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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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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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Critical Code Studies

[…]the way we might explicate a work of literature in a new field of inquiry that I call Critical Code Studies (CCS). Codework critics and artists have operated on the cusp of this analysis. Cayley’s emphasis, for example, is “the role of code in literal art” but not the role of code in all software objects, even those not intended to be literary. The focus of CCS is not literature made of code or code that is literature, although these may benefit from its techniques. Rather, I propose that code itself is a cultural text worthy of analysis and rich […]

Critical Code Studies Conference – Week One Discussion

[…]Stephen. Critical Code Studies 26 Oct 2009. Web. 8 Sept 2010. http://criticalcodestudies.com/wordpress/2009/10/26/tim-toady-bicarbonate/ Reiche, Claudia, and Verena Kuni. Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols. Autonomedia, 2004. Print. Russo, Julie Levin. thearchive2. LiveJournal. 10 Apr 2008. Web. 8 Sept 2010. http://community.livejournal.com/thearchive2/1465.html Young, Susan Elizabeth, and Dave Aitel. The Hacker’s Handbook: the strategy behind breaking into and defending Networks. CRC Press, 2004. […]
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Critical Code Studies and the electronic book review: An Introduction

Critical Code Studies starts here.” That was the tagline of the Critical Code Studies Working Group (CCSWG), a gathering of over 100 scholars from countries across the globe for an applied experiment in field formation. The Working Group met over the course of six weeks, beginning February 2010, to engage the work of Critical Code Studies. As we defined it in the early days of the CCS blog, Critical Code Studies is the application of hermeneutics to the interpretation of the extra-functional significance of computer source code. It is a study that follows the developments of Software Studies and Platform […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Two Discussion

In the second installment of a six-week discussion, contributors search for examples of Critical Code Studies “in the wild.” Instead of asking how code can be read critically, they examine how code is already being created and disputed by lawyers, programmers, and the general public. Editor’s Note: In the second installment of the discussion that took place in the summer of 2010, Jeremy Douglass leads the Critical Code Studies Working Group in exploring the practical challenges and constraints of reading code critically, with an emphasis on real-world examples. An introduction and overview for this week by Mark Marino and Max […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Two Introduction

Can Critical Code Studies overcome the divide between technology workers and technocultural theorists? Code matters. It matters to the many people who program it, and to those who allow themselves to be programmed by it. It makes a difference how the code is written. It makes a difference on which platform it is executed. It makes a difference who is reading it and what they know about programming. It makes a difference how the programmer imagined the ones who would read her code. Code matters. Its materiality is immaterial when discussing the ways in which segments of code circulate through […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Three Discussion

In Week 3 of a six-part series, Critical Code Studies contributors spelunk the mysteries of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal text adventure game. Delving into close readings of the original FORTRAN code, the group plots the twisty passages linking media theory, deconstruction and philosophies of programming. Group Code Annotation: Colossal Cave Adventure According to Donald Knuth, designer of the “literate programming paradigm,” Colossal Cave Adventure is the “ur-game for computers” (Knuth 1998/2002). Because computer games have, for decades, been a point of connection between the worlds of technology (from the Greek techne, “skill”) and art (from the Latin ars artis, […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Three Introduction

[…]of Crowther’s source code serve as the point of departure for the third week of the Critical Code Studies Working Group. In this week, Jerz led a new team on a second expedition to map the original source code of Colossal Cave Adventure. The project differed slightly from the previous two weeks in that the group attempted to collaboratively annotate Crowther’s original source code in conjunction with the usual discussion. Their contributions, following the ethos of Critical Code Studies, highlighted extra-functional content and offered historical, political, aesthetic, technical, and anecdotal observations. About thirty-five years ago, when Colossal Cave Adventure was […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Four Discussion

In Week 4, Critical Code Studies contributors kept the magic alive as they discussed Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “On Sourcery and Source Codes,” the first chapter of her forthcoming Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Informed by Chun’s psychoanalytic reading and her awareness of the materiality of code work, the conversation deals with fetishism, gender, genetics, and performativity in ways both abstract and tangible. Week 4 of the CCS discussion began with a reading from the first chapter of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s recent book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. We are grateful to MIT Press for allowing us to share […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Four Introduction

[…]open up spaces of discovery. Nevertheless, it was our shared text for Week 4 of the Critical Code Studies Working Group – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s first chapter from her forthcoming book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory – that challenged me to rethink the anecdote of my dad’s fingertips in relationship to notions of ritual and magic that undergird so much of our technological practice. In this chapter, Chun introduces the term “sourcery” to signify what she sees as contemporary culture’s fetishism of source code. Software (source code), Chun claims, “is a magical force that promises to bring together the […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference- Week Five Discussion

