In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.
In this interview Serge Bouchardon resumes his many activities in the realm of digital media. Besides a professional background in e-learning and the activity as researcher and professor he has also authored a book about electronic literature and several literary works. He explains why in his book he chose the theories of structuralism to analyse a topic that reaches out to post-structuralism or post-modern theories. Furthermore he describes the way the aesthetics of the literary text changes in the digital context. He then ponders about the status of electronic literature in the field of academia and talks about his current projects.
University of Bergen, Humanities Faculty
5020 Bergen
Norway
In December 2012, a one-day workshop "Exploring Paratexts in Digital Contexts" was organized at the University of Bergen by the Digital Culture Research Group. The point of departure of this first workshop was paratextual theory as it was first articulated by Gérard Genette in 1987 (Seuils / English translation Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation 1997). This event was followed by the book Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture edited by Nadine Desrochers and Daniel Apollon (IGI Global, forthcoming Summer 2014). These two initiatives have revealed a strong interest in the academic community for appraising the potential and limits of paratextual theory in digital culture.
The Digital Culture and Electronic Literature Research Groups at UiB organizes this follow-up workshop Paratext in Digital Culture: Is Paratext Becoming the Story? to share ongoing research on paratextual devices, functions and strategies in digital culture and brainstorm about new research opportunities. The participants will explore further how paratext and related concepts may contribute to a better understanding of the nature and function of digital objects.
Source: UiB's homepage
This presentation seeks to examine issues around the practice of porting electronic literature,particularly E-poetry by examining the case of First Screening by bpNichol, a Canadian poet whoprogrammed a suite of e-poems in Apple BASIC in 1984. This work was preserved, documented, ported, curated, and published in Vispo.com in 2007 by a collaborative group of poets and programmers: Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber. This publication consists of a curated collection of four different versions of First Screening which I will analyze in my presentation:1. The original DSK file of the 1984 edition, which can be opened with an Apple IIe emulator, along with the Apple BASIC source code as a text file, and scanned images of the printed matterpublished with the 51/4 inch floppy disks it was distributed in.2. A video captured documentation of the emulated version in Quicktime format.3. The 1993 HyperCard version, ported by J. B. Hohm, along with the printed matter of thatpublished edition.4. A JavaScript version of First Screening ported by Marko Niemi and Jim Andrews.I will make the case that these ported versions are ontologically different by performing media-specific analysis of each text, and critical code readings of their programming and source codes. Through close readings of the presentation (screen) and logical (source code) layers of each version I can point out what is gained and what is lost every time this suite of electronic poems is ported. For example, when the code poem embedded in lines 3900 – 3935 of the original Apple BASIC program is ported into another programming language, such as Hypercard or Javascript, it ceases to be a code poem because it is generated by different code to be displayed on the screen.
The impact of the cultural transformations brought about by the new computer technologies is enormous and it calls forth a reconfiguration of our relations with texts.
Ironically, our entrance into this mythical cyberspace does not happen under the tutelage of Oedipus, the first philosopher, rather it transpires under the auspices of Oedipa Mass, the heroine of the 1966 Thomas Pynchon novel, The Crying of Lot 49.
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?
In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between "forensic materiality" and "formal materiality," Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson's electronic poem "Agrippa."Drawing on newly available archival resources for these works, Kirschenbaum uses a hex editor and disk image of Mystery House to conduct a "forensic walkthrough" to explore critical reading strategies linked to technical praxis; examines the multiple versions and revisions of Afternoon in order to address the diachronic dimension of electronic textuality; and documents the volatile publication and transmission history of "Agrippa" as an illustration of the social aspect of transmission and preservation.
(Source: MIT Press catalog copy)
"The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine" is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of digital literary studies and for the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitality at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects.
(Source: DHQ)
Taken together, the "electronic" in Electronic Literature and the "mechanism" in Mechanisms clearly resonate in the way they both attempt to link the deep level of machine code to the formal level of textual and metatextual code to the social level of cultural code.
In the talk Mencía describes how her art practice moved from using electronic devices to create physical inscriptions, such as in the installation "I Love You" which was a sort of fax machine that made images in response to the interactor moving a toy car over a stone with the works "I Love You" engraved in it, and collaborative performance works based on collective activities and gestures, to a practice in digital media based on communication and miscommunication in human and computer language.