Introduction to Thesis Chapter Two: The Spatial in the Digital Preface

Figure 2.1: Dreamaphage introduction, describing the spaces of the work in the contexts of narrative. 

This chapter examines how the prefaces to the digital works introduce the spatial in preparation for reader interaction. This preparation is manifest in two forms: firstly, as representations of space; and secondly, in the establishment of representational space. The representation of space follows a tendency “towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs” (Lefebvre 39), which are manifest in the prefaces as maps, diagrams and images. These systems include rules for interaction with the digital works. In conjunction with the representation of space, representational space in the prefaces “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” and is composed of “more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre 39). The prefaces introduce the reader to representational space via narrative elements such as characters and objects. By examining these features of representational space, I establish how the prefaces introduce the reader to the digital texts, and in particular interaction with them, but positioning her in relation to the spaces of narrative. I argue the prefaces establish representational space and the representation of space and in doing so establish rules related to the spatial for interacting with the digital works. Interaction is represented in the prefaces on the condition of compliance: firstly, with the rules of the representation of space; and secondly, with the objects, characters and narrative references introduced within representational space. By introducing spaces in the works thus, the prefaces assert control over interaction with the digital works.

              The prefaces introduce the spatial as the means for achieving goals. In the preface to Dreamaphage (See Figure 2.1) a cure is said to reside in the dreams of the characters, where “all other methods are errors. The words of these books, their dreams, contain the cure” (Dreamaphage). The prefaces guide the reader towards the goal of the cure “hidden in the dreams themselves”. The preface describes Dreamaphage as containing hidden elements deep within its spatial structures, including “dozens of hidden buttons and lost texts,” that are “leading to the books” (Dreamaphage Preface). These emphasized points, buttons, objects, lost texts and the books, represent stages moving toward (“leading to”) goals. The prefaces to Egypt also suggest goals (e.g. the command; “You may not want to read it now, but take it with you when you go!” Egypt), which focus on a presence for the reader in the spaces of the text.  In this context of goals, space is more than just a structural component to the texts; it functions as a representative meta-medium governing all interaction, including reading and navigation. This structuring follows the meta-organizing principles I have already described as grounded in Lefebvre’s tri-partite model of production. In the digital works, the reader is given specific goals, such as locating the name spell in Egypt or the cure to the dreamaphage virus in Dreamaphage, and solving the relationship problems in Façade of Grace and Trip, “an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties” (Façade website). I argue that these instructions are attempts to prescribe interaction with the spaces of the works.

              I begin by describing the prefaces as examples of remediation how the referencing of older media sets the initial boundaries for interaction. I argue this remediation is a controlling element in the prefaces and is part of their paratextual function. I then explain how the prefaces prepare the reader for the spatial components of the works. I go on to clarify how the prefaces reference the space of the texts, and as a result position the reader in relation to interaction. The prefaces to Façade are the website; http://www.interactivestory.net/ (ii) a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ); and (iii) “Behind the Façade” (a PDF document published separately from the other two components).[1] Egypt’s prefaces are; (i) the introduction (with dedication, Figure 2.2 below); (ii) the Glossary and Rubric; (iii) the maps (Figure 2.4); and (iv) the “Papyrus Sections” (Figure 2.4). The Dreamaphage prefaces are; i) the introduction from the published work by the Electronic Literature Organization; (ii) a further two-stage introduction; and (iii) a brief Help guide.[2] The preface to Last Meal Requested is a description of narrative context but does not prescribe reading. Last Meal Requested is also archived at the Rhizome Artbase (http://rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/16975/), where it features a prefatory artist statement introducing the main themes of the work.[3] I argue that the prefaces prescribe  interaction in how space is first presented in maps and diagrams according to representations of space and through representational space.

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[1] “Behind the Façade” can be ordered as a PDF document from the authors. It is sent via email once a five dollar charge is paid online.

[2] Both the prefaces to Dreamaphage are accessible from http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/nelson__dreamaphage.html

[3] The present study works with the copy kept at www.e-garde.net.

