constraints

This volume examines the structure of text-based Future Narratives in the widest sense, including choose-your-own-adventure books, forking-path novels, combinatorial literature, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and alternate reality games. How 'radical' can printed Future Narratives really be, given the constraints of their media? When exactly do they not only play with the mere idea of multiple continuations, but actually stage genuine openness and potentiality? Process- rather than product-oriented, text-based Future Narratives are seen as performative and contingent systems, simulating their own emergence.

(Source: Publisher's abstract)

In this paper I argue that the restrictions imposed by technological barriers within select forms of digital literature and net art are cause for the success of these works from the early internet to the present—the technological restrictions themselves guided their formulation. Arguably, the
constraints create the aesthetic context in which the works thrive, while the artist figure
transforms into mechanical producer.
I ground my research in earlier studies I have engaged in, tracing the creation of digital literature and net art around the network itself. I build upon these theories and engage in media theory analyses of the networked communication systems from which these works were created. I observe how works of digital literature and net art are specifically inhibited by the technology on which they were created for: Apple BASIC restricts bpNichols works from using lowercase lettering; the Apple Lisa (1983) integrates the mouse but the Apple Inc (1984) removes most of this accessibility from the user and restricts interactive fiction; the Apple Macintosh, less adaptable to change, experiences (relatively) widespread adoption as the DIY spirit from the Apple I series and its digital literature works quickly fade. Hardt and Negri describe how labor transforms the organization of production—linear relationships of the assembly line transform into indeterminate relationships of distributed networks. I evidence how these basic moves within these distributed networks of digital literature and net art production embrace the restriction of the medium, depend on it, and in fact integrate these formal elements into the early digital literature aesthetic. Such identifiable elements, visible in contemporary works, are in fact traceable to the early occurences in the mid-1980s as I demonstrate.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This essay is a synopsis of my fourth chapter from my dissertation. My research consists of game-poems and how they fundamentally alter the experience of “reading” poetry. Ultimately, my argument is that poetic experience is no longer initiated by text, but by the kinetic, audible, visual, and tactile functions in the digital environment that I label as trans-medial space; in effect, these functions sustain the poetry experience, and, thus, require the reader/user of the poem to play, rather than read, as a new form of “reading” the digital game-poem in order experience and interpret a poem’s meaning.

As a result, this essay explicates my theory and purpose for constructing and presenting an online, multiplayer game experience of a digital poem ironically titled “How to Read a Digital Poem”. Set in Markus Persson’s Minecraft platform, I demonstrate how this trans-medial space functions as an expression of poetry, mediating our interaction with digital poems. As a result, my Minecraft Poem challenges the level of immediacy and ephemeral notions of space that has been associated with technological advancement in digital poetry advocated by N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Mirona Magearu. The environment is a space oscillating between constraint and unconstraint methods to produce a poem, but results in a stable trans-medial space for the digital poem to perform and be experienced by the user/player.

While aesthetic practices in photography, film and music have undergone significant transformation due to the affordances of computational tools, the practice of creative and critical writing has remained largely unaffected. As programmable environments further populate the cultural environment it is increasingly important that we understand the ways in which those designed specifically for literary contexts may serve to challenge traditional notions of the writing endeavor. Our paper will provide a brief historical framework for the emergence of generative literary writing practices, a description of a new authoring environment (RiTa) for use in both the production and teaching of digital writing, and an analysis of specific concepts—including layering, materiality, authorial intent, constraints, and distributed creativity—that the use of this environment meaningfully engages.

(Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

A response to Nick Montfort's "Remediating the Social" keynote talk. Rettberg was subsituting for Rita Raley, who was unable to attend the conference due to Hurricane Sandy's impact on New York. Rettberg provides two examples of collaborative procedural writing practices as a contrast to the social programming examples such as the Demoscene Montfort discusses, and some followup questions on the four main points of Montfort's essay.