interface

This study concentrates on reading digital poetry. Reading entails the act of reading, strategies of analysis, and the means of understanding. Specifically, this study constructs a model of reading and interpreting poetry in digital form by close analysis of three complex case studies. Broadly, this study concerns the aesthetic means and meanings of poetry in the contemporary moment, where new and old media are in visible negotiation with each other. In digital poetry artistic expression, digital media, technology and cultural practices clash and combine to produce new poetic forms. With new forms of poetry come new challenges to reading, analysis, and interpretation. Digital poetry presents new material, literary, technical, and rhetorical strategies and techniques that offer novel possibilities – and restrictions – for reading. Thus, my broad question is: How do we read digital poetry? This broad question is broken down to a subset of research questions. These deal with the material medium, readerly action, and the processes of the poem, which are all to be seen as constituent of its effects and meanings. In answering these questions, I construct a new model for reading digital poetry. The model is distilled from my close readings of the case studies. The readings are literary, cultural, media-historical and media-specific. The background methodology for the investigation comes from the notion of close reading (sensu Culler 2010; Simanowski 2011; Pressman 2014). My reading model consists of three main elements: interface, interaction, and interpretation. I further divide the interface into elements of data (e.g. text, music, images), processes (e.g. temporal control, text generation), and medium (as material and conceptual). Interaction consists of logic, performance, and effect, which designate the mode of engagement with the work, the joint performance of the poem and the reader, and the effects these produce. Interpretation includes the articulation of effects and meanings. Whereas the effects are created in interaction with the work, articulating them is seen as part of interpretation. Interpretation includes the articulation of the meanings and connections the poem invites. In other words, the poem’s interface guides the concrete act of reading, interaction guides the reader’s mode of engagement with the interface, and interpretation guides the means of understanding what is read. The case studies renegotiate the interrelated and overlapping arenas of print and digital poetry, old and new media, and traditional and digital literary criticism. The first includes Cia Rinne’s zaroum (2001), archives zaroum (2008; with Christian Yde Frostholm) and notes for soloists (2009). The second is Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Dakota (2002). And the third is Stephanie Strickland’s “V-project”, which includes two print books (V:WaveSon.nets /Losing L’Una 2002; V: WaveTercets /Losing L’Una 2014) two web applications (V:Vniverse Shockwave application 2002 with Cynthia Lawson-Jaramillo; Errand Upon Which We Came 2001; with M. D. Coverley), and an iPad application (Vniverse 2014; with Ian Hatcher). The emphasis in the case studies is on examining strategies of reading and interpretation as well as producing new readings and interpretations of the poetry in question. I investigate the interdependence of traditional print-based and emerging digital strategies of reading poetry, and combine print-based scholarly approaches with digital-based scholarship.

We are living in an interface culture: wherever we are, we find touch screens, microphones, sensors, cameras; and we are constantly reminded of interfaces through their sounds. Whether mobile, networked or embedded in architecture or artefacts, the number of interfaces constantly increases to meet the desires of technologies, users and markets.

Usually, an interface is understood as a technological artefact optimized for seamless interaction and functionality. However, the interface also draws upon cultural and artistic traditions, and plays an important role in our culture as art, entertainment, communication, work and businesses. It is a cultural form with which we understand, act, sense and create our world. In other words, it does not only mediate between man and computer, but also between culture and technological materiality (data, algorithms, and networks). With this, the mediation affects the way cultural activities are perceived and performed.

