emulation

This paper presents a feminist, platform-conscious approach to reading and preserving a work of early, pre-web electronic literature: Kathryn Cramer's short Storyspace hypertext fiction, "In Small & Large Pieces" (1994). Ensslin adopts a postphenomenological approach centered around Material Engagement Theory (MET), which was originally developed by cognitive archeologists and anthropologists to reflect the material significance of extended, embedded, embodied and enactive cognition, also known as "e-cognition" (Ransom and Gallagher 2020), for human development and subjectivity. Glossed briefly, "extended" refers to the relational idea that "minds and things are continuous and interdefinable processes rather than isolated and independent entities" (Malafouris 2016: 9); "embedded" foregrounds the situated, spatially contingent nature of these processes and relationships; "embodied" emphasizes the fact that the things we interact with become cognitive extensions of the human body, and that "human-technology relations are not representational relations but embodiment relations" (Ihde & Malafouris 2018: 205); and "enactive" signifies that "cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is the enactment of a world" (Varela et al 1991: 9; Iliopoulos 2019). What we learn, know, understand and feel is therefore a product of our active, embedded and embodied interaction with the things around us, and that includes technologies of reading and play. Applied to reading electronic literature, MET can help us understand how the materialities of e-literary creation and experience have a recursive, reciprocal and diachronically dynamic effect on our relationship with a work, but also more generally with our own understanding of what we do and who we are in the field and the community. Ensslin examines how MET can account for how emulation-often stigmatized as legally fraught and inauthentic-can become an integral part of restorative and productive co-reading.

This paper was a contribution to the panel, "On the Effect(s) of Living Backwards", at the ELO 2021 Conference.

William H. Dickey, who died of complications from HIV in 1994, was born in 1928 and brought up in the Pacific Northwest. He published fifteen books of poetry, including Of the Festivities, which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1959, More Under Saturn, which was awarded the California Silver Medal for Poetry in 1963, and The Rainbow Grocery, which won the Juniper Prize in 1978. In the Dreaming: Selected Poems was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1994, and The Education of Desire appeared posthumously from Wesleyan University Press in 1996. 

While a professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University in the 1980s, he became interested in the potential of early personal computers to expand the boundaries of poetry. The California Association of Teachers of English cited him as "Friend of the Machine." 

Beginning in 1988, Dickey used the HyperCard software on his Macintosh SE to compose what would become fourteen "HyperPoems." Integrating images, icons, animation, and sound effects with typography and text, the HyperPoems address many themes critics acknowledge as central to Dickey's print oeuvre: history, mythology, memory, sexuality, the barrenness of modern life, and (over and under all of it), love and death. But they also represent an important technical progression of his poetics, one with clear roots in the ideas about poetry he had forged through decades of mindfulness about the craft. 

Three of the poems (those in Vol. 2) may fairly be called erotica, and represent unique documents of gay life in San Francisco at the height of a prior pandemic. They are certainly some of the very earliest (and most explicit) digital creative works by an LGBTQ+ author. 

None were ever published in his lifetime. Plans for a posthumous edition (prepared for publication on floppy disk with technical and editorial assistance from Deena Larsen) ultimately went unfulfilled. In the summer of 2020, however, the HyperCard Online emulator at the Internet Archive (in Dickey's own home city of San Francisco) finally offered us a platform. This panel discussion will mark the first public presentation of Dickey’s innovative HyperCard poetry to the electronic literature community. Panelists will include: 

Matthew Kirschenbaum (Chair), Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland. Kirschenbaum led the effort to recover the poems from older storage media and migrate them to the Internet Archive. 

Deena Larsen, the original technical editor for Dickey’s HyperPoetry. Larsen will walk us through one or two poems in detail, discussing both poetics and the nature of her posthumous editorial interventions. 

Andrew Ferguson, lead for the HyperCard Online emulator. Ferguson will discuss technical challenges involved in migrating thirty-year-old HyperCard stacks to a browser-based environment. 

Susan Tracz, Professor Emerita and the California State University Fresno and Dickey’s literary executor—and long-time friend of the poet. Tracz will fill in the human story behind the poetry and the computers. 

