materiality

Discussing the works of three digital creative practitioners working in Ireland, Anne Karhio situates Ireland itself as a case study for demonstrating the ways in which electronic literature as a seemingly global and transnational practice can confront the complexly situated realities of everyday embodiment, technological materiality, and politicization of national borders. She thus recommends electronic literature be seen as more crucial part of digital arts and humanities research in Ireland and elsewhere.

(ebr)

In electronic literature, the practice of writing under constraint is widely accepted as a creative catalyst; through self-imposed textual restraints, we find new meanings and forms. At the same time, some of us are often reading and writing under constraint due to various disabilities. Yes, we can describe electronic literature as “formally inventive” in its wide use of multimedial writing, but no text or its reception is purely formal because it is always material, situational, and embodied as well.

Bringing up accessibility of these texts generally leads to a knee-jerk reaction: "I don’t want to be limited", "it would stifle my creative freedom", or, god forbid, "why does everything have to be so politically correct?" What if we move past this initial resistance not toward denial, rejection, or a resigned compliance, but with the same creative energy that we allow other forms of writing under constraint?

This essay rewrites Joe Tabbi’s essay “Electronic Literature as World Literature, or, the Universality of Writing under Constraint” through the lens of disability. I explore the concept of digital accessibility by speculating upon what accessible electronic literature can be.

(Conference abstract)

Contemporary environmental traumas are placing formidable demands on the creative arts when it comes to interrogating their kaleidoscopic complexities and implications. Electronic literature that engages topics of climate, infrastructure, and nonhuman agency is in a promising position here, due to its recasting of extent literary and poetic traditions using the architectures of contemporary digital computing and communications infrastructure. These technologies are involved not just in measuring and mapping a rapidly degrading environment, but their developmental histories and continued functioning are implicated in both embedding and perpetuating the very effects being detected.

This paper, presented at ELO 2019, examines the varied capacities and potentials of electronic literature to critique the present ecological moment. It discusses a selection of three works that engage not only the most evident questions of digital technology in the context of environmental sensing, but which deploy their literary qualities to establish modes of sense-making that reach beyond the peripheries of data-driven eco-discourse. The first two works discussed are the Twitter bot Station 51000 (@_LostBuoy_), by Mark Sample, and This is a Picture of the Wind by J.R. Carpenter. Both are examined in terms of their use of literary language and digital environmental data to place into dialogue human and non-human modes of perception and knowing.

This paper closes by discussing the author's own creative practice, and, in particular, a speculative multimedia project entitled Waveform. This project is one in which an airborne camera drone measures the outlines of incoming ocean waves, and uses the datapoints yielded to generate poems that meditate on practices of measurement and classification in a scientific context. Here, the seemingly Apollonian gaze of airborne sensors are recast using the algorithms of poetry generation, working to examine the deep histories and consequences of treating the world ‘as from above’. The sciences and discourse of the Anthropocene are products of our late scramble to account for the serious damage caused by these attitudes — to map the effects they rendered peripheral to their gaze. It in this way that the critical-creative potentials of electronic literature are summarised and accounted for in this paper.

In recent years, the digital humanities has been shaken by important debates about inclusivity and scope—but what change will these conversations ultimately bring about? Can the digital humanities complicate the basic assumptions of tech culture, or will this body of scholarship and practices simply reinforce preexisting biases? Bodies of Information addresses this crucial question by assembling a varied group of leading voices, showcasing feminist contributions to a panoply of topics, including ubiquitous computing, game studies, new materialisms, and cultural phenomena like hashtag activism, hacktivism, and campaigns against online misogyny.

Taking intersectional feminism as the starting point for doing digital humanities, Bodies of Information is diverse in discipline, identity, location, and method. Helpfully organized around keywords of materiality, values, embodiment, affect, labor, and situatedness, this comprehensive volume is ideal for classrooms. And with its multiplicity of viewpoints and arguments, it’s also an important addition to the evolving conversations around one of the fastest growing fields in the academy.

