affect

Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence -- movement, affect, and sensation -- in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate onmultiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing and assessing William Jamesʹs radical empiricism and Henri Bergsonʹs philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. 

Source: Publisher description

Described by Robert Coover as “perhaps the true paradigmatic work” of the “golden age” of hypertext literature, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) provides not only a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but an opportunity to consider the ways in which the gothic as a genre serves to problematize the somatic dimension of our writing technologies. In its capacity to touch the reader directly, at the level of the nerves, tissues, and fibres of the body, Patchwork Girl recalls the debates concerning the affective force of the gothic novel, and, in particular, the threat it was thought to pose for women readers. The gothic, in this sense, emerges as the deep and unsettling recognition that the technological is the formative ground of subjectivity, the very condition of our becoming. What Jackson calls “the banished body,” the monstrous materiality of subjectivity, haunts not only the eighteenth-century faith in the powers of rational powers of intellection, but our own post-human dreams of transcendence.

This paper investigates the manner in which e-literature is reconstructing and intensifying some of the sensory capacities of literary language. The interactive nature of many works, as well as their use of image and sound and the fact that the ‘surface’ text is produced and informed by a ‘deeper’ level of generative code, means that new critical concepts, vocabularies and ways of reading adequate to this new situation need to be developed. Katherine Hayles. John Cayley, Talan Memmot, and Rita Raley, have all written authoritatively on the importance of software and code in determining approaches to electronic poetics, and the difference this makes to how we understand new media writing. Matt Kirschenbaum makes the distinction between formal and forensic materiality in order to break down the emergent logics at play in the digital ‘text’. We introduce a different perspective, one that focuses on the ecology of the body (its distribution) in its engagement with different forms. Using the electronic work of Melinda Rackam, Jason Nelson, Stelarc and Alan Sondheim we argue that technological innovation is reshaping aesthetics through a new ecology of the body that privileges affect, and emphasises proprioceptive capacity. In this paper we look at electronic texts and forms that both reproduce and challenge an emergent focus on an aesthetics of ‘touch’, proximity and novelty.

(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI)

The interactive fiction work "Hors-Categorie" stages a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France bicycle race. In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various bodily choices—blood doping, shaving one's legs, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects that alter the game state. My effort in writing this work—concerning doping, cyclists, bodies, and ethics—is to think through the potentialities for engaging, designing, and theorizing new media with an emphasis on the embodied nature of affect. I argue that by thinking through together the indeterminacy of affect, the indeterminacy of the bodies that generate affects, and the virtuality of new media, we can experiment with the capabilities and capacities of each of these concepts. The rich inter-animation of affect, the body, and new media can co-produce virtualities that not only enliven each terms' potentiality, but indeed can contribute to what I suggest is an "ethics of experimentation" that is needed to think through relations of the body, feelings, technology, and new media. Put differently, I wish to mobilize these concepts together to suggest an inherent affinity that expands our theories of the embodied nature of affect and its crucial role in new media work. "Hors categorie" is a designation for climbs in the Tour de France that are "beyond classification." That is, the intensities of the climbs—the grade of the climb, the altitude, the weather possibilities—do not fit within the classificatory scheme the race uses elsewhere. I choose this pun for my interactive fiction experiment to highlight the indeterminacy—the virtuality, even—of the sporting body when it encounters emergent technologies that threaten systems of classification—classifications of bodies and their capacities, of drugs, and of ethical codes of conduct—and elude the very technologies designed to produce those classifications—drugs tests, ethical charters, etc. My presentation, both a work of interactive fiction and an academic essay, is an attempt at creatively staging a number of theoretical encounters in order to experiment with bodies, affects, interactive fiction, and ethics. My presentation takes advantage of the configurative possibilities of game play and links that to the configurative possibilities of bodies and of the virtual, by staging a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France race. In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various choices—blood doping, taking aspirin, shaving one's legs, opening doors, watching television, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects, both offered by the game state, or parser, and as experienced in the player. How does the player experience his or her body? Does the player avail themselves of the medical technologies present? How do these alter how the player feels? How do the various—and temporally fleeting—judgments imposed upon players influence their relationships to their virtual/real bodies, and the movements that arise from these relationships? What emerges from the confluence of affective intensity and provisional judgment of this intensity? How does this influence subsequent action? How do these bodies—parser, virtual bodies, "real" bodies -intermingle and co-constitute new bodies through the generation of affects? My hope is that the game provides an amusing (!) platform for meta-reflection on these questions and, I imagine, their somewhat indeterminate, provisional answers. This type of experimentation allows us to introduce affect and virtuality into "regimes of living" (Collier and Lakoff, 2002), which allows for a certain type of animation of ethical questions. At the level of design and coding, this project attempts an experiment with what has been discussed as Silvan Tomkins' (1995) "cybernetic" theory of affect. Tomkins' theory of affect emerged in the context of, and was influenced by, the cybernetic theories of Norbert Weiner. In a conceptualization that greatly informs my efforts here, Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (1995) discuss Tomkins' critical distinction—countering Freud—between drives and instincts as analogous with a distinction between digital and analogue: drives exist as binary motivations (on/off) while affects have qualitatively differently possibilities. If drives operate in a "stop/start" way, then affects, which Tompkins claims are instinctual, are more "and/and/and". For Sedgwick and Frank, this model allows us to understand how things differentiate: how quantitative differences turn into qualitative ones, how digital and analog representations leap-frog or interleave with one another. My interactive fiction work experiments with at the level of writing how various affects can combine with each other in certain configurations following actions—and how this can be written into code. The translation of analogic affect into digital code back into analogic affect through the virtual possibilities of thought and bodies interests me—so I have written "hors-categorie."

