Article in a print journal

The author discusses his computer music composition, Voyager, which employs a computer-driven, interactive “virtual improvising orchestra” that analyzes an improvisor’s performance in real time, generating both complex responses to the musician’s playing and independent behavior arising from the program’s own internal processes. The author contends that notions about the nature and function of music are embedded in the structure of software-based music systems and that interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them. Thus, Voyager is considered as a kind of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices.

What if the post-literary also meant that which operates in a literary space (almost) devoid of
language as we know it: for instance, a space in which language simply frames the literary or
poetic rather than ‘containing’ it? What if the countertextual also meant the (en)countering of
literary text with non-textual elements, such as mathematical concepts, or with texts that we
would not normally think of as literary, such as computer code? This article addresses these
issues in relation to Nick Montfort’s #!, a 2014 print collection of poems that presents readers with the output of computer programs as well as the programs themselves, which are designed to operate on principles of text generation regulated by specific constraints. More specifically, it focuses on two works in the collection, ‘Round’ and ‘All the Names of God’, which are read in relation to the notions of the ‘computational sublime’ and the ‘event’.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This essay takes a media archaeological approach to putting forward haunted media as theory of mediation able to address contemporary networked writing practices communicated across and through multiple media, multiple iterations, multiple sites, and multiple times. Drawing upon Derrida’s invitation to consider the paradoxical state of the spectre, that of being/not-being, this paper considers the paradoxical state of long-distance communications networks. Both physical and digital, they serve as linguistic structures for modes of transmission and reception for digital texts. Composed of source code and output, these texts are neither here nor there, but rather here and there, past and future, original and copy. The in-between state has been articulated in terms of ‘medium’ in Western philosophy since classical times. The complex temporaility of this in-between state is further articulated in this essay through Alexander Galloway’s framing of the computer, not as an object, but rather as “a process or active threshold mediating between two states”. The theoretical framework for haunted media put forward in this essay is employed to discuss a web-based computer-generated text called Whisper Wire (Carpenter 2010). Whisper Wire 'haunts' the source-code of another computer-generated text, Nick Montfort's Taroko Gorge (2008), by replacing all of Montfort’s variables with new lists of words pertaining to sending and receiving strange sounds. Drawing upon heuristic research into Electronic Voice Phenomena, and citing Freud’s notion of repetition as a hallmark of the uncanny, Whisper Wire will be framed as an unheimlich text — a code medium sending and receiving un-homed messages, verse fragments, strange sounds, disembodied voices, ghost whispers, distant wails and other intercepted, intuited or merely imagined attempts to communicate across vast distances through copper wires, telegraph cables, transistor radios, and other haunted media.

Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 is an unbound novel that can be read in any order. This essay explores how the novel's indeterminate nature affects the sjuzhet and fabula. It finds that the fabula works in an essentially normal way, but priority is shifted from the reader-determined sjuzhet to the (perceived) author-determined fabula, which shows that readers privilege the author's intention over their own activity and order.

This paper explores the rhetoric of surface and depth in two different kinds of digital poetry. Kinetic and time-based compositions, such as John Cayley’s “overboard” and “lens”, explore new parameters of visual and spatial representation – the ‘complex surface’ of the digital screen. The other type of digital works, the so-called ‘codeworks’, such as “%Location” by JODI, thematise the underlying technological prerequisites and specificities of the medium. Both sets of examples upset and challenge established conceptions of depth and surface. (Source: RiLUnE, no. 5, 2006: http://www.rilune.org/mono5/1_sommaire_resumes.pdf)