[…]the spot. While something of a special case, then, livecoding raises broader issues for Critical Code Studies, especially questions related to the definition of programming and the visibility of code. As John Bell pointed out, livecoding further applies pressure to the valuation of “scripting” over “coding”: the former is not considered “real” programming because of the use of high-level languages for small tasks. The Ruby on Rails framework was promoted using an “amazing and carefully scripted series of demo magic tricks,” in Jeremy Douglass’ words: on a terminal window projected for an audience, a few scripts generated a basic but […]
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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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An Emerging Canon? A Preliminary Analysis of All References to Creative Works in Critical Writing Documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base

[…]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 […]
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Nature’s Agents: Chreods, Code, Plato, and Plants

[…]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 […]
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"These Waves …:" Writing New Bodies for Applied E-literature Studies

[…]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 […]
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Digital Creativity as Critical Material Thinking: The Disruptive Potential of Electronic Literature

[…]‘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 […]
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Critical Code Studies Week Five Opener – Algorithms are thoughts, Chainsaws are tools

[…]constructs indistinguishable from the ones that are built in.  In essence, a macro is a block of code that exploits homoiconicity by temporarily treating another code block as if it were data (before passing it back to the compiler as code). You are not expected to understand this. You know what would be really great?  If people took a piece of a live coding performance — this one or another — recorded their own live commentary over it, and then put that in the comment thread.  It’s easy!  Even the simplest video editor will let you do this.  And really, isn’t […]
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The Code is not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)

[…]computing and technoscience – and his explicitly chosen media keep him immediately allied with codeworking colleagues, Sondheim’s work must also be read against earlier and contemporary writers working within or with a sense of the formally and aesthetically innovative traditions of poetics, and not only the poetics which intersects with Burroughs and Acker. With the implication that Sondheim’s writing needs to be judged as such and should not necessarily be granted a special credit of affect or significance because of its instantiation in new media. In the necessity to read the work in both a programmatological context and in the […]
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Critical Ecologies: Ten Years Later

[…]“Oh, don’t worry, my Toby never bites!” every critic warms to his subject, feels what he studies or the way he studies it is good in the way belief. But I think the rest of us should be leery of Toby. He’s descended from wolves; it’s in his nature to bite. So there is something to be said for a critical stance that refuses to make nice right up to the bitter end, keeps its distance from that which it can’t help but admire. Anyway, the new physiocracy can take care of itself. Leave the note of hope to the […]

Forgetting Media Studies: Anthologies, Archives, Anachrony

[…]tension, which we might see at work in any number of fields, is particularly fraught for media studies. Critical anthologies within media studies necessarily raise questions of temporality along two axes, namely in terms of the institutional and the material parameters of the field. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, numerous critical collections appeared on the market with the implicit intent both to crystallize the contemporary intellectual, cultural, and political concerns of the then-emergent project of media studies and also, in the same gesture, to legitimize media studies as an academic field. These attempts at legitimization, efforts to ground […]
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Addressing Significant Societal Challenges Through Critical Digital Media

[…]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 […]
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Experimental Electronic Literature from the Souths. A Political Contribution to Critical and Creative Digital Humanities.

[…]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 […]
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Critical Attention and Figures of Control: On Reading Networked, Software-based Social Systems with a Protective Eye

[…]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 […]
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How to Re-Hijack Your Mind: Critical Making and the ‘Battle for Intelligence’

[…]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. […]
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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 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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British Poetry at Y2K

[…]by now why such poems by Fisher might be respected by poets from both the Cambridge and London groups, and indeed there are moments when he might be thought of himself as a member of one group — But it is precisely with a poetics of the sublime – and Keith Tuma’s original fisher by obstinate isles thought he might “maintain ‘the sublime’ / in the old sense…Unaffected by the ‘march of events'” – that I want to leave this Fisher of the latter-days and all but conclude this essay. I am not alone in thinking that A Furnace may […]

The Pleasure (and Pain) of Link Poetics

[…]“cheating,” operating against the implicit code of mystery-reading behavior. The implicit code of reading most types of fiction in codex book format favors starting at the first page and moving to the last. Hypertext readers rarely have such a developed implicit code of behavior to react with or against. A Storyspace hypertext generally provides the reader with choices to move from any given lexia only to those other lexias the author has linked. The link in any case is a predetermined avenue of navigation. Whether the link has been directly chosen by the author, randomly determined by the computer, or […]

