[…]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 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, […]
[…]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. […]
[…]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, […]
[…]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 […]
[…]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 […]
[…]– 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. […]
[…]“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 […]
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 […]