Contributors: Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi, U of Lethbridge; Moya Bailey, Northeastern U; Bridget Blodgett, U of Baltimore; Barbara Bordalejo, KU Leuven; Jason Boyd, Ryerson U; Christina Boyles, Trinity College; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Lisa Brundage, CUNY; micha cárdenas, U of Washington Bothell; Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown U; Danielle Cole; Beth Coleman, U of Waterloo; T. L. Cowan, U of Toronto; Constance Crompton, U of Ottawa; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M; Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, U of Colorado Boulder; Julia Flanders, Northeastern U Library; Sandra Gabriele, Concordia U; Brian Getnick; Karen Gregory, U of Edinburgh; Alison Hedley, Ryerson U; Kathryn Holland, MacEwan U; James Howe, Rutgers U; Jeana Jorgensen, Indiana U; Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Dorothy Kim, Vassar College; Kimberly Knight, U of Texas, Dallas; Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson U; Sharon M. Leon, Michigan State; Izetta Autumn Mobley, U of Maryland; Padmini Ray Murray, Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology; Veronica Paredes, U of Illinois; Roopika Risam, Salem State; Bonnie Ruberg, U of California, Irvine; Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), U of California, Santa Barbara; Anastasia Salter, U of Central Florida; Michelle Schwartz, Ryerson U; Emily Sherwood, U of Rochester; Deb Verhoeven, U of Technology, Sydney; Scott B. Weingart, Carnegie Mellon U.

(Source: University of Minnesota Press)

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)

From 2011 to 2016, under the guise of editor Domenico Quaranta, small-house publisher Link Edition published the series In My Computer. The premises is self-explanatory; each author has to amalgamate the contents of what will eventually become a material book (printed through the self-printing service Lulu) using contents gleaned and selected from the artists' personal computers. The results are varied and confounding; from Miltos Manetas' haphazardly garnered manifestos and musings to Martin Howse's mammoth-sized compendium of code lines compiling every operation processed by his computer in the span of the month of June 2011, to the screen-grabs of Ubermorgen and the quotidian color-coding of every Web page accessed by Greg Leuch for months, to mention a few examples, every entry in the In My Computer series attempts to radicalize what it means to reify a computer in book form. The deliberate action of encapsulating parts of a computer's data and/or contents in a book form (and the choices pertaining to that process) can be understood as a backwards step – or is it? What is implied by the decision of creating a book – even more so, having a book created through an automated process – using digital files as a raw material? Aren't all books nowadays following roughly the same process? Can we still consider the artistic intent at the heart of the project of the In My Computer Series, what one could call a "technotextual operation" (Hayles, 2001), as a form of "radical mediation" (Gursin, 2016), or has the digital apparatus so completely swallowed the book production that such an endeavour has rendered all but obsolete what would once had been the ragged edges of its willingly opaque remediation? Furthermore, the apparent insistence on publishing "raw" books, in the sense that typos, poor graphic design and other visible flaws obstinately remain in the final product, attests to the many vagaries displayed as proofs of mistake-prone human beings at the heart of these projects. But is an obvious flaw in a book the vestige of the affirmation of a human presence in an otherwise automated digital process? Or does it attest to the indifference of a machine ordered to accomplish an operation notwithstanding the end result? This paper wished to address these questions, among others, in order to understand the quickly-receding gap separating the book culture from the screen culture, starting from the hypothesis that what can be said to constitute a book has by now bypassed considerations of its materiality. I will posit that the endeavors of the authors who contributed to the In My Computer series can be best described using the concept of transwriting (Gaudreault and Groensteen, 1991; Tremblay-Gaudette and La Manna, 2016)

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1229/What+We+Offer+You+Is+More+or+Less+The+Sum+of+Its+Parts+%3A+The+Human+in+the+In+My+Computer+Book+Series_)

Carsten Schinko on Niklas Luhmann’s Analogue Loyalty.

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

About a year ago in a TLS review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in Simulacrum America).

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

About a year ago in a TLS review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in Simulacrum America).