amerika

[…]and notions of “talent” and “genius”–is the expansion of collaborative practice, from working with other artists to working with computers through generative and automated methods of creation. Amerika continues to see working with the AI language models GPT-2 and GPT-3 as a “meta-remix gam session,” where the jam session itself produces new considerations of self and collaborative others—the rich stuff of his book. –Lai-Tze Fan Editor and Director of […]
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Hypertextument: reading the new Victory Garden

[…]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 […]
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My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence: an interview with Mark Amerika

[…]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 […]
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All of the spaces collapsing: an interview with xtine burrough

[…]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 […]
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Review: Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing As Contemporary Art, ed. Steve Tomasula. Alabama UP, 2022

[…]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 […]
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Platforms,Tools and the Vernacular Imaginary

[…]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 […]

Gathering Critical Code Studies Working Group 2020

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 […]
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Week Three: Feminist AI

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 […]

Week Two: Indigenous Programming

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 […]

Week One: Introduction to Critical Code Studies

[…]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, […]
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TL;DR: Lessons from CCSWG 2020

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 […]

Introduction to Critical Code Studies Working Group

[…]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 […]
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Gastropoetics

[…]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 […]

Learning Management Platforms: Notes on Teaching “Taroko Gorge” in a Pandemic

[…]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 […]
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On Reading and Being Read in the Pandemic: Software, Interface, and The Endless Doomscroller

[…]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 […]
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Executable Landscapes: Speculative Platforms and Environmental E-Literature

[…]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 […]
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Language |H|as a Virus: cyberliterary inf(l)ections in pandemic times

[…]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. […]
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