Close Reading Space in Interactive Digital Literature (Thesis Extract Chapter One - Methods and Background)

Close reading  cannot be applied equally to all media as a single method of analysis. For example, the difference between close reading a novel and a digital work can be grounded in the roles of space and interaction and how both contribute to narrative. David Ciccoricco examines this compatibility between close reading and the interactive potentials of digital literature, concluding “we are left with an inherent contradiction for close reading digital literature: one simply cannot close read digital text in the New Critical sense, for reading a text as a text does not work when you can no longer take the "text" to be an idealized abstract site of formal interplay” (Ciccoricco 2012 np). However, Ciccoricco does go on to answer this challenge by referencing I. A. Richards’ famous statement, “a book is a machine to think with” (Richards 1). By developing a close reading that includes the material Ciccoricco proposes a re-evaluation of it as a method of analysis that is related to the re-creation that takes place in all reading. This close reading of digital literature includes a focus on the meaning-making machine that is the material work. It is the contention of the following study that the material specifics of the digital work as a text are dominated by the spatial in a system that is both interpreted and interacted with, for the purposes of narrative formulation.

Close reading can explain the interpretive possibilities as well as the changes brought about by reader interaction with  the spatial and multimodal dimensions of digital works of literature. In order to analyze such interaction and interpretation, my close reading follows Jan Van Looy and Jan Baetens’ method whereby

Reading is always an act of dismembering, or tearing open in search of hidden meanings. ‘Close’ as in ‘close reading’ has come to mean ‘in an attentive manner’, but in the expression ‘to pay close attention’, for example, we still have some nearness […] when it comes to close reading the text is never trusted at face value, but it is torn to pieces and reconstituted by a reader who is always at the same time a demolisher and a constructor (9-10).

Van Looy and Baetens’ material metaphor of dismemberment combines design and address in the creation of narrative. “The text is never trusted at face value” and reading follows a process of interpretive interaction (“pay close attention”) and physical process (“torn to pieces”). Opening the digital text and its interpretation include a presence for the reader within its spatial structures, searching for an epiphany in its “hidden meanings”. In opening up these works as spaces, and studying closely how they can be navigated and re-arranged, it is the material components that guide interpretation. The material elements combine in the design of space in perspective and the emphases of the monumental. This process is a combination of “a pre-digital historical conception of close reading and the sort of materially-conscious hermeneutics that digital textuality requires” (Ciccoricco 2012 np). I demonstrate the combination of traditional close reading with an interpretive awareness of the material in my attention to the spatial possibilities of the digital works.

My close reading combines the material components of the digital texts in its focus on the spatial. David Ciccoricco describes such a reading as the “close analysis of the individual components that comprise its topology” (Ciccoricco 2012 np). Ciccoricco argues “scholars of digital textuality are determined to move away from the dominant paradigm of a textual topography, and instead speak more accurately of textual topology” (2012 np).  This contrast between topography and topology is important for understanding how I apply close reading to the spatial dimensions of the digital works. Topography "originally meant the creation of a metaphorical equivalent in words of a landscape. Then, by another transfer, it came to mean representation of a landscape according to the conventional signs of some system of mapping. Finally, by a third transfer, the names of the map were carried over to name what is mapped" (Hillis Miller 3-4). Thus topography represents space, but is not spatial of itself, with the three examples cited by Hillis Miller (i.e. metaphorical equivalent, representation and the name of what is mapped) being instances of  symbols standing-in for a physical entity. Thus topography is not interactive in the sense space is in the digital works, where the search for Van Looy and Baeten's "hidden meanings" demands a level of interaction that does not operate just on the level of the symbolic. Rather, it is necessary to combine interaction and interpretation in a close reading of the digital texts on the level of topology.

The linearity of topography can be contrasted with textual topology, or  “the material form of network narrative” (Ciccoricco 2007 57), as my focus of close reading the digital interactive works. Hanjo Bresseme qualifies this network as how “structure, texts, images and sounds can be mapped onto and inserted into each other […]. The various media are no longer framed in and thus framed off from each other”  (34). The interdependent framing results in an interactive space

The hypermedia topology is characterized by a conflation of and oscillation between surface and depth, because although the textual traces always appear superficially on the user’s screen […], hypermedial space consists of a multiplicity of levels and layers that are successively folded onto this surface that is, furthermore, used for both reading and writing purposes that thus conflates not only the surface and depths but also the active and the passive onto one spatial plane (Bresseme 34-35).

