Article in an online journal

With the arrival of the first generation of consumer headsets, virtual reality has produced a wealth of exploratory projects from a diverse group of very talented practitioners including game designers, animators, documentary journalists, Hollywood filmmakers, social activists, university researchers, and visual artists. Most of what these adventurous folks (myself and my students included) are producing is terrible, which is just as it should be.

Expanding human expressivity into new formats and genres is culturally valuable but difficult work. We are collectively engaged in making necessary mistakes, creating examples of what works and what doesn’t work for one another to build on. The technical adventurism and grubby glamour of working in emerging technologies can make it hard to figure out what is good or bad from what is just new.

Racter poses virtually no threat to human authors, nor does any other algorithmic author currently available. The question is hence not one of replacement, but of augmentation, of new responsibilities for the human author in light of the algorithmic one. When Juhl writes that computer-generated output lacks the intentionality of a text with a human author, he falls into a similar trap as Bök: both scholars fail to recognise the fundamentally human basis of algorithmic authorship. Human intention hasn’t disappeared, but is merely manifest in a new way. Indeed, The Policeman’s Beard’s apparent randomness is a rhetorical choice, and Racter’s nonsensical output pushes the limits of creativity by means of an intentional goal to be incomprehensible.

Textual analysis places great emphasis on determining the development and direction of authorial intention to illuminate a text’s layers of meaning. How, though, is one to determine the development of authorial intention in a text that appears to remove the traditional human author? This paper explores issues of authorship presented to genetic criticism (critique génétique) by algorithmically-produced texts – that is, texts produced through programmed logic in a computer rather than through direct human agency – such as those of the Twitter bot Pentametron (twitter.com/pentametron). This paper considers the perceived importance of authorship and human agency in the creation of a text. Algorithmic texts challenge contemporary notions of textual creation and development, in turn posing challenges to genetic criticism that are similar to those posed by cut-up texts in other media. This paper argues that Pentametron’s rather nonsensical algorithmic output stresses the reader’s responsibility for meaning-making, and suggests that such algorithmic texts are not so much final texts to be subjected to genetic critique themselves, but are more aptly considered to be forms of avant-texte. These avant-textes serve as inspiration for human-computer symbioses, for re-creations wherein readers make sense out of the seemingly senseless.

Important piece by @MezBreezeDesign on @TheWritPlatform about creating #elit and #digitalfiction in the #VR space.

- Kate Pullinger

This essay presents an approach to teaching Digital Humanities through two largely unexplored lenses: electronic literature and foreign languages (Spanish in particular). It offers a practical example of a course taught during the Spring of 2016 at UC Berkeley that combines literary analysis with the teaching of basic programming skills, and DH tools and methods. Concretely, this course is an upper division, undergraduate writing intensive class, where students learn how to write and talk about electronic literature–e.g. hypertext novels, kinetic poetry, automatic generators, social media fictions, etc.–, learning specific terminology and theoretical frameworks, as they gain the skills to build their own digital art pieces in a collaborative workshop setting. By taking this course as a practical example, this essay tackles three important pillars in the humanities. Firstly, the overall concept of literature, and more specifically, the literary; secondly, what we understand by literary studies at the university; and thirdly, and more broadly, what constitutes cultural (beyond technical) literacy in the twenty–first century. This essay’s final claim is that teaching e-it as DH effectively address all three.