agency

This paper considers how the avatar focuses the metaphor of interactivity in video games and interactive narrative environments. It argues that, despite serving as the on-screen representation of user input, the avatar has some independent agency (whether through design or representational practice) that influences its behavior. Thus, rather than merely relying upon it as her transparent stand-in, the player must negotiate with the avatar to achieve her goals. The negotiation serves to dramatize interactivity as an imperfect conduit between the textual and extra-textual worlds. While not so evident in video games, this imperfection sustains the metaphor of interactivity, deepening expressivity in interactive narrative environments.

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

Argues that we still have very poor language for discussing the place of the reader in electronic—or computer-mediated—narratives, and that little work has been done to evaluate the relevance of core narratological concepts like narrator, narratee, and implied reader as tools to describe the process of reader positioning in electronic narratives. The author sees Aarseth's analysis of interactive fiction in terms of an intrigue, with an intriguee and an intrigant as one of the most sophisticated analyses of the reader's position in electronic writing, and extends this model.

Social science in general and anthropology in particular has long attended to core concerns with the structure and form of societies, and with the constant interplay of individual and collective elements. These concerns are obvious: how we understand the emergence and form of human worlds necessitates an approach to creative agency alongside the conditions under which that agency is exercised. As Marx famously wrote in 1852, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. But recent scholarship in the field of anthropology has taken theorising beyond the familiar impasses of structure and agency through an emphasis on practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977) and on to the embodied and improvisational nature of knowledge and social action (e.g. Ingold 2000, Hallam & Ingold 2007). Creativity is central here. But creativity conceived not as individual genius (an approach that generates questions about how the individual and the collective collide; one clearly linked to other assumptions Westerners make about the bounded-ness of individual minds, and the proprietary nature of the self), but creativity as an emergent (and necessary) aspect of social relations.

As anthropological study is based in a deep engagement with the potentialities and differences between human life-worlds (e.g. Descola 1994, 2005; Vivieros de Castro 2009, 2010), much of the best anthropological work has taken as its inspiration (and guiding its methodology) ideas and concepts generated in the ethnographic encounter with other traditions, traditions where those concepts of individual boundedness and self-propriety do not dominate. At present this approach is well represented by the work of Marilyn Strathern, whose reformulation of the problems of western epistemology in dialogue with the detailed practices and understandings of people in Melanesia has shown the possibilities not only for understanding other ontological systems, but for this understanding to illuminate core theoretical assumptions and approaches within western society, and in anthropology itself (e.g. Strathern 1988, 2005 etc.). So alongside the recent turn in theorisation, a long standing tradition of questioning assumptions that lie behind our theories is adding to the need to re-think creativity as more than the work of exceptional individual minds.

What this anthropology has made possible is the formulation of conceptual approaches that move us outside and beyond the recurrent divisions between persons and objects, individuals and society, creative genius and slavish replicators.

(Source: Author's introduction)

This paper examines the way literary practice in digital media illuminates traditional literary processes that otherwise remain unremarked, and conversely, what the literary concept of ‘address’ might contribute to an understanding of the way digital media are reinventing literary agency. It explores handwriting as an embodied praxis linking thought with corporeality through the medium of gesture, and its transformations in text-based new media art. Handwriting (and especially signatures) has long been thought to make personality traits manifest. Its expressive gestural and kinematic aspect can be illuminated by Werner’s theory of physiognomic perception in which two-dimensional diagrams are shown as consistently corresponding to and eliciting a small number of categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) in viewers. Diane Gromala’s ‘Biomorphic Typography’ (2000 onwards) in which the user’s keystrokes generate biofeedback input which combines with the behaviours assigned to typography to animate text in the present time of writing draws on these conventions and complicates them in the process. By contrast, John Geraci’s locative media project ‘Grafedia’ (2004-2005), in which, as he says, ‘walls are made into websites’ handwriting signals the public discourse of graffiti with all its connotations of haste and illegality. In this work, users can write by hand on any of the various physical surfaces of the world and link this graffiti to rich media content that can be accessed by others as they come across the texts, appropriates the live dimension of handwriting as graffiti into the memorialising and communicative functions of a larger textual work that might also be collaboratively elaborated over time. The handwritten graffiti (in blue and underscored) mimics the default HTML hyperlink, which makes it visible as a piece of Grafedia, also signals the complex reciprocity between handwriting and print in new media work.

(Source: authors' abstract)

Expanded concepts of agency permit us to question what or who can be an active participant in creative activity, allowing us to revisit the debate on authorship. We can ask whether creativity might be regarded as a form of social interaction. How might we understand creativity as the interaction of people and things rather than as an outcome of action?

Whilst creativity is often perceived as the product of the individual artist, or creative ensemble, it can also be considered an emergent phenomenon of communities, driving change and facilitating individual or group creativity. Creativity may be regarded as a performative activity released when engaged through and by a community and thus understood as a process of interaction.

In this context the model of the solitary artist, producing artifacts that embody creativity, is questioned as an ideal for achieving creative outcomes. Instead, creativity is proposed as an activity of exchange that enables (creates) people and communities. The creation of new things, and the forms of exchange enacted around them, can function to "create" not just things but also people, binding them in social groups and "creating" the community they inhabit.

It thus becomes possible to conceive of creativity as emergent from and innate to the interactions of people and to consider the gift-economy as fundamental to social formation. Such an understanding can function to combat the dominant instrumentalist view of creativity, that demands of artists that their creations have social (e.g.: "economic") value.

This contribution to the panel discussion will seek to engage these themes and concepts in the context of how online communities of creative practitioners form and interact.

(Source: ISEA2011)

This text discusses how our understanding of authorship has evolved over the past few decades and how this process is now being effected by developments in network and communications technologies. Situating the discussion in relation to post-structuralist theory, Actor Network Theory and the anthropological work of James Leach the impact of network technologies are considered, with particular attention to the emergence of distributed forms of authorship and models of expanded agency. The work of two artists who engage network and communications technologies in distinct ways is discussed in order to evoke perspectives on emergent forms of authorship and agency. The work of Mez Breeze is considered as evidencing a shift in authorship from the human author to an agency of computability embedded in the formal structures of the language employed in the work, suggesting that the text operates as an automatic generative system that constructs the reader as computational interpreter. The Megafone mobile communications project by Antonio Abad and Eugenio Tisselli is discussed as an activity where authorship is distributed across a population of people connected to and mediated by mobile network technologies. The existence of a networked community operating as an automatic generative system is considered as a form of expanded agency where subject, agency and community are evoked as an autopoietic apparatus. The text concludes by identifying the argument as a set of complex interactions that can be seen not only as agents of creation but also as a creative outcome. It is suggested that the outcome of a creative act is not necessarily the primary expression of creativity but rather incidental to a process that is itself creative agency.