It is precisely the movement between surface and depth that is realized in reading perspective, focus and the monumental in the digital works of my study. I contend that like all forms of space, the hypermedial is profoundly material in its “multiplicity of levels and layers that are successively folded” (35).[1] I combine the interpretive materiality of surface and depth, levels and layers with the dismemberment of Van Looy and Baetens to create an interactive form of close reading that interprets spatial dynamics in design and address.

By combining topology with the dismembering of the text I devise a close reading that includes the written word and image as well as the spatial dynamics of the navigable, interactive and ergodic in the digital texts. In this way my close reading follows the idea that any analysis of interactive narrative works “must consider the formal, material, and discursive elements of each work as at once distinct and inseparable, each integrated toward the production of meaning” (Ciccoricco 2012 np). The formal is present in the prefaces to the digital texts as prescriptive guides and authorial instructions for reading. The material is made a part of the interpretation of the text in its design. The discursive operates in addressivity and indicates the limited range of responses that can be made to them by the reader. The spatial provides a frame for the integration of these “formal, material, and discursive elements of each work”, and this is what my close reading takes up. I argue throughout my study that the spatial represents a juncture between the materiality and the interpretive possibilities of the digital works. The point of Ciccoricco’s argument, that "digital media do not dispossess us of an interpretive reading practice" (np), strengthens my approach that finds the spatial as interactive and dominant in the formation of narrative. 

In my close reading of the digital works I analyze formal, material and selected discursive elements according to how they are produced by the spatial. Both material and addressive criteria are parts of close reading in the “consideration of the formal, material, and discursive elements of each work as at once distinct and inseparable, each integrated toward the production of meaning” (Ciccoricco 2012 np). The monumental, place, addressivity and perspective are ‘the individual components that comprise its topology’ in my close reading of the spatial. My focus on these elements aligns with Ciccoricco argument that, “it is also necessary to extend discourse of 'spatiality' as it pertains to reading and rereading. It is necessary, that is, to move over and away from the ‘Line’ and into the space of the network ” (Ciccoricco 2007 44). It is precisely this movement from the line of conventional narrative discourse, into the governance by the spatial of interaction with the digital works that is the subject of the following close readings. The shift in analysis from “the ‘Line’” to networked and interactive elements is accomplished through my adaption of the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre. Space in the digital works is coded according to Lefebvre's concepts of representation of space and representational space.

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[1] Bresseme references the “immateriality of the texts” (35), but this seems to contradict the concept of hypermedial space characterized by surface, depth, levels and layers.


Works Cited

Bresseme, Hanjo. 'One Surface Fits All: Texts, Images and the Topology of Hypermedia”. Text and Visuality: Word & Image Interactions 3. Martin Heusser, Martin Heusser, Michèle Hannoosh, Leo Hoek, Charlotte Schoell-Glass & David Scott (Eds.). Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1999. 33-43. Print.

Ciccoricco, David. “The Materialities of Close Reading: 1942, 1956, 2009”. Digital   Humanities Quarterly, 2012 Volume 6 Number 1. 16 August 2012. Web. 25 August 2012 http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000113/000113.html
 
Ciccoricco, David.  Reading Network Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Print.

Hillis Miller, Joseph. Topographies. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995. Print.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 2007. Print.

Richards, I.A. The Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Trubner, 1926. Print. 

Monumentality, Perspective, the Iconic and Remediation in the Design of Digital Narrative Works

