Conference paper or presentation

Recent advances in machine learning provide new opportunities for the exploration of creative, interactive works based around generative text. This paper compares two such works, AI Dungeon (Walton 2019) and Project December (Rohrer 2020), both of which are built on the same artificial intelligence (AI) platform, OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3. In AI Dungeon, the player can choose from several predetermined worlds, each of which provide a starting point for the story generation. However, while interacting with the system within this world, the player can stop, edit, modify and retry each utterance, allowing the player to “sculpt” the AI’s responses, and choose what goes into the AI’s memory, helping to shape the overall direction of the story. At a broader level, the player can edit world descriptions, insert scripts between the AI and the player (themselves or others), and share these worlds/scenarios with other players. Similarly, in Project December, the player interacts with several AI “matrices”, either directly through conversations, or more indirectly by creating new matrices by defining a starting paragraph and sample responses, which can then be “spun up”, tested, and tweaked much like the worlds in AI Dungeon. These matrices can also be shared with other players.When interacting with both works, there is a need for the player to repeatedly engage with the work to learn how to entice a satisfying experience from the system (Mitchell 2012; 2020). However, the key difference is the framing of the experience. In AI Dungeon the person experiencing the work is either taking on the role of the player, entering text and seeing how the AI responds, or that of an author or perhaps a co-author, tweaking the input to the AI or its responses or adjusting the underlying scenario to get a desired response. In contrast, Project December is presented as part of a fictional website for a “Project December” run by “Rhinehold Data Systems”, promising the opportunity to talk to “the world’s most super computer”. Upon accessing the “customer terminal”, which looks and feels like an old dialup terminal, the player takes on the loosely defined role of “Professor Pedersen” whose “.plan file”, dated November 13, 1982, contains several tasks related to the various “matrices”, suggesting a mystery to be solved and a larger narrative to be explored. I will argue that whereas AI Dungeon attempts to provide players with access to and an uncritical understanding of how the underlying AI system works, Project December’s narrative framing instead defamiliarizes the play experience (Mitchell et al. 2020), potentially creating a more emotional connection between the player and the “matrices”, and thereby encouraging the player to critically reflect on the implications of the underlying technological platform.

In this work, we propose to study a series of Argentine digital literature productions that problematize the idea of property in language. We refer to practices of appropriation and expropriation that –through copy-paste, plagiarism, remix, collage and work with “ready made”, among other operations that the digital medium facilitates - question the triad author-authority-property. We consider that, in this questioning of the traditional conception of authorship, these productions also allow us to read an “epochal slippage” within the category of subject (Bürger 2001), as they propose alternative forms of subjectivity.In the general process of virtualization of subjects and their signifying practices, we consider that appropriationist writing practices propose particular modes of subjectivation. In this sense, we are interested in asking ourselves if it is possible to think in terms of mediated subjectivities, “halfway” –between human agency and the machine–, turned into specters or turned into a “medium”, due to their various links with technology. That is to say multiplied subjectivities, as they "make others speak" and withdraw from the expression of their own, in a questioning of the notions of ownership and authorship. Productions that bring multiple voices into play, while giving place to them in a single modulation. Regarding these practices, we are interested in raising the question of whether or not they operate as resistance to the hegemonic meanings of digital culture. In other words, if they manage to escape the binary logics of the technolinguistic standardization systems and the segmentation of profiles, which tend to reduce the subjective to what is offered “to be captured as data” (Kozak).