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

This panel will deal with the relationship between extreme affect and electronic literature: How are pain, sex, and death _embodied_ in E-lit, virtual worlds, and textuality so that the abstract, for the reader, performer, or user, becomes empathetically embodied within hir? In other words, how can the skipping/skimming, which characterize the Net, be delayed, so that an actuality of politics and the body emerges? This panel will explore this and related issues. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

While discussion of the relationship of image and word has been prominent in the discourses
surrounding new media writing, the role of sound is rarely addressed in this context, even
though words are sounds and sounds are a major component of multimedia. This paper
explores possibilities for new theoretical frameworks in this area, drawing on musico-literary
discourse, intermedia theory and inter-cultural theory, and using ideas about semiotic and cultural exchange as a basis.

The paper will examine the different types of sound in new media writing from voice-based
performance of words to soundscapes and musical composition, and the role of sampling, vocal
manipulation and improvisation. Building on my previous work on affective intensities in new
media writing (Smith 2007 ; Smith 2009), and the manipulation of the voice to create cultural
effects such as sonic cross-dressing (Smith 1999), I will discuss the ways in which sound plays
a distinctive role in new media writing. I will argue that it creates mood, immersion and affect,
and can be very important in questioning stereotypical concepts of gender or racial identity. I will
also talk about sound as part of the process of making a work, and how the sound can drive the
writing, as well as writing driving the sound.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

Since the first symbolic scripts emerged, language has always been visual. My own work explores how language's visual can be read both as art and as poetry; how affect is amplified by sound; how generative and combinatorial layouts of text-video-sound open art from linear readings into infinite variations perspectives.
For ELO, I am interested in creating an artist talk that utilizes content derived from two essays on digital poetry written for my comprehensive exams in the summer of 2009. The original essays are entitled: "Affecting Language: interdisciplinary explorations of emotion (new media, neuroscience, phenomenology and poetry)" and "Defining Creative Conduits: mediations on writing in digital media". Since both essays (as take-home exams) were each written over a brief 72 hour span, I look fwd to the opportunity of synthesizing and refining their argument into a presentation format.
(Source: Author proposal)

John Cayley dadas up the digital, revealing similarities of type across two normally separate, unequal categories: image and text. "Neither lines nor pixels but letters," finally, unite.

(Source: ebr First Person thread page)