In the influential study on screen media The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg convincingly argues, “the computer screen is both a ‘page’ and a ‘window’, at once opaque and transparent. It commands a new posture for the practice of writing and reading – one that requires looking into the page as if it were the frame of a window” (Friedberg 2006 19). My analysis of the spaces that result from design can be equated with the visual composition of the page/window, according to perspective and monumentality, the iconic and remediation. Firstly, a scene from a window can include monumental emphases upon objects that result in the viewer assigning significance to them within the overall scene. Monumentality, as I explained in Chapter One, is the coded organization of space where hierarchies are attached to “the strong points, nexuses or anchors” (Lefebvre 2007 222), resulting in the meanings of that space. These points establish what can be termed representational space, providing both meaning and guidance for reader navigation and interpretation.[1] Representation space is “directly lived through [by] its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’” (Lefebvre 39). I equate monumentality in the works with “non-verbal symbols and signs,” which evoke “not ‘stories’ but suggestive markings” and “trigger reactions” (Nitsche 2008 44). The ‘suggestive markings’ within monumentality organizes the reader’s temporal experience of space as a fundamental element in design. The results are emphases on particular features and these influence representational space, foremost through the provision of procedurality and focus in the reading of narrative. Interpretation of the monumental points occurs in relation to each other and defines the character of representational space. As I explain in the following analysis, a monumental point relates to other monumental points, forming a relational grid of meaning/s within representational space. Design techniques for the creation of monumentality include repetition (a single element repeated multiple times within a space), perspective (emphasizing dimensions, proximity or scale), auditory (sound placed at important points within the space) and objects and elements of space (doors, furniture, ornaments) that are associated with characters and are expressed (and therefore linked) in dialogue.

Perspective is a particularly important codified system in the design of the works, where point of view is manipulated, resulting in both meaning and restrictions in reading. In the following analysis I explain how perspective is not only visual, but emerges in the spatial as the result of audio and haptics (touch simulation) in the works. Audio establishes the perimeters of representation space, and in doing so it sets the temporal and spatial perspective/s experienced by the reader in reception. Firstly, the audio in the works establishes spatial perspective by breaking up the representational space and marking out significant monumental points for the reader, which establishes the order of narrative.  Audio establishes spatial perspective with spatially arranged “sounds [that] can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality” (Kahn 1999 27). As a result of the arrangement of audio in design, the conceptually dissociative and embodied properties of sound have the potential to contribute to a representational space which includes the reader. Furthermore, the design of the audio immerses the reader in a physical relation to narrative, as Kahn states, by detaching vision as a conceptual apparatus and rendering the body a site for experience, understanding and spatiality. The positioning of the reader in representational space by design is linked to focalization, or “the perspective in terms of which the narrated situations and events are presented” (Prince 32). In responding to the sonic space of the works, temporal and spatial focalization becomes part of the procedural arrangement of narrative in design. In my examination of audio as a part of design I argue temporal perspective is a result of the focalization in narrative created by audio. The material dimensions of the digital works include the “temporal and spatial relationships [that] are essential to our understanding of [the] narratives and go beyond the specification of a date and a location” (Bridgeman 2005 65). Representational spaces in the works include the reader, as an embodied agent, as a character, or as a perspectival presence in the works. Placing the reader within the representational space of the works results in a restricted or guided experience of narrative.

In the acknowledgement of the page dimension to the digital works, remediation is central for how representational space is negotiated in reading. 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). This refashioning can influence the reception of the digital works in terms of reading as a historical and acquired practice. Each reference to an older medium in the digital is also a reference to the reception practices associated with that form. This historical awareness is an important element in reading representational space in the works. Remediation in design is thus meaningful due to the non-verbal qualities it brings to the works. In the digital works each instance of remediation adds perspectives to reading, as a remediated video, a book, or a phone, with each providing a distinct point of view within overall narrative structure. Due to the simulative nature of remediation in the digital works, each example of remediation comes with a perspective on narrative. A virtual-book supposes the physical act of reading and a home video supposes a viewing subject. As I explain in the following analysis, the objects in the digital works are related to themes in design and interaction with them results in reader perspective as part of narrative. What emerges from the triad of object, theme and perspective is the reader physically entering into a relationship with the digital work and performing it according to the structure of its design via its objects.