But, have we now reached the end of cultural computing? In Apple’s 1984 advertisement video for the first Macintosh computer, an interface for conformity, absorbing the worker in a totalitarian state, was replaced by an interface for individual expression and do-it-yourself culture. Three decades later, the table is turning. According to a leaked NSA presentation it is now Apple who is Big Brother, and enthusiastic iPhone customers who are the zombies living in a surveillance state (Rosenbach et al 2013). The imagined free world of cultural computing has turned into a business of “controlled consumption” (Striphas 2010; Andersen and Pold 2014). To prevent piracy, software and hardware providers such as Apple, Amazon and Google have introduced a new cultural business model that involves a licensing system for cultural software and content. In short, cultural production becomes consumption – a matter of uploading content into the cloud, and selecting pre-configured filters. Although configurations are intrinsic to an interface culture, this has been taken to another level, and has turned into a ‘war on general purpose computing,’ as described by Cory Doctorow: the locking down of software into hardware turns the computer into an IT “appliance” (2011). Simultaneously, cultural consumption becomes production of data of what is read, looked at, listened to, etc., valuable in marketing as well as national defence. In this way, interface culture has been subsumed under a strictly monopolizing business model. The computer, which was originally developed as a military technology but redefined as emancipatory and revolutionary by Apple and others, is now back again where it began: as a military intelligence technology.

The above indicates that our interface culture has become ‘post-digital’: the digital expression holds less fascination, and digital culture is no longer the domain of DIY culture per se (see e.g., Cascone 2010, Cramer 2014, Cox 2014). Following this, and building on prior work on interface criticism (e.g., Andersen & Pold 2011), we propose six characteristics of the interface that we believe are important to address to critically reflect contemporary interface culture.

(Source: Author's introduction to the article)

For the last year or two I’ve been focusing most of my research and writing on the notion of ‘interface’ – a technology, whether book or screen, that is the intermediary layer between reader and writing. What I’ve found is that ‘interface’ gives us a wedge to approach the broad and complex question of how the reading and writing of poetry have changed in the digital age and how the digital age has in turn changed the way in which we understand what I call “bookbound” poetry. It seems to me that a discussion of digital poetry in terms of interface – a discussion whose methodology is driven by the field of Media Archaeology – could be a crucial intervention into both poetry/poetics and media studies in that it meshes these fields together to 1) make visible the Human-Computer interfaces we take for granted everyday; and 2) to frame certain works of electronic literature as instances of activist media poetics.

In part influenced by the so-called “Berlin school of media studies” that has grown out of Friedrich Kittler’s new media approach, Media Archaeology is invested in both recovering the analog ancestors of the digital and reading the digital back into the analog. And so the argument I keep trying to make is this:  nineteenth-century fascicles as much as mid-twentieth century typewriters and later-twentieth century digital computers are now slowly but surely revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning depends on interfaces that fundamentally frame what can and cannot be said. I am, then, trying to move the definition of “interface” outside its conventional HCI-based usage (in which interface is usually defined as the intermediary layer between a user and a digital computer or computer program) and apply it to writing media more broadly to mean the layer between reader and any given writing medium which allows the reader to interact with the text itself. Moving the fields of HCI and literary studies closer together through a simple widening of the term “interface” does not just signal a mere shift in terminology. Instead, my sense is that a hybridizing of the two fields helps to move the study of electronic literature into the post-Marshall McLuhan, enabling us to go beyond repeatedly pointing out how the medium is the message and take up Katherine Hayles’ well-received injunction for “media-specific analysis” to get at not just particular media, but particularities such as the interface in the individual media instantiations of e-literature.

It also seems to me that an attention to interface – again, made possible through attention to certain works of e-literature – is a crucial tool in our arsenal against a receding present…by which I mean without attention to the ways in which present and past writing interfaces frame what can and cannot be said, the contemporary computing industry will only continue un-checked in its accelerating drive to achieve perfect invisibility through mulit-touch, so-called Natural User Interfaces, and ubiquitous computing devices. My sense is that the computing industry desires nothing more than to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read let alone write the interface.

(Source: Author's introduction to the essay)

“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.

