Conference paper or presentation

This paper presents a feminist, platform-conscious approach to reading and preserving a work of early, pre-web electronic literature: Kathryn Cramer's short Storyspace hypertext fiction, "In Small & Large Pieces" (1994). Ensslin adopts a postphenomenological approach centered around Material Engagement Theory (MET), which was originally developed by cognitive archeologists and anthropologists to reflect the material significance of extended, embedded, embodied and enactive cognition, also known as "e-cognition" (Ransom and Gallagher 2020), for human development and subjectivity. Glossed briefly, "extended" refers to the relational idea that "minds and things are continuous and interdefinable processes rather than isolated and independent entities" (Malafouris 2016: 9); "embedded" foregrounds the situated, spatially contingent nature of these processes and relationships; "embodied" emphasizes the fact that the things we interact with become cognitive extensions of the human body, and that "human-technology relations are not representational relations but embodiment relations" (Ihde & Malafouris 2018: 205); and "enactive" signifies that "cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is the enactment of a world" (Varela et al 1991: 9; Iliopoulos 2019). What we learn, know, understand and feel is therefore a product of our active, embedded and embodied interaction with the things around us, and that includes technologies of reading and play. Applied to reading electronic literature, MET can help us understand how the materialities of e-literary creation and experience have a recursive, reciprocal and diachronically dynamic effect on our relationship with a work, but also more generally with our own understanding of what we do and who we are in the field and the community. Ensslin examines how MET can account for how emulation-often stigmatized as legally fraught and inauthentic-can become an integral part of restorative and productive co-reading.

This paper was a contribution to the panel, "On the Effect(s) of Living Backwards", at the ELO 2021 Conference.

were forced into situations somewhere between Brazil and The Matrix, in which workspaces become the world. Also this evinced Paul Virilio’s notion of technological acceleration while confining to one spot (ZOOM!) undifferentiates the technologically enabled person without disabilities and the technologically au and the technologically augmented paraplegic (The Third interval).These existential effects led to my creation of a visualyl narratological immersive experience entitled Confinement Spaces, which consisted of 3D scans and renders of the UAE quotidian landscape, first of places immediately around me. But as I was able to expand my tr avels, more spaces were scanned in, creating a form of “narrative molecule” based on experience in the 1990’s with designer Roy Stringer’s Navihedron interface regime.In Confinement Spaces, six months of expanding explorations into iconic spaces of the United Arab Emirates as an allegory of confinement in space and the fracturing of reality as depicted by the glitches in the 3D scans.All of these elements (technological collapse of space and time, the freezing of existence into a timeless space, and all of these spaces collapsed in to a form of momentary narrative are consistent with my studies of spatial narratology and form as proposed by Joseph Frank. In this paper, I wish to discuss the spatiality of pandemic time, the similarities of Covid time to Joyce and Proust, and the modes in which Confinement spaces develop these ideas.

This paper outlines public archives of electronic literature authoring tools and technologies via git version control as a platform for decentralized organization, with a specific focus on current and proposed future uses of the GitHub platforms. How are the source code and tooling for creating electronic literature maintained currently preserved through public open source, and how might ELO initiatives and community best practices engage with them in the future?Throughout its history electronic literature has been been widely varied and proliferated in many ways: varied in forms or artifacts that are experimental or avant-garde in themselves, varied in modes of distribution across various platforms (including popular and experimental forms), and varied in the authoring tools and techniques used to create it. This proliferation and continual engagement with the *now* of rapid technological change is by its nature usually attached to relatively ephemeral software and hardware forms, whether StorySpace, Flash, the Nintendo DS, et cetera. As most electronic literary works are therefor by default ephemera, a long-held core mission of electronic literature communities of practice has been the preservation, archiving, and dissemination of electronic literature works. A survey briefly considers the context of many existing initiatives to catalog and archive such works -- in particular, the examples of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (https://elmcip.net/), the CELL Search Engine (https://cellproject.net/), and IFDB: the Interactive Fiction Database (https://ifdb.tads.org/). As the CELL project describes it: "To the degree that inclusion in a database is now the publishing event and the life of a literary work is defined through a trail of linked commentaries and active responses, the gathering and identification of works becomes itself a creative and scholarly activity." Currently these database catalogs tend to be primarily artifact-centric -- focused primarily on preserving a "work" -- rather than tool-centric or platform-centric, focused on preserving a practice, craft, or creative mode.By contrast, several electronic literature authoring communities of practice are organized around particular genres or platforms -- for example, hypertext authors using Twine, IF authors using Inform, or bot authors using Tracery -- make extensive use of open source repositories and hosts such as GitHub in order to develop and disseminate authoring tools, platforms, libraries, and plugins et cetera for electronic literature authoring. These tend to be decentralized, supported by small numbers of self-hosting developers who are addressing to specific active communities of practice in their own terms. One practical consequence of this is tagging: umbrella terms such as "electronic literature" or "elit" are almost unknown in GitHub repository tags.The paper concludes by putting forward a model for a public open source archive for electronic literature tool and platform source code, based on cataloging and mirroring a collection of forks of existing code bases drawn from across multiple electronic literature authoring communities. It is modeled on a related project in the area of creative computing, the Archive for Processing initiative (https://github.com/archive-for-processing/archive-for-processing).

