metaphor

"Flow" is the movement of eyes and bodies through museums or city traffic, through instructional diagrams or branching narratives, through hypertexts or games. What is flow in electronic literature? While comics scholars have theorized linear flow (e.g. closure, trails) and hypertext scholars have theorized multilinear flow (e.g. transclusions, links), this exploration of flow in elit considers flow as a total experience or simultaneous visible landscape, beginning in the visual design tradition of flowchart art. Bill Barker or Martijn Englebregt's beaurocratic infographics, Jason Shiga or Chris Ware's narrative diagrams, and Simon Patterson or Dorian Lynskey's subway map art remixes all posit narrative as an experience occuring within a visible landscape of controlled traversals. In digital arts, this situated experience is best exemplified by performers using flow-control programming. How might the metaphors and software tools of flow-control used by audio livecoders and video jockey mashup artists (e.g. PD, Max/MSP, Quartz Composer) serve electronic textualists (e.g. Yahoo! Pipes)? What sort of eliterature and epoetry aesthetics emerge from flow-controlled textual landscapes?

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

For one of my courses this fall, my first semester in the new Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University, I created a short Flash piece on medium and a hypertext project on medium as metaphor, looking at eight texts—four print authors and four new media works. This presentation focuses on these projects.

Mark Hansen (2004) argues that the privilege of literature as a technology of communication lies not in its imitation of the flexibility of technical media, but rather in its relationship with the body. This is apparent in the processes by which we acquire alphabetic literacy (how we learn to read and write) and in the reproduction of writing through processes of inscription, dissemination and reception. Newer media technologies are tapping into this relation of intimacy with increasingly greater speed and accuracy (Kittler, Levy). The conversion of text into language calls not only on the cognitive capacities of writers and readers, nor simply on the sense of sight alone. Rather, it mobilises these capacities along with those of all the other sensory modalities, including affect. Language itself is a supramodal synaesthetic medium, as various theories of metaphor make clear. This view of language makes electronic forms a privileged site for understanding the relationship between language, the visual, and the sonic as they are channelled and processed by the senses and temporarily organised in a series of ‘central assemblies'. We take this latter term from the work of Silvan S. Tomkins in order to examine the processes of cross-modalisation as they feed into the production of meaning by the user-reader.

(Source: Author's abstract from 2008 ELO Conference)

M.A. Thesis, 94 pages

The last thirty years have presented us with technology that has had a profound impact onhow we produce, socialize with others, and consume culture. Today most of these actions arelinked to a computational setup which involves a screen representing our options in twodimensions and a hand-operated controller for manipulating the screen environment, ahardware setup that has not changed considerably the last 50 years. The dominant interfacefor personal computers—the graphical user interface—is highly ocularcentric, where onlyparts of the body apparatus (eyes and hands) are addressed in the interface directly. As anincreasing amount of information, life experience and human contact is channeled through it,the desktop computer system, becomes increasingly inadequate to fully represent theseactions. Any prosthesis added to or used in conjunction with the body and any part of thesensory apparatus neglected will define our interaction with information. Informationgathered by the somesthetic—the touch and proprioceptic senses—constitute a significantcomponent in the way we form hypotheses about what an object is, and how it can bemanipulated. By addressing the somesthetic senses in computer interfaces, we can achievericher and more intuitive interactive experiences.

This paper aims to identify the key components of a general purpose computationalenvironment that foreground multimodal interaction by 1) investigating the significantqualities of the somesthetic senses from a phenomenological and neurophysiological point ofview, 2) pointing to successful principles of human computer interaction (coupling), and toolsfor designing embodied interactions (physical metaphors, interface agents, affordances, andvisual and haptic feedback), 3) evaluating the components of current mobile phonetechnology, surface computing, responsive environments, and wearable computing.

(Source: Author's abstracts)

The concept of narrative has been widely invoked by theorists of digital textuality, but the promotion of what is described as the storytelling power of the computer has often relied on shallow metaphors, loose conceptions of narrative, and literary models that ignore the distinctive properties of the digital medium. Two myths have dominated this theorization. The myth of the Aleph (as I call it) presents the digital text as a finite text that contains an infinite number of stories. The myth of the Holodeck envisions digital narrative as a virtual environment in which the user becomes a character in a plot similar to those of Victorian novels or Shakespearean tragedies. Both of these myths rely on questionable assumptions: that any permutation of a collection of lexias results in a coherent story; that it is aesthetically desirable to be the hero of a story; and that digital narrativity should cover the same range of emotional experiences as literary narrative. Here I argue that digital narrative should emancipate itself from literary models. But I also view narrative as a universal structure that transcends media. This article addresses the question of reconciling the inherent linearity of narrative structures with the multiple paths made possible by the interactive nature of the digital text by distinguishing four forms of interactivity, which result from the cross-classification of two binaries: internal versus external interactivity; and exploratory versus ontological. Each of these categories is shown to favor different narrative themes and different variations of the universal narrative structure.

(Source: author's abstract.)

Deploying the metaphor of "narrative motors," Tisselli analyzes several of his own "degenerative works" in which the program (the engine) burns fuel (information) until it is depleted and generates noise.

from ebr Electronic Book Review: D. Fox Harrell considers how a media theory of the "phantasmal" - mental image and ideological construction - can be used to cover gaps within electronic literary practice and criticism. His perspective is shaped by cognitive semantics and the approach to meaning-making known as "conceptual blending theory."