theory

This is a two-part meditation on where electronic literature came from, some of the places it’s been, and how (and why) it might possibly go on.

Espen Aarseth will look at the roots of electronic literature in the period before 1997, discussing the origins of digital writing in terms of contemporary art and theory. Particular attention will be given to interactive fiction and what happened to it.

Stuart Moulthrop skips over the really important bits (1997-2010) and concentrates on the state of electronic literature in the current decade, especially the intersection of various text-generation schemes with latter-day conceptualism and “the new illegibility.”

Both keynote speakers will offer critical prospects on the very idea of electronic literature, the meaning of the name, and various present and future ontologies for our discourse.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The coordinates are deceptive! Doesn’t matter the position of the point, but the force that it produces, the space that it opens in the landscape of the real. This issue zero aims to contribute to a non-cartesian idea of point. Thinking its meaning from four anti-geometrical hypotheses. The point as a beginning (a space opening); the point as force and disturb (maybe creative); the point as network (points that aggregate other points), but most of all, the point as something that takes place, that supervenes in the unquiet landscape of the real, a singularity.

The contributions presented here, depart from those coordinates and destroy them:

// They reflect on the creative nature that the point represents/identifies in the architectonic/artistic production landscape: Álvaro Seiça Neves, Pedro Bismarck.

// They identify strategies of thought/construction that evolve the connective and communicative singularity of the point: Pedro Oliveria, André Sier,

// They understand the role of the critic as (re)production and (re)cognition of creative points: André Tavares, Bernardo Amaral.

In 1921, in L’Esprit Nouveau, we too had gone back to zero in order to try to see things clearly. But if we did go back to zero, it was with the intent not to stay there, but only in order to reestablish our footing. -- Le Corbusier

(Source: punkto 0)

"Theoretical Permutations for Reading Cybertexts" is a review essay on Markku Eskelinen, Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory (London: Continuum, 2012), and C.T. Funkhouser, New Directions in Digital Poetry (London: Continuum, 2012). Both books engage new media works and practices in ways that are transformative of the conceptual apparatus and tools of literary theory and literary analysis. Moving between the deep analysis of the Funkhouser’s and the high-level abstraction of Eskelinen’s will give readers an exhilarating sense of just how new media is changing our aesthetical experience and our way of thinking and writing about the textual experience.

Markku Eskelinen’s Cybertext Poetics and C.T. Funkouser’s New Directions in Digital Poetry set new standards for the theory and analysis of digital texts. Eskelinen’s groundbreaking book synthesizes his research of the last decade into a theory for the new media textual condition with profound implications for the entire field of poetics. Through Eskelinen’s transmedial reframing of the operative categories of the field, it becomes clear how certain "universals" of literary theory have been in fact strongly dependent on a limited corpus of print-based situations. Funkhouser’s close readings of digital poetry are also deeply informed by a hands-on poetics of digital writing and reading practices on the web. Building on his historical account of computer poetry, his main concern here is to analyze the multimedia and programmable specificity of post-WWW digital poetry. Eskelinen’s permutational descriptions of the narratological and ludological variables involved in ergodic and non-ergodic works, and Funkhouser’s close attention to the signifying dynamics sustained by the variability of programmable forms extend the critical landscape for thinking about literary poiesis, digital and otherwise.

(Source: Author's abstract at DHQ)

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Source: amazon.com

Computers were once thought of as number-crunching machines; but for most of us it is their ability to create worlds and process words that have made them into a nearly indispensable part of life. As Jacques Leslie puts it, if computers are everywhere, it is because they have grown into "poetry machines." The term "cyberspace" captures the growing sense that beyond - or perhaps on - the computer screen lies a "New Frontier" both enticing and forbidding, a frontier awaiting exploration, promising discovery, threatening humanistic values, hatching new genres of discourse, and alerting our relation to the written word. The purpose of this book is to explore the concepts of text and the forms of textuality currently emerging from the creative chaos of electronic technologies. The essays gathered here address several needs in cybertext criticism: they engage in a critical, though not hostile, dialogue with the claims of the first generation developers and theorists; they search for a middle ground between a narrowly technical description of the works and general considerations about the medium; they outline a poetics tailor-made for electronic textuality, and they relate cybertexts to the major human, aesthetic and intellectual concerns of contemporary culture. Within the general territory of electronic textuality, they focus on three areas.

Introduction / Marie-Laure Ryan --
Pt.1. Cybertext theory. Aporia and epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock: the temporality of ergodic art / Espen Aarseth. Theorizing virtual reality: Baudrillard and Derrida / Mark Poster. Virtual topographies: smooth and striated cyberspace / Mark Nunes. Cyberspace, virtuality, and the text / Marie-Laure Ryan --
Pt.2. Cyberspace identity. Women writers and the restive text: feminism, experimental writing, and hypertext / Barbara Page. "The souls of cyber-folk": performativity, virtual embodiment, and racial histories / Thomas Fisher. The disturbing liveliness of machines: rethinking the body in hypertext theory and fiction / Christopher J. Keep. Postorganic performance: the appearance of theater in virtual spaces / Matthew Causey --
Pt.3. Cybertext criticism as writing experiment. Artificial life and literary culture / N. Katherine Hayles. Virtual termites: a hypotextual technomutant explo(it)ration of William Gibson and the electronic beyond(s) / Lance Olsen. Myths of the universal library: from Alexandria to the Postmodern Age.

Consider a work from Shakespeare. Imagine, as you read it, being able to call up instantly the Elizabethan usage of a particular word, variant texts for any part of the work, critical commentary, historically relevant facts, or oral interpretations by different sets of actors. This is the sort of richly interconnected, immediately accessible literary universe that can be created by hypertext (electronically linked texts) and hypermedia (the extension of linkages to visual and aural material).The essays in Hypermedia and Literary Studies discuss the theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges posed by the convergence of hypermedia systems and traditional written texts. They range from the theory and design of literary hypermedia to reports of actual hypermedia projects from secondary school to university and from educational and scholarly to creative applications in poetry and fiction.