Gerrit Krol is a novelist and poet, but also a computer programmer, who worked for Royal Dutch Shell. This book offers the earliest examples of computer-generated poetry from the Netherlands, and includes an essay about Krol's methodology.
Florence’s presentation explores how the “espacement” (Mallarme, Derrida) intrinsic to all writing changes in a born-digital context.
The essay is a poetic exploration of how digital writing and reading operate in a new dynamic, exploring existing pathways and structures, innovatively correlated. But this simple change in relations - this new dynamic - does something further. Not only does digital reading/writing make visible and active existing structures of reading and language, it also creates new ones
"OK Texts" is a series of linked animated gifs that explores the noton of textuality and texts.
"Technical determinisms will cause you great pain.
Continue?"
Technocapitalism began as a set of essays collected in 2002 to be the first in a series of Alt-X Critical E-books.
Under the "technocapitalism" thread, ebr authors regard technology as neither utopian nor neutral, but as capital. As everyday life becomes further defined by communications, automations, and informatics, technology shapes our languages, animates our environments, and fosters our relationships. Techno-logic assures us that it applies scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life, bringing planning, design, and growth. Yet, this is a conservative philosophy that serves to reign in technologies. The essays gathered in this thread (circa 2003) by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills fleshed out some of the social relations of exploitation created by this harnessing of information technologies, especially in the university and through the web. A decade later, the essays assembled by Aron Pease explore our current era of technocapitalism more broadly. As the techno club prepares its citizens for permanent war in the global state, we can also observe a technocapitalist imaginary, exemplified in the wildest fantasies of postmodern fiction and transdisciplinary discourse, pointing a way through.
(Source: EBR)
Brian Lennon considers the aesthetic that Retallack has evolved out of a cybernetic sensibility - a formalism that does not impose authoritarian codes or repressive orders, but rather hacks a pattern out of the sheer data of everyday life: directories, menus, phone books, indexes, encyclopedias, and archives.
The Gathering Cloud collates research into the history and language of meteorology with current thinking about data storage and climate change. Archival material from the Met Office Archive and Library in Exeter has been studied and sifted, along with classical, medieval, and Victorian sources, including, in particular, Luke Howard’s classic essay On the Modifications of Clouds, first published in 1803.
This research material is presented as a sequence of texts and images, acting both as a primer to the ideas behind the project and as a document of its movement between formats, from the data centre to the illuminated screen, from the live performance to the printed page. In his foreword media theorist Jussi Parikka describes the work as “a series of material transformations made visible through a media history executed as digital collage and print publication, hendecasyllabic verse, and critical essay”.
This work won the New Media Writing Prize 2016.
The Cloud is an airily deceptive name connoting a floating world far removed from the physical realities of data.
An estimated 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information are created and stored globally each year by ordinary consumers with no sense that data is physical and storing it has a direct impact on the environment.
This essay is a hypothesis with focus on the generational shift from deep attention, towards hyper attention in cognitive modes. Deep attention is a cognitive mode witch will allow you to focus long term, problemsolving, analyzing etc. Reading a long novella, solving a mathproblem. Hyper attention is the cognitive mode where you multitask, lots of minor tasks at once, as in playing a videogame, using social media, etc. In this mode your focus has a short timeline and tends to affect your attention span conserning long time problemsolving.
The article discusses the educational preparedness in the future, when this problem is likely to affect us. As a society the problem of this generational shift has already started to show itself,
but the educational system need to prepare for the changes that will arise, when todays 10 year olds enter the area of higher education. It is suggested that being prepared could be to use new pedagogical models, that provide greater stimulation than the typical classrom.
The author concludes that the two cognitive modes are and should be side by side, and that educators has a responsibility to adapt to the changes that are surfacing now, and to the changes that will only increase in the years ahead.
So standard has deep attention become in educational settings that it is the de facto norm, with hyper attention regarded as defective behavior that scarcely qualifies as
a cognitive mode at all.
Notes Very Necessary is a collaboratively authored web-based multi-media essay that aims to addresses climate change by remixing images, text, and data generated by centuries imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, and scientific exploration in the Arctic. The title is borrowed from an essay authored in 1580 by the Englishmen Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman offering detailed instructions on how to conquer new territories by taking copious notes. In 2015 Barbara Bridger and J. R. Carpenter attempted to follow these instructions by making, finding, and faking notes, images, data, and diagrams online and reconfiguring them into a new narrative. The result is a long, horizontally scrolling, highly variable collage essay charting the shifting melting North.
if the wind does serve
go a seaboard the sands.
set off from thence.
note the time diligently.
turn then your glass.
keep continual watch.
use bottom scroll bar or arrow keys to scroll from left to right
The Kaos electronic literature magazine was published on floppy disk by the French company Kaos as a new year electronic postcard from 1991 to 1993. Realised by Jean-Pierre Balpe, the father of automatic literary text generation, the issue #3 released in January 1993 for Apple Mac proposes generators by different authors (in French and one in English by Jasper). (Source: http://imal.org/en/resurrection/kaos-3-action-poetique-jean-pierre-balpe)
Kaos était une revue sur ordinateur consacrée à la littérature électronique et produite par la société Kaos, qui la présentait comme carte de voeux. Réalisée par Jean-Pierre Balpe, trois numéros sur disquettes seront ainsi édités entre 1991 et 1993. Ce numéro 3 est sorti en Janvier 1993. La génération automatique de textes est quasi l'oeuvre de Jean-Pierre Balpe dont l'influence a été décisive sur la littérature numérique française des années 1980. Le numéro 3 propose plusieurs générateurs de différents auteurs. (Source: http://imal.org/fr/resurrection/kaos-3-action-poetique-jean-pierre-balpe)
Jean-Pierre Balpe is the programmer of most of the pieces in the issue. Mark Smith is the programmer of the JasperEngine.
In this paper I argue that the restrictions imposed by technological barriers within select forms of digital literature and net art are cause for the success of these works from the early internet to the present—the technological restrictions themselves guided their formulation. Arguably, the
constraints create the aesthetic context in which the works thrive, while the artist figure
transforms into mechanical producer.
I ground my research in earlier studies I have engaged in, tracing the creation of digital literature and net art around the network itself. I build upon these theories and engage in media theory analyses of the networked communication systems from which these works were created. I observe how works of digital literature and net art are specifically inhibited by the technology on which they were created for: Apple BASIC restricts bpNichols works from using lowercase lettering; the Apple Lisa (1983) integrates the mouse but the Apple Inc (1984) removes most of this accessibility from the user and restricts interactive fiction; the Apple Macintosh, less adaptable to change, experiences (relatively) widespread adoption as the DIY spirit from the Apple I series and its digital literature works quickly fade. Hardt and Negri describe how labor transforms the organization of production—linear relationships of the assembly line transform into indeterminate relationships of distributed networks. I evidence how these basic moves within these distributed networks of digital literature and net art production embrace the restriction of the medium, depend on it, and in fact integrate these formal elements into the early digital literature aesthetic. Such identifiable elements, visible in contemporary works, are in fact traceable to the early occurences in the mid-1980s as I demonstrate.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
