An assertion is made, "All war is a failure" and the 61 countries that were involved in World War One (1914-1918) is reduced to just 4 states and one empire. A series of tweets follows that could not be called a discussion, with a re-tweet and a counter assertion running parallel to each other. Is this public history (i.e. the creation of knowledge from and for historical paradigms in the public sphere)?
I follow history online. From the twitter account Real Time WWII to the spatial experience of Rome Reborn. Between these two examples are the millions of documentaries on YouTube (I can recommend All History Buff). I also use social media to teach cultural studies from a historical perspective. My area of research expertise is narrative studies related to technology and spatial representations. In this post I want to discuss an aspect of public history online that occupies a lot of my thought. I propose that the 'real time' of mediating history with digital media poses potential problems for critical method as we understand it today. This problem emerges from a long tradition of reading as arguably the dominant form of media consumption in relation to history.
The mediation of culture is widespread today (8-9 Kaun and Fast 2014). Part of that mediation is the presentation of history, often in 'live' 'real-time' or participatory modes using digital media. Digital media offer offers specific temporal and spatial perspectives on the presentation of history that result in immersive experiences and a strong sense of identification with the subjects of mediation. It is in this way, of activating space and time in narrative that Social Networking Sites (SNS) "should not only be considered as infrastructures that allow for social interaction, but as emerging actors in their own right" (Kaun and Fast 51).
Many times I have opened Twitter and read @RealTimeWWII with the feeling I am reading newspaper headlines for the day.
Another example of this 'live' feel to history is @kokoda1942LIVE, a Twitter account of the New Guinea campaign by the Australian army against the Japanese in World War II. As well I have roamed the streets of Harlem in the 1920s and visited an empty Cotton Club, with jazz playing.
The question I ask is did I learn anything from being in a space that simulates the events or time that is the subject of the history? My answer is, I do not believe that simulation alone is enough for the advancement of historical scholarship. The positioning of a viewer within the representation does not mean there is knowledge produced.I contrast the above image from Virtual Harlem with one taken from Harlem in 1920s.
Virtual Harlem, Street Museum, @Kokoda1942Live and @RealTimeWWII are examples of digital media in the service of history with a strong element of simulation added. The three examples provide a suggestion of sharing something of the time and space depicted. They do not necessarily stimulate questions, provide multiple points of interpretation or the polyphony that is so often found in well researched history, anymore than a photograph or a sonnet does.
There are however, examples where I do believe digital media can be used for effective historical scholarship. Examples include Dr. Heather Richards-Rissetto’s work in Copan in Honduras with gesture-based 3D GIS system to engage the public in cultural heritage (Richards-Rissetto 2012 2013). Another example is Dr Cecilia Lindhé working in Sweden on ‘Rethinking medieval spaces in digital environments’ (Lindhé 2013).
The Rome Reborn Project is further example that builds models using digital media that are then tested against evidence:
"Rome Reborn is an international initiative whose goal is the creation of 3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550). With the advice of an international Scientific Advisory Committee, the leaders of the project decided that A.D. 320 was the best moment in time to begin the work of modeling. At that time, Rome had reached the peak of its population, and major Christian churches were just beginning to be built. After this date, few new civic buildings were built. Much of what survives of the ancient city dates to this period, making reconstruction less speculative than it must, perforce, be for earlier phases. But having started with A.D. 320, the Rome Reborn team intends to move both backwards and forwards in time until the entire span of time foreseen by our mission has been covered."
Like the work of Dr. Heather Richards-Rissetto the Rome Reborn project attempts to triangulate known facts against a three-dimensional model and the existing theory, to come to some new conclusions about how Rome developed as an urban space.
The glaring conclusion here is that the powerful reach and popularity of digital media should be considered according to specific needs when practicing public history online. The feedback and interactive potentials of digital media should be separated from the popularity of digital tools. Each has affordances, but they are not necessarily in the service of each other. There are enormous opportunities and great possibilities to be gained from working in history with digital tools in the public sphere. But a literacy needs to be developed along the way, as well as distinct goals and methods too.
"The Immersive Internet provides
the first omnibus account of the emerging world-view of people who
spend most of their quality time mediated by computer-based
technologies. It should be taken seriously by anyone trying to design a
liberal arts curriculum for Humanity 2.0." – Steve Fuller, University of
Warwick, UK
The Immersive Internet Reflections on the Entangling of the Virtual with Society, Politics and the Economy will be released by Palgrave Macmillan on Friday 29th March 2013. The internet has begun to develop into a much more immersive and
multi-dimensional space. Three dimensional spaces and sites of
interaction have not just gripped our attention but have begun to weave
or be woven into the fabric of our professional and social lives. The
Immersive Internet – including social media, augmented reality, virtual
worlds, online games, 3D internet and beyond – is still nascent, but is
moving towards a future where communications technologies and virtual
spaces offer immersive experiences persuasive enough to blur the lines
between the virtual and the physical. It is this emerging Immersive
Internet that is the focus of this book of short thought pieces –
postcards from the metaverse – by some of the leading thinkers in the
field. The book questions what a more immersive and intimate internet
might mean for society and for each of us.
Contents
1. Postcards from the Metaverse: An Introduction to the Immersive Internet; Dominic Power and Robin Teigland 2. Niggling Inequality: A Second Introduction to the Immersive Internet; Edward Castronova 3. The Distributed Self: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Human Identity; Richard Gilbert and Andrew Forney 4. Meta-dreaming: Entangling the Virtual and the Physical; Denise Doyle 5.
