writing

When you consider that writing as a form hasn’t really changed all that much since The Epic of Gilgamesh, some 4,000 years ago, what’s occurring in the world of new media becomes that much more impressive. Digital writing is already able to do things that authors aspired towards for years; incorporating visuals, music, and sound, as well as interacting directly with audience. In this issue we’ve tried to put forth work that exemplifies the wide range new media is capable of.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Fall/editor.html)

This text explores the material implications of electronic reading and writing in the Anthropocene. It does so by briefly examining the consequences that the production and usage of electronic devices has on ecosystems and social contexts. Different perspectives on how a reader or writer may deal with the negative effects of sociotechnical systems are offered: restraint, pharmacological awareness and togetherness. Such perspectives can be transformed into reading and writing tools for the Anthropocene that may allow readers and writers of electronic literature to integrate the notion of an extended community, that is, an intimate and paradoxical complicity with nearby and remote humans and non-humans, and invite them into the digital text

Source:(1) (PDF) The Heaviness of Light. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332523774_The_Heaviness_of_Light [accessed Oct 01 2019].

The possibility of machines making works of art has fascinated mankind for centuries. Men have dreamed not only of machines equipped with a powerful artificial memory, capable of reproducing patterns and structures from previous texts; they have also devised machines capable of working on their own, producing beautiful works without any human input. That leads us to the startling hypothesis posed by Calvino (2009): “will there be a machine capable of replacing the poet and the writer?”. The fact that written verbal language consists of nothing but visual symbols rearranged into meaningful structures makes this system (and Literature, as well) a field where experimentations with automated creation tend to be prolific. The interactive computer system Library of Babel, created by the American writer John Basile, based on the central metaphor of the short story “The Library of Babel”, by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, is a remarkable techno-artistic product in this area. The system works on the mathematical principle of Combinatorics, so that any click on the refresh button triggers a different combination of 29 graphic symbols (the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the space, the full stop and the comma) among all possible rearrangements, filling in a page with 3200 characters. As if in a lottery in which one wins by buying tickets for all possible rearrangements (which would evidently cost more than the prize), the system Library of Babel encompasses, under massive layers of linguistic chaos, all texts (literary or not) that could be written with these 29 graphic symbols. With that in view, this paper discusses the ontological and aesthetic consequences of a “total writing”, the logical premise of a project like the Library of Babel, which lies somewhere between a machine that subsumes all possible writers, but also all possible archives. As to the theoretical bases for our analysis, we will analyze Basile’s system from the perspectives defended by Umberto Eco (2016), Italo Calvino (2009), Barthes (2004), Deleuze (1979) and Raymond Quenau (1961).

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/609/A+poe…

Since the widespread adoption of the printing press, we have been writing with and for machines. However, the ways in which and the extent to which machines could participate in acts of writing have changed over time. We have now reached a point where machines play an active role not only in the reproduction and distribution of writing, but in its production and, even, at times, in its creation and composition. As we find ourselves more and more writing with and for machines, there is the possibility that compositional functions once assigned uniquely to humans can be outsourced or automated. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which my 2016 electronic literary work, “At, Or To Take Regret: Some Reflections on Grammars” (https://nickm.com/taroko_gorge/at_or_to_take_regret/) draws attention to the issues, implications, and possible consequences of compositional automation for the teaching and learning of college writing and the ways in which this and other works of electronic literature can be used in a contemporary college writing course to discuss the affordances and functions of writing in different medial environments. The paper engages with the work of Annette Vee, Stuart Moulthrop, N. Katharine Hayles, Franco Berardi, and Michael Halliday in its consideration and discussion of the changing value(s), definitions, and functions of literacy and literacy education in the early twenty first century.

As a new media author, I write the visible, readable text (texte-à-voir *) and the underlying source code, the program (texte-auteur *). As a new media artist, I also design and create the user interface and the multimodal elements - the whole thing.

