In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.
The concept of “erased” text has been a recurrent theme in postmodernist criticism. While most speculation about the presence or absence of an absolute text is applied to print literature, the manifestations of digital text present a new and entirely separate level of investigation. The combination of visible language and hidden code do not negate the basic questions of language and interpretation – these continue to be important in our study of electronic texts. However, the visible text – under the influence of code – can be modified, transformed, and even deleted in ways that introduce markedly different implications for reading strategies and meaning structures. This paper will explore a selection of works from electronic writers illustrating text/code practices that involve disappearing “text.” Text can absent itself by the simplest of reader actions – the mouseover or the link which takes the reader to another “lexia” in the piece. But text can also be obliterated by actions of the code, unassisted by the reader/navigator. Moreover, there are intermediate techniques to create vanishing text. Oni Buchanan and Betsey Stone Mazzoleni’s The Mandrake Vehicles – subtitled “meaninglessness and back” – is a good example of clearly visible, reader-activated, yet code-determined text manipulation. Stuart Moulthrop’s Deep Surface takes a different approach to “executed” text – imagining a “deep reading simulator.” Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley’s In the White Darkness proposes a symbolic function for elusive text and image. Stephanie Strickland’s slippingglimpse lets the movement of water itself be the mechanism for creation and erasure of text. These, and other works, begin to suggest a set of categories that might be identified in electronic literature. The presence/absence of meaningful information in electronic fiction and poetry can signify in many ways. And, we may ask, when the text is gone, does it leave a “trace”? Or is vanishing text in electronic literature actually a case of One (text) + One (Code) = Zero (0)? (Source: ELO 2013 Author's abstract)
The most important difference between print texts and born digital works is that of input and outcome. As Stephanie Strickland noted in her “Born Digital” essay, “To read e-works is to operate or to play them.” Several electronic writers use text/code practices that involve disappearing “text” or image. Text can absent or present itself by the simplest of reader actions – the click (which might activate anything from a Flash file to a sound clip), the mouseover (which might obliterate text by color change, show/hide functions, time-outs), or the link (which might take the reader to another “lexia” and resist return), or the act of typing in text responses (which might elicit further information or restrict same).
Dreaming of a book you're not writing.
At drømme om en bog du ikke skriver.
I drømme er bøgerne tomme. Store læderindbundne, knirkende sager, fyldt med blanke sider, som man selv fylder ud med sin spidseste pen nat efter nat. Kapitel efter kapitel. Bagefter forsegler man dem med en lille gylden lås. Og holder nøglen fast krammet i en svedig hånd, før man gemmer den det mest hemmelige sted. Når man vågner, leder man som en rasende. Men nøglen er væk.
Coover wrote: “The most distinctive literary contribution of the computer has been (...) the intimate layering and fusion of imagined spatiality and temporality.” Of course, by “spatiality” Coover meant the topologies of text non-linear in its presentation, not a more literal representation of space. I discuss my experiments using the Google Maps API as an interface for hypertext fiction. This of course is not in itself new, but there are some possibilities in cartography-oriented fiction I would like to call attention to. In particular:
1. Using a familiar interface, such works may introduce a broader audience to Electronic Fiction, without dumbing it down;
2. The Golden Age’s concerns with spatiality are recast now with a third extra dimension, represented space in a more literal sense. The realm of topological possibilities in this intertwining – temporality, textual structure, represented space – is vast. 3. Such works inevitably touch upon our subjective relationship with space, and the shifting modes of our articulation thereof. Three works are presented:
1. Where in the World is Loira do Banheiro? (2008) is a collaborative map of haunted places in Sao Paulo. Visitors are invited to contribute their own stories of haunted places – personal, a-friend-of-friendish, or belonging to folk/common knowledge. An introductory text and a design in imitation of classical “ghost stories” websites suggest some playfulness to the endeavor. This work has been featured in Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo, the two largest newspapers of the city and the first and third, respectively, in the country. Besides points 2 and 3 listed above, this work explores the common grounds between anonymous writing and folkloric storytelling.
2. Quem Matou Clarah Averbuck? (2009) Clarah Averbuck is a writer residing in Sao Paulo, who became notorious for her thinly-veiledly autobiographical fiction and who began her career writing on the Internet. In the real world, she is alive; in the story, she is found dead in mysterious circumstances. Her death itself is completely irrelevant, but the “mystery of her death” connects different storylines. I have tried to point out the specificities of the interface, such as using satellite photographs of real places in a work of fiction and its consequences, for example; and to scrutinize point 2 more closely. It is a humorous work, and its Leitmotiv is the difference between fiction and lies. Clarah Averbuck was not pleased.
3. The Time Again of Bruno Zeitblom (2010 – of yet unfinished) This work portrays a character, a musician fascinated with Sound Landscapes and the role of spatiality in music, by describing his relationship with the space he inhabits. Recordings of found and ambient sounds are presented as the main character’s attempt of an "aural cartography" of the city.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).