digitization

Much of Nigerian oral poetry, especially the musical genre, has been increasingly reduced to digital formats through the instrumentality of new media technologies. This transformation has, however, not been sufficiently acknowledged in oral literary researches and discourses. This alternative existence acquired by the oral forms manifests itself in digital technological modes like CDs, VCDs, DVDs, digital radio and television and the internet which assure them of longevity. This paper, therefore, engages Nigerian oral poetry and its inscription in digital processes using new media technologies. In particular, it negotiates the trajectory of transforming primary orality to secondary and tertiary orality through which oral performances like songs have acquired new modes of existence and meanings by way of recordings and digitalization using the new media. Many of these poetic forms have travelled through historical time to the postmodern moment as migrant metaphors and have become stored in digital forms thus making them new wine though preserved in the old wineskins of the poets and new media processes. Using an emergent generation of Nigerian popular poets and musical artistes, the paper problematizes the episteme of authorship. It interrogates the very idea of authorship in the contested and interstitial space of communal and individual authorship in the digital age where the term has undergone radical destabilisation. Who owns the oral forms, for instance? Is it the so-called anonymous composer in traditional society, the collector or recorder who mediates the creative process and becomes a surrogate agent, or the contemporary artist who is heir to this timeless tradition of oral intellection through performances that are digitalized and stored in retrieval systems, or is it a virtual community of authors, or a hybrid of all of these? The paper concludes that digital technologies are a means of preserving these oral forms and endowing them with vitality and enduring relevance to meet the immediacy and urgency of postmodern societal needs in Nigeria.

With ‘interface criticism’ (Andersen and Pold) as an outset, we will address how the interface is in a transition from a closed system of interaction, to a dispersed network. More specifically, we are interested in how to relate aesthetically to this transition as a new mode of organization of the ‘masses’ (or ‘users’) that takes place in a cultural industry around metainterfaces. Following a path of critique from Benjamin, Kracauer, Crary, Hayles and others, we intend to discuss it as a new form of media spectacle: a ‘metainterface spectacle’ that simultaneously organizes the users, and offers a way of perceiving their reality as ‘cognitive assemblages’.

This spectacle not only makes the interface increasingly transparent, smooth and accessible to the users; it also makes the organization of and perspective on the users more opaque. Put differently, with increased digitization follows not only a smooth user-reality of social media, video conferencing, streaming, and more, but also the displacement of horrific conditions of labor in the countries that produce our platforms (at the factories in Shenzen or the mines in Congo), problems around privacy emerging from increased datafication, the decline of quality (sound and images are ‘poor’ (Steyerl, Sterne) and text is datafied), global monopolies, and more. This paradox poses an interesting question to interface criticism, and digital research more broadly: when the interface disappears, how may one develop a critical understanding of the potential disjunctions (or, dislocations (Laclau)) between the desires of the users and the organization of users (including the maximization of profit, transgression of data privacy, exploitation of resources, and more)? How is perception formatted by and through technology and data, how does this relate to broader reconfigurations of sense-perception and ways of reading?

In search for possible answers, we are particularly interested in the hard to capture dimensions of common practices of digital culture (how images, text, music, user data, etc. are circulated, formatted, metrified, filtered, re-purposed, and more), and how they are exposed and reflected in artistic practices. We will analyse how artists and authors (e.g. Joana Moll, Ben Grosser, or Allison Parish) try to emphasize their own critical practice (‘poetics’) in artist run workshops, and how they in this way seek to help users critically relate to a contemporary ‘metainterface spectacle’.

They do so in quite different ways; engaging different levels of code, technical infrastructures, surface/user interfaces, the use of software tools, and more. An analysis of how these workshop practices reflect the particular poetics of the artists relates to ongoing discussions within software studies (of ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre) and how to ‘(un)learn’ technology’ (Bogers & Chiappini); but it also opens up for discussions with neighboring fields, including digital humanities (how to perform critical textual analysis when the text is algorithmically performative and the performances hidden in the banal discretion of a technological (and often technocratic) system?), as well as design and HCI (how to understand ‘critical technical practice’ as an alternative to ‘design’?).

Our contemporary digital age relies on the ontology of the hyperlink with its capacity to conflate time-space, which allows us immediate access to information in its varying forms of organization. The hyperlink brings texts, images, documents and modes of accessing information directly to our computer and mobile media screens, bypassing the old materialities and technologies for storage of cultural artifacts. Providing us with the fast convergence of information and cultural artifacts, it radically alters the manner in which we extend ourselves in time and space. Sybille Kramer argues that these changes are wrought through digital technologies that operate at the level of the subhuman and sub-perceptible level of the operation of digital code.

In this paper, rather than simply celebrating the collapse of space-time made possible by digitisation and the hyperlink, or mourning the disappearance of the human, we introduce the concept of “excryption” to think the nature of this change. By “excryption” we understand the out-folding and e-volution of space-time, and therefore of memory. Our focus on the role of human bodies in mediating digital experience owes a huge debt to feminist scholarship on embodiment and the theorisation of gender and difference. The history of scholarly feminism is both a history of the refusal to dematerialise corporeality and a history of insisting upon possibilities for dynamic re-configurations and re-patternings of living matter. By unraveling a genealogical network which stretches from Ariadne to artists Stephanie Strickland, Fiona Templeton, Petra Germeinbok and Barbara Campbell, and which passes through writers and thinkers Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, Anna Munster and others, we are also able to recover and remake a feminist epistemology based on the concept of the “thread” which today holds a new relevance to the understanding of digital works as they transform of print-based modes of textual engagement.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

With the digital media in a culture changed by hypermedia, by immersion in virtual spaces and new social habits in reading, the fiction universe has been transmitted to us in a printed way and we can start to reflect on its past context to find a space in the future. This book searchs for answers of a key question when we talk about digitization of works of fiction previously printed. Is it possible to move and in which way the cultural memory of a printed book to the virtual memory characterised by hypertext, audiovisual immersion and participation in reading-writing?