The object-theme-perspective triad in the digital works develops from the signification of Charles S. Pierce, as “a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs" (Pierce/Houser 1992 411). Space is defined in the works by the interactive elements that operate in narrative according to a triad of object-theme-perspective. The iconic sign is the basis for this triad in reading, which, as I have already clarified in previous chapters, “is a sign fit to be used as such because it possesses the quality signified” (Peirce New Elements Vol. 2 307). The object-theme-perspective triad is activated in the digital works when the object/s within the work are related to a narrative theme and any interaction with the object/s by the reader results in perspective/s on that theme. Repetition enforces the iconic in the works, as it creates meaning at the level of the material according to emphasis. In the design of the digital works, the repetition of a picture, a sound or a word is often meaningful according to its physical manifestation as multiple. This repetition results in the reading of forms and combinations as patterns, based on emphases.[2] Repetition is thus one element in meaningful design that guides reading, and which often spills over from the representational world of narrative into the inhabited world of the reader.  My primary example of this cross over between the narrative function of design and the role design plays in the physical work is monumentality. These exchanges between the physicality of design and the meaning of narrative according to monumentality hold elements of interactional metalepsis.

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[1] Such representation in the materials of digital media can be related to how “users of cyberspace have bought into the ‘spatialized’ scenario, complete with its imperialists overtones, by using frontier framework” along with the “highlighting and re-inscribing [of] suburban values” in such representational spaces as The Sims (Flanagan 2000 76). Flanagan’s argument takes up the re-inscription of values upon space that frame particular narrative possibilities. This is highly relevant to the present study.

[2] Emphasis as non-verbal meaning is discussed by Katherine Hayles (See Hayles 1999: 28, 98, 248 and 2005: 173, 182, 189).

Place in Digital Narrative

The representation of place in interactive digital texts is an important element in how narrative functions. In examining the literature, Eva Kingsepp (2006) analyzes place according to the narrative of the text in relation to the historical genre of “Nazi-ness” in the computer games Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of Honor: Underground. In Kingsepp’s approach, the representation of place within narrative is dependent upon “locations […] identified through a number of visual signs that together with connotations to other mediated visual representations, such as film and photography, establish a feeling of being in a certain place” (Kingsepp 67). The establishment of place in reading, according to Kingsepp, is dependent on the preexisting narrative associations, which are part of the “connotations to other mediated visual representations” (67). Places in the narrative are not points within the work where features are located, as these are spatial and part of design. A place addresses the reader in a representational sense, according to pre-existing narrative associations, where recognizable features depict or simulate elements of a location, either specifically such as Chicago or Cairo, or in terms of genre. A place that fulfills the requirements of genre functions on the level of depiction, in the sense of ‘village on the Nile’ or ‘a home’. The reader can often interact with these representations according to particular sets of pre-existing narrative elements, such as identifiable places (i.e. bar, lounge, hospital, generic Egypt, home, ancient ruin, colonial hotel).

         Place is not only a semantic label related to genres, even within the representational space of the digital works. Place is experienced and understood in the digital works, as “we tend to identify traces of circumambulatory movements that brings a place into being as boundaries that demarcate the place from its surrounding space” (Ingold 32). Navigation is a central element in this mode of reception. My reading of place in the digital works is profoundly dialogic, in a similar sense to that described by Ingold. When drawing on the work of Christopher Tilley (1994 25) and Lefebvre (1991 117-118), Ingold describes the role of place in human existence as

“place-binding. It unfolds not in places but along paths. Proceeding along a path, every inhabitant lays a trail. Where inhabitants meet, trails are entwined, as the life of each becomes bound up with the other. Every entwining is a knot, and the more that life-lines are entwined, the greater the density of the knot. Places, then, are like knots and the threads from which they are tied are lines of wayfaring” (Ingold 33).

These convergences of experience and habitation are named and these names represent the sum total of what makes the place. Places that are both inhabited and imagined in the physical world are represented in the digital works. Interaction (mainly navigation and manipulation of objects), and language are the methods by which the reader inhabits the places within the representational space. Bakhtin in “The Problem of Speech Genres” (95-99) describes the assignment of genres solely based on the perceived identity of the addressee. However, many of the criteria mentioned by Bakhtin, such as social hierarchy, reader, listener, public or private, are contextualized by place. An example of this contextualization is taken up by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in their use of Bakhtin’s related analytical concept of chronotope, time/space, to unpack the role of place in the hero/heroine trope: Introducing the break with the home as a place introduces the elements of chance in the relationship. (Morson and Emerson 379). In operating outside of genre classifications place is an organizing principle within representational space; it is lived through, understood and negotiated at the same time. In the digital works the representation of elements related to gender and class extends the representational scope of place into the specifics of society, culture, history etc. Close reading place somewhat removes the reader from the experience of the place, and by resorting to such tools as genre, it allows for the representational aspects to be analyzed.