“Modernism is a history of infections: by political movements; by mass culture and consumerism; and now by the Internet, information technology, and interactivity. The openness to exteriority and its infections is an essential characteristic of the modernist inheritance, and that inheritance is the will to reveal the Other within oneself, to become Other, to become infected by Otherness.”Boris Groys, "In the Flow"The “Art in Quarantine” (AiQ) project [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/] is an online gallery launched after an international Open Call for (e-)mail art and art via email by cyberliterature collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 [wreading-digits.com], in the first 40 days that followed the Covid-19 pandemic status. Currently hosting more than 900 artworks, the AiQ project aimed to facilitate a safe place for artistic expression in the aftermath of one of the most restrictive and impactful periods of the COVID-19 pandemic so far.Reminiscent of the viral-like behaviour intrinsic to mail art culture and community(ies), AiQ adopts several principles of mail art to the digital sphere, namely networking and collaborative practices as a form of disrupting conventional art channels. Functioning as a net art installation, it includes an interactive digital map in which visitors can track the arrival of artworks by day and location. Symbolically subverting a logic of infection, contamination, and contagion (from Latin contagionem, "a touching, contact"), this virtual interface reveals, day after day, the transmission chain of another type of virus: that of artistic expression.On the whole, after its period of quarantine, the gallery featured artworks covering multiple formats and genres, by more than 350 authors from 57 different countries, and emulating the behaviour of “good” viruses that establish a symbiotic relationship with their host: in this case, the AiQ online gallery.For the present paper, we will focus on 3 artworks that fall under the spectrum of “electronic literature”1. Working as organisms that are part of a specific ecosystem, or population, this sample has the potential to take even further the idea of language as a virus both as a figure of thought and experimental laboratory.In their self-reflective nature, revealing language as a form of virus in itself, the selected artworks act as distinctive virus strains that make use of different poetic and programming languages in artistic creation: a generative online memorial, a mobile screen capture performance, and a software system/digital art installation.Ultimately, the experience of confinement in pandemic times is the infectious prima materia that paradoxically constricted and impelled their creations and creation processes, leading them to experiment on distinctive media and languages, often away from their usual workspaces and into the online flow, where, to a great extent, life and art have temporarily moved.1 Patient Zer0, by Pedro Alves da Veiga [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/#images-113]; viral#c, by Robert B. Lisek [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/#images-23]; Status Offline (from Thoughts on Screen series), by Clara Abi Nader [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/#images-51].

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

This paper explores two main mobile app narratives that deal with the issue of perilous irregular migration, 'Survival' (2017, Omnium Lab) and 'Bury me, my love' (2017, The Pixel Hunt, Figs, ARTE France). This paper explores the way in which the mobile app form lends itself to elevation of migrant narratives and explores the capacity of such works to generate empathy.The paper will analyse the way in which migration and its subjects are treated and placed into relation with the notion of the game. The paper will also address the comparison between game-style apps and other online modes whereby migrant experience is being represented, such as that of humanitarian photojournalism and portraiture as it arises in social media apps, such as Instagram.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Video games and their associated forms stand as the most lucrative entertainment sector on the planet, dominating other forms of visual media in dollars generated annually. In the proposed paper, adapted from a dissertation chapter, I will draw upon my experience as a game designer to illuminate the increasingly dire ways that various actors in the political sphere – from online trolls all the way to world leaders – have combined the language and techniques borne from the industrial practices of game design with the power of social media and other online communication platforms to produce new forms of disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theory. In this paper, I will trace the history of a specific form of game – the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), from its early literary history in 1903 to its modern incarnations. Subsequently, by harnessing lessons from my own work developing ARGs for the 2016 video game Frog Fractions 2 and the 2020 film Dared My Best Friend, I will examine how closely the principles employed during ARG marketing campaign have been in similar use in American politics since the 2016 American presidential campaign, culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capital. I will discuss how modern totalitarian systems will almost certainly continue to refine and deploy these strategies in the future as a new, dangerous form of propaganda: one that lives primarily in online discussion platforms and, much like the narrative of an ARG, is constructed both unwittingly and collaboratively by the targets of the propaganda themselves. Finally, I utilize my experience both as a designer and online community manager to address how, especially during COVID-19 quarantine, these emerging risks can be combated as the daily intersection of digital and analogue worlds continue to merge ever closer.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Electronic literature and computer games share a common history beginning from the earliest adventure games (Rettberg 87). As both the “technological platforms” that host electronic literature and games, and the “social contexts” that inform them evolve, so does the content, gameplay, and types of interactions they facilitate (Rettberg). The development of the Tinder platform and other mediated dating applications has precipitated the incorporation of interactive fiction games into the dating experience.The conception of dating as a game is by no means a new phenomenon. The “pickup” model of dating considers interactions between potential sexual partners to be governed by a set of rules that participants can learn in order to “win”(Almog and Kaplan). While such practices existed long before digitally mediated dating sites, applications like Tinder extend the gamification of dating; the Tinder platform further gamified these experiences with the release of the electronic literature game, Swipe Night, which debuted in October 2019. Swipe Night, in the model of hypertextual fiction, allowed users to play through a narrative, making choices that impacted the resulting storyline.Swipe Night was intended to connect users in new matches based on their choices as they navigate through the Swipe Night story, a deviation from Tinder’s usual matching via geographic proximity alone. The game played out over four weeks, with each week continuing the story from the week before. The in-app interactive narrative was largely successful, with over a million people tuning in each week (Perez). The Swipe Night trailer began making its rounds on tinder and other social media apps in late September 2019. In the 45 second trailer, users were introduced to the concept of the narrative: “Every Sunday, experience an interactive adventure where your choices can lead to matches. But you only have till midnight until the adventure is over” (Timmermans and De Caluwé).While the Tinder application has, since its inception, facilitated the gamification of dating through its fast-paced, turn-based interactions, the debut of the hypertextual fiction Swipe Night further underscored the game-like interactions of the platform. However, Swipe Night also enabled community development based around common choices within the narrative, and fostered discussion among Tinder users on a variety of platforms. While users’ Tinder data is ephemeral and not publicly available, cross platform conversations offer insight into user perceptions and experiences navigating the Tinder platform, and Swipe Night in particular. This study examines user reactions to the Swipe Night event on the subreddit r/Tinder; some users praised the unique matches they were able to form through interaction with the electronic narrative, while others lamented the effectiveness of the fiction for facilitating the development of actual relationships. As the formation of both communities and romantic relationships increasingly occurs via digitally mediated communication, a study of Tinder’s Swipe Night event provides essential insight into both the gamification of human interaction and audience reception of these developing interactive fiction technologies.

