performativity

One of a series of eco-critical reviews, Stephen Dougherty exploresthe new ways that “matter is made to matter” in Ira Livingston’swriting on science and literature. The payoff of an ecocriticismgrounded in the materiality of language itself, can bee seen by thestrong political positioning toward the end of Dougherty’s essay.

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

In my earlier research, I have drafted a theory of literary communication using programmable and networked media based on Actor-Network Theory (e.g., “Reassembling the Literary: Toward a Theoretical Framework for Literary Communication in Computer-Based Media”, in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, eds. Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, pp. 25-70). In this optic, the conceptions of “actor-networks”, or more precisely, the conceptions of distributed agencies and of chains of translations between human and non-human actors provide us with a framework that helps to relate human dispositions and corporeal activities, variable activity roles of human actors in the literary system (as “author”, “editor”, “reader”, etc.), changing media technologies and various literary procedures. The semantic field of “nets” and “networks” acquires a special significance because it stresses the uncertainty about sources of action.

It goes without saying that “electronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice between literature, computation, visual and performance art”, as the conference organizers argue appropriately. This does neither mean that literature as a specific medium of expression has come to an end nor that digital media are not suited for literary communication. However, what is still needed is a theory of literature as well as analytical methods that are able to conceive of and to observe “open” and unfinished processes between humans and non-humans that only lead to ephemeral materializations on displays instead of works as “closed” materialized objects. Using approaches from STS, Semiotics and Media Studies as well as from Literary Studies, the proposed paper aims at replacing notions of the “work” with an awareness of the local and temporal emergence of specific material-discursive reconfigurations “for another first next time”. Karen Barad’s elaboration of “posthumanist performativity” suggests that writing and reading practices should be regarded as entangled by a web of “non-human” material-discursive practices (cf. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003), pp. 801-831).

In literary projects such as Stephanie Strickland et al.’s slippingglimpse, John Cayley and Daniel Howe’s The Readers Project, Michael Mateas’s and Andrew Stern’s Façade or Caitlin Fisher’s Andromeda, to name a few, a congealing of physical, semiological, technological etc. agencies can be analyzed in action. Here, subjectivity does not only refer to the experiences of the human recipients, but also to that of the machines, which recursively observe their own operations (cf. Francisco J. Ricardo, The Engagement Aesthetic: Experiencing New Media Art Through Critique). Therefore I propose not to define “the literary” as a special domain but as a “very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, p. 7). I will try to identify particular poetic effects of the brief moment of a network’s “becoming-literary”. From there on, the decisive questions of literary studies need to be brought up again and partially revised:

How do the relationships between “text” (contains letters), “work” (contains texts), “material medium” transform in electronic literature?
How, when, and through what does a specific aesthetic experience develop for the (human) recipient in these associations or entanglements?
How does the translation between the agencies of human actors acting in the “real word” and those of literary characters or actions in the fictional space of a story or an interactive drama like Façade or a Cave installation like Screen or those of an avatar in a computer game take place?

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Through the creative projects Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk the author explores how language and communication function in a hybridized context where human and machine are responsible for both the articulation and interpretation of texts. The dynamics of such a hybrid apparatus allow insights into how the making of meaning and its reception can be considered as a socio-technical system, with implications for how people are situated and instantiated.

Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk are language based digitally mediated performance installations. They each use progressive developments of generative and interpretative grammar systems. Bodytext (2010) was authored in Adobe Director and coded in Lingo and C++. Tower (2011) was developed with a bespoke large scale immersive virtual reality simulator and was coded in Python. Crosstalk (2014) was developed and coded in Processing.

Bodytext is a performance work involving speech, movement and the body. A dancer's movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing real-time motion tracking, voice recognition, interpretative language systems, projection and granular audio synthesis. The acquired speech, a description of an imagined dance, is re-written through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the performer causing texts to interact and recombine with one another through subsequent re-compositions. What is written is affected by the dance, whilst the emergent texts determine what is danced. The work questions and seeks insight into the relations between kinesthetic experience, memory, agency and language.

Tower is an interactive work where the computer listens to and anticipates what is to be said by those interacting with it. It is a self-learning system, and as the inter-actor speaks, the computer displays what they say and the potential words they might speak next. The speaker may or may not use a displayed word. New word conjunctions are added to the corpus employed for prediction. In its first version the initial corpus was a mash-up of Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey. Words uttered by the inter-actor appear as a red spiral of text, at the top of which the inter-actor is located within the virtual reality environment. Wearing a head mounted display the inter-actor can look wherever they wish, although they cannot move. The predicted words appear as white flickering clouds of text in and around the spoken words. What emerges is an archeology of speech where what is spoken can be seen amongst what might have been said, challenging the unique speaker’s voice.

Crosstalk is a multi-performer installation where movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented 3D environment employing real-time motion tracking, multi-source voice recognition, interpretative language systems, a bespoke physics engine, large scale projection and surround-sound audio synthesis. The acquired speech of inter-actors is re-mediated through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the inter-actors physical actions causing texts to interact and recombine with one another. The elements in the system all affect how each adapts, from state to state, as the various elements of the work – people, machines, language, image, movement and sound – interact with one another. Crosstalk explores social relations, as articulated in performative language acts, in relation to generative ontologies of self-hood and the capacity of a socio-technical space to “make people”.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

ractices of public and performative electronic writing connect our arts movement to important sites of social transformation, beginning with the resistance to neoliberalism in government and academia, and potentially touching larger questions about relations of mass and elite culture.

This panel comprises three papers, two by creator/conveners of participatory projects, the third by an interested theorist. The creators offer reflections on the meaning of participatory engagement based on their own experiences with the form. The theory paper adds some more abstract reflections addressing questions of general concern to electronic literature as a cultural movement.
Electronic Literature and the Public Literary
Stuart Moulthrop (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

When the Electronic Literature Organization was born 25 years ago, digital experimentation suffered from a binary disease. On the one hand, works were often received (perhaps by some of us conceived) largely as exercises in disruption: signs of an end of books, or spectres from the aftermath of that apocalypse. Conversely, electronic work was dismissed as dead-end experimentation, doomed to imminent irrelevance because, as Jane Douglas echoes Dr. Johnson, nothing new lasts. This increasingly maddening impasse was eventually resolved through persistence. Time passed. Online bookselling and the advent of e-books finished off the end of books. Meanwhile emergent practices, though never broadly popular, defied extinction long enough to enter into dialogue with established interests.

Credit for perseverance belongs to all who kept on keeping on, but particular thanks go to N. Katherine Hayles, who introduced the crucial notion of “the literary,” a cultural Oort cloud surrounding the inner system of received literature, out of whose precincts strange forms of verbal art are seen to precipitate: graphic novels, fan fiction, algorithmic verse, Twine games. Hayles’s revised cosmography helped advance discussion from disruption/denial to continuity – refiguring end-as-terminus into end-as-outcome, the double sense explored in this year’s conference theme. This crucial shift grants to experimental writing the power to reproduce or reassert the effects of traditional literary art. Writing in digital media can become, in Marjorie Perloff’s phrase, “poetry by other means.”

Amalgamating traditional literature with an emergent literary allows serious consideration of phenomena that might otherwise escape notice: see Stephen Johnson’s discovery of narrative sophistication in 21st-century television, or Henry Jenkins’s appreciation of socially mediated complexity in Survivor and Lost. Something similar goes on in Hayles’s later discussion of changing cognitive styles, the interplay between “hyper” and “deep” forms of attention. See especially her argument for electronic literature as amenable interface, where she proposes to juxtapose Emily Short’s Galatea with Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.0. Both “hyper” interactive fiction and “deep” novel serve a unified end of literary expression. Inner and outer spheres harmoniously align.

Yet though Hayles’ vision happily rescues us from dreary dualism, it also leads to new problematics. Both literature and the literary may be existentially disturbed by their encounter. If the new lasts, it becomes the status quo: the phrase “electronic literature” seems increasingly redundant now that the majority of verbal production is digitally mediated. By the same token, the presence of “poetry by other means” can bring crucial changes to the meaning of poetry. What if the ends of literature supposed by digital practices differ in important ways from those of traditional writing?

In answer to this last question I will consider two cases in which the electronic inflection of “the literary” opens a particularly acute gap between emergent and traditional practice: the performative message-writing of the Overpass Light Brigade, and the networked improvisation of the 2012 Occupy MLA project. Both projects redefine writing not as an originally solitary and asynchronous practice, but as directly participatory social action. Significantly, both instances also confront social developments – insurgent right-wing politics and academic neo-liberalism – that profoundly transform the ground conditions for both literature and “the literary.” By foregrounding the tensions between mass and elite sensibilities, these examples of what I call the public literary demand a further revision of the cultural model, one that gives as much recognition to discord and opposition as it does to discourse and harmony.
Together We Make a Message
Lane Hall (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

As the screen expands, public space collapses. We move through restricted zones, tweeting while walking, chronicling a catalogue of ends in 140 characters or less. What questions, within the circles of academic intelligence and delectation, do we ask of ourselves? What is the scale of our formulation? How do we frame the concerns of our worlds?

The Wisconsin Uprising pushed me to learn our state’s rich history of resistance. We marched, we collected signatures, we delivered; and we lost more than we won. Two elections later, and we realize that we are not merely experiencing a rightwing anomaly that will in due time – when good citizens realize the con – swing us back to sanity, but we are living the end of our Progressive era, as its long historical sweep ceases, leaving us with narratives of austerity, authority, compliance and control. Idle No More. Occupy. Los Indignados. Black Lives Matter. Question Austerity: from regional to national to international, we shift in scale and perceive emergent patterns coalescing at the ends of the familiar, searching for resistance, for answers, models, resilience, a way through.

What questions do we ask of our beloved practices, our genres, our art forms, our technologies, when the urgencies of ends coalesce around epic struggles framed at the scale of planets? Indeed, the ends of capitalism, the ends of nature, the ends of climate stability, the ends of peak oil, the ends of the commons - to name just a few - catalogue an index of ends that could make an Oulipian jump the run of his labyrinth and take to the streets, telling the story, like Calvino, over and over, of insurrections and revolutions that lose themselves in violence only to find themselves in the new old language of love. But is the literary up to the task of the times?

The Overpass Light Brigade emerged organically out of the Wisconsin Uprising. We wanted to open up for public protest the long nights of winter, so we illuminated signs. We wanted to place propaganda where the people were, so we hit bridges and streets during evening rush. We began to perform and perfect a communitarian, meme-focused DIY public service announcement system that was as short as the short form can get and still be language. We cognate with the hashtag, interlocking contested public spaces with contested virtual spaces, each to each amplifying a circuitry of generative and distributive gestures. Our public literature isn’t electronic as much as it is battery operated. We make alphabetic mobile devices for people to hold and collectively create meaning as they bear witness over the highway night, with semi-trucks honking air-horns in Doppler drop roaring the dark highway down. And the urgency of insurgency is open sourced, with the Light Brigade Network coming soon to a city near you; testimonials in LEDs pushing at the edge of the allowable with police always watching, twitching between rest and arrest.

And finally, what do we say? What forms must art in the age of urgency take? Light in the darkness, gestures of solidarity, issues of efficacy, poetics and persuasion, collaborations and community: these are the things that interest me. This is what I want to talk about with panelists and practitioners. I’ll show a few slides, maybe a video, and mostly want to talk with people about why we do what we do and what we think we are doing when we do it.
We Interrupt for This Breaking Story
Rob Wittig (University of Minnesota-Duluth)

I’m intrigued by the way that electronic literature narratives can not only contain a political dimension (the way print literature has often done) but can contain current events and even breaking events. In netprov (networked improv narrative) projects such as the ones Mark C. Marino and I are currently producing, moment-by-moment changes in social and political situations can be woven into the stories. This mimics the way in which blogs, image sharing, video sharing and social media are used by reporters, bystanders and newsmakers in and around real-life incidents in the contemporary media universe. I will look at how these voices and perspectives weave – confronting, contradicting and illuminating each other – and compare them to vast social fiction projects such as those of Balzac and Faulkner, examining the similarities and differences resulting from their technological constraints and affordances.

I will look in particular at:

The LA Flood Project, a netprov by Mark C. Marino, et al. which enacts the social and political consequences of an imaginary flood in Los Angeles.
Occupy MLA, a netprov performed over two years with Mark C. Marino in which we enacted the precarious lives and inner anxieties of adjunct faculty (such as Mark and myself) and encouraged open debate of sensitive issues of adjunct social status, workload, health benefits and financial compensation.
Grace, Wit & Charm, a complex netprov in the guise of a workplace comedy about workers whose job is to assist others in their self-presentation on line: “Grace” uses motion capture to help clients’ avatars move more naturalistically in online gaming environments, “Wit” helps clients be funnier in their status updates, and “Charm” is assistance for the romantically impaired and helps clients conduct their online liaisons; over the course of the performance the Grace, Wit & Charm company is gradually taken over by a healthcare conglomerate and our plucky characters find themselves performing unlicensed (albeit quite cost-effective) virtual surgery. Among the goals of this netprov was an incisive, satirical critique of American health care.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This presentation will link the trope of “digital ekphrasis” (as articulated by Cecilia Lindhé) and the developing of platforms for “augmented reality” to argue that one probable future for electronic literature lies in the interweaving of “born digital” and print texts in ubiquitous layers of mediation. It will examine three instances of “augmented” print – the multimodal performance of ekphrastic poetry, the AR comic book Modern Polaxis, and the AR epistolary romance Between Page and Screen – all of which demonstrate the power of “intermediation” (Hayles) and foster a critical perspective on it. Looking at these amalgamations of print and digital textuality through the lens of digital ekphrasis reveals that electronic literature will most likely always arouse ambivalence, just as the trope of ekphrasis in traditional media has, for better or worse, provoked a sense of the uncanny through its interweaving of visual, auditory, tactile, verbal, or haptic experiences.

I will first establish the aesthetic and rhetorical theories of ekphrasis that will frame my discussion of augmented reality and electronic literature. In writing of the centuries of ambivalence associated with intermedial “picture poems,” W.J.T. Mitchell has outlined the “dangerous promiscuity” of ekphrasis (155), how its “mutual interarticulation” (162) – with words helping to determine the significance of images and vice versa – threatens the stability assigned by audiences to each medium, at the same time that it provokes the “hope” that each medium’s limitations can be overcome. Lindhé has rehearsed and extended that discussion to highlight specifically “the interaction between visual, verbal, auditive and kinetic elements in digital literature and art” (Lindhé Par.13). She makes the case that the more comprehensive theory of ekphrasis in rhetoric allows us to understand and appreciate the intermedial functions of digital textuality in new ways: “digital literature and art align with this concept of ekphrasis, especially in the way that its rhetorical meaning is about effect, immediacy, aurality, and tactility. The multimodal patterns of performativity in the rhetorical situation stage a space-body-word-image-nexus with relevance for how we could interpret and discuss digital aesthetics.” Lindhé’s concept of digital ekphrasis has much to offer as we think about the power of electronic literature, but I will argue that the ambivalence the trope has always elicited is just as important to remember.

In the final section of the presentation, I will demonstrate how various AR texts court a sense of the uncanny and thereby serve as paradigmatic examples of the multi-layered future of electronic literature. After noting the precedent of Caitlin Fisher’s Andromeda (Electronic Literature Collection, V.2), I will examine the remediation of print poetry through multimodal AR performances and locative poetry (Berry and Goodwin). Next, I will offer a close analysis of Sutu’s AR comic book Modern Polaxis, which employs both the palimpsest effects of AR and the tropes of science fiction (time travel, body snatchers, the automaton) to encourage us to “learn to taste the tea on both sides” of an uncanny reality. Finally, I will end with a discussion of Borsuk and Bouse’s Between Page and Screen, to my mind the most ambitious use yet of AR for literary expression. Like Lev Manovich’s thoughts on “the poetics of augmented space,” Borsuk’s work (both the book and her essay on “words in space and on the page”) shows us, it is more fruitful to think of AR as a cultural and aesthetic practice than as a technology. The platforms for AR may change from smartphones to wearables, and beyond, but AR itself will persist in, among other things, an uncanny electronic literature not just “born digital,” to use Strickland’s phrase, but cached in the world around us.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Rui Torres is Associate Professor at University Fernando Pessoa (UFP) in Porto and also author of several works of digital poetry. In this interview he explains how he started working in this field and where his inspiration comes from. Furthermore he explains why he sees the works of electronic literature as literary experiments and his concept of aesthetics taking in account his privilege for multimedia and the active participation of the readers in the creation of some his works. In the end he makes some considerations about preservation and archiving of works of electronic literature.

Material representations and simulations of reading motions can be embodied and enacted through expressive uses of formal devices in programmable works. These interactions between reading self and embodied codes are reflexively choreographed in ways that illuminate the performativity of cognition and interpretation. Meaning production through acts of reading that become scripted in the textual field will be analyzed in 'The Readers Project' by John Cayley and Daniel Howe.

The subject of the thesis is to introduce and contextualise the possibilities of writing in the interactive media as well as to study the literary art of interactive media in the Anglophone area. One of the attributes of the contemporary art pieces of interactive media is their intermedial character; the authors often link text, image and sound to introduce the fictional world. The aim of the thesis is on one hand to refer to the questions that are not new but have appeared in new circumstances due to the digital format and internet and on the other hand to refer to the questions typical for the digital fiction research. The research concentrates on the digital fiction – a digital piece written in a computer programme, in which the author offers a fictional world. The thesis addresses several aspects of digital fiction, whose combination indicates its characteristic status within the group of digital art – fragmentarity of narrative, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality and the principles of game and play. The current phenomena that influence also the creation of the analysed art pieces and their popularity among readers are the aesthetic attraction, in this context brought mainly by the use of media diversity, and the effort to evoke the most intensive experience in the shortest time span. The thesis consists apart from the introduction, conclusion and interludium (dealing with the materiality of digital fiction) of four chapters. The scientific approaches to the problematics of writing in the interactive media are in the second parts of these chapters used in the process of analysis-interpretation of particular digital fiction pieces.