Since starting to write and create in new media, I have felt compelled, by the digital medium itself, to attempt to fully exploit the affordances of programmable media for expressivity by employing non-linear narrative methods, non-trivial interactivity and random programming in poetically and/or narratively meaningful ways. This has led me to create, what Noah Wardrip-Fruin calls, playable media works.

Writing creatively for algorithmically-driven media, working with others’ code frameworks and writing my own programs has led me to consider the expressivity of game processes and, consequently, my work has taken on more game-like characteristics. I’d like to trace this development by presenting a selection of extracts from key works (listed below) which demonstrate this move towards writing for playability.

The key Electronic Literature works:

Fitting the Pattern ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/fitting_the_pattern.html )
Underbelly ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/underbelly.html )
Out of Touch, an ongoing series ( http://www.crissxross.net/oot/indexoot.html )
Rememori ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/rememori.html )

*Philippe Bootz, Towards an ontology of the field of digital poetry

This paper will present Letter to an Unknown Soldier, a new kind of war memorial, made entirely of words. Created by writers Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger, the project was commissioned by Britain’s 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the outbreak of WW1. Inspired by Charles Jagger’s 1922 bronze statue of a soldier, who stands on Platform One of Paddington Station, London, reading a letter, the digital artwork invited everyone in the country to write their own letter to the soldier.

Letter to an Unknown Soldier began with letters commissioned from 50 well-known UK-based writers; it opened to the public for submissions from mid-May 2014, and all the letters received to date went online on 28 June (the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand). The website remained open for submissions for 37 days, until 4 August (the centenary of Britain’s declaration of war). The project quickly snowballed in popularity. By its close, more than 21,400 letters had been received from around the world.

Letter to an Unknown Soldier now stands as an extraordinary example of a crowd-sourced participatory media artwork written by thousands of people who don’t think of themselves as writers. It forms a vivid snapshot of what people think about war, and what it means to remember a war no longer within lived experience.

Website address: www.1418now.org/letter

Letter to an Unknown Soldier directly disrupts Britain’s increasingly hegemonic and nostalgic approach to commemorating war. In the UK, Remembrance Day, which marks the end of WW1, morphed into Remembrance Sunday, which became Remembrance Weekend, which is now in the process of becoming Remembrance Week. Heavily ritualised and pre-programmed, we are expected to remember war by watching the Queen at the Cenotaph on television, by wearing red poppies, and by observing the two minutes of official silence. Letter to an Unknown Soldier gave people the opportunity to speak into that silence by posing the following questions: What does it mean to remember something you can’t remember? If you could say whatever you wanted to say to the unknown soldier, what would you say?

Letter to an Unknown Soldier was an international transmedia writing event. Spread across many platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, Figment, Tumblr, YouTube and Storify – but always focussed on the digital artwork itself, it has generated layers of data that transform the notion of the war memorial from something static to a work that reflects both lived and living experience. The diversity of responses to the project was both unusual and inspiring, including submissions from schoolchildren, serving soldiers, a huge range of the public, as well as the current British Prime Minister. We asked people to write a letter to the soldier and they responded, in their thousands.

During the project, Harper Collins UK commissioned a book of selected letters: this book includes 138 of the letters and was published in November 2014. Over the next few months the website, and all its digital traces and residues, will be transformed into both an archive of the artwork and an open access resource for educators and community organisations; using the archive, the British Library has created a dataset for researchers. This presentation will show the work as well as describing how it was made, how it was disseminated, and the future of the project.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Nonlinear writing refers to (a) a writerly activity and (b) a specific type of written document. The first meaning relates to the strategy of composing a text in a nonsequential way by adding, removing, and modifying passages in various places of manuscript rather than producing it in one piece, from beginning to end. The second meaning refers to documents that are not structured in a sequential way, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Rather, their macrostructure follows an associative logic, which assembles its composite elements (paragraphs, text chunks, or lexis) into a loosely ordered network. These networks offer readers multiple choices of traversing a document, which can facilitate specific types of reading strategies, such as keyword searches or jumping between main text and footnotes, and complicate others, such as reading for closure or completeness. (Source: Author's introduction)