variantology

Walter J Ong argues: ‘The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word’. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of enunciation in which written words refuse repose. This essay argues that although spoken, written and printed words operate within radically different temporal planes, spoken words also have thing-like properties and written and printed words also move through time. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of signification unforeseen by Ong in which written words refuse repose. Jay David Bolter argues that digital writing ‘challenges the logocentric notion that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language ... The writer and reader can create and examine structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech’. N Katherine Hayles argues that, in digital media, the text ‘becomes a process, an event brought into existence when the program runs ... The [text] is ‘‘eventilized,’’ made more an event and less a discrete, self-contained object with clear boundaries in space and time’. Jean-Jacques Lecercle argues that language is a constructed system, constantly subject to change ... ‘We therefore need to conceive of language not as a stable, arrested system, but as a system of variations’. This essay draws upon a diverse corpus of literary, media and performance theory and practice to establish a critical framework for examining the performance of variable texts throughout the entire apparatus of hardware, software, networks, bodies and spaces within and through which they operate and propagate. This framework is applied to a number of examples of digital writing which incorporates variability, instability, transformation and change into the process of composition, resulting in texts which are both physical and digital, confusing and confound boundaries between speaking, writing and reading.

Not quite a short story, not quite a stage play, ‘Once upon a Tide’ is just one of those moments in literature when time … stands … still. When plot advances by simply refusing to budge. One of those waiting times, slack tides, great hollows within which heat intensifies, cold deepens, night thickens, fevers rage, or the sun continues its relentless blaze. Tension builds, and still nothing happens; neither the sight of a sail on the horizon nor the slightest breath of wind. It is within these long stillnesses that sailors’ yarns unravel. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the entirety of Marlow’s tale is recounted in one evening whilst sitting utterly still on the deck of a ship moored on the Thames. In the pitch dark and the heavy night air of the river, the narrator strains to discern meaning: ‘I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips…’.

In fiction, these long feverish pauses eventually break. In a variable text, however, we may hover forever within the tense and nuanced relation between reading, listening, watching, and waiting for the sentence, the word, the clue…

(Source: J. R. Carpenter, The Junket)

The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing insofar as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and those of Atlantic Canada are separated by three and a half thousand kilometres of ocean. Yet for centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. These comings and goings have left traces. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond, and through these networks, they become informed by the networks’ structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks’ code languages. Writing coastlines interrogates this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance, and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? This thesis takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions. This practice-led research refers to and infers from the corpora and associated histories, institutions, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences of the visual, media, performance, and literary arts, as well as from the traditionally more scientific realms of cartography, navigation, network archaeology, and creative computing. "Writing Coastlines" navigates the emerging and occasionally diverging theoretical terrains of electronic literature, locative narrative, media archaeology, and networked art through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art (Bergvall 1996, Hall 2008). Central to this methodology is an iterative approach to writing, which interrogates the performance of writing in and across contexts toward an extended compositional process. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to a theoretical framework and methodology for the creation and dissemination of networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory. (Source: Author's Abstract)

Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future. Source: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/deep-time-media

In Reading Writing Interfaces, Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Indistinguishable From Magic | Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier

Chapter 2: From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Chapter 3: Typewriter Concrete Poetry and Activist Media Poetics

Chapter 4: The Fascicle as Process and Product

Chapter 5: Postscript | The Googlization of Literature

Works Cited