The representation of place in the digital works of this present study is addressive. This addressivity progresses from the iconic elements and first-person perspective dealt with in the previous chapter. In their work with virtual worlds as a means to foster civic engagement, Eric Gordon and Gene Koo draw on the work of Malpas (1999) and Tuan & Mercure (2004), to identify place as “experienced space” (Gordon and Koo 206). As the site of experience, place becomes an organizing principle;

“Place can be produced through happenstance (the space of a first kiss), through narrative (the space of childhood that is persistently articulated with story), through familiarity (the space one lives each day), or through representation (the space of art or advertising). This identification with place is an important method of organizing personal experience and social actions" (Gordon and Koo 206).

In relation to the experience of the digital works as reading, the iconic features described in the previous chapter enter narrative in the representation of place based on reader identification. The experience of space in the works via navigation and the iconic elements in the works, such as virtual objects, create a sense of identification with the elements of place. The experience of the space by the reader is addressive according to the representations of place. An example of this recognition and experience is the lounge area in Façade, as a set of iconic representations, and the source of reader identification with a place. The reader negotiates the space created by design, as a series of interconnected and interrelated places, where space “is created by events, rather than being merely a location where events occur” (Muse 2011 191). The result is the role of place in reading, which is “not the writing of a place, but rather writing with places, spatially realized topics” (Bolter 2001 36). In this sense, place is narrated not as an object, but in the subjectivity gained by the experience of the work. Within its addressive elements the identification with place is associated with genres.

Genres function in reading the digital works by fusing characters with locations. An example of this is how places in Façade feature qualities that are assigned to the feminine and masculine characters as separate and specific places. The result is the infusion of space with meanings that are related to the genres of gender, in specific stereotypical and culturally specific ways. As I explain in the following analysis, the resulting narrative address is composed of coordinated written and visual components, character’s voices, incidental or diegetic sound. Navigation takes on meaning as the character fuse with the places represented in narrative, which in this study include class and gender. Similarly, Jenny Sundén argues in relation to narrative performance in early text-based MultiUser Dungeons (MUDs), “identity is experienced simultaneously as “self ” and “other” in embodied and imagined spaces” (Sundén 2002 80). This split between the subject and object exists in the embodied and imagined spaces of interactive texts. In other words, digital texts are “storied places” consisting of “carefully structured places to explore, and inhabit” (Sundén 2006 281). I argue separation between self and other in relation to reading the digital texts is diminished in the representation of place. The fusion with place is a defining addressive element that guides reading. The characters are fused in narrative with the places they occupy in a similar to how, “the inhabitant of the virtual world is a part of that world almost like a programmed extension” (Muse 205). The character and the program are one in digital interactive narratives.  This fusion includes the representation of place according to gender and socio-economic class.

The representation of place, and its associated elements are frames in reading narrative. Frames take on different meanings specific to the narratives of the works that must be distinguished. The frame is as much about reader contexts as it is about the work itself. As Terry Eagleton points out,

Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, merely a cumulative affair; our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others (Eagleton 67).

Eagleton provides, in “what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding”, a concentrated focus on the interpretive end of the dialogic network in reading. Frames of reference are related to pre-existing narratives within the digital works in the sense of dialogic addressivity. Address in the works establishes pre-existing components for narrative as a frame to events and actions. As I explain in my analysis, place is one such framing technique. To expand my account of place as a framing element in reading, to conclude this chapter I briefly illustrate how this can be applied to another frame for interactive narrative. Colonial nostalgia frames the reading of Egypt by dividing places according to colonial and the Other. These places outside the colonial are an interconnected network of dangerous and unstable sites in the narrative of the work. In both cases context is provided by framing, which controls and directs reader responses to narrative based on the conditions these frames represent in the texts.

