Written in Unity for use with Oculus RIFT glasses, Cardamom of the Dead is a literary VR environment - the user wanders through a virtual environment filled with a vast collection of things a narrator, heard in voice-over, has hoarded over years (decades? centuries?). The environment is filled with debris and stories and the piece is ultimately a meditation on collecting as madness, consoling practice and memory palace.
(Source: ELO 2014 Media Arts Show)
I attended the ELO’s 2012 conference at WVU as a novice in electronic literature—primarily as a fiction person with an interest in the creative possibilities of new media, particularly given the ways in which the nature of the cinematic experience is becoming more personal. (Though I am a writer rather than a scholar, I have written critically on this topic in “The Lost Origins of Personal-Screen Cinema,“ a chapter in the anthology Small Cinemas Discovered Anew, forthcoming in 2014 from Lexington Books/Rowman-Littlefield.)
At ELO 2012 I saw a presentation on the SCALAR authoring system (by Eric Loyer of the University of Southern California’s Alliance for Networking Visual Culture), and immediately knew that I had to use the system to tell the story of my relationship with my late father, which has been vexing me for decades. (Please see the companion to this submission, a Media Arts show proposal called “daddylabyrinth: a new media memoir,” for a description of the project.) I would like to discuss, in the sprit of several talks I saw at the 2012, my experiences working with SCALAR and the possibilities it offers as a creative medium for writers who are not also programmers—a community for whom I believe it can be a groundbreaking tool.
This would include a contextual look at two forces driving electronic literature—polylinear narrative and navigational readership—and how writing with SCALAR enables what I call “synaptic writing”: creating meaning in the writing process based on a relationship between units (to borrow Ian Bogost’s formulation from Unit Operations) that is not linear but associational. Writing in this mode is not a process of exploring a narrative line but of exploring a narrative environment, and the author’s role is to create a balance between the reader’s twin needs of navigational freedom and a sense of coherence provided by the author.
On the navigational reader’s part, the construction of narrative also occurs associationally. (Wolfgang Iser’s Reader-Response Theory is perfectly tailored for the reader of electronic literature, who is called to be highly active in bringing discrete units into coherence.) Understanding the reader’s function in this way has necessitated, as I work with SCALAR, many adjustments to my writing and revision practice from traditional linear habits to polylinear ones—from following a linear model to following a synaptical one, which gathers meaning as it moves from one unit to the next.
This presentation would follow up on the one I made in September 2013 at the inaugural conference of Oxford University’s Centre for Life-Writing, which was entitled “Electronic Lives of Physical Objects: Weaving daddylabyrinth.” I would take a more personal approach than I did at Oxford, focusing on how I work with SCALAR and questions on the nature of digital authorship.
A portion of the work is currently up to view on demo at http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/daddylabyrinth/index, and I would include portions of it in the presentation for demonstration purposes.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
Cyborg Tactics and Perilous Hermeneutics in Lexia to Perplexia Shifts in materiality across space¬—from monitor to cell phone screen, from private bedroom to public bus—alter experience and sway meaning. But time also entails an expectation of change that sometimes never comes: works of electronic literature often go without the steady updates to security, appearance, and functionality that corporate software enjoys, turning into strange ruins that, if not broken, carry that possibility. Eight years after the publication of Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, my paper returns to one of the book’s case studies, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, with the goal of investigating the effects of the passing years on the hermeneutics instilled in the user by the text. Focusing on the instability that time and software evolutions have sown, I argue that in this uncertain environment, the recourse of the user is a heightened emphasis on investigation, experimentation, and attempted recovery. With these motivations in mind, I turn to various palimpsests in the text, features of Lexia that straddle the divide between the literary technique and the glitch. Palimpsests are marks of the broken Web, a layering generally born not from experimental poetics but coding errors, and in puzzling over their status and possible meanings, the user explores the tactics required/allowed/prohibited in their interpretation. Full engagement with the text requires that the user turn to capabilities of the computer beyond the browser—copying and pasting, modifying human memory, extending human sight: becoming a good cyborg. The interactive text is read by doing, and in Lexia doing entails experimentation and brings with it the possibility of danger. As the text’s content foregrounds human-machine intersections, the enactment of these tactics brings the text’s meaning closer to the body of the user—in painting a potentially perilous picture of human-machine interactions, the old and possibly broken text may be more effective than its original, new and shiny, manifestation(Source: Author).