A discussion of the film, The Matrix in the context of the future of books, the aestheticization of coding, and the insistence of the analog. Appears online in CTheory and in Life in the Wires: The CTheory Reader.
Near the beginning of The Matrix, Neo has hidden some data contraband inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulations. The book is a joke of simulation in itself; bound in green cloth with gilt letters, it simulates the authority of a classic but has no backing or substance. It is all surface -- the inside has been cut out, is no longer essential. It is an empty prop in more ways than one. But is it a key to the film?
A detailed discussion of the exhibit “Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions” (now installed at the University of Washington). Grigar looks specifically at the major technological shifts in affordances and constraints provided by early computer interfaces and the ways in which e-literature writers from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s worked with and against these interfaces. For example, she discusses the command-line interface of the Apple IIe – which was released in 1983 – as an example of an interface that exemplifies an ideology wholly different from the now dominant Graphic User Interface. Thus, the command-line interface also makes possible entirely different texts and entirely different modes of thinking/creating such as that exemplified by bp Nichols' “First Screening” from 1984.