Keynote address

Subject-making is profoundly aesthetic. In the current moment, of data-intensive cultures and identity wars, the subjects that are made stem from machine learning techniques that engage aesthetics differently, nonetheless profoundly. My talk will focus on subjects of data abstractions, poetics of idealisation and aesthetic recognition. 

Unlike other forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning that are used for creative production, female-presenting virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant are not designed to be collaborators nor content producers, but rather, to serve as mouthpieces and platforms for others' pre-designated scripts to be performed. This talk examines the gendered design and creative limitations of AI virtual assistants as part of a growing body of studies in the systemic biases of technological design

Periods of rapid technological change also redraw our sense of cultural and geographical periphery. Routes of transport and travel, communications infrastructures, and networks of cultural production extend, transform, and redirect the perimeters of our personal and collective imagination. In this lecture I will examine how Ireland’s location at the geographical margin of Europe has also rendered it a focal point of technological experimentation and exchange, and has closely entwined it with the story of electronic literature. I propose that the peripheral imagination informing this relationship can also encourage the kind of cultural dissent needed to tackle the consequences of unchecked technological ambition to the fragile environments of the Anthropocene.

The field of Electronic Literature comprises new forms of literary creation that merge writing, computation, interactivity, and design in the creation of writing that is specific to the context of the computer and the global network. While electronic literature is a field of experimental writing with a history that stretches back to the 1950s, it has grown most expansively in the late two decades. Forms of electronic literature such as combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, kinetic and interactive poetry, and network writing bridge the 20th century avant-garde and practices specific to the 21st century networked society. Yet electronic literature has faced significant hurdles as it has developed as a field of study, related to the comparative instability of complex computational objects, which because of their formal diversity are often not easily accommodated by standardized methods of digital archiving, and are subject to cycles of technological obsolescence. Rettberg's presentation will address efforts to disseminate, document, and archive the field of electronic literature. After providing some examples of genres of electronic literature, Rettberg will discuss projects such as the Electronic Literature Collections, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, and the Electronic Literature Repository that seek to preserve a corpus of work and criticism for the future.

A version of this illustrated article about creative process was given by J.R. Carpenter as a Keynote Address at the New Media Writing Prize Award Event at Bournemouth University in January 2017.

A talk-performance delivered at the University of Coimbra on Torres's praxis. The talk was scripted with a constraint with the letter P. Bruno Ministro assisted by changing 'slides.'

The world of game development is heavily male dominated and sexism is notoriously endemic in online gaming and videogames. In this context, as a feminist woman and sole writer, developer and designer of an interactive digital narrative, I am something of a rarity. Doing it all myself may seem perverse, especially in a field where collaboration is common, but the ability to author code myself is empowering and, crucially, gives me independence - a development environment of one's own - a classic feminist goal. In this presentation, I will discuss how these factors are reflected in the interplay of genre, narrative, discourse, gameplay, game logic, character development and thematic content in my interactive digital narrative, Stitched Up (currently a work-in-progress).

In an extremely rare inversion of the 'Damsel in Distress' trope, a common plot device in video games, the central male character in Stitched Up is a 'dude in distress' (Sarkeesian 2013). A powerful female antagonist has trapped Joel in a perilous situation and he must be rescued by his wife, Sarah (both Joel and Sarah are player characters). However, rather than action adventure, I describe Stitched Up as a psychological thriller. Moreover, its feminist narrative themes, problematizing the idea of home, significant others, working women, parenthood and masculinity, suggest similarities with the emerging literary sub-genre of Domestic Noir.

To create an interactive narrative that is capable of exploring these issues, I am drawing together concepts from second-order cybernetics with Possible Worlds theory from narratology. Combining these abstractions provides me with a framework for not only thinking about character-driven playable narratives, but also a methodology for authoring and designing them. I am drawn to Possible Worlds theory because, unlike structuralism, it does not regard fictional characters as purely semiotic constructs but regards them as make-believe life-like persons, able to arouse emotions in the reader. Influenced by cybernetics, along with the concept of feedback and 'the art of steering' (cybernetics' etymological root), I am exploring the idea of the fictional character as a Black Box in order to simulate psychological depth.

An observer can only infer what is going on inside a Black Box from its inputs and outputs. Stitched Up is text-driven but highly visual and I am coupling my dialogue-based game engine with a responsive abstract visualisation system for the characters' internal emotional data to deliver subtextual layers of meaning. These combined outputs will affect the choices that reader-players make, the inputs. This stimulus-response model, which is my core gameplay loop, functions as a kind of rudder for the reader-player to steer a course through Stitched Up's narrative universe of Possible Worlds. How the reader-player chooses to interpret the characters' behaviour will determine the kind of story they experience and its outcome. The 'Damsel in Distress' trope invariably decrees a revenge-driven story, Stitched Up's 'dude in distress' device challenges that edict.