materiality

Countering the persistent popular notion that electronic literature is just reading the classics under glass, Daniel Punday advocates for greater innovation, and more authorial autonomy, at the level of book design. Insisting on “authors’ rights to design the interface through which readers encounter their books,” Punday argues that digital book publishing should strive to emulate the medial status of games, “which remain messy individuals.”

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/modular) 

In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Karl Steel examines Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital (Shukin reviews Steel in the other half). In particular, Steel looks at Shukin’s biopolitical framework, and considers how that framework challenges not only our conception of what constitutes the animal, but also–and more to the bone–our conception of the capacity of fields like animal studies.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/animal_capital)

Jussi Parikka interviews artist Zoe Beloff about her relationship to the emerging set of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies known as media archaeology. In way of response, Beloff discusses some past works, including: Lost (1995), Shadow Land (2000), Claire and Don in Slumberland (2002), Charming Augustine (2005), The Somnambulists (2008), and The Dream Films (2009).

(Source: ebr)

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality--from the holograph manuscript to the printed book--Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts.

(Source: Publisher)

“Moveable books” predate the printing press. Such experiments, including popular pop-up books of the nineteenth century, pushed against the boundaries of two-dimensional storytelling by crafting ways paper can mechanically foster motion and depth. iPad artists and game designers experiment with device-specific expressive capacities. I call moveable books designed for iPad “playable books” to invoke their ergodic filiation with videogames. In this presentation, I analyze one playable book, 80 Days (2014) by Inkle Studios, which won Time Magazine’s best game of the year and was named by The Telegraph a best novel of the year. Crossing the “border” between literature and videogames, 80 Days invites us to consider how popular modes of human/computer interaction in games shape new forms of reading in device-specific ways. I discuss how 80 Days’ gameful attributes adapt and contest Jules Verne’s 1873 novella Around the World in Eighty Days. The game gives the reader a physical experience of the original story’s chief mechanic, racing to beat the clock. Interactions with NPCs [non-player characters] in 80 Days unlock information essential to win; respect and cultural sensitivity are procedurally rewarded. This resists the original novella’s racist depiction of nonwhite “others.” My paper suggests how 80 Days‘ emergent game attributes interrupt our readerly drive to “master” a text.

(Source: http://kathiiberens.com/)

Walter J Ong argues: ‘The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word’. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of enunciation in which written words refuse repose. This essay argues that although spoken, written and printed words operate within radically different temporal planes, spoken words also have thing-like properties and written and printed words also move through time. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of signification unforeseen by Ong in which written words refuse repose. Jay David Bolter argues that digital writing ‘challenges the logocentric notion that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language ... The writer and reader can create and examine structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech’. N Katherine Hayles argues that, in digital media, the text ‘becomes a process, an event brought into existence when the program runs ... The [text] is ‘‘eventilized,’’ made more an event and less a discrete, self-contained object with clear boundaries in space and time’. Jean-Jacques Lecercle argues that language is a constructed system, constantly subject to change ... ‘We therefore need to conceive of language not as a stable, arrested system, but as a system of variations’. This essay draws upon a diverse corpus of literary, media and performance theory and practice to establish a critical framework for examining the performance of variable texts throughout the entire apparatus of hardware, software, networks, bodies and spaces within and through which they operate and propagate. This framework is applied to a number of examples of digital writing which incorporates variability, instability, transformation and change into the process of composition, resulting in texts which are both physical and digital, confusing and confound boundaries between speaking, writing and reading.

Shelley Jackson’s Snow does not easily conform to established literary categories or interpretative strategies – words written on snow are evanescent and fragile, vanishing as soon as the surface on which they had been inscribed melts away. The text in progress is offered to the audience only as the documentation of the artist’s own acts of inscription, made available through the accounts on Flickr and Instagram dedicated to the project. Additionally, reading the story in a traditional way on Instagram is possible only in reverse order of the photostream. In my presentation I would like to broaden the notion of a literary text taking into consideration the very materiality of this project’s affordances – especially the specificity of the inscription surface, evoked to the audience with photos regularly uploaded to Instagram (which itself can be seen as a domain of fluidity with its constantly changing visual stream). What I am particularly interested in is the specific mode of meaning distribution – in this case performed between the evaporating substance, photographic documentation and networked media.

(Source: Author's Abstract, ICDMT 2016)

From January 19, 2016 through April 21, 2016, The Stedman Gallery will host an electronic literature exhibition entitled “Electronic Literature: A Matter of Bits.” The exhibition is sponsored by the Digital Studies Center and was curated by Director Jim Brown and Associate Director Robert Emmons.

Since at least the 1970s, authors, artists, and computer programmers have been exploring the literary potentials of digital computing. The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) describes electronic literature as having “important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” Much of this work might strike us as ephemeral or lacking the same physical materiality as print-based literature, but writers, artists, scholars, and critics have continued to question this commonplace. Silicon and bits are no doubt different from print and ink, but the “Matter of Bits” exhibition will demonstrate how electronic literature relies on any number of materialities for its existence. Featuring work from around the world, this exhibition displays works of electronic literature on a range of devices, from a Commodore 64 to a Microsoft Kinect to an Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset.

In addition to raising these important questions about materiality, this exhibition will also host the launch of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3. Published by the Electronic Literature Organization, this collection gathers together historical and contemporary works of electronic literature from around the world. “A Matter of Bits” will feature a number of works from this brand new collection, works that push us to consider how electronic literature helps us think differently about literature in the digital world.

(Source: https://digitalstudies.camden.rutgers.edu/electronic-literature-a-matte…)