feedback

Private Screening is a live performance which considers questions of presence, access, and vulnerability in light of a cultural rush into interfaces of abstraction.

Locked in feedback loops that route through the computational cloud, the mind's means of provisionally defining itself — language — becomes data to be collected, systematized, synthesized, monetized, and maximized for impact. In these conditions, what does it mean to speak and to listen intimately? When the mind is persistently joined with networks, what does it mean to be self-consciously present?

Private Screening is a commissioned work responding to Goat Island's 2007 performance The Lastmaker. It premiered as part of the Goat Island Archive, a retrospective exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in June 2019.

“E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it.” Stephanie Strickland outlines 11 rules of electronic poetry.

Cybertexts are the pairs of utterance-message and feedback-response that pass from speaker-writer to listener-reader, and back, through a channel awash with noise. Cybertextuality is a broad theory of communication that draws on the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) to describe how we manage these dual message-feedback cybertexts into being and that helps explain the publishing, the transmission, and the reception of all speech and text. Recursiveness, complexity, and homeostasis are three principles of cybertextuality. Because we are cognitively blind to how we create most utterances (language belongs to procedural memory, which can be recalled only by enacting it), we unselfconsciously model even our own language acts (not just ones by other people) simply in order to recognize and revise them. We observe or receive our own language acts before anyone else does. Our feedback is to represent those acts meaningfully. Mental modelling, as a feedback mechanism, is recursive. Our every utterance or output serves as input to another (possibly silent) uttering. Messaging-feedback is also complex. It operates cognitively on phonetic, lexical, grammatical, semantic, and discourse levels of language and often handles different utterances simultaneously. However, cybertextual cycling serves us well. It is a dynamic, self-regulating (what is termed homeostatic) steering mechanism. Using it, we can manage our language creation just as James Watt’s flyball governor controls a steam engine. We can observe this cybertextual self-regulation in our mind’s working memory as well as in the many language technologies -- manuscript, printed book, word-processor -- we have built to extend the very limited capacity of that working memory. Digital infrastructure offers, in some ways, a better cybertextual avatar for communication than supplied by our own mind.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

When we are talking about the new media art and e-literature we need to emphasize a crucial shift in
a very nature of today’s work of art; instead of a stable work of art (Ger. Kunstwerk) we are witnessing its transformation to the flexible service of art, to the performance and the event. As such it enters the present society shaped by the shifts from industrial society to postindustrial (and information) one, from material labor to immaterial, from Taylorist mode of production to postindustrial, e. g. a flexible one, from material artifact to its logo, from manufacturing to marketing of brands, from the economy of artifacts to the economy of financial markets and their products.

The flight of capital away from the productive economy (of material goods) into the financial
economy of more abstract instruments and services has caused many significant consequences also in the scope of production and its very phenomenology. Suddenly, by the stock exchange driven financial markets with the novel series of risky financial products (derivates) are becoming the crucial venues of spectacular events in the present society. The question needs to be raised, what are the novel concepts taken from the field of economy that might be applied in the (social) theory of e-literature?In this paper we aim first to explore the shift from industrial production to postindustrial prosumption in terms that the feedback from e-literary world (of readers, scholars, critics) is getting
more and more crucial for the producers of e-literary works. E-literature authors write and program
their pieces for e-literary world, which is not an abstract entity but as a living one consisted from
readers, (other) artists and experts who are able to steady contribute some basic information to the
authors.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)