Examples of everyday urban experiences with interfaces are numerous: TripAdvisor provides access restaurants, and other sights that are otherwise not clearly visible in the urban landscape; with Airbnb, any apartment in the city holds the invisible potential of a bed and breakfast, etc. In other words “every street corner and every local pub leads a double life.” (de Waal). The interface is however not just an interface to the city, but is a meta-construction that within itself holds a particular urban gaze (Andersen and Pold). This presentation focuses on the black box of the urban metainterface, and how the city is textualized beyond the street sign and the billboard; and how this produces a particular territoriality and perception of space. The urban metainterface depends on an ability to capture the user’s behaviors: the more the interface opens up the city – to diverse behaviors and signification – the more it needs to monitor the users and their milieu, and process these data. The more we read, the more we are being read. But what are the aesthetic mechanisms of seeing and walking in the city, whilst being seen and being guided? In the app Las calles habladas, or Spoken Streets, by Clara Boj and Diego Diaz, the user is offered a random map and walking path around their location. The app is an audio guide, but unlike most audio guides, however, the narrative appears fragmented. The audio track is an automated text-to-speech function where each user movement generates a search and is answered by the reading of debris from the World Wide Web’s enormous body of text: phrases from websites, Twitter feeds, or Facebook events appear together with symbols, numbers, and URLs. Sometimes there is a direct and visible linkage to the user’s location, as when the user is near a shop that also is listed on a website. At other times the relation is more abstract. The relation between sense and nonsense, between potential narrative and raving incoherent jabber, seems to be central to the literary experience of using the app and points to both how the city can be defined as a “semiotization” of space, and the ways in which this process is deeply intertwined with “how the web speaks the streets”. To unfold the grammar of the urban metainterface, the presentation accounts for how the city itself (according to Roland Barthes) functions as a process of semiosis that is structured around a particular, often-implicit, and unconscious way of seeing, and with Boj and Diaz as a starting point, but also with references to the literary works of Graham Harwood, the presentation elaborates the kinds of gazes the metainterface produces.

Modern forms of literature frequently question our reading habits, and provoke us to re-define the act of reading and the book form. The “magic” of the book, described by Bezos as its ability to be an invisible device that disappears in the reader’s hands, permitting them to enter a story-world, is nowadays replaced by the “real magic” of non-invisible interfaces. The latest manifestations of these interfaces invite us to do things we usually do not do while reading: to touch, to shout, or to shake the device. In the other words, our reading becomes a very sensual and corporeal action and our “reading behaviour” is important for discovering the meaning of the work. That’s why we need a revision of poetics (Simanowski 2009), like Bouchardon’s theory of gestural manipulation as a literary figure (2014). 

In this paper, while examining literary works dedicated to mobile devices, I ask how adding playability to the story and engaging readers’ gestures and body in act of reading can be useful to “renovate” the literary canon, and to remediate it for today’s digital natives. My main case study will be iClassic collection, in which playability and reader gestures are not used only to make well-known works more attractive. Every story is re-told in a new, multimodal way, not only illustrated or enhanced with mobile media possibilities – particular narration aspects are translated into new media language. 

Contexts for analysis will derive from both, the mobile-literature field (e.g. different remediation of Around the World in 80 Days, Elastico Press apps) and non-mobile e-lit (e.g. works that re-write the canon in playable versions: Concretoons, Bałwochwał). This remediated canon will be also analyzed in context of modern “mobile-books,” literary apps that use haptic aspects as primary strategy for reading digital-born stories (e.g. The Incredible Tales of Weirdwood Manor). But the context of various “new” (not only mobile) book forms that re-fresh and re-new the traditional vision of the book will be important, too. Thus, I will use examples of AR-books or digi-novels (Level 26), step-in-book technology (wuwu&co), playable non-mobile texts (The Winter House), texts that use biofeedback (The Breathing Wall), as well as locative and physical narratives (Turnton Docklands). Important context will also be the traditional tension between a book forms typical for children’s and adult literature (and actual evolution in these divisions, provoked by new-media).

 The broader context for my research is a question about the actual evolution (remediation) of canonical genres and literary forms. Here one of examples can be the classic epistolary novel and its modern incarnations as email- or sms-novel and then twitterature or other (trans)literary projects on social platforms (blogs, FB, flickr).

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: