surface

This paper presents a critical framework about literature mods—modifications of source code and surface of literary works—and a set of new empirical methods—modifying deformances—as a way of reading and analyzing the behavior of digital kinetic poems, since they move in time and space. How to simply read poems behaving as changing events? How to read poems that display at extremely high speed? How to critically analyze surfaces of inscription that may be impossible to be read? What methods of criticism can be set in practice in order to read kinetic poems? The problem of how to read digital poems, how to interpret them, and how to write criticism about them is closely tied to what kind of methods the reader and scholar use. Some of these methods can, and should require practical engagement with the creative works, a point that C. T. Funkhouser (2014) highlights. In fact, that is the type of “computational poetics” methodology that, in “operating” the code and interface, Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort (2013) call for. Thus, this paper contributes to an analysis of digital kinetic poems with an exploratory reading and modding of their code and display. Its key finding is the development of a method that blends critical inquiry with experiments of modifications of the poems’ output in terms of spatiotemporal transitions. These modifications of time-based parameters are built within a framework of open source software, remix culture, and draw from intervening practices of altering video games as mods. In addition, they are discussed against the backdrop of Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann’s (1999) notion of “deformative criticism.” Samuels and McGann’s “deformance” approach employs analyses through alteration of creative works, but at the print textual level, in order to isolate and alter content that expands the practices of reading and interpretation. Contrarily, modification and versioning is a set of methods used in software development that can be adapted to reading kinetic poetry. Reading kinetic text and kinetic poetry presents a challenge because it demands interdisciplinary approaches and critical openness to engage with artifacts that are complex and difficult to be read. In addition to analyzing the different components of a literary work by using traditional humanities models, literary criticism at the level of praxis with programming languages and processes must develop new methods. Because spatiotemporal dimensions such as onscreen speed and textual behavior are topical concerns that affect the reading experience, this paper presents modifications of kinetic poems in order to discuss them. What I call a modifying deformance is no less than a method that emerges out of modding practice and theory of literature. The main achievement is the awareness of how coding affects display, process, and event, rather than modifying works for purposes of development, improvement, conversion, remake, technical support, or artistic creation. Finally, I argue that literature mods can pave the way to resituate assumptions in the field of digital literature, regarding literary and aesthetic criticism.

overboard by John Cayley, with Giles Perring, is an example of literal art in digital media that demonstrates an 'ambient' time-based poetics. There is a stable text underlying its continuously changing display and this text may occasionally rise to the surface of normal legibility in its entirety. However, overboard is installed as a dynamic linguistic 'wall-hanging,' an ever-moving 'language painting.' As time passes, the text drifts continually in and out of familiar legibility - sinking, rising, and sometimes in part, 'going under' or drowning, then rising to the surface once again. It does this by running a program of simple but carefully designed algorithms which allow letters to be replaced by other letters that are in some way similar to the those of the original text. Word shapes, for example, are largely preserved. In fact, except when 'drowning,' the text is always legible to a reader who is prepared to take time and recover its principles. A willing reader is able to preserve or 'save' the text's legibility.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

The lability of digital works, mainly due to the changes undergone by programs and operating systems, as well as to the increasing speed of computers, has been taken for granted by a certain number of critics over the last years. The artists, therefore, have four options when dealing with the potential instability of the electronic device which will display their work:
- In keeping with “the aesthetics of surface”, the artists simply ignore this instability.
- The “mimetic aesthetics” takes into account the instability of the electronic device, but it also tries to reduce its impact by providing the work with a stable experimentation frame.
- The most radical approach, the “aesthetics of the ephemeral”, consists of letting the work slowly decompose, accepting that, through its changing forms and updates, unexpected mutations may even, sooner or later, lead to the obsolescence of the artistic project.
- The fourth approach, called the “aesthetics of re-enchantment”, mystifies the relationships between the animated words and images, between the sounds and gestures of manipulation in a digital artwork, in order to advocate an “unrepresentable”, something that words can not describe and yet, that one can “feel” by experiencing the work.
The poems La Série des U and Passage by Philippe Bootz seem to perfectly fit in the aesthetics of the ephemeral: the author was among the first ones to theorize both about the lability of the digital device and the eventual obsolescence of digital creation, and also one of the first ones to experiment them in his poetic projects. Yet, in these digital poems, the mimetic aesthetics, the aesthetics of the ephemeral and of re-enchantment alternately intertwine, merge or mutually exclude one another, so that their conflicting relationships allow us to raise a certain number of fundamental questions about digital poetics.

Source: Author's Abstract

Electronic Literature and Digital Art share many processes, themes, creative and theoretical guidelines. In this sense, I developed a critical framework that could resist to a hyperdisciplinary analysis and include one of the characteristics of this sharing pattern: the transfer and transformation processes. In order to recognize these processes I have done an approach of the transduction concept that could perform a theoretical migration on these aspects: the transducer function. Thus, the transducer function appears in the critical analysis of the works by Mark Z. Danielewski, Stuart Moulthrop, R. Luke DuBois and André Sier. The selected works are representative of the following genres: novel, hyperfiction, net.art and digital installation, drawing on phenomena and concerns resulting from the creative production within the digital culture. In this research I have enhanced mechanisms, patterns, languages and common grounds: authorship, user, cybertext, surface, hypertext, infoduct, interactivity, pixel, algorithm, code, programming, network, software and data. (Source: Author's abstract)

The panel was a team-reading / deconstruction of Jim Andrews' Aleph Null. The author first presented Aleph Null, a digital artwork / digital art tool that enables users to adjust and compose a generated animation Andrews describes as "color music." Leonardo Flores presented the work in the context of Andrews' background and his prior work. Mark Marino presented a reading at the level of code, with particular attention to the paratexts in the comments of the code itself. Giovanna di Rosario read the surface effects of the piece itself.

John Cayley reports on writing and the practice of literary art in the immersive 3D audio-visual environment of the Cave at Brown University, addressing the use of text-as-surface in a three-dimensional space. He develops a conception of new media as “complex surfaces” based on Cave writing courses to confront the relationship between language and embodiment, language and materiality—always attempting to develop a specific literary aesthetics.

(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)

In this paper I investigate the emergence of new writing and reading practices under the impact of digital media. Examining Cayley's poetic work riverIsland , I focus on what the poet himself calls “literal morphing.” These transformations of letters constitute, I argue, an important shift in poetic writing whose importance for literary analysis must be acknowledged. I conclude that poetic works in programmable media lead to a rethinking of concepts of surface and depth in relation to writing.