Larps are a form of analog game in which participants co-create and collectively inhabit diegeses (Montola 2012, cf. Gennette 1980). Larp may also be thought of as a medium, and codic larps are a type of larp platform that use diegetic code (Steele 2016) to represent parts of the story, allowing conflicts about what happens next to be resolved through contests in which diegetic material has been congealed into code and rendered deployable. Codic larps offer a unique opportunity to teach and study code, and the analog nature of codic larp allows advanced engagements like platform modding to happen with fewer layers of technology to navigate than digital code platforms, ostensibly lowering the barrier of entry to coding, while allowing diegetic code to serve as a "boundary object" (Star and Griesemer 1989, Star 2010) through which scholars and professionals from many backgrounds may develop common language to engage in cross-codic critique.Recently, embodied gaming activities including codic larps have come under scrutiny by those who question the power relations inherent in physically embodying one’s own avatar, as well as in rituals surrounding the embodied deployment of diegetic code. In the wake of developing and touring their digital Shakespeare game, Play the Knave, Gina Bloom, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell have explored the argument that having players physically embody their characters is troubled by the degree to which out-of-game asymmetrical power relations like racisms and sexisms attach themselves to bodies (Bloom et al. 2021), an issue that is part of a phenomenon that I call creep, which is when unwanted out-of-game assemptical power relations creep into the fantasy world you are trying to make with your game. 

Additionally, sociologist Steven Dashiell has criticized meta-coding rituals that often surround algorythmic analog gameplay for reinforcing the power relations that underpine structural forms of sexism and other inequalities (Dashiell 2017, 2018), fueling arguments within larp communities that diegetic code deployment should be removed from games altogether (cf. Fatland et al. 1999).

Pushing back against these anti-embodyment and anti-codic sentiments is the work of other gamemaker-scholars who have engaged larp's embodiment and rituals of code deployment to ostensibly develop interventions into pervasive forms of systemic inequality. Jonaya Kemper's work on emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2017, 2020), Diana J. Leonard's efforts to develop anti-racist scaffolding for codic larp (cf. Leonard 2013, 2018), as well as the work I have done on anti-code (Steele 2016, 2018), and the efforts to develop larp consent mechanics by Johanna Koljonen (Koljonen 2020), Sarah Lynne Bowman (Bowman 2017), and Maury Brown (Brown 2017), demonstrate efforts to not only salvage different facets of the larp medium, but to "fork the code": using the larp medium's unique embodimemt and of code-based play to offer game mechanics and scaffolding as interventions into the creep of systemic racisms and sexisms.

References:

• Bloom, Gina, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell. (2021): "Playful Pedagogy and Social Justice: Digital Embodiment in the Shakespeare Classroom." Shakespeare Survey 74, special issue on Shakespeare and Education (forthcoming). Accessed April 9, 2021.

• Bowman, Sarah Lynn. (2017): "A Matter of Trust - Larp and Consent Culture." Nordiclarp.org, Feburary 3, 2017.

