digital textuality

With ‘interface criticism’ (Andersen and Pold) as an outset, we will address how the interface is in a transition from a closed system of interaction, to a dispersed network. More specifically, we are interested in how to relate aesthetically to this transition as a new mode of organization of the ‘masses’ (or ‘users’) that takes place in a cultural industry around metainterfaces. Following a path of critique from Benjamin, Kracauer, Crary, Hayles and others, we intend to discuss it as a new form of media spectacle: a ‘metainterface spectacle’ that simultaneously organizes the users, and offers a way of perceiving their reality as ‘cognitive assemblages’.

This spectacle not only makes the interface increasingly transparent, smooth and accessible to the users; it also makes the organization of and perspective on the users more opaque. Put differently, with increased digitization follows not only a smooth user-reality of social media, video conferencing, streaming, and more, but also the displacement of horrific conditions of labor in the countries that produce our platforms (at the factories in Shenzen or the mines in Congo), problems around privacy emerging from increased datafication, the decline of quality (sound and images are ‘poor’ (Steyerl, Sterne) and text is datafied), global monopolies, and more. This paradox poses an interesting question to interface criticism, and digital research more broadly: when the interface disappears, how may one develop a critical understanding of the potential disjunctions (or, dislocations (Laclau)) between the desires of the users and the organization of users (including the maximization of profit, transgression of data privacy, exploitation of resources, and more)? How is perception formatted by and through technology and data, how does this relate to broader reconfigurations of sense-perception and ways of reading?

In search for possible answers, we are particularly interested in the hard to capture dimensions of common practices of digital culture (how images, text, music, user data, etc. are circulated, formatted, metrified, filtered, re-purposed, and more), and how they are exposed and reflected in artistic practices. We will analyse how artists and authors (e.g. Joana Moll, Ben Grosser, or Allison Parish) try to emphasize their own critical practice (‘poetics’) in artist run workshops, and how they in this way seek to help users critically relate to a contemporary ‘metainterface spectacle’.

They do so in quite different ways; engaging different levels of code, technical infrastructures, surface/user interfaces, the use of software tools, and more. An analysis of how these workshop practices reflect the particular poetics of the artists relates to ongoing discussions within software studies (of ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre) and how to ‘(un)learn’ technology’ (Bogers & Chiappini); but it also opens up for discussions with neighboring fields, including digital humanities (how to perform critical textual analysis when the text is algorithmically performative and the performances hidden in the banal discretion of a technological (and often technocratic) system?), as well as design and HCI (how to understand ‘critical technical practice’ as an alternative to ‘design’?).

This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman's 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these 'interactive' texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly 'infinite' text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the 'naturalness' of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader's/player's desire for a high level of perceived agency.The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.

We Descend: Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor first appeared in electronic form in 1997, published by Eastgate Systems on a floppy disk as a Storyspace Reader for Macintosh computers; as of 2018, the work is available on the internet, encoded in HTML5 and CSS3, the latest in a series of at least a dozen necessary "upgrades" to its software instantiation. Throughout this period, techology for presenting archival material has continued to transform at an increasing rate. At the same time, previously unknown writings have come to light; new methods of processing writings have been developed; and certain assumptions guiding the preparation of previous volumes have had to be updated as well. This paper will focus on some of the most pressing issues facing the primary "minder of gaps" in such an enterprise, the Curator, of which Bill Bly is only the most recent. Perhaps the largest gap to be bridged in our comprehension of such an enterprise is that between the impression of tidiness and order that any "finished" instantiation — with its neatly labeled apparati, finding aids, annotations, and commentary — presents to the reader, in contrast to the extensive dithering, fussing, and floundering actually required to herd together a collection of writings that have been gathered and transmitted over a span of many generations. Once brought together, these texts must be arranged, sequenced, and linked to one another in an organization that facilitates their being read, understood (each by itself and as a member of a group), pondered, and then easily located again after being laid aside. The immaterial "space" defined by this "placement" of such "objects" in relation to each other — as if they were furniture and other appurtenances arranged in a room — is useless until its design can be mentally grasped by the reader, and some person must perform this essentially hospitalic function, that of welcoming the reader into the space inhabited by the writings of the Archives. In doing so, this hôtelier (the Curator, whether named or not), leaves a trace that itself can be "read". In We Descend, all such persons are regarded as of equal importance to the original Authors whose work the reader has come here to encounter. The first Curator was Egderus himself, a scribe who discovered a cache of ancient texts, to which he added writings by his contemporaries as well as his own recorded thoughts and memories, thereby creating the first "holdings" that form the kernel of the Archives now bearing his name. This process of amalgamation was recapitulated some generations later by an unknown Scholar who rediscovered the long-forgotten holdings of Egderus and passed it along, bridging the gap between Egderus and Bill Bly, whose mission has been to render the Archives into hypertext form.

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/614/Welco…

This twenty-minute paper builds toward the following provocation: it is no longer possible for a text not to be digital. Considering both existing and invented definitions of digital textuality, this paper frames (again!) various discussions of the nature of digital (and "electronic) texts, examining in digital texts their materialities and temporalities, their associated modes of composition and reception, their most evident differences from traditional texts, and their claims to both digital-ness and to textuality. Selecting key features from this analysis, I conclude that the digitalness of a text relates to the way in which it opens (and closes) certain possibilities of reading and other actions. Google's Book project, numerous digital library efforts, and even devices for digitizing business cards attest to the drive to make all texts digital. But, I suggest, even beyond these current events, we have come to understand the very idea of a text already in terms of its possibilities and thus as already digital or potentially digital. What room is left for another, non-digital notion of textuality to present itself?

(Source: Author's introduction)

Throughout the ages, literature has been a cultural element related to textuality and its technological devices in a slowly, but deep, way. All the devices turned media (voice, papyr, bulky bindings, paperbacks, electronic books or tablets) changed not only how one reads but mainly one's relationship with knowledge and the world.

(Source: Short and free translation from the original abstract)

The line between electronic literature and digital games has started to blur more than ever. For example, Christine Love’s 2012 Analogue: A Hate Story can be read as a literary “story” that builds on the visual novel form. However, critic Leif Johnson (of IGN) reviewed Analogue as a “game-like experience” and even a “game” that “neatly sidesteps the label of mere ‘interactive fiction’ like Love’s other games thanks to some smart design choices.” Phill Cameron (of Eurogamer) describes Analogue repeatedly as a “game” and also reflects on its deviation from the “interactive fiction” category. The slippage between the language of fiction and games, in such mainstream reviews, reveals a fascinating taxonomic undecidability. Though Analogue’s “textual” focus makes it a natural boundary object between electronic literature and digital games, this tension extends to games that incorporate minimal text or even no text at all. In this presentation, I focus on Thatgamecompany’s third and most critically-acclaimed game, Journey, which was also released in 2012. In Journey, the player guides a mysterious robed avatar through a desert and up a mountain. At different moments, the player can discover other players but cannot communicate with them via either speech or text. The journey on which the player embarks is suggestive of many things but ultimately unsolvable at either a ludic or narrative level. As Ian Bogost observes, “It could be a coming of age, or a metaphor for life, or an allegory of love or friendship or work or overcoming sickness or sloughing off madness. It could mean anything at all.” Rather than determining the “literariness” of Journey, I explore how it uses the affordances of both electronic literature and digital games to produce complex narrative networks. As such, my analysis focuses both on the shared gameplay experience of Journey itself and on the fan-created “Journey Stories” Tumblr space that collects emergent narratives of interactive play. This experience, I contend, helps us think through and across the boundary between electronic literature and videogames, and their once-discrete cultural orientations.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/digital-games-and-el… )

This essay is an in-depth analysis of Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000). The novel, marked by digital textuality, is an encompassing multilayering system fictionally constructed by different authors and several narratives. Thus, these narratives form a major work that reveals and parodies aspects of the gothic novel, as well as other genres and modes. Nevertheless, its structure is formally connected as a hypertextual narrative. Therefore, it would be inexact to categorize House of Leaves as being either one or other literary object. I propose approaching this novel as “participating” in all these categorizations.
Finally, I read the concept of ‘echo,’ which is presented by Danielewski on Chapter V, as an essential notion to understand the characters' progression through the narrative. This perspective concludes that literature reaches its potential when there is a singular production of echo, or an unpredictable lack of echo, meaning discomfort and strangeness (ostranenie) in the reader’s consciousness.