Illegal Knowledge: Strategies for New Media Activism

[…]effective strategy of www.McSpotlight.org which is focused on research, outreach, and activist networking was never repeated on the same scale. Why not? Should we continue to make the distinction between good content and networking projects and “bad” criminal hackers? (No, but people still do.) Ricardo Dominguez: Geert’s breakdown of net.activism into a binary of good activism (www.McSpotlight.org), or digitally correct activism, vs. the bad hacktivism of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) strikes me as far too simple. EDT’s work was and is tactical theater; McSpotlight.org was a long-term strategic action. So to compare one with the other disregards the context […]
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Textual Events (3 of 5)

[…]to harass Web authors to remove images, corporate logos and even corporate names from websites critical of their activities. In order to highlight the absurd extremities to which IP police powers have been extended, McLeod took out a trademark himself–on the phrase “freedom of expression.”TM He owns it. You do not. The efforts of absurdist media pranksters such as ®TMark are the subject of Caren Irr ‘s essay, which seeks to describe ways in which their efforts to use the system of socio-ideological reproduction to send new messages can be linked to a more capacious opposition to dominant forms of […]

Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy

[…]such as Cygnus have convinced the market that you do not need to be proprietary about source codes to make a profit: the code might be free, but tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades, office applications, and hardware are not. In 1998, when Netscape went “open source” and invited the computer tinkers and hobbyists to look at the code of its new browser, fix the bugs, improve the package, and redistribute it, specialized mailing lists exchanged opinions about its implications. It is an established pattern of the computer industry, in fact, that you might have to give away your […]
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Patched In: A Conversation with Anne-Marie Schleiner about Computer Gaming Culture

[…]an interdisciplinary approach and a disciplinary approach. Gaming programs should integrate gender studies, film and television theory, computer science, sociology, digital art, and cultural studies into computer gaming curriculums, (and allow for different emphases.) We also need to discover what would be specific to a discipline of game design and gaming studies. Developing such an interdisciplinary and also disciplinary program would allow for a common language to be shared among programmers and artists, as well as informing gaming culture in general. There is much territory yet to be explored and we should prepare our students to better understand both the […]
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Women in the Web

[…]everyday life and working relations? As a very junior faculty member participating in a women’s studies faculty study group in the mid 80’s, when I tried to explain that I was investigating the politics of making distinctions between what has been called “the oral” and “the written,” a more senior historian impatiently insisted, “Something just is oral or written!” Although each feminist there cared about and taught the importance of denaturalizing cultural categories feminists critiqued, to no one was it obvious that orality and literacy were variations on nature and culture. When I was a postdoc in another university a […]

A Project for a New Consultancy

[…]frame for assessing the options available for meeting Bérubé’s goal of bringing critical studies knowledge to bear on policy making. Bérubé’s decision to work within the mode of journalism, the magazine medium, makes perfect sense in the apparatus of literacy. My response, however, is to reconsider this decision in the light of the shift in our apparatus from literacy to electracy. I am basing my speculations about the nature of electracy on a poststructuralist epistemology. …A further quandary for the poststructural consultant wanting to influence policy using the electronic media has to do with the dissolution of the communications model […]

Videogames of the Oppressed

[…]Design. London: Kogan Page Limited. Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1, no.1 (July 2001). http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen/ Eskelinen, Markku, and Raine Koskimaa, editors (2001). Cybertext Yearbook 2000. Saarijärvi: Publications of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä. Frasca, Gonzalo (1998). “Don’t play it again, Sam: One-session games of Narration.” http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/papers/frasca.html. —. (2001). “Videogames of the Oppressed.” M.A. Thesis: School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (2001). http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/thesis/. —. (1999). “Narratology meets Ludology: Similitude and Differences Between (Video)games and Narrative.” Parnasso 3: 365-371. http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm. Freire, Paulo (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. […]

Community of People with No Time

[…]As Richard Coyne notes: “Information is thought to be the essence of life, as in the DNA code. To record and break the code is to have mastery over life” (Coyne 1995, 80). The most common organizational pattern identified in all systems is networking. All living systems are arranged in a network fashion. Since the 1920s, when ecologists began studying food chains, recognition of networks became essential to many scholars, in different forms. Cyberneticists in particular tried to understand the brain as a neural network and to analyze its patterns. The structure of the brain is enormously complex, containing about […]

Meditations on the Blip: a review

[…]matter. Fuller examines three types of software that represent useful interventions into software studies: critical software, social software, and speculative software. The first of these, critical software, is software that investigates software. Fuller describes two modes by which critical software operates. The first looks at evidence of normalized software in order to disclose how the process of normalization becomes manifest. Critical software works “by using the evidence presented by normalized software to construct an arrangement of the objects, protocols, statements, dynamics, and sequences of interaction that allow its conditions of truth to become manifest” (23). Critical software, then, engages the […]

