aesthetics

In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.

In this interview Serge Bouchardon resumes his many activities in the realm of digital media. Besides a professional background in e-learning and the activity as researcher and professor he has also authored a book about electronic literature and several literary works. He explains why in his book he chose the theories of structuralism to analyse a topic that reaches out to post-structuralism or post-modern theories. Furthermore he describes the way the aesthetics of the literary text changes in the digital context. He then ponders about the status of electronic literature in the field of academia and talks about his current projects.

This essay that consists from a number of self-contained segments looks at the phenomenon of Flash graphics on the Web that attracted a lot of creative energy in the last few years. More than just a result of a particular software / hardware situation (low bandwidth leading to the use of vector graphics), Flash aesthetics exemplifies cultural sensibility of a new generation. This generation does not care if their work is called art or design. This generation is no longer is interested in "media critique" which preoccupied media artists of the last two decades; instead it is engaged in software critique. This generation writes its own software code to create their own cultural systems, instead of using samples of commercial media. The result is the new modernism of data visualizations, vector nets, pixel-thin grids and arrows: Bauhaus design in the service of information design. Instead the Baroque assault of commercial media, Flash generation serves us the modernist aesthetics and rationality of software. Information design is used as tool to make sense of reality while programming becomes a tool of empowerment.

(Source: Author's abstract)

When we strip the lexical band-aid ‘embodiment’ off the more than 350 year-old wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body, we find animation, the foundational dimension of the living. Everything living is animated. Flowers turn toward the sun; pill bugs curl into spheres; lambs rise on untried legs, finding their way into patterned coordinations. The phenomenon of movement testifies to animation as the foundational dimension of the living.

We propose that the importance of movement in the distribution of space and time is one of the things digital media works make palpable. While western aesthetics – consonant with its spatialised images of subjects and objects – has traditionally paid more attention to spatial form, this is being challenged by new forms of mobility made possible by digital media. These provide both the opportunity for immersion in mediated and programmed/programmable environments, but also the opportunity to move through existing and technologically augmented environments in different ways, using different surfaces and forms of literary inscription.

In these contexts, for example, the silent and stable forms of letters and words on a page that we associate with books take on an animatory force. Letters move and make sounds, as in the programmable works of writers such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland , Maria Mencia,, or else they are reclocated off the page so that one can touch and play with them (exemplary here is Camille Utterback’s ‘Text Rain’, or more recently, work being done in the CAVE environment at Brown University) , or else they are transported and translocated in processes that bear witness to movement and mobility through landscapes.

The programmable and interactive works that we analyse in this paper re-designate and redeploy of sensory ecologies in terms of movement through space. By introducing movement as an aesthetic dimension these new forms of writing and aesthetic practice implicitly acknowledge the importance of time or duration in the constitution of being, that is, in the constitution of objects, subjects and things which echo and mimic processes of ‘Life’.

(Source: Authors' abstract, ELO 2013 conference site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/ethos-life-digital-w… )

Computation and networking are changing language, the art of reading, and the act of writing. Multimedia digital poetry allows for the creation and simultaneous display of visual, sonic and textual patterns with unprecedented mobility and typographic capacities. This interdisciplinary form encourages an exploratory art-research practice-based investigation using a blend of theoretical knowledge ranging from literary criticism, phenomenology, aesthetics, affective computation and neurological research. In contrast to software-centric theory and/or materiality analysis, this thesis argues for the continuing relevance of the lyric, expressive affect and aesthetics in contemporary digital poetics. It examines the evolution of digital poetry with a specific emphasis on online poetry. In the context of this thesis, poetry is considered to be an ancestor of computer code. Poetry is also considered as information visualization of emotions. Emotions are considered to be complex embodied patterns; poetry expresses those patterns in language.

Source: Author's Abstract

In two essays, "Toward a Semantic Literary Web" (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and "Electronic Literature as World Literature" (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature's present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe's and Marx's unrealized call for the formation of a world literature "transcending national limits"), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another, and renewed, revised, or renounced by later generations).

Trying to hold onto both of these desirable literary qualities, the aesthetic as well as the communicative, I turn my attention in the present talk to the one place where such conversations are now being staged - not in stand-alone scholarly journals or social media (online or in print) but rather, in databases. Specifically, I consider the open source, open access literary database. I settle on database construction as a necessary scholarly and technical complement to the creation of works, not for wholly archival purposes, but as a condition or destination for present creativity. The electronic database, by granting authors (and their critics) access to present discourse networks and a means of identifying works,opens possibilities that appear unique to literary writing in new media.

One point of reference in my talk will be the Electronic Literature Organization's Electronic Literature Directory (ELD version 2.0). The ELMCIP Knowledge Base, developed in Scandinavia, the U.S., and Europe, offers another, complementary point of entry. Brief descriptions of other literary archives, developed or in development in Montreal, Providence, Siegen, Sydney, and elsewhere, will indicate how interoperability can work at the level of databases, and how literary collaboration might at last begin to work across disciplines and institutions. I argue that the current, wide-ranging database construction (already a trans-disciplinary collaboration among scholars and programmers), is the necessary precondition to the emergence of the electronic 'world literature' that I described some years previously.

Literary works by John Cayley, Jason Nelson, Simon Biggs and others (who turn, or detourne, informatic databases into literary works) will be accessed through the above databases and discussed during the course of the talk.

This dissertation is comprised by five interrelated electronic essays (plus a VRML installation) on artifice, information, and aesthetics. Each essay has been conceived as an intervention in the current critical discourse of new media studies. The essays oscillate loosely between the twin graphical themes of typography and topography, evoking what a recent writer in ArtByte magazine has called (in another context) "a vast network of dislocated visual events." The first essay, "A White Paper on Information," argues for a fundamental shift in the nature of information in the midst of our current "Information Age," a shift recognizing information (data) as a historically and epistemologically distinct category of representation; this shift, I argue, is a direct result of the rise (since the mid-eighties) of computer graphics and information design as leading-edge research areas in computer science. "The Textual Condition of Electronic Objects" explores recent debates in the textual and editorial theory community in order to encourage an understanding of electronic objects that accounts for their material composition at the computational level and their inflection by such considerations as platform, interface, data standards, software versioning, and the like. It seeks to offer an alternative to the predominant post-structuralist conception of electronic textuality. "The Other End of Print" documents the perfection and promotion of a virtual aesthetic in the graphic design of recent print media, and argues that print, far from being outmoded by the new publishing ecology of the computer, has in fact played a key role in the making and marketing of our most influential representations of cyberspace, virtual reality, and related phenomena. "Lucid Mapping" explores three-dimensional writing spaces as both typographic and topographic phenomena, while arguing at a more general level that aesthetics, far from being a distraction to an otherwise "transparent" interface, can play a key role in information design and human-computer interaction. It is accompannied by a VRML installation that demonstrates principles articulated in the essay. The concluding piece, a coda entitled "New Media, New Historicisms," centers around a review of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's recent book Remediation; it argues for a more refined engagement with various historicisms and historical practices in new media studies, and underscores the need for a serious documentary knowledge of information technologies, a knowledge based on archival research into the institutional infrastructures which support hardware and software development -- the corollary to the emphasis on the computational basis of electronic objects discussed in the essay on textual theory. 

Source: author's abstract