dialogue

Not quite a short story, not quite a stage play, ‘Once upon a Tide’ is just one of those moments in literature when time … stands … still. When plot advances by simply refusing to budge. One of those waiting times, slack tides, great hollows within which heat intensifies, cold deepens, night thickens, fevers rage, or the sun continues its relentless blaze. Tension builds, and still nothing happens; neither the sight of a sail on the horizon nor the slightest breath of wind. It is within these long stillnesses that sailors’ yarns unravel. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the entirety of Marlow’s tale is recounted in one evening whilst sitting utterly still on the deck of a ship moored on the Thames. In the pitch dark and the heavy night air of the river, the narrator strains to discern meaning: ‘I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips…’.

In fiction, these long feverish pauses eventually break. In a variable text, however, we may hover forever within the tense and nuanced relation between reading, listening, watching, and waiting for the sentence, the word, the clue…

(Source: J. R. Carpenter, The Junket)

In support of their belief that the truest test of a methodology is to apply it to a new set of questions/practices, Barbara Bridger and J.R. Carpenter embark on a conversation about Carpenter’s computer-­generated dialogue: TRAINS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]. As they attempt to find language appropriate to an extended notion of dramaturgy capable of both contributing to and critiquing a digital literary practice, their calls and responses to one another come to perform the form and content of the dialogue in question. The resulting discussion provides an example of putting performance writing methodology into practice.

Traditionally, visual, computational, performing, and literary arts referred to separate corpora, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences. This persistent separation proves problematic for creating, disseminating, experiencing, and theorising multi-modal work which draws equally upon multiple artistic and scientific traditions. This paper adopts a necessarily hybrid approach to addresses a multi-modal body of practice-led research. The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a performative form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Like the broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signifies that it is intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of the printed map are QR codes which link to computer-generated narrative dialogues composed of fragments culled from a corpus of print literature. These are presented as performance scripts replete with ‘stage’ instructions suggesting how and where they might be performed. As such, these points on the physical map point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts. This paper frames the composition of this work in terms of the Situationist strategies of détournement and dérive as theorized by McKenzie Wark. Adopting N. Katherine Hayles’ conception of the digital text as ‘eventilized’, and adapting Foucault’s conception of the archive ‘emerging in fragments’ to consider the computer-generated narrative as a general system of the formation and transformation of statement-events, this paper situates The Broadside of a Yarn and three stand-alone works to have emerged from it on an axis between langue and parole, between what is said and what is done, between what Deleuze and Guattari term machinic assemblages of desire and assemblages of collective enunciation.

This paper locates narrative resonance in transatlantic communications networks through a discussion of one web-based work, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], a computer-generated narrative dialogue which propagates across, beyond, and through transatlantic communications networks. These networks engendered by generations of past usage come to serve as narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away.

In 2001, Florian Cramer wondered whether ‘the theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted... from perceiving computer data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in such notions as ‘hypertext’, ‘hyperfiction’, ‘hyper-/multimedia’) towards paying attention to the very codedness–that is, textuality–of digital systems themselves' (Cramer, 2001). I want to extend this focus on the codedness of computer-based textuality into a technosocial ‘phenomenology’ of the text-as-apparatus. These texts cannot be understood separately from the apparatus that displays and performs them. ‘Trilogical’ relationships exist between humans and apparatuses that are revealed during the performance of the text-as-apparatus. The trilogue acknowledges the apparatus as an entity that, while lacking consciousness, possesses a pseudo-agency with ramifications for the interpretations of such texts. The result is new types of creative relationships, in which different concepts of language compete, and hopefully combine, to create new types of meaning.