Search results for "critical code studies working group"

[…]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 […]

[…]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’ […]

[…](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 […]

[…]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). […]

[…]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 […]

[…]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 […]

[…]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 […]

[…]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 […]

[…]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 […]