motion

“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/)

It is too easy to fall into prognostications of electronic literature as the end of literature or as a new beginning. (...) Such views imply too much teleology, and see electronic literature purely as the unfolding of the possibilities of the apparatus. The rhetorical logic at work is literalization, i.e. taking literary works as the sum of their technical features. (Rui Torres & Sandy Baldwyn, eds. 2014. PO.EX: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia. Morgantown, WV: Center for Literary Computing: xv-xvi).

Our panel title, adapted from Manuel António Pina’s poetry book (1), serves to interrogate our notions of literary art today, when we consider its current production and distribution through various media (printed codex, programmable media, digital platforms, Internet, social networks). The ironical paradox contained in the phrase “it is just a little bit late” seems to suggest the idea that not much has changed despite the so-called “big changes” (in the case of Pina, it is relevant to know that his work was published in 1974, the year of the Portuguese revolution). Taking his ironical premise into the field of literature, it is legitimate to ask ourselves how literary art has changed across these media incarnations, how meaningful is “the electronic” for a definition of literature, what changes are actually significant, and how they impact on notions of author, work, reader and literary experience. The papers in this panel offer three perspectives on the end(s) of electronic literature and may be described as attempts to de-literalize its technical apparatus.

(1) Manuel António Pina (1943-2012). The title of his poetry book is “Ainda não é o fim nem o princípio do mundo calma é apenas um pouco tarde” [“It’s not yet the beginning or the end of the world remain calm it’s just a little bit late”]. This book was originally published in 1974.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This article looks at works of electronic poetry in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. While video and digital experiments in these languages date back to the 1970s and 1980s, the works considered here are mostly post-World Wide Web, i.e., produced between the mid-1990s and 2009. The article discusses the work of Philippe Bootz, founding member of Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture (LAIRE) and theorist of programmed literature. It comments on the relationship between digital computer code and literature, addressing the materiality of the display and poetics. Other topics explored include programming poetry, patterns of specific writing processes, and automatic text generation. Through analysis of computer-assisted multimodal and retroactive forms, this essay discusses the role played by code and motion in digital works. It also stresses the function of language as cultural form in electronic literature.

(Source: Author's abstract)

AbstractWhat is the difference between reading on screen and reading electronic literature? Between an e-book and an e-lit piece? Electronic literature, or eliterature, uses computer technology as an integral part of the work to convey meaning. Find out about the literary art of links, images, sounds, and motions. Make connections between images and text, between sounds and words, between motions and implications. Uncover an exciting new world where writers expand beyond the page and embrace the screen with an array of new literary techniques.

AgendaThis workshop will cover 4 basic elements of electronic literature: links, imagery, motion, and sound. For each element, we will read a portion of works to see these elements in action, take part in an exercise to explore writing using these elements, and discuss techniques to recognize and understand these elements.

LinksLinks in most hypertexts (bbc news, blogs, wikipedia) are substantive links—follow these for a further elaboration on a topic. Links in eliterature can be substantive, but they can also be causal, associative, expansive, reductive, playful, etc. Thus the link itself becomes a literary device, as flexible as a metaphor or litotes.

Sample: Deena Larsen's Ghost Moons <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/deena/tsuki/>Flit link on 'everything' goes to lover, implying a connection between love and everything and link on "nothing" goes to everything, showing a contradiction.Exercise: Participants choose two pictures from the set and a string to link the two—and describe how the link connects the two pictures.Sample: The Unknown <http://www.unknownhypertext.com>Show associations between links (follow a few links and discuss why that link landed on the page).

ImageryImagery overlays text to tease out overtones or implications in the text. Imagery can also contrast the text, implying a contradiction with the words. Imagery can also have meaning in itself.

Sample: Rob Kendall's Study in Shades<http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/00/04/kendall/index.htm>Show how the images support the meaning of the text—the daughter disappears as the father sinks into Alzheimers, and the father's contrast—black and white rather than gray—is darkened as the daughter faces who he is now.Exercise: Write a sentence and pick two images—see how the sentence changes meaning when juxtaposed with each image.Sample: Stuart Moulthrop's Radio Salience<http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Spring/moulthrop/moulthropbi… how imagery can become a game, and can lead to more pieces.

MotionMotions can be fast, abrupt, flowing, slow or nearly imperceptible. The motion of the text can reveal new words, obscure connections, force a reading pace (either slower or faster than average reading paces), and create storylines. Motions can be with images or with texts.

Sample of revealing and concealing text by motion: Rob Kendall's Faith <http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/kendall__faith/index.htm>Shows how texts can be re-arranged through motion.Exercise: Get a partner and write two sentences. One person reads while the other dances about, creating a second layer of meaning to the words.Sample: Peter Howard's Rainbow Factory<http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/flash/rainbow.html>Simple animated graphics provide two perspectives.

SoundSound can carry words that echo the text or contradict the text. Sound can be music, language, sound effects, etc. We will concentrate on word sounds here, as we have seen sound effects used (Peter Howard's Rainbow Factory) and music used (Rob Kendall's Faith).

Sample: John Sparrow, eye in the making<http://www.canberra.edu.au/centres/ inflect/03/Sparrow/eye_newer%20Folder/eye.html>Shows one word and repeats another word for multiple meanings.Exercise: Play a sound. Participants write two sentences that merge with or bouce off of the sound, and explain how the sound and text go together. Play a new sound and examine how the sentences work with this sound. Write a new sentence that works with this sound.Sample: Deena Larsen, I'm Simply Saying<http://www.canberra.edu.au/centres/inflect/02/larsen/simply7.html>Uses music/motion to uncover the multiple meanings in words.

Follow UpParticipants will be given a list of further readings to explore electronic literature in email (Rob Wittig's Blue Company <http://www.robwit.net/bluecompany2002/&gt;), blogs (She's a flight risk <http://shes.aflightrisk.org/&gt;), and social network applications (Why some dolls are bad). This list will include places to view electronic literature (e.g., "Drunken Boat," "Iowa Review," Electronic Literature Organization).

(Source: Deena Larsen's description for the 2008 ELO Conference)

Mark Sample provides a close-reading of one work that takes advantage of the “interface free” multitouch display: released in the last year, “Strange Rain” is an experiment in digital storytelling for Apple iOS devices (the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) designed by new media artist Erik Loyer.

As dark storm clouds shroud the screen of the iOS device, the player can take advantage of the way in which the multi-touch interface is supposedly “interface-free” – the player can touch and tap its surface, causing what Loyer describes as “twisting columns of rain” to splash down upon the player’s first-person perspective. In the app’s “whispers” and “story” modes “Strange Rain” unites two longstanding tropes of e-literature: the car crash – the most famous occurring in Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1990); and falling letters – words that descend on the screen or even in large-scale installation pieces such as Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (1999). Sample argues “Strange Rain” transcends the familiar tropes of car crashes and falling text, reconfiguring the interface as a means to transform confusion into certainty, and paradoxically, intimacy into alienation.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Sample's paper was presented at the MLA 2012 Special Session "Reading Writing Interfaces: E-Literature's Past and Present.