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

A primary interface pattern of contemporary software platforms is the infinite scroll. Often used to deliver algorithmically-selected personalized content, infinitely scrolling feeds are one of many design decisions seen as responsible for compulsive use of social media platforms and other information-rich sites and apps. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a time marked by a substantive increase in time spent online, the infinitely scrolling feed has been implicated in a new negative pattern: “doomscrolling.” Doomscrolling refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly--and in some cases, almost involuntarily--scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. While the realities of the pandemic have necessitated a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety, doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. It may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, the author’s artwork, titled The Endless Doomscroller, acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized phrases and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. Using concepts from Christian Ulrik Andersen’s and Søren Pold’s Metainterface, Wendy Chun's analyses of habitual new media, Geert Lovink’s theories of how sadness gets coded into platforms, and Matthew Fuller’s software studies guidance to perform deep analyses of small computational things, this paper will examine how the infinite scroll has intersected with pandemic-era platforms to create a world full of unhappy and unrelenting doomscrollers. Why don’t users look away from the scroll? Who most benefits when they can’t stop? And how might text-focused digital artworks intervene? Can an artwork that asks users to read *more* bad news headlines create an opportunity for mindfulness or enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what platform interfaces want from and do to us? What if, in this age of pandemic platforms, the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling?

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Anton Ferret, author of the E-Lit work The Fugue* book, will present a reflection on the technological and creative part of it, all that can be done well working with platforms and taking advantage of their own intrusion into the data and all that it means to lose it by the cultural and technological change that has meant the greater awareness for privacy. Oreto Doménech, a researcher in digital literature, will focus on the reception: on how this literary work reconfigures the platforms through which it’s expressed and on how fiction itself uses the platforms to build a metadiscursive reflection on the literature inserted in the historical and social fact.The Fugue* book (ELC II; 2008) turns the reader into the author and protagonist of the same story he is reading and his real-life friends turn into fictional characters. Both obsessively harass him in a violent, sensual plot: with crimes, envy (including literary one), false attributions of authorship and bitter disputes in forums and social networks. Technically, the work is based on the idea of remixing and "mashup" and integrates elements as diverse as the Facebook APIs, applications in PHP and Javascript languages, automatic emails, PDF self-generation or speech synthesis. You can see a video of the work (https://youtu.be/m4UW5uo_H4M) which cannot be read right now due to the obsolescence of the Adoble Flash software.Technologies and platforms in this work are related to creation, not to edition or distribution, which supposes main problems and diverse derivatives of the technologies, like the need of continuous technological update, costs, dependence on the work to the availability of the technology and of the platforms, like for example, to other people's conditions, subjection to technological evolution of the platforms and the introduction of third parties, the big platforms, in the very heart of the works. This literary fiction is constructed with interaction, multimedia, language technologies, data obtained from the Internet and data provided by the reader, ingredients all of which involve well-known and used technologies and platforms.However, the reading pact that introduces us to fiction, reconfigures these platforms along different reading paths. The use of the wide range of platforms builds the plausibility of the stories and ironically places them at the center of the digital landscape in a critical review of the platforms themselves. The theme is distilled, refined, and focuses on the dehumanization of relationships between people, the text-context relationship, public and private space, the real self and masks (authorship, deception and plagiarism), gender literary texts and their analogy with the types of platforms… Texts and spaces related to a communicative situation completely out of literary creation make it possible for all these fragments to function as parts of a single literary narrative.Reading The Fugue* book is an intelligent, amusing and critical experience, with the subtle background of the complexity of the human being able to create (the) networks with words. When digital accelerates the hybridization of the arts, only the centrality of the word defines literature.