Individually Social: Approaching the Merging of Virtual Worlds, the
Semantic Web, and Social Networks; Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez 6. Virtual Worlds as Radical Theater: Extending the Proscenium; Anthony M. Townsend and Brian E. Mennecke 7. Virtual Worlds and Indigenous Narratives; James Barrett 8. The Immersive Hand: Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Environments; Smiljana Antonijević 9. Discovering the 'I' in Avatar: Performance and Self-Therapy; Alicia B. Corts 10. Reflections and Projections: Enabling the Social Enterprise; Steve Mahaley, Chuck Hamilton and Tony O'Driscoll 11. Added Value of Teaching in a Virtual World; Inger-Marie Falgren Christensen, Andrew Marunchak and Cristina Stefanelli 12.
Play & Fun Politics to Increase the Pervasiveness of Social
Community: The Experience of Angels 4 Travellers; Maria Laura Toraldo,
Gianluigi Mangia, Stefano Consiglio and Riccardo Mercurio 13. Framing Online Games Positively: Entertaining and Engagement through 'Mindful Loss' of Flow; Müberra Yüksel 14. Inhabitants of Virtual Worlds, Players of Online Games - Beware!; Antti Ainamo and Tuukka Tammi 15. Relationships, Community, and Networked Individuals; Rhonda McEwen and Barry Wellman 16. Gemeinschaft Identity in a Gesellschaft Metaverse; Cynthia Calongne, Peggy Sheehy and Andrew Stricker Sorting out the Metaverse and How the Metaverse is Sorting Us Out; Isto Huvila 17. On the Shoulders of Giants: Understanding Internet-based Generative Platforms; Jonny Holmström 18. Social Norms, Regulatory Policies, and Virtual Behavior; Andrew Harrison, Brian E. Mennecke and William N. Dilla 19. Self-organising Virtuality; Rick Oller 20. Making Currency Personal: The Salutory Tale of the Downfall of the DomDrachma; Matthew Zook Afterword; Tom Boellstorff
On a simple level remediation, “the
representation of one medium in another” (Bolter and Grusin 44), introduces the
reception practices associated with both old and new media for Dreamaphage. The remediation of a book calls
upon the reading practices traditionally associated with that particular
material form (reading left to right in English, type script arranged on flat
pages arranged in order, a set sequence of pages etc.). In Dreamaphage, five three-dimensional virtual objects, which in form
and function resemble printed books, compose the majority of the work.The reader opens the
cover, turns the pages and reads the lines of printed text in the virtual-books
from a first-person perspective as one does an actual book. However, due to the
Flash programing, the virtual pages can only be opened one at a time in an
order starting from the first page. In this way randomness has been precluded
from reading. Despite the clear simulation, the books in Dreamaphage do not make it possible for the reader to “learn how to
participate in the construction of a text, searching in ways the author might
never have anticipated, yoking ideas together which were to be located at
different points in the work” (Rhodes and Sawday 2000 7), according to the
traditional design of the codex book. Rather, the simulated books of Dreamaphage restrict reading by
controlling order and positioning the reader in a temporal relationship with
narrative that is grounded in a shared representational space.
The concept of remediation (Bolter
and Grusin 1999) is just one historical dimension that makes close reading
relevant to the analysis of digital literature. Remediation is “Defined by Paul
Levenson as the “anthropotropic” process by which new media technologies
improve upon or remedy prior technologies. We define the term differently,
using it to mean the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media
forms. Along with immediacy and hypermediacy, remediation is one of the three
traits of our genealogy of new media” (Bolter and Grusin 2000 273). As I go on
to explain through my analysis, remediation has the effect of the awareness of
media according to historical praxis in reading. I examine address, the
prefaces, perspective and the representation of place in the works as making
reference or including remediation. Finally, emerging from the historical, it
is not the temporality suggested by interactive media that creates tensions
between digital technology and close reading, rather it is the process of
interactive meaning making that is problematic for traditional close reading
methods. The digital works are interactive, fluid, and dynamic, and as I
demonstrate in my analysis, open to close reading that accounts for these
factors. For this reason the methodological points for close reading digital
literature outlined by Ciccoricco (2012) are useful for this present study.
Remediation is a central element in
how representational space is negotiated in reading narrative. Remediation, as
I have already described, is “the formal logic by which new media refashion
prior media forms” (Bolter and Grusin 2000 273) in “the mediation of mediation”
(Bolter and Grusin 2000 56). How this refashioning can influence reception
should firstly be understood in terms of reading as a historical and acquired
practice. Readers’ respond to remediation with an awareness of media as
representing sets of historical practices and responses. Each reference to an
older medium in the digital is also a reference to the consumption practices
associated with that form. This historical awareness is an important element in
reading representational space in the works. Remediation in design is also
meaningful due to the qualities it brings to the works. In the digital works
each example of remediation adds perspectives to reading, such as a video, a
book, or a phone, with each providing a point of view within the overall
narrative structure. These remediated elements perform functions within digital
narrative similar to characters, with a medium providing a point of view in the
overall structure of the text. Due to the simulative nature of remediation in
the digital works, each example of remediation comes with a perspective on
narrative.
The lack of a hard or fast boundary
is a characteristic shared by the digital prefaces, in a general sense of
remediation, which builds upon Genette’s “undefined zone” regarding the reader
approaching the text. The preface produces an image of an interior and exterior
in relation to the work, offering rules and advice in regards to the reader’s
approach and interpretation. The rules of the prefaces are one key element in
the performative reading of the works. Each preface functions in relation to
the text it introduces, as a guide for reading, including discounting,
qualifying, explaining, and contextualizing elements of the work for the
reader.
The prefaces embody the remediation
of print, which contributes significantly to how reading is introduced.
Remediation, or as Bolter and Grusin summarize it the “mediation of mediation”
(Bolter and Grusin 2000 56), guides reader attention by introducing the
historically and culturally familiar in the representation of print. I contend
that this introduction is part of reading the texts, and more specifically it
directs reader attention and agency in the authorial prefaces. Thus remediation
historicizes the digital works and contextualizes their reading beyond the
material instantiations in a set of established reception practices.
