Book (monograph)

What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential.Wardrip-Fruin suggests that it is the authors and artists with knowledge of these processes who will use the expressive potential of computation to define the future of fiction and games. He also explores how computational processes themselves express meanings through distinctive designs, histories, and intellectual kinships that may not be visible to audiences.Wardrip-Fruin looks at "expressive processing" by examining specific works of digital media ranging from the simulated therapist Eliza and the first major story-generation system Tale-Spin to the complex city-planning game SimCity. Digital media, he contends, offer particularly intelligible examples of things we need to understand about software in general; if we understand, for instance, the capabilities and histories of artificial intelligence techniques in the context of a computer game, we can use that understanding to judge the use of similar techniques in such higher-stakes social contexts as surveillance.

(Source: MIT Press)

"Net literature" is a relatively young phenomenon that has its roots as well in the experiments of visual and concrete poetics as in the application of hypertext. With the extensive use of computer- and network-technologies this new kind of literature has grown up and is now considered to be one of the most important influences of recent art. Not only does "net literature" connect sound, video and animation with interactivity and allows new forms of artistic expression. It also destroys the traditional functions in the literary system: The ‘death of the author’ gives birth to the writing reader.

In this study a first attempt is made to apply the concept of "canon" to "net literature": Is there already a "canon" existing and if so, what are the techniques that are used to form this "canon"? Based on a theory of action and a modification of Karl Erik Rosengren’s "mention technique" a sample of German reviews on "net literature" was analyzed. The main research interests were: How reviewers refer to "net literature", which projects are considered to be of exceptional quality and which internet services influence this process of canonization (and how).

This study is also regarded as a test of the applicability of Rosengren’s method for the analysis of "net literature": Is it valid to use a method that was originally designed for the empirical study of the (traditional) literary canon for this purpose?

 The monograph is available to download from the archived linked in this entry.

Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They call this process of refashioning "remediation," and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.

(Source: MIT Press)

Reflections and predictions of technology's effect on reading and writing In this study, Christian Vandendorpe examines how digital media and the Internet have changed the process of reading and writing, significantly altering our approaches toward research and reading, our assumptions about audience and response, and our theories of memory, legibility, and context. Reflecting on the full history of the written word, Vandendorpe provides a clear overview of how materiality makes a difference in the creation and interpretation of texts. Surveying the conventions of reading and writing that have appeared and disappeared in the Internet's wake, Vandendorpe considers various forms of organization, textual design, the use (and distrust) of illustrations, and styles of reference and annotation. He also examines the novel components of digital texts, including hyperlinks and emoticons, and looks at emergent, collaborative genres such as blogs and wikis, which blur the distinction between author and reader. Looking to the future, reading and writing will continue to evolve based on the current, contested trends of universal digitization and accessibility. (Source: University of Illinois Press.)

In this revolutionary and highly original work, poet-scholar Glazier investigates the ways in which computer technology has influenced and transformed the writing and dissemination of poetry. In Digital Poetics, Loss Glazier argues that the increase in computer technology and accessibility, specifically the World Wide Web, has created a new and viable place for the writing and dissemination of poetry. Glazier's work not only introduces the reader to the current state of electronic writing but also outlines the historical and technical contexts out of which electronic poetry has emerged and demonstrates some of the possibilities of the new medium. Glazier examines three principal forms of electronic textuality: hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and works in programmable media. He considers avant-garde poetics and its relationship to the on-line age, the relationship between web "pages" and book technology, and the way in which certain kinds of web constructions are in and of themselves a type of writing. With convincing alacrity, Glazier argues that the materiality of electronic writing has changed the idea of writing itself. He concludes that electronic space is the true home of poetry and, in the 20th century, has become the ultimate "space of poesis."

(Source: University of Alabama Press catalog.)

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles’s latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.

My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. 

(Source: University of Chicago Press catalog copy)

CONTENTS

AcknowledgmentsPrologue: Computing KinPart I. Making: Language and Code1. Intermediation: Textuality and the Regime of Computation2. Speech, Writing, Code: Three Worldviews3. The Dream of Information: Escape and Constraint in the Bodies of Three FictionsPart II. Storing: Print and Etext4. Translating Media5. Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon6. Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork GirlPart III. Transmitting: Analog and Digital7. (Un)masking the Agent: Stanislaw Lem’s "The Mask"8. Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us9. Subjective Cosmology and the Regime of Computation: Intermediation in Greg Egan’s FictionEpilogue: Recursion and EmergenceNotesWorks CitedIndex