In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.
F8MW9 is a collaboration between Jim Andrews and margareta waterman. F8MW9 seeks randomly to play short parts of a sound file of vocalizing by waterman. the part of the sound file played is indicated visually. as the sound plays, a visual interpretation (drawn by waterman) of the vocalizing is revealed. In fact waterman is vocalizing her interpretation of the revealed visuals, ie, the vocals and the visuals coincide. Controls at the bottom of the piece allow the user to: a) Set the maximum duration (in milliseconds) of played audio snippets b) Press an infinity button to hear the whole audio file uninterupted (click the writing at top to exit this mode) c) Click a button to change the writing/glyphs that are rendered d) Clear the screen e) Set audio volume f) Go to a related waterman/andrews collaboration. The reader can also click the graphic or waveform to play the sound at that point. Includes an interview by Andrews of waterman about the sound and glyph visuals.
The Adobe Director piece requires the free Shockwave plugin from get.adobe.com/shockwave.
The aim of the speech will be to show that e-literature realizations not only could be a renovation of avant-garde or even earlier tradition, but also in many cases provoke the same kind of questions which were made by theoreticians of (e.g.) formalism or structuralism in relation to avant-garde or modern text. Looking at electronic texts we re-ask about a literacy of those works and have to renovate our conception of literary communication, re-thinking not only the category of the text (as Aarseth did), but also the character of signs and code used in this kind of communication.
A part of the speech will be a case study of „Between Page and Screen” by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, a specific (AR-)book in which there is no (material) text inside, although it is a book of visual poems. This new media realization (different from all children-addressed AR-books offering illustrations as AR-projections, because it offers a text-based projections) will be shown as an example of metatextual voice in discussion of role that code plays in e-literature communication. Offering to the reader signs possibly read only by a machine and changing the act of reading in co-reading with the computer “Between Page and Screen” shows how important could be Manovich’s category of transcoding in reading e-literature.
This work (and others, occasionally mentioned in the speech) will be discussed in context of literary realizations and theoretical conceptions questioning the only verbal character of signs and code in the literary communication to show that for the relation between e-literature and tradition (visual literature, avant-garde typography, concrete poetry) a way of defining a role of mentioned elements and the role of book itself (seen as an interface or – using Aarseth’s category: cybertext, machine) could be seen as the main problem. In all mentioned context: e.g. in futurists’ books, in works of artists of art of book or in the polish liberature (proposed in 1999), the material form of book and all non-verbal aspects of used signs are treated by authors as an important part of their work, semantically important. The same we can see in e-literature realizations, in which that how the work functions makes how (and what) it means.
For this reason I will recall a case of AR-book by Borsuk and Bouse, e-literature work using as its interface traditional, material paper-made book (and published by Siglio, publisher oriented in “uncommon books”), as a pretext to discussion on literacy of e-literature in context of some traditional problems with this category.