Remediation accounts for the materiality of addressivity, which in the prefaces
exhibits a strict adherence to the conventions of print media. This
prescriptive function can be attributed to what Bolter and Grusin explain as,
“The representation of one medium
in another [...]. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so
widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital
media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of
perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old” (Bolter and
Grusin 2000 45).
In contemporary digital media the
practice of remediation is so widespread that it exists in a totalizing
spectrum. All forms of media refer back to established forms of mediation, or
as Marshal McLuhan pointed out, “the 'content' of any medium is always another
medium” (McLuhan 1964 8). For this reason remediation is not taken up in detail
in the previous chapter, as it is a basic element in digital media today. In
the prefaces, the remediation of the works themselves is clarified and explained
by the authorial voice, and this includes references to spatial configuration
(including depth, layering and design), which harmonize the various media forms
in the works (video, three-dimensional spaces, written text, audio and still
images), and represent movement and the passing of time for the reader.
Furthermore the prefaces themselves
are remediated elements that frame the reception of the multimodal digital
works. The references to remediation in the prefaces are attempts by the
authorial voice to control responses to the works based on established
reception practices associated with the older media. All forms of media refer back to established
forms of mediation, or as Marshal McLuhan pointed out, “the 'content' of any
medium is always another medium” (McLuhan 1964 8). In the prefaces, the
remediation of the works themselves is clarified and explained by the authorial
voice, and this includes references to spatial configuration (including depth,
layering and design), which harmonize the various media forms in the works
(video, three-dimensional spaces, written text, audio and still images), and
represent movement and the passing of time for the reader. Furthermore the
prefaces themselves are remediated elements that frame the reception of the
multimodal digital works. The references to remediation in the prefaces are
attempts by the authorial voice to control responses to the works based on
established reception practices associated with the older media.
Authorship of a so-called born-digital text demands skills and forms of expression that are radically different from works that are digitized or that employ remediated authoring methods.
The born-digital work "refers to materials that originate in a digital form. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital. It is most often used in relation to digital libraries and the issues that go along with said organizations, such as digital preservation and intellectual property. However, as technologies have advanced and spread, the concept of being born-digital has also been discussed in relation to personal consumer-based sectors, with the rise of e-books and evolving digital music. Other terms that might be encountered as synonymous include “natively digital,” “digital-first,” and “digital-exclusive'" (Wikipedia).
Authoring the born-digital text demands a skill set the includes those needed for the analogue texts that feed into the digital via remediation:
"According to their book Remediation: Understanding New Media by J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin,
remediation is a defining characteristic of new digital media because
digital media is constantly remediating its predecessors (television,
radio, print journalism and other forms of old media). Remediation can be complete or visible. A film based on a book is
remediating the printed story. The film may not provide any reference
to the original medium or acknowledgement that it is an adaptation. By
attempting to absorb the old medium entirely, the new medium presents
itself without any connection to its original source. On the other hand,
a medium such as a movie clip can torn out of context and inserted into
a new medium such as music. Bolter and Grusin describe this as visible
remediation because, "The work becomes a mosaic in which we are
simultaneously aware of the individual pieces' and their new,
inappropriate setting."(New New Media Wiki)
It is important to comprehend remediation as including practices associated with older media, which change as a result of the fusion with newer media. Examples of this dual-directional influence include film spectatorship, which has been dramatically altered in the last ten years as a result of the pervasiveness of moving images manufactured for, and distributed by the Internet. In the same way newspapers have changed their production and distribution techniques in response to an information economy radically altered by digital media. Consumption of newspapers has changed as a result of this multi-layered series of influence on how people take in news.
So how should one think about authorship in relation to born-digital texts? Of course it is simpler to break it down into the reading practices that can be associated with the media. The visual includes moving and still images, along with 3D navigable spaces and all the dynamics that can be coded into written text using digital media. One has to only consider the speed and movement of Young.Hae Chang Heavy Industries to see how words become images in a born-digital work:
The visual in a Young.Hae Chang Heavy Industries work is the written word, but it is more than that. With rhythm, dimensions and addressive syntax what can be termed a poem in the analogue sense becomes an experience for the reader. The role of audio in this experience cannot be understated.
Sound is an important consideration in any born-digital work. Sound creates space, contextualizes objects, provides rhythm for the text and guides the reader along a set path of interpretation. Ignoring sound in the authoring process is to present a digital work without its legs.
The creation of space is achieved with the visual and the audile, but relies on the interrelated quality of perspective. Perspective is a vast field of knowledge. Sufficient to say the era of the marriage between realism and quattrocento perspective in the Western Hemisphere is coming to an end.
ur perception of space is dominated by perspective, in the sense of a reduction
of the projected size of objects with distance. One of the key jobs of the
visual brain is to decode this size diminution as distance in the third dimension,
or egocentric distance. If the eye were a pinhole cameras, the projection
of the world onto the back plane would be in perfect linear perspective (and
in perfect focus). The succession of images projected on the curved retina
within the eye what Leonardo da Vinci termed natural perspective, a series
of distorted projections that needs to be integrated over time in a representation
in the brain as the eye moves around the scene. How the brain decodes the
information in natural perspective into an accurate appreciation of the spatial
layout has yet to be resolved. (Principles of Perspective)
In many examples of online visual 3D media (e.g. Second Life, World of Warcraft) depth of focus is infinite and there is no central vanishing point. Natural perspective is gradually being coded by digital media in the current age. This is an exciting prospect. My advice is look to the artists and not the geometers.
With a 3D printer and laptop, does everyone have the tools they need to build a bio-weapon? Science fiction novelist, blogger and activist Cory Doctorow talks to Nigel Warburton about whether we can - or should - attempt to regulate subversive technology.
Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin
“The
labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever
fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
“One
text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry
would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”
Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary
divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant
reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the
contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art
and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry.
