cybertext

Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley's research-based practice of electronic literature, Grammalepsy introduces a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice developed specifically for the making and critical appreciation of language art in digital media. As he examines the cultural shift away from traditional print literature and the changes in our culture of reading, Cayley coins the term “grammalepsy” to inform those processes by which we make, understand, and appreciate language.Framing his previous writings within the overall context of this theory, Cayley eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers to reduce aesthetic linguistic making-even when it has multimedia affordances-to “writing.” Instead, Cayley argues that electronic literature and digital language art allow aesthetic language makers to embrace a compositional practice inextricably involved with digital media, which cannot be reduced to print-dependent textuality.

John Cayley reviews the Hypertext ‘97 Conference, which brought together representatives from corporate and academic sectors.

Apologies: This is not a ‘balanced’ review of the Hypertext ‘97 conference, but only, as Ted Nelson would put it, one particular, packaged, ‘point of view’. I haven’t named all the names I should have or even many and I have not explicitly acknowledged the herculean efforts of the many organizers. Readers are referred to the full published conference proceedings, The Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, edited by Mark Bernstein, Leslie Carr, and Casper Osterbye (New York: ACM, 1997). My perspective is that of a practitioner of literary cybertext. This piece was written quickly as a draft towards a (probably shorter) review of the conference which is to be published in the UK-based periodical (presently a quarterly newspaper) of ‘digitalartcritique’ entitled Mute.

J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew Hargadon on the affective side of hypertexts via “schemas, scripts, and the fifth business.”

This doctoral thesis is dedicated to a form of storytelling which was added to the literary horizon
almost three decades ago. Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. The
transgression of linearity, a feature which is often related to print or, more precisely, to the novel, and the attempts to reduce authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining
characteristics of this literary form. These works were first described as fragmented objects
comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of
choice and a participative role in the construction of the text. This text was read by selecting several links and by assembling its lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new kinds of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several forms of representation could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons. Sound was also included as part of digital fiction.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software is often followed by the creation of new
types of texts. Virtual reality or augmented reality are presently being used to produce new textual responses. These demand an analysis of the relation between interactivity and immersion. While interactivity is often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion is frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the
reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the
result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was
mostly viewed as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing electronic literature as part of a long self-generating process known as literature, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. In fact, they represent intrinsic characteristics which can be identified in any kind of literary text. In order to better understand the relation between immersion and interactivity, the alleged transparency of the medium and its apparent immateriality will be discussed in this thesis. The hybridity and interactivity of digital fiction will be considered as aesthetic features that must be covered by literary analysis. This thesis aims to address the relationship between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.

Cybertexts are the pairs of utterance-message and feedback-response that pass from speaker-writer to listener-reader, and back, through a channel awash with noise. Cybertextuality is a broad theory of communication that draws on the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) to describe how we manage these dual message-feedback cybertexts into being and that helps explain the publishing, the transmission, and the reception of all speech and text. Recursiveness, complexity, and homeostasis are three principles of cybertextuality. Because we are cognitively blind to how we create most utterances (language belongs to procedural memory, which can be recalled only by enacting it), we unselfconsciously model even our own language acts (not just ones by other people) simply in order to recognize and revise them. We observe or receive our own language acts before anyone else does. Our feedback is to represent those acts meaningfully. Mental modelling, as a feedback mechanism, is recursive. Our every utterance or output serves as input to another (possibly silent) uttering. Messaging-feedback is also complex. It operates cognitively on phonetic, lexical, grammatical, semantic, and discourse levels of language and often handles different utterances simultaneously. However, cybertextual cycling serves us well. It is a dynamic, self-regulating (what is termed homeostatic) steering mechanism. Using it, we can manage our language creation just as James Watt’s flyball governor controls a steam engine. We can observe this cybertextual self-regulation in our mind’s working memory as well as in the many language technologies -- manuscript, printed book, word-processor -- we have built to extend the very limited capacity of that working memory. Digital infrastructure offers, in some ways, a better cybertextual avatar for communication than supplied by our own mind.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

We have been referring to electronic literature as a corpus of texts with dynamic and
multimodal features. A digital text can change during reading and assume the form of a
collage work, a film or a game. Additionally, the text as a whole (Eskelinen, 2012),
because of its own transient nature, might never be presented to the reader. The text
can be played at such a pace as to be partly or completely ungraspable. Due to the range
of forms assumed by the text, it might also be unable to return to an early state. This
means that the reader might not be allowed to reread or replay the text in order to achieve
a final or coherent version of it. This also means that there might be no original state to
return to.
Shapeshifting is the ability of a being to take the form of an object or of another being.
This has been a common theme in folklore and mythology and it continues to be explored
in games or in fantasy and science fiction films, as well as in literature. Since digital
fiction is created through a computer and this tool can show emergent behavior, texts can
easily undergo unexpected metamorphosis. They are transmorphs that change their shape
- from letters to images or icons, from human language to binary code - by simulating
(or becoming) different art forms or media. Brainstrips (2009), by Alan Bigellow, for
example, incorporates comic strips, photography and audio files. Andromeda (2008), by
Caitlin Fisher, is a pop-up book which comes to life thanks to augmented reality
markers detected by the computer’s webcam. Some of these texts thwart any notion of
textual stability/identity in order to respond to the reader’s intervention or to complete a
programmed action. In Connected Memories (2009) María Mencía tells the story of
several refugees living in London through disappearing keywords. In The Flat (2005),
by Andy Campbell, the reader follows a trail of memories. Following the traces of
narrative and dealing with the text’s constant shapeshifting are the tasks a reader might
have to accept in order to read digital fiction. Subverting the reader’s expectations is
often part of the game.
The reader, trapped in a symbiotic relationship with the machine (Hayles, 2008), must
unmask the story while exploring and manipulating the elements on screen. Volatile
signifiers transmitted by an auto-generative text have an impact on the process of
signification. During the contact with the text, immersion in the narrative and
interaction with the text (Ryan, 2001) become often irreconcilable. With this paper I
propose an analysis of the multimodal, transient, interactive (or reactive) nature of the
digital text. By applying the concept of shapeshifting to the works cited above, I aim to
address the impact of textual hybridity and transience on reading and, simultaneously,
to depict electronic literature as an ever-evolving shapeshifter.

Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. In so doing, transgression of linearity and the attempt to reduce the authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining characteristics of this literary form. Works of digital fiction were first described as fragmented objects comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of choice and a participatory role in the construction of the text. These texts were read by selecting several links and by assembling lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new types of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several media could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software and new devices is often followed by the creation of new texts. Head-mounted displays and tracking devices are being used to produce new textual responses. Bodily movement is often treated as the catalyser of these textual responses and the reader is often considered as the creator of a narrative written in real-time. This means that the attempt to offer the reader a participatory role continues to be fostered by electronic literature. In this thesis, digital fiction is described as part of an introspection and self-generating process catalysed by literature. Consequently, these new kind of texts will be defined as part of the ever-evolving field of literature.
While interactivity was often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion was frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was mostly regarded as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing interactivity as a set of cognitive and physical actions on the part of the reader and by defining immersion as a result and origin of these actions, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. This thesis aims at addressing the relation between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.