interface

Metainterface is about interface aesthetics and culture, and as an analytical strategy, it focuses on the tendency in art that reflects the contemporary interface; that is, on readings of artworks. In this sense, it presents contemporary art works, but it also reflects on the current challenges of contemporary interface culture in a situation where the computer’s interface seemingly both becomes omnipresent and invisible; where it at once is embedded in everyday objects and characterised by hidden exchanges of information between objects; or, what it conceptualizes as a metainterface. By bringing the tendency in artworks forward, the book aims to demonstrate how certain critical interfaces have an ability to reflect the deeper fissures within new technologies and the production of the work of art itself; an ability to show us an interface, after the interface has seemingly disappeared into ‘smart’ futures and new promises of anticipation, participation, and emancipation.

The article considers "first generation digital objects" from the standpoint of textual studies, considering "digital media themselves from the specific vantage points of bibliography and textual criticism." Kirschenbaum discusses in detail different editions of Michael Joyce's afternoon and Deena Larsen's work in editing an edition of William Dickey's electronic poetry in HyperCard.

TOC's promotional tease – “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” – became awkwardly literalized when, after a Mac OS update, I could no longer open the novel. The tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC – exhibited internationally, prize-winning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press – is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, “may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization”.

TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts “only two or three years.” It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad, an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share. TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed 1 million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker. TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon. But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.

What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures. The reader’s touch is a performance not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, code, human body and the physical setting in which the performance transpires. TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996) is a medial evolution that prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what's at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.

(soucr: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

E-books, e-book readers, touchscreens and other types of displays do not belong to the realm of fantasy any more, but are an indelible part of our reality. Interactivity is becoming a key ingredient of electronic publications. There are several projects dedicated to children that allow the practicing of important literacy skills, such as language development, story comprehension, sense of the structure, and collaboration in storytelling by playing and experimenting. These activities are crucial to a child’s development.

During middle childhood the most important seems to be a process of development involving increasingly creative use of playing to develop plots and episodes, the transition from individual to group play, the growing importance of language in plot development and the strengthening of links between play and social life. It is important that a child interacts with a book, not just by passively following a story but by participating in its creation upon every encounter. Graphic design should aim at facilitating the linguistic and social development of a child, at the same time stimulating his or her creativity and abstract thinking, as well as supporting the development of fine motor skills, which are all necessary to self-sufficiency.

Therefore this project’s key requirements involve the following aspects – educational, emotional, ergonomic as well as more detailed objectives:

Using gestures to facilitate a child’s development (the development of brain hemispheres, eye-hand coordination, developing abstract thinking).
The opportunity of constructing a variety of stories – a child builds a story by himself or herself, deciding on the plot development.
The use of randomization and surprise elements, where the book becomes a new story, explored by a child at every encounter, but within the preprogrammed framework (beginning-development-ending).

Body mechanisms, which are necessary for the development of handwriting, are autonomy in dressing etc., a proper grip by hand and three fingers (tripod fingers grip), as well as the use of the non-dominant hand to hold paper. Proper positioning of the thumb and two other fingers is crucial for the correct holding of a pencil. This type of grip plays a key role in the mechanisms using fine manipulation.

Autonomy is based on the development of movements made in specific directions: up and down, inside and out, as well as circular. These are the same directions a child must master in order to write letters and digits. In dyspraxia therapy it is advised that “finger games” are used, such as the manipulation of puppets put on fingers, paper clips and clothes pegs (by manipulating these objects a child practices the opposition of a thumb and strengthens the three fingers participating in the pencil grip).

This paper presents the results of a qualitative user study conducted on a group of early readers (aged 6-9) in a primary school in Krakow, Poland, on a sample of 20 children. The presented solution is a new type of plot construction in a publication – an open structure that is not chronological but has some key points (like the beginning and end) predefined. It is also an attempt at using gestures, which are native to software in a way that is beneficial from the point of view of developmental psychology.

The prototypes of a paper and a digital tablet-based book made it possible to check children’s reaction to non-chronological storytelling application and aimed to verify the design principles along with fine motor skills needed to manipulate the objects on touch screens.

The aim of the study was to evaluate whether the paper book might help children learn the use of a more complex, tablet-based book, built using the same principles, but considering the usage of touchscreen and touch gestures. The test also aimed to verify the speed of mastering a user interface when little or no visual hints were provided.

The paper also explains how open structure designs, based on randomized elements, allow the expansion of the genre with educational books, aiming to help develop the young reader’s eye-to-hand coordination and make more engaging stories based on new content.

(Source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The transformation of interface from a merely indicative tool of navigation to a suggestive element infused with metaphorical power in text-based hypertext literature, and the incorporation of hypermedia and modes of play and games into the hypertext scenario--both strains are gradually winning attention in electronic writing. Topics such as the clarification of paidia (play) and ludus (game) constituents, their formal impact on literature, and the comprehension of the aesthetic matrices projected by the symbiotic infusion of literature, play and games, have been posited, creating a new node in the network of literary studies. In order to explore these fertile new fields, this paper first assigns itself to a survey of interface design and a formal observation of play and games in samples of electronic literature. Furthermore, the paper is focused on the interlaced poetics of representation (narrative) and simulation (paidia / ludus) in literary hypertext, play and games (together to be occasionally called, cybertext or ergodic literature, both terms taken from Espen P. Aarseth). It is hoped that the paper can bring more poetical recognition to digital textualities.

Source: Author's abstract