However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as
the present situation in the education sector of most Western
democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from
and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of
culture. There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy
in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the
union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in
reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works.
Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual
worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are
interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of
the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation
represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in
Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not
witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary
orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly
emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual,
sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for
understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are
simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating
objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about
arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism,
iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of
digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving
digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the
material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its
representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how
performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of
the digital works. These works are
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995)
Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2004)
Façade By Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2006)
Second Life http://youtu.be/9g-kYvK3P-Q
CONSTRUCT by salevy_oh (2011)
The Celebration by Iris Piers (2011)
Patchwork Girl is a work of electronic literature by American author
Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate
Systems in 1995. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's
'Afternoon, a story' as an important work of hypertext fiction.
"Shelley Jackson's brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an
electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and
intensely parasitic on its print predecessors."
The actions of the avatar, which is the identity of its operator in SL,
conform to the traditions of Varjrayana Buddhism. The combination of the
actions of the avatar and the audio is a two fold signifying structure,
with the operator of the avatar at the center. In a simulative sense
the operator of the avatar is enacting a practice that is firmly
contextualized in religious and social contexts.
Last Meal Requested is an interactive net art work by Japanese/Swedish
artist Sachiko Hayashi. It deals with themes of gender, state power,
violence and the rhetoric of the image. The original work can be
accessed at http://www.e-garde.net/lmr/lmr2.html
Selavy: What happens when you write in a diary? Of course, some people
write down “got up at 7am, drank a coffee, had lunch with Jim, went to
bed early”, but that’s not the type of diary I’m referring to. It is
rather the idea of keeping a record of selected thoughts, feelings,
moods, ideas, etc. The important part is, of course, that you do that
regularly. And that is exactly what I did in CONSTRUCT: I added one room
each day. Every one of the 75 days of the residency has its own room,
often relating to the topic of the residency itself, a time capsule of
ideas, artifacts, or reference to other work. If you read a diary, you
may get an idea about the writer and her life. If you visit CONSTRUCT,
you may get an idea about Selavy Oh and her residency.
The Celebration "combines a circular display of flatscreens, reminiscent
of a giant zoetrope, containing amateur film footage from the
1910's-1940's with different soundscapes that can be manipulated by the
audience" (Piers).
How the audience manipulates the various audio and images, and how they
combine to create an interactive and immersive space, makes The
Celebration an engaging work of interactive digital art.
The visitor enters a darkened space, where the only available light
comes from the 10 screens showing the films of The Celebration. By
moving around the space and judging their own distance, speed of
movement, posture and height in relation to the (largely invisible)
Arduino trackers, a dance begins with the audio and the cracked black
and white images from almost a century ago.
Each of the screens that make up The Celebration has an Arduino tracking
sensor attached, which maps the movements of the body of a visitor, and
implements pre-programmed changes in the presentation of images and
sound.
Unknown faces stare out from the screens, mostly laughing, talking
(unheard) and often looking straight at the camera, and at the audience.
As these faces watch, the visitor dodges and weaves, hops and slides,
while the images and sounds change. At the same time the visitor is
watching the faces, along with their bodies, their families and friends,
competitors at sports events and classmates, neighbors and colleagues.
It is according to this arrangement that a circuit of movement and gaze
is achieved by the programming of The Celebration.
Façade is a prototype of interactive drama, a new genre of character and
story-intensive interactive entertainment. Façade is freely
downloadable at interactivestory.net. In Façade, you, the player, using
your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of
Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their
early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that
quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict
dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the
accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced
to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have
changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play
the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out
differently the next time.
In this video Facade is used to promote an abstinence program.
Introduction: Lawrence Lessig/Professor, Harvard Law School Eric Besson/MInister of Industry, Energy & Digital Economy, France Charles Chao/Chairman & CEO, SINA Corp. Yuri Milner/CEO & Managing Partner, Digital Sky Technologies Xavier Niel/Founder & Chairman, Iliad Sean Parker/Managing Partner, Founders Fund Niklas Zennström/CEO & Founding Partner, Atomico Moderator: John Gapper/Chief Business Commentator, Financial Times
N. Katherine Hayles professor of literature at Duke University is interviewed by Stacey Cochran for Raleigh Television Network program The Artist's Craft. Directed by Marnie Cooper Priest and Michael Graziano.
A mythical text in the areas of computer media and literature, Literary Machines by Theodor "Ted" Nelson has been reprinted again. A book I have long wanted to read, but have never been able to afford (check out $191 on Amazon)
Literary Machines by Theodor Holm Nelson Mindful Press Distributed by Eastgate Systems Inc ISBN 0-89347-062-7 $25.00
An incredible multisequential volume about inventing hypertext, reforming copyright, reimagining quotation, and reworking education and reading. It extends from the viscous soup of the politics of computing to the nuts and bolts of how a hypertext system can, for instance, represent arbitrarily large integers compactly. The systems humanist is presented as an alternative to the techie “noid” and humanist “fluffy.” Nelson proposed to reshape literacy and publishing far more profoundly than Haussman altered Paris. Although he admits that a next-generation system might be needed at some point, the general approach is to think about the problem long and hard, devise a more or less flawless system, and then just implement it, never iterating. We should be glad that Xanadu was sketched, not completed. The dynamic, incisive, and continually revised and evolving writings of Ted Nelson have participated in thought and culture in a way that no crystalline, fully armed and operational literary machine could have. (From GXA)
I have asked the university library to buy it.....
Engelska D, litt.vet. inr. 30 hp 12a Digital literature 12b Bakhtin and the Dialogic Principle
15th April 10:15-12:00 C203.
'Life knows two value-centers that are fundamentally and essentially different, yet are correlated with each other: myself and the other; and it is around these centers that all of the concrete moments of Being are distributed and arranged.' — Mikhail Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act
What is Digital Literature? See http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html The term refers to simulative and representational works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the broad category of digital literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:
•Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web •Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms •Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects •Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots •Interactive fiction •Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs •Poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning •Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work •Literary performances online that develop new ways of writing (Adapted from the Electronic Literature Organization)
Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture Jenkins' essay outlines a way of thinking about computer games, as digital communicative artifacts, some of which embody stories or narratives. Central to Jenkins ideas about computer games and narrative are:
1. Spatiality: “Before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about game spaces. Across a series of essays, I have made the case that game consoles should be regarded as machines for generating compelling spaces, that their virtual playspaces have helped to compensate for the declining place of the traditional backyard in contemporary boy culture, and that the core narratives behind many games center around the struggle to explore, map, and master contested spaces.” (Jenkins 4)
2. Environmental Story Telling: “Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.” (Jenkins 5-6)
3. Enacting Stories: “Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player's reaching their final destination, though, as Mary Fuller notes, not all travel narratives end successfully or resolve the narrative enigmas which set them into motion. Once again, we are back to principles of "environmental storytelling." The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward movement towards resolution. Over the past several decades, game designers have become more and more adept at setting and varying the rhythm of game play through features of the game space.” (Jenkins 7)
4, Embedded Narratives “According to this model, narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble and make hypothesis about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues. As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the game world itself. If you are wrong about whether the bad guys lurk behind the next door, you will find out soon enough - perhaps by being blown away and having to start the game over.” (Jenkins 9)
5. Emergent Narratives "The characters [of The Sims] have a will of their own, not always submitting easily to the player's control, as when a depressed protagonist refuses to seek employment, preferring to spend hour upon hour soaking in their bath or moping on the front porch. Characters are given desires, urges, and needs, which can come into conflict with each other, and thus produce dramatically compelling encounters. Characters respond emotionally to events in their environment, as when characters mourn the loss of a loved one. Our choices have consequences, as when we spend all of our money and have nothing left to buy them food. The gibberish language and flashing symbols allow us to map our own meanings onto the conversations, yet the tone of voice and body language can powerfully express specific emotional states, which encourage us to understand those interactions within familiar plot situations." (Jenkins 12)
Who was M.M. Bakhtin? http://www.rpi.edu/~zappenj/Bibliographies/bakhtin.htm Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born in Orel, south of Moscow, in 1895 and grew up in Vilnius and Odessa. He studied classics and philology at St. Petersburg (later Petrograd) University, then moved to the country, first to Nevel and then to Vitebsk, in the wake of the revolutions of 1917. During the 1930’s and early 1940’s, he completed some of his most important studies of the novel, including "Discourse in the Novel," "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," and "Epic and Novel." He also completed his major work on Rabelais, submitted as his doctoral dissertation to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow in 1941 (he was later awarded the lower degree of Candidate). A successful teacher in Saransk during the 1950’s, Bakhtin was discovered in the early 1960’s by a group of Moscow graduate students who had read his Dostoevsky book. He wrote notes titled "Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book" in 1961; published a second edition of the book, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, in 1963; published the Rabelais book, Rabelais and his World, in 1965; and published a collection of his most important essays on the novel, The Dialogic Imagination, in the year of his death, 1975. During the last twenty-five years of his life, he also wrote several essays later published under the title Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. His work spread throughout the West in the 1980’s and is the subject of vigorous debate and reassessment in Russia in the mid 1990’s (Emerson, First Hundred Years).
Bakhtin can be described as a philosopher, cultural and literary critic and theorist. In his large body of work, much of which has not been translated into English, Bakhtin provides several theoretical devices that can be used to critically analyze cultural and symbolic systems. Chronotope, Carnivalization, Heteroglossia, Polyphonic, Monologic, and Dialogism are all terms which Bakhtin applies complex meanings to, in a sense as analytical tools. The last of these, dialogism is what we will be discussing today, particularly in relation to a work of digital literature.
In the English translation of “The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays” by M. M. Bakhtin (2002 edition), dialogism is described as
“Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as part of a greater whole – there is constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of it current inhabitants, insures that there is no actual monologue. One may, like a primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into thinking there is one language, or one may, as grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of “literary languages” do, seek in a sophisticated way to achieve a unitary language. In both cases the unitariness is relative to the overpowering force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism.” (Glossary to Bakhtin,2002:426 by Holquist)
Key Words and Phrases
“Epistemological mode” "A theory of the grounds of knowledge: how we ‘make meaning'." (Pearce 2)
“Heteroglossia” “Many Tongues”
“Refers to the ‘internal differentiation’ and ‘stratification’ of different registers within a language in particular, the struggle between the official (ideological dominant) and nonofficial registers.” (Pearce 62)
“The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological - that will insure that a word uttered in that place at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as it possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such it is that which systematic linguistics must always suppress.” (Glossary to Bakhtin,2002:428 by Holquist)
“Monologue” “Speaking alone”
“Monologue refers to those texts in which (to quote Lodge) ‘the authorial narrator does not merely impose his own imperative frame on the table, but makes the characters speak the same language as himself.’ (p19) Bakhtin, as we have already seen, associates this type of authorial hegemony largely with prenovelistic discourse, although it is also a tendency in the classic-realist novel fronted by the so-called ‘omniscient narrator’.” Pearce 51)
"Dialogue" Not simply ‘turn taking’, but is perhaps better expressed in the word closest to that used by Bakhtin; dialogism. Dialogism is a state or condition, not just an activity but a quality of being.
“Dialogic relationships are possible not only among whole (relatively whole) utterances; a dialogic approach is possible toward any signifying part of an utterance, even toward an individual word, if that word is perceived not as the impersonal word of language but as a sign of someone else’s semantic position, as the representative of another person’s utterance, that is if we hear it in someone else’s voice. Thus dialogic relationships can permeate inside the utterance, even inside the individual word as long as two voices collide within it dialogically (microdialogue, of which we spoke earlier).” (Bakhtin, 2002:184)
In relation to a work of digital literature dialogism operates throughout the artifact. It is in the sense that the mechanics and design of the work of digital literature are also sources or sites of meaning. The materiality of literary works as dialogic systems, no matter what media, is well illustrated by a short video, “Learn the Book”:
What makes a book meaningful in the context of the ‘medieval helpdesk’ is learning the registers of its use. These registers are culturally, historically and socially situated. Because we are so familiar with books as a means of storing and transmitting information, culture, knowledge, and so on we do not question the dialogues that exist around such artifacts and how they are employed in the construction of meaning.
A well known and respected theorist of digital literature, Katherine Hayles writes;
“Let us begin rethinking materiality by noting that it is impossible to precisely specify what a book – or any other text – is as a physical object, for there are an infinite number of ways its physical characteristics can be described. Speaking of electronic text, for example, we could focus on the polymers used to make the plastic case or the palladium used in the power cord. The physical instantiation of the text will in this sense always be indeterminate. What matters for understanding literature, however, is how the text creates the possibilities for meaning by mobilizing certain aspects of its physicality.” (Hayles 2005 103)
So, how does the digital text create “the possibilities for meaning by mobilizing certain aspects of its physicality?” By observing the principles of dialogism as proposed by Bakhtin and applying them to a complex, one could say heteroglossic, example of digital textuality; we can gain some idea of how the possibilities are embodied in the assemblage.
Alleph http://www.alleph.net/splash.html Alleph is a complex labyrinth based upon seven depicted visual spaces; an overgrown garden, an abandoned school classroom, a brick wall, an abandoned workshop, empty prison cells, a landscape of menhirs and an abandoned medical theatre. From these dynamic, navigable spaces eleven texts of spoken and written prose, poetic and dramatic narratives and eight puzzles (game or toy like) can be opened from links in the spaces. Move your cursor around inside the images and when you come across a link a green mass will appear around the cursor. Click on the link and it will open a window of text, audio or graphics. As well as the spoken audio texts; in Rasta Creole English, Persian, Urdu and Standard English, there are also several sound and music audio texts. Spoken and written works included within Alleph are by Maqapi Selassie, Farid al Din Attar, and are performed by Amjad Hussain Shah and coded by Irvine Saunders. Alleph was produced using Macromedia Flash by a production team from Emote Media Production Company in Birmingham England, led by digital artist Sakab Bashir. The work is described by Bashir as “A true interactive story” and “a self portrait” in “a patient labyrinth of lines tracing the face”.
The remainder of this seminar shall be devoted to looking at, interpreting and experiencing Alleph by Sakab Bashir.
Texts Referenced Bakhtin M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1981. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas Press, 2002.
Bakhtin M.M. Towards a Philosophy of the Act. trans. and notes by Vadim Liapunov, ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov Austin: Texas UP, 1993
Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Pearce. Lynne. Reading Dialogics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.
The 2007 NMC Conference Proceedings features sixteen papers on topics from virtual worlds and gaming to streaming media technologies, digital storytelling, and more. The topics were ones nominated by attendees at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference held in June at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis.
The Proceedings include these papers:
The Arts Metaverse in Open Croquet: Exploring an Open Source 3-D Online Digital World Ulrich Rauch and Tim Wang | University of British Columbia Beyond World of Warcraft: the Universe of MMOGs Ruben R. Puentedura | Hippasus ClevelandPlus in Second Life Wendy Shapiro, Lev Gonick, and Sue Shick | Case Western Reserve University Out of the Cave or Further In? The Realities of Second Life Gregory Reihman | Lehigh University Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: Socio-emotional Dimensions of Digital Culture Which Are Transforming the Shape of New Media Literacies Angela Thomas | University of Sydney Teaching Field Research in a Virtual World Ed Lamoureux | Bradley University A View from Second Life’s Trenches: Are You a Pioneer or a Settler? Cynthia Calongne | Colorado Technical University
N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (ND Ward Phillips Lectures)
A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with Electronic Literature by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study. Hayles's book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts.
Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models. Key to her argument is the observation that almost all contemporary literature has its genesis as electronic files, so that print becomes a specific mode for electronic text rather than an entirely different medium. Hayles illustrates the implications of this condition with three contemporary novels that bear the mark of the digital.
Included with the book is a CD, The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, containing sixty new and recent works of electronic literature with keyword index, authors' notes, and editorial headnotes. Representing multiple modalities of electronic writing--hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, narrative animations, installation pieces, and Flash poetry--the ELC 1 encompasses comparatively low-tech work alongside heavily coded pieces. Complementing the text and the CD-ROM is a website offering resources for teachers and students, including sample syllabi, original essays, author biographies, and useful links. Together, the three elements provide an exceptional pedagogical opportunity.
The Swedish public service television has begun a new format for news broadcast. In an effort to bolster lagging ratings the SVT 9pm broadcast has done away with ties on men and now show long shots (5-10 seconds) of camera men scurrying around as presenters move about the scene, dominated by a huge plasma screen, chroma key video screen and a warm orange and red backdrop set.
Notice necktie missing. Here added by the SVT editorial to draw attention to the fact that it is missing.
So far nothing so extraordinary about a news broadcast reskinning. What is interesting about the 'new' SVT news is the ’Open Editorial’ broadcast that is now available on the website. Here, through a series of short videos 'we' are shown something of the processes behind the 30 minutes of news sent nightly by SVT at 9pm. The composition of these videos is interesting:
"But the question is, what will the editorial team achieve. Will Anna Hedenmo record a false direct (live on tape) with a Danish Police officer or will he [sic] go direct live with a link. It depends upon that he [sic] must translate."
To me these rhetorical questions suggest reality TV, which in a sense it is. What I find more interesting is the concept of transparency that is implied by ‘Open Editorial’. I agree with Jay Bolter, that media transparency is not only a myth; it has the potential to be dangerous:
The problem was that the operators [of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979] did not question their interface. They treated the valve indicator as if it were a transparent window on the level of water inside the reactor. The operators should have been prepared for that possibility; they should have looked at the indicator rather than through it. Under the pressure of an emergency, however, they made the assumption of transparency. (Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, 54), ( taken from The Myth of Transparency)
While we are looking through the ‘Open Editorial’ at the scene of the news making, we are perhaps being encouraged to believe that it is not being 'made' but rather is happening. We join our presenters at the scene:
Meanwhile at the desk side, a discussion of possibilities unfolds
In this image one should notice that we are at eye level with each of the participants and sharing the space with them from that perspective. All of the videos are constructed in a similar fashion. If the participants are sitting down then the camera is shooting from the eye height of someone sitting down (usually from the chair next to them). In the next shot we gaze upon a reporter hard at work and the computer he is using is clearly branded. The national television network SVT is non-commercial, and has a policy against branding. But when we go behind the scenes we become aware of a level of branding that is probably inevitable in such a form:
The news is brought to you by Dell Computers
Finally, I would like you to compare SVT 'Open Editorial' with another form of 'open' news broadcasting. 'OhmyNews' is a citizens news network based in South Korea but that reaches all over the world:
"OhmyNews is a South Korean online newspaper with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000.
It is the first of its kind in the world to accept, edit and publish articles from its readers, in an open source style of news reporting. About 20% of the site's content is written by the 55-person staff while the majority of articles are written by other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens.
OhmyNews was influential in determining the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections in December 2002 with the election of Roh Moo Hyun. After being elected, Roh granted his first interview to OhmyNews.
OhmyNews International is an English language online newspaper that features "citizen reporter" articles written by contributors from all over the globe. Its content is almost 100% citizen reporter.
On February 22, 2006, OhmyNews and Japanese firm Softbank signed an investment contract valued at US$11 million. In 2006 OhmyNews started to build a Japan-based citizen-participatory journalism site called OhmyNews Japan, launched on August 28 with a famous Japanese journalist and 22 other employees working under ten reporters. These journalists' articles were the object of much criticism, on Nov. 17, 2006, the newspaper ended the citizen-participation aspect of the paper. The South Korean newspaper admitted that OhmyNews Japan had failed.[1]
The 2nd Citizen Reporters' Forum was held by OhmyNews in Seoul, Korea from July 12 to 15, 2006.
The 3rd International Citizen Reporters Forum was held by OhmyNews in Seoul from June 27 to 29 in 2007." Wikipedia
While the differences between 'Open Editorial' and 'OhmyNews' are clear and not surprising, it seems that the ambition of the former is to be more like the latter.
Welcome to When Fiction Meets Interaction, a day of exploring electronic literature in HUMlab.
"This Will Install a Story. Do you Want to Continue?", so begins the installation of Michael Joyce's 1987 hypertext work of fiction, Afternoon, a story. The use of the term 'Install' ("To connect or set in position and prepare for use") preempts many of the key concepts in electronic literature that remain relevant even 20 years after the first version of Afternoon, a story was published. The works of electronic literature (eLit) we will look at today are read and responded to using a monitor screen. Behind what is on the screen are at least two layers of computer programming or code. The human readable code of an authoring program such as Macromedia Flash and the machine readable binary code that all digital media rely upon. The setting up of the story ready for use is not something one associates with books outside the the use of a book to perform an act, such as a marriage or oath of office when a bible is installed for the ceremony. Electronic literature is installed, used and performed as the reader/user/player interacts with the codes of the text to produce a story. The Electronic Literature Organisation is a useful source for information and a definition of eLit:
What is Electronic Literature? The term refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:
* Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web * Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms * Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects * Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots * Interactive fiction * Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs * Poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning * Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work * Literary performances online that develop new ways of writing
There is more to eLit than the short list given here. For example how would we classify 34 North 118 West(2004) - a location aware interactive game that can be played when you visit "real world" Los Angeles. GPS tracks your location as you walk around in Los Angeles, and what your story will be like depends on how you move around in the city.
Although they may vary considerably in form and content we can use Joyce's Afternoon as a prophetic starting point for a short tour of the history of eLit and what he says of the text has resonance in many previous and subsequent works:
"Pursuit of texture", to quote Joyce, could be a summary for the whole of eLit I think, to have the curves and crevices as our journey through a text is to interact with it. If it is a game the goal is to tell the story, a story, which ever story emerges at that time. The means of telling a story electronically did not emerge over night, as Jan has pointed out in his introduction today dealing with computer development in the 1940's; this thing has a pedigree and here is just a few of the many antecedents:
"It were miserable for a person not to come and obtain All the sciences of the world, collected together in my breast, For I know what has been, what in future will occur." - Taliesin (c.534 – c.599)
The bard learnt the stories from a teacher and then retold them from memory, adding their own elements to the telling. Improvisation is the seed of interaction for where there is uncertainty there is invention.
Pilgrimage: Reading a text (the bible, the koran, the vedas, the sutras) and then acting out their contents in a journey to a sacred place has many similarities to the quest and epic narratives of certain genres of eLit. Pilgrims have been dressing in special clothes and performing rituals based in texts for a very long time. A good example is The Book of the Wanderings of Felix Fabri (Circa 1480-1483 A.D.).
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream by Francesco Colonna (1499) The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili relates the story of the dream of Poliphilo 'in which it is shown that all human things are but a dream, and many other things worthy of knowledge and memory.' The tongue twisting 'Hypnerotomachia' poetically translates as the 'strife of love in a dream'. This magical book reads like a work of interactive fiction as the hero in the "labyrinthine plot, moves through many strange places encountering dragons, wolves, and maidens, against an ever changing backdrop of mysterious ruins, monuments, orchards, gardens and fountains." Richly illustrated with artistic use of typeface and layout the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili borders upon the interactive with its intricate plot and engaging design.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-1769) Trying to explain Tristram Shandy is not easy. Best just include a single image from the text: Tristram Shandy is real in the sense that one must face the same moments Tristram faces as he attempts to tell his story. We wait while he waits and we all wait together.
"Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change" Locksley Hall, Alfred Tennyson.
In Paris in 1925 some artistic friends developed a game they called cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse):
The technique was invented by Surrealists in 1925, and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution.
Later the game was adapted to drawing and collage, producing a result similar to children's books in which the pages were cut into thirds, the top third pages showing the head of a person or animal, the middle third the torso, and the bottom third the legs, with children having the ability to "mix and match" by turning pages. It has also been played by mailing a drawing or collage — in progressive stages of completion — to the players, and this variation is known as "exquisite corpse by airmail", or "mail art," depending on whether the game travels by airmail or not.
The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." ("The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.")
"El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" ("The Garden of Forking Paths") by Jorge Luis Borges (1941) "The form of the Garden is that of a detective story. At the centre of the narration is a book written by Chinese philosopher Ts’ui Pen. The book itself comments on the notion of time. Stephen Albert, the Sinologist friend of the narrator Yu Tsun, explains to him that Ts’ui Pen’s two goals, construct a labyrinth and write a book, merge into the published book based on his ‘chaotic manuscripts’. The book’s title is the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ as well. The book is the labyrinth, the Garden. The construction of the maze is explained by Albert: In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses simultaneously all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork" The Garden of Forking Paths
Concrete Poetry Concrete poetry, pattern poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has evolved to have distinct meaning of its own. Early examples of typographically-based poetry include poems by George Herbert (1593-1633) and parts of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. More recent poets sometimes cited as influences by concrete poets include Guillaume Apollinaire, E. E. Cummings, for his various typographical innovations, and Ezra Pound, for his use of Chinese ideograms, as well as various dadaists.See the online text by Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968, Indiana University Press).
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets The Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine that bears that name) are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s; its central figures are all actively writing, teaching, and performing their work today. In developing their poetics, members of the Language school took as their starting point the emphasis on method evident in the modernist tradition, particularly as represented by Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky. Language poetry is also an example of poetic postmodernism. Its immediate postmodern precursors were the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Eliza (1966) ELIZA is a computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, designed in 1966, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Thus, for example, the response to "My head hurts" might be "Why do you say your head hurts?" The response to "My mother hates me" might be "Who else in your family hates you?" ELIZA was named after Eliza Doolittle, a working-class character in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, who is taught to speak with an upper class accent.
We are now at a point were we can talk about electronic literature. In 1970 computer programmers Theodor H. Nelson, Nicolas Negroponte and Les Levine exhibited electronic works in Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. The Software exhibition was pivotal in the development of the creative use of computers as “neither a celebration of technology nor a condemnation, but an investigation, through implementation of new shapes for the processes brought into the culture via computation.” (Theodore H. Nelson “[Introduction] From Software – Information Technology: It’s New Meaning for Art” 1970, The New Media Reader, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort Eds. p248)
In Afternoon, a story the narrator, Peter, begins by addressing the reader, "I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning." The quest for closure on such a powerful concept as the death of a child drives the story through multiple labyrinths comprised of 539 interconnected lexias.
Lexia: [The text under study, Balzac's short story "Sarrasine,"] will be cut up into a series of brief, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading. This cutting up will be arbitrary in the extreme . . . . The lexia will include sometimes a few words, sometimes several sentences; it will be a matter of convenience: it will suffice that the lexia be the best possible space in which we can observe meanings . . ." Roland Barthes S/Z (1970) p13.
"Closure is, as in any fiction, a suspect quality although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends. -- from "Work in Progress", a lexia in Afternoon. (Overcoming Closure)
Maybe we should read some of Afternoon, a story.
If you want to spend more time pondering the ways of early commercial hypertext fiction this is a good power point on Hypertext.
Further Hypertexts of the First Generation: Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden and Reagan Library, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl and Deena Larsen's Marble Springs, and more from Eastgate.
Newer Hypertext that have moved into more visual and three dimensional forms:
Cybertexts (some of these links are old as I compiled this list in 2003)..
This study investigates Anglophone digital poems, created with and disseminated through digital computer media, for their visual, kinetic, and textual practices. I seek to articulate an analytic method grounded in close readings of selected poems. I have chosen to focus on poetic practices that raise questions about spatiality, temporality, kineticism, and word-and-image construction. My chief interest lies in how poetic form is orchestrated and what forms of engagement these digital constructions present the reader with.
Underlying the main arguments of this study is an understanding of literary works in general as materially, culturally, and historically situated entities. Such “attention to material” is brought to bear on the digital poems that I analyze. Building upon N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of a “media-specific analysis,” I propose a materially specific analysis. In line with this proposition, I investigate particular properties of three clusters of poems. I propose terms such poemevents, cinematographic poems, and visual noise poems.
A common feature of digital poems is the multisensory experience created through visual, auditive, tactile, kinetic, and textual artifice. The reader’s level of interaction is often of utmost importance. To articulate the different roles that the reader has to take on, I use two compound terms: reader/user and reader/viewer/listener. I argue that the active embodied engagement that is required of the reader/user in some digital poems and the denial of an active participation in others is part of the works’ materiality.
Digital poetry as a field is expanding; it would not be too daring to claim that the exploration of the writing of poetry in the age of new media has only begun. I conclude the thesis by looking forward to what might lay ahead, how literary scholarship can be inspired by digital poetic work, and the questions about literary materiality that it poses.
The entire text is downloadable online. Having known Maria for the past three years I know that this text will be of the highest standard and it will become an important contribution to the field of digital text theory. Congratulations Maria!