• Brown, Maury (2016): “Creating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics,” Nordiclarp.org, September 9, 2016.

• Dashiell, Steven. (2018): "Rules as Written: Game Algorithms as Game Capital." Analog Game Studies 5(3). Accessed April 9, 2021. 

• Dashiell, Steven. (2017): “Rules Lawyering as Symbolic and Linguistic Capital,” Analog Game Studies 4(5). Accessed April 10, 2021. 

• Genette, Gerard. (1980): Narrative discourse: An essay in method. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

• Haraway, Donna J. (1991): “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge), 149-181.

• Fatland et. al. (1999): Dogma 99: A programme for the Liberation of Larp. Also see: https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Dogma_99

• Koljonen, Johanna. (2020). “Larp Safety Design Fundamentals.” RPG学研究 | Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies 1: 3e-19e.

• Kemper, Jonaya. (2017): "The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity Documentation." NordicLarp.org June 21, 2017. Accessed April 9, 2021. 

• Kemper, Jonaya. (2020): Wyrding the Self. In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen (eds.). What Do We Do When We Play? Helsinki; Solmukohta 2020. Accessed April 9, 2021. 

• Leonard, Diana. (2013): “The Dynamic Life Cycle of Live Action Role-playing Communities,” in Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek (Los Angeles, CA: WyrdCon, 2013).

• Leonard, Diana. (2018): “Conflict and Change: Testing a Life-Cycle-Derived Model of Larp Group Dynamics,” International Journal of Role-playing 6:15-22.

• Montola, Markus. (2003): "Role-Playing as Interactive Construction of Subjective Diegeses." In Gade, Morten, Thorup, Line & Sander, Mikkel (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up. Theory and Methods in Larp 82-89. Copenhagen, Projektgruppen KP03. The book for Knudepunkt 2003.

• Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. (1986): "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39." Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3: 387-420. Accessed April 9, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/285080.

• Star, Susan Leigh. (2010): “This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 5: 601–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910377624.

• Steele, Samara Hayley. (2018): "Code Critique: Port of Secrets/Snippet of Anti-Code from the Irvine-Based GM-Less Larp Community." Critical Code Studies Working Group 2018, January 29, 2018. 

• Steele, Samara Hayley. (2016): “The Reality Code: Interprepating Aggregate Larp Rules as Code that Runs on Humans." International Journal of Role-playing 7: 30-35.

• Steele, Samara Hayley. (2016): “Code as Diegetic Language in LARP.” Presented as part of the “Critical Code Studies and Creativity Panel” at the 30th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), Atlanta, Ga. 3-6 November 2016.

Steele's talk begins at 12:50:

This research will attempt to define a new cultural and socio-economic movement we will tentatively call ‘Platformism.’ We will define Platformism as a contemporary overarching meta-narrative driven by the networked communities and economies made possible by software apps which can be considered at once discrete platforms, and forming part of broader ecosystems affecting almost every sphere of human experience. By delineating and mapping Platformism as an evolving system of complex and disputed territories, our purpose is to explore how creative practices including writing and literature can function in, through and against the platform.Beginning with the 2020 Covid emergency travel and movement restrictions, there has been a dramatic acceleration of the already significant mass-migration toward digital platforms. Networked platforms have multiplied in form and function, and (according to the hyperbole of some companies offering these services) cater to almost every aspect of human being. Many of these platforms have been proposed as alternatives to traditional spaces for social and professional activities. Individuals, groups and communities have experienced a kind of ‘forced experiment’ during this period as they adopted services made possible by online and networked technologies, through computer and mobile telephony, often for the first time.Contemporary writers and other creative practitioners are no exception to this digital mass-migration. Not surprisingly, many artists have embraced Platformism; its promise of new feelings through innovative software; its claims of ‘exposure’ through access to massive user-bases; its non-stop attention/affirmation cycles through ubiquitous always-on technologies. We will argue against accepting the platform as a neutral, arbitrary and isolated substrate passively awaiting inscription by the user/artist. From this perspective, an understanding of Platformism can be useful for observing and developing art and literature in, through, and against the platform.We will present a speculative Platformist ‘manifesto’, algorithmically generated through the statistical analysis of a large number of ‘terms of service’ documents taken from existing software and hardware platforms. This Platformist Manifesto resignifies the legal agreements of social media sites (such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) with hardware platforms (such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Playstation, and Nintendo) into a general declaration which can reveal underlying intentions, motives and beliefs.This generative manifesto will also reveal the metanarratives of Platformism, allowing the reader to form a mental mindscape. These topographies may suggest the limits of the Platform, or at least offer pathways to navigate its boundaries. Our purpose in mapping this territory is to cultivate opportunities for commoning our struggles and priorities, to forge artistic and social positions within these topographies. To return writing to the edge.