Finally in relation to the representation of place in the texts, beyond the spatial dimensions outlined in the previous chapter, sound should also be understood as addressive. In address sound is symbolic representations, one of which is the representation of place. The example I discuss at length in this chapter is the use of accented and gendered voice as audio in Last Meal Requested and Façade, and how each is used to represent place and class. The accents in Last Meal Requested and Façade are attributed to the characters, as well as situating them in the places they occupy in narrative. In Façade recorded speech is standardized North American educated pronunciation, indicating a middle class affluence to the characters and thus establishing that particular context for all reader interaction with them. As a contrast, the accents of recorded speech in Last Meal Requested are linked to representations of South Central Los Angeles and the deep south of the United States. These are non-standardized dialect pronunciations that are connected to lower class and uneducated speakers. Class distinctions are signified by the accents of characters, which positions them in the larger defining category of place. Through references to place, sounds invite particular interpretations in the reading of the narratives.

Addressivity in Digital Narratives

Beyond the level of design, Last Meal Requested, Egypt, Façade and Dreamaphage function as complex communicative acts or utterances in reader engagement. As part of this engagement, the concept of dialogic addressivity explains how these works incite the interpretive responses from a reader that create narrative meaning. I outlined in Chapter One the basic concept of addressivity as adapted from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin qualifies all communication in terms of addressivity, always with an intended recipient and fashioned with “the quality of turning to someone” (Bakhtin 1986 99). This address defines the style, mode, sentiment and contexts of narrative, as “every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates (Bakhtin 2002 280). By understanding the digital works as utterances that are contextually defined by addressivity, it becomes possible to see in each, “the influence of the anticipated response, dialogic echoes from other’ preceding utterances, faint traces of changes of speech subjects that have furrowed the utterance from within” (Bakhtin 1986 99). I equate the ‘furrows’ from within the utterance with the possibilities for interpretation and responses in representation. Two examples dealt with in this chapter of how ‘dialogic echoes’ are introduced into the reception of the digital works are in the speech accents as indicative of class in Last Meal Requested and gendered elements demarcating places in Façade. These features provide external context for the reader, in relation to the works as complex assemblages of social, cultural, historical and literary referents. From these factors it is possible to establish addressivity as a means by which the works can be understood in reading.

Addressivity is grounded in the idea that literature seeks out identities in how it evokes and refers to contexts. Literature does this through, “composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend[ing] on those to whom the utterance is addressed, how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines his addressee, and the force of their effect on the utterance” (Bakhtin 1986 95). In the digital works, the addressee is expected to understand and respond to particular references and representations that are grounded in cultural, social and historical assumptions. These assumptions include concepts of gender and identity as well as the class structure of North American society in Facade and Last Meal Requested. In the digital works language operates in relation to these contexts in its broadest possible sense, taking in images, spaces, bodies, sounds and writing, and these create the conditions of identity that fit within the reception of the works. In this reception it is necessary to consider language “not as a system of abstract grammatical categories but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life” (Bakhtin 2002 271). Language as ideologically saturated and representing a world view is cohesive in and of itself. This language relies on the images and ideas grounded in broader social and cultural contexts, but it is individual and whole at the point of its expression. An example of this context/individual duality is the class aspirations of Trip in Façade draw upon middle class North American identity from the late 20^th century, but at the same time is an expression of individuality for the character in relation to the character of Grace.

Addressivity in narrative depends upon the ideological qualities of the utterance in how they anticipate an answer from an addressee. This anticipation of a response, as I explained in Chapter One, is part of the works as interactive media that communicate with a reader. The works demonstrate that “understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other” (Bakhtin 2002 282). Communication in the works is defined by ideology, which operates across the media represented in the works (i.e. video, spaces, written text, audio, images), and unites them as texts. In the digital works of the present study, ideology is expressed in the representation and references to class and gender as themes in narrative. In this sense the works are dialogic, in a model that “represents readers as shaping the utterance as it is being made. That is why utterances can belong to their speakers (or writers) only in the least interesting, purely psychological sense; but as meaningful communication, they always belong to at least two people, the speaker and his or her listener” (Morson and Emerson 1990 129). These are expressed through genres and stereotypes, with a focus on the representation of places within narrative. Genres are represented in the digital works according to Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, whereby meaning is associated with the context the utterance represents, not only in time and place, but also as a historical and material example of a particular social act of communication. The genres I discuss in the works are expressed in accents, gendered places, and representations of class.

