An interview with Stuart Moulthrop, a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (USA) and an early author of works of electronic literature.
This paper explores the ontology of the digital. Specifically I argue that digital technologies, digital aesthetics, and digital culture express characteristics of the binary code. The binary code, which defines the digital, balances between ideal and real; tied always to some material substrate, the binary code nevertheless operates according to a logic of perfectly specified 0s and 1s. And it tends to bring this idealized perfection into the real, dividing up the world into neat, discrete categories, offering predefined choices with predictable outcomes, and shaping not only the materials of the machine but also the bodies and habits of users according to this binary logic. The binary code is an apotheosis of abstraction, but it is an operative abstraction, which becomes effective even while retaining its pure formality. Brief examples will elaborate this overarching argument, considering the digital’s ontological relationships to temporality, space, material, virtuality, uniqueness, identity, determinism, and language.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).
Prosthesis is a set of live vocal performances addressing complicities inherent in the use of digital technology and emergent artificialities in cognition, language, and the physical body. It consists of nine main sections, including readings augmented by projections and recorded voice, and concludes with a song.
(Source: Author's site)
I did use code to write and shape parts of the Prosthesis text, but none of those programs were made publicly available at any point, or even named. They were more one-off algorithms I wrote to get particular compositional effects, rather than a platform I built out in a sustained way. They were mostly written in javascript, but could just as easily have been php or python or c. The animated texts that accompanied live performances (and that appear in some of the published digital versions of sections online) were all made with html / css / javascript.