The paper describes the procedure of porting of one of the first known poetry generators in Russian from a description of a program algorithm published as an article in the USSR Academy of Sciences: Automatics and Telemechanics in 1978. Boris Katz, a computer linguist at MIT in the moment, and at that moment mathematical mechanical faculty of Moscow university graduate was working on the generator in 1972 - 1975. The generator is based on Stone, 1916, the collected poems by Osip Mandelstam. This work was inspired by his elder colleague, a professor of Moscow University, E.M.Landis. Katz started his research on machine poetry and was asking colleagues if they knew anyone working on the theme in the Soviet Union, and they failed to point him to similar work.After several years of developing the program on BECM - 4 (Big Electronic Calculating Machine) he noticed Michael Gasparov’s book Contemporary Russian verse. Metrics and rhythmics. 1974, that analysed contemporary and traditional poetic verse and general laws of organization of Russian verse. This made a considerable contribution to the work.In order to understand the context in which On Program Composing Verse was produced we have to note that unlike in other language contexts the first generated poems in Russian appeared later than musical compositions, even though the beginnings of statistical analysis of literary texts dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. Another component that proved necessary for the computational poetics in the Soviet context was the study of structural properties of literary texts such as metrical analysis of Russian verse undertaken by Vladislav Kholshevnikov, Boris Tomashevsky and Michael Gasparov. So it was important to gain both qualitative and quantitative knowledge in regards of the properties of the poetic text in Russian.Porting or recreating this generator involved creation of a database in which every word of the Mandelstam’s Stone has been classified and included into a database. The program was created by a computer scientist Boris Katz in 1978 for BECM. A poet and computer programmer Anna Tolkacheva used java script for porting the original program. The paper will report on the principles and choices made during the process, as well as the mistakes made at the first iteration of the project and methods implemented for correcting them.

We live in a world where everyone with access to technology can publish. From YouTubers to Instagram-influencers, from gamers watching each other play online to writers self-publishing, content is everywhere. And yet, the biggest company with its most promising title and the podcaster putting their first episode online share the same problem: how to find an audience. Over recent years, digital technologies have fostered the proliferation of new platforms for publishing and broadcasting, and the rise of video streaming has further dissolved the boundaries between these two modes. Publishing no longer refers only to words but also images, video and sound and its reach is pervasive and global. Amplified Publishing, part of the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D project, a collaboration between four universities in the UK is examining what publishing has come to mean across sectors, platforms and media and explores its future direction. As a wide-scale research project, it looks at questions such as; What does ‘publishing’ mean in the 21st Century? How will the increased availability of seamless and synchronous visual and audio media enhance and expand traditional media, like books and magazines? What does personalisation offer to both content creators, their publishers, and their audiences? With the rise of visual storytelling, what is the future of reading? And, most importantly of all, who are our audiences, where are our audiences, and what does our audience want? This paper addresses this question of audience and seeks to understand specifically how narrative-based digital publishing, a theme within the Amplified Publishing project, can reach an active audience across platforms. In particular, it questions how audiences experience innovative forms and how their experiences can be mediated and guided by writers, producers and technologists. It uses findings drawn from an understanding of audience from electronic literature and ambient literature to draw conclusions about the future of audiences as they experience digital published content across platforms. It reaches beyond the Covid-19 digital landscape and seeks to understand how audiences have changed and what they might be looking for next.