(While reading this extract from my PhD Thesis I recommend listening to Negativeland by Neu)

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Possible Thesis Cover

This is a mock up I did today as an idea for the cover of my PhD thesis. It should be published early in 2013 if all goes well. I wanted to have an image that refers directly back to the process of writing and research. The unmade bed at the bottom of the image, and the corner desk piled high with books, discs, artifacts and instruments speaks of how I have been living the past 7 years.

Please Lord make it end!

Combination of Thesis Extracts on Remediation

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.

Thesis Extract: Layering in Design

Layering operates in the design of the works from the underlying code, whereby “the practices of concealing and revealing [that] offer fertile ground for aesthetic and artistic exploration […] reveal themselves according to time sequences, cursor movements, and other criteria” (Hayles 2005 54). Hayles cites the example of Coverley’s Egypt, as an example “where the visual tropes of revealing and concealing resonate with the multiple personae, patterned after ancient Egyptian beliefs, that cohabit in one body” (Hayles 2005 55). The representation of temporality, as Hayles suggests “according to time sequences,” is related to the spatial configuration achieved by layering. Design does this by “re-creating on the screen dynamics that both depend on and reflect the ‘tower of languages’ essential to code” (Hayles 2005 54). [1] The concealing and revealing in design effectively bundles code-created objects in a digital text, providing a sense of temporal progress in narrative. The following analysis explores further the techniques used to make layering part of design, specifically in regard to narrative.  

The works dealt with in this study are coded at the point of reception; with inputs from readers developing narrative according to the conditions of spatial configuration in design. Clicking and following links, along with word recognition, cultural and social references, and the combinatorial possibilities found in spatial navigation, activate narrative progression. Thus layering in the works includes reader attention to these structures, such as the keyword parsing in Façade. Layered bundles, such as the audio, visual and spatial content together, are arranged in meaningful sequences, which can be repeated and therefor emphasized in reading. In some examples layering results in narrative metalepsis, grounded in how layers transgress narrative boundaries through the use of perspective, depth and temporal representations in design. By functioning in this way, layering is a fundamental part of reading new or digital media, which Lev Manovitch compares to the effect of montage in film, as a defining element in digital media reception (Manovitch 2002 143-147). In my analysis I develop Manovitch’s observation in relation to narrative as it is affected by design.

My analysis of what David Shepard calls “the executed layer” of the digital work, or “what the user experiences” (Shepard 2008 np), reveals that it is actually composed of multiple layers when read for the effect on narrative. These layers include combinations of characters and settings, writing, audio, video and still images. Each of these are composed of further sub-layers, for example the audio layer of Façade can be arranged into sub-sets according to individual keywords, or as layers of music, character voices and sound effects, and even further according to how dialogue is parsed by the program in narrative progression. Each of these layers conceals and reveals other layers during reception. The reader organizes the layers via linkages, not just via clickable points but also using keywords and virtual objects. All these linkages are examples of material meaning and navigation joined in reading, where “by traversing the gap that is the link, the gap is filled with meaning” (Parker 2001 np). Meaning is associated with the link as “a syntactic, structural, and distinctive feature” (Raley 2011 1). The activation of a link by the reader is therefore a meaningful part of the interpretation of narrative. As the reader navigates via links, and arranges the layers according to design, particular narrative features blend, are obscured or transmute into each other. In this sense, layering is the organization of narrative, which results in both restrictions and meaning in reading.

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[1] Hayles cites Rita Raley as the source of the “Tower of Languages” trope. Describing the gradients that exist in a digital program between the base code and the layer experienced in reception, Raley explains, “The tower of programming languages that underlies the representation of natural languages on the screen. For all of the differences among particular instances or events of codework, they all incorporate elements of code, whether executable or not. Code appears in the text, then, in whole or in part, in the form of a functioning script, an operator, and/or a static symbol” (Raley 2002 np). The code of the text, at the point of reception, is precisely the concern of this present study.