Unnatural Habitats sings the poetry of primitive submarines, crippled spaceships, and basement apartments. Canadian poet Kathy Mac explores the consequences of American idealism, from the Apollo 13 tragedy to the U.S. invasion of Kuwait.
This paper presents a feminist, platform-conscious approach to reading and preserving a work of early, pre-web electronic literature: Kathryn Cramer's short Storyspace hypertext fiction, "In Small & Large Pieces" (1994). Ensslin adopts a postphenomenological approach centered around Material Engagement Theory (MET), which was originally developed by cognitive archeologists and anthropologists to reflect the material significance of extended, embedded, embodied and enactive cognition, also known as "e-cognition" (Ransom and Gallagher 2020), for human development and subjectivity. Glossed briefly, "extended" refers to the relational idea that "minds and things are continuous and interdefinable processes rather than isolated and independent entities" (Malafouris 2016: 9); "embedded" foregrounds the situated, spatially contingent nature of these processes and relationships; "embodied" emphasizes the fact that the things we interact with become cognitive extensions of the human body, and that "human-technology relations are not representational relations but embodiment relations" (Ihde & Malafouris 2018: 205); and "enactive" signifies that "cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is the enactment of a world" (Varela et al 1991: 9; Iliopoulos 2019). What we learn, know, understand and feel is therefore a product of our active, embedded and embodied interaction with the things around us, and that includes technologies of reading and play. Applied to reading electronic literature, MET can help us understand how the materialities of e-literary creation and experience have a recursive, reciprocal and diachronically dynamic effect on our relationship with a work, but also more generally with our own understanding of what we do and who we are in the field and the community. Ensslin examines how MET can account for how emulation-often stigmatized as legally fraught and inauthentic-can become an integral part of restorative and productive co-reading.
This paper was a contribution to the panel, "On the Effect(s) of Living Backwards", at the ELO 2021 Conference.
Published in issue 1:3 of the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994), Kathryn Cramer’s short poetic hypertext fiction, “In Small & Large Pieces” came bundled with Kathy Mac’s “Unnatural Habitats”, first as two 3.5-inch floppy disks for Macintosh and PC, and later on a single CD-ROM requiring 2 MB RAM and a hard disk drive. A “dark fantasy” and “postmodern Through the Looking Glass” (folio back cover), Cramer’s work aligns with numerous remediations of Alice in Wonderland in contemporary history of art, narrative, and digital culture. The titular broken looking glass becomes a metaphor of “obsessive fragmentation” (blurb) throughout the text, and of how readers move between different types of texts, such as poems, hand-written notes, and captioned images “illuminates this moment of shattered self” (ibid).
“Century Cross” is one of the nine hypertexts from Larsen's Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts. It was published in 1995, two years before Samplers by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext Volume 2, Number 2. It was bundled with Judith Kerman’s “Mothering” and Michael van Mantegem’s “Completing the Circle.”
This entry is based on access to the original files, interviews held with the artist, and personal papers the artist donated to the Electronic Literature Organization. Thus, the date of the publication has been corrected to reflect the information found in these resources.