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

Though not an ideal solution, lyric reflection can be a significant method of preserving electronic literature. Having lost Flash, one solution is mimetic: a technical project resulting in a faithful copy of the original work, allowing the work to be experienced in all its particularity and interactivity. Failing that, footage, screenshots, and thorough, plainly descriptive writing can make a long-term accessible record so that at least that space in the genre’s history can be seen and understood by future generations. What happens, however, when a work a work features elements of ephemerality? On a computational level, this can happen to a far greater degree than with a traditional print book. Outside of rare tragedies, we can retrieve an old text from the archives, but we cannot retrieve the experience of, for instance, Multi-User Dungeons in the late 1990s. Lyric recollection, however, provides a literary model for securing something very close to the experience of the work.Two particularly notable sources here are William Wordsworth for an early example and Indra Sinha for a specifically elit example. In his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility … the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” The poem, therefore, is not located in the original experience nor is it trying to be a mimetic copy of it. In the tranquil reflection, however, the poet is able, ideally, to capture the process of remembering so clearly that a new instance of the original type of emotion is actively produced by this new virtual encounter. In a similar way, Sinha records 1990s MUDs in his 1999 memoir The Cybergypsies, carefully shifting between forms to recreate the imaginative depth of the experience. We might also imagine a lighter form of this in the wild success of Façade – which parallels something of the social, writing-based experience of MUDS – on YouTube.Pavel Curtis suggests in 1997 that “it is difficult to properly convey the sense of the experience in words. Readers desiring more detailed information are advised to try mudding themselves” (124-5). Writing such as Sinha’s presents a model for how we might preserve important elements of generational and platform-specific electronic literature for future personal, authorial, and scholarly consideration. Such writing about personal online experience was popular around that time. In 2020, Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley and Joanne McNeil’s Lurking indicate a return to this more broadly. Among more formal archival efforts, in imagining a long literature history of elit for the future, lyric narratives – particularly in incorporating instances of the computer text as in Sinha – will inevitably play a significant role in how future generations ephemeral and social elit works.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:- a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;- a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;- a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.In order to reduce these limitations, to stimulate the reading practices and, at the same time, to develop young readers’ competencies in digital literacy, a website dedicated to children’s digital literature has been conceived, in partnership with the Littérature Québecoise Mobile group, directed by Bertrand Gervais: Lab-yrinthe.The website is intended as a virtual laboratory on contemporary children’s digital literary phenomena and aims at providing information based on scientific observations, as well as conceptual and didactic tools to educators, publishers and researchers.More particularly, Lab-yrinthe presents a catalog of heterogeneous digital literary works produced or distributed in Quebec, including enriched books, mobile apps, narrative video games, geolocated narrations, augmented reality creations, interactive theater performances, virtual installations and podcasts. Each creation is analyzed from a set of descriptive parameters conceived by the research team (Acerra, Lacelle et al., 2021) with the purpose to illustrate the semiotic, multimodal and technological materials of the text, as well as the poetic or rhetoric effects of their combinations. From this basis, some educational and didactic suggestions are depicted: teachers can refer to this section to find a reading key of the digital work and, at the same time, to have clear examples of the possible exploitations of a digital writing process in the school context.Finally, a dedicated section of the Lab-yrinthe website presents the main co-creation and co-production projects, carried out with partners from the cultural industry (ranging from the National television, to the Montréal Poetry Festival and Bookfair, from digital and analog publishers to National libraries and archives). In this case, both the actors, the contents and the distribution conditions are presented as indicators of the current orientations of the digital publishing field.BibliographyAcerra, E., Lacelle, N., et al. (2021, in press). « Décrire les œuvres littéraires numériques pour la jeunesse », Lire, comprendre, interpréter et apprécier des supports composites, La Lettre de l’AIRDF, n° 68.Lacelle, N., et al. (2017-2020). Soutien au développement de démarches d’édition numérique jeunesse au Québec à partir de pratiques favorables de production, diffusion et réception. Research project financed by the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture (Québec).

(Source: Authors' own abstract)