Locating the Literary in New Media

[…]can generate these dreams (a trivial side product of the bodies’ real purpose, which is to go on working, and to expand their networking endlessly). We see it in The Sims and numerous other computer games, in which players conduct virtual characters through career choices, commodity purchases, and social networks. What we don’t get in these highly developed simulations is the cultivation of any capacity to imagine an alternative to the operations of simulation and commodity consumption. Hayles is of course right to point out how, since the telegraph technology of James’s late nineteenth century, information has penetrated ever further […]

Text, Textile, Exile: Meditations on Poetics, Metaphor, Net-work

[…]some poems, some mini-essays. One even sent a power-point presentation. This enactment of net-working across diasporic distance was a way to generate creative energy, which I find is most stimulated through conversation and interaction; hence the need for collaboration in the last decade or so. I asked specifically that they comment, if they could, on the “textuality” of the pieces: that is, how they could be “read.” But I also stipulated that any kind of response – a photograph or a drawing – would be acceptable. I got wonderfully varied answers from a range of poets, friends, and colleagues. Ed […]
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A [S]creed for Digital Fiction

[…]and Bell 2007) with an awareness of close reading as a historical medium specific practice. code: As critics primarily and coders peripherally, we recognize the importance of code in digital fiction, and we do so on a continuum. On the one end, the incorporation and recombination of elements of programming language, binary code, and mark-up conventions implicitly affects the semantic space of the text. On the other end, the same codestuff can be used explicitly, infecting and inflecting the text to defamiliarize the work of art. cybersomatics and corporeality: We believe that the reading of digital fiction involves a different kind of […]

Computers, Cut-ups, and Combinatory Volvelles

[…]Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine, The Collected Research Reports of The Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992): 60. * * * Around 1650, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer devised an ingenious ballet. It’s simple: first, give each dancer a board inscribed with a letter of the alphabet; then watch as new words or phrases emerge from dance. The very movement of the dancer’s bodies will act as a combinatory mechanism from which language springs.Jan C. Westerhoff, “Poeta Calculans: Harsdörffer, Leibniz, and the Mathesis Universalis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60.3 (1999): 465. There is no evidence that Harsdörffer […]
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Finding the Human in “the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world”: Embodiment, Place, and Materiality in Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures

[…]also links to a 37,000-page archive of chemical industry documents assembled by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a group that also operates the Human Toxome Project’s “Mapping the Pollution in People.” Links to this project provide users with a catalogue of particular toxicants found in human bodies all over the world. The project couples this chemical data with detailed portraits of real people who have tested positive for various toxicants and chemicals. Alaimo argues that such electronic literatures combine scientific data, medical narratives, and political calls to action to provide new practice of meaning-making for ordinary experts to use in […]
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Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages: The Case of Electronic Literature

[…]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 […]
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Language as Gameplay: toward a vocabulary for describing works of electronic literature

[…]Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]” and Judd Morrissey’s “The Jew’s Daughter.” I will introduce a critical vocabulary for examining these works, grouped around the following concepts: “The Holy Grails of Electronic Literature,” “Six Varieties of Crisis,” and the “Surrealist Fortune Cookie.” Respectively, these describe: the contradictions inherent between paradigms of science and paradigms of literature and how they have shaped motivations by creators; the manner in which writers of electronic works can provide “non-trivial” reading experiences in the absence of standard literary paradigms premised on apocalyptic (or simply “plotted”) narrative; and a concept of the basic unit of the sentence in an […]
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The Assimilation of Text by Image

[…]Lifeon Earth (2nd ed.). New York: W.H. Freeman. Marino, M. C. (2010, September 15). “Critical Code Studies and the electronic book review: An Introduction.” EBR : Electronic Book Review. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/ningislanded Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. (1997, 98). Lucid Mapping and Codex Transformissions in the Z-Buffer. Retrieved February 9, 2011, fromhttp://www2.iath.virginia.edu/mgk3k/lucid/ Mauler, H. (2004). The Zoo « ZEITGUISED. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from http://zeitguised.wordpress.com/2004/05/24/the-zoo/ Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995). Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1st ed.). University Of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T., & Hansen, M. B. N. (Eds.). (2010). Critical Terms for Media […]

Revealing Noise: The Conspiracy of Presence in Alternate Reality Aesthetics

[…]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 […]
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The Politics of Plasticity: Neoliberalism and the Digital Text

[…]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” […]
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Lift This End: Electronic Literature in a Blue Light

[…]of computational art (387)—projects that invite, if not require, attention to various forms of codeCode-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. […]
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Internet radio and electronic literature: locating the text in the act of listening

[…]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 & […]
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