References: 

https://archive.org/details/william_dickey_hyperpoems_volume_1https://a… 

There exists a rift in contemporary culture of computational poetry generation. On the one hand, a vibrant poet-programmer scene has emerged around certain arts-focused conferences (e.g. ELO), online events (e.g. #nanogenmo/#napogenmo), spaces (e.g. NYC's Babycastles), and publication venues (e.g. Nick Montfort's Badquar.to). On the other, computer scientists working on Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and related fields publish scientific research on generating literary texts. The epistemological divide between these two groups can be seen most readily in the latter's focus on using empirical tests to assess work. These tests may be intrinsic (e.g. a quantitative measure of the linguistic features of computer-generated poetry), but they are often extrinsic (e.g. based on human judgments of whether a poem possesses qualities such as humor or coherence). Underwriting much (though not all) of this activity is the notion of the Turing Test and its assumed goal of computer-generated text that can pass as human-authored. Clearly, a great variety of work produced by the former group, poetprogrammers, does not lend itself to this kind of empirical testing; more often these works refuse to dissemble, instead radically foregrounding their non- or post-human qualities. The point of this paper will be to reconsider the peripheral status within the e-lit community of the kind of text generation that takes as its goal the emulation of human-produced literary discourse. As this paper’s title suggests, our main point of theoretical departure is Walter Benjamin’s classic account of the way that mechanical reproduction threatens art’s “aura” by obliterating the distance between art and its consumer. Likewise, Vilém Flusser (_Does Writing Have a Future?_) imagined that computer-generated poetry requires the writer-programmer to “dissect” their experience, fracturing it into the smallest logical units possible in order to be calculable and thus turned into a model of human cognition. What is “mechanically reproduced,” then, is not so much the poem but the poet. What do we learn about ourselves, our experiences, and our perception when we subject them to algorithmic “dissection”? What notions of the human do we reproduce or produce anew when we model the mind or minds? How do contemporary computational paradigms (e.g. deep learning) constrain this representation? Where is the consonance between human and computational thought, and where is the dissonance? What remains mysterious, distant, unmodellable? The goal of this paper is not to answer these meta-questions but rather to suggest that to turn entirely away from “emulation” as a goal is to evade them. In an era when algorithmic agents increasingly imitate humans, corporate interests are very happy to pursue these questions on their own terms, determining what aspects of humanity are worth emulating and to what ends. Artist- and researcher-led “imitation games” are one way of wresting back this prerogative; our talk will reflect on these questions in light of the Turing Tests in the Creative Arts at Dartmouth College. ELO2019 University

The aim of PO.EX: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent the intermedia and performative textuality of a large corpus of experimental works and practices in an electronic database, including some early instances of digital literature. This article describes the multimodal editing of experimental works in terms of a hypertext rationale, and then demonstrates the performative nature of the remediation, emulation, and recreation involved in digital transcoding and archiving. Preservation, classification, and networked distribution of artifacts are discussed as representational problems within the current algorithmic and database aesthetics in knowledge production.

(source: abstract DHQ)

The aim of ‘PO.EX '70-80: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature’ (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent the intermedia and performative textuality of a large corpus of experimental works and practices in an electronic database, including some early instances of digital literature. This paper shows how the performativity of digital archiving and recoding is explored through the remediation, emulation and recreation of works in the PO.EX archive. Preservation, classification and networked distribution are also discussed as editorial and representational problems within the current database aesthetics in knowledge production. (Project reference: PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008).

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.

Kirschenbaum makes an "argument for the importance of digital preservation while describing how how he accessed SWALLOWS via an Apple // emulator and then provided Zelevanksy with the original .dsk file from which he then created a new version of SWALLOWS (with audio and video clips mixed in) called G R E A T . B L A N K N E S S" (Source: adapted from post at loriemerson.net).

The intended audience of Born-Again Bits includes besides e-lit authors also the publishers, archivists, academics, programmers, and funding officers who will be necessary partners in an overall, renewable ecology of electronic literature. These other communities are already at work on digital preservation strategies. However, experimental e-lit has special qualities that make it an extreme case of the digital artifact. It is hoped that ELO's PAD initiative will contribute to other digital preservation strategies by ensuring that they accommodate e-lit and so, in the process, become more robust for all digital works.

Born-Again Bits had its origin in the work of the PAD Technology/Software Committee (directed by Alan Liu), which in 2002 and 2003 prepared a report for ELO proposing strategies for the long-term preservation of electronic literature. Born-Again Bits distills the conclusions of that report into a two-part plan: the ELO Interpreter and X-Literature Initiatives. The specifics of the plan are imagined less as hard-and-fast commitments than as a way to flesh out what a general approach might look like. Though necessarily technical at some points, the overall goal of Born-Again Bits is to allow diverse stakeholders (authors, publishers, archivists, academics, programmers, grant officers, and others) to get just enough of a glimpse of each other's expertise to see how an overall system for maintaining and reviving the life of electronic literature might be possible.

(Source: Preface to Born-Again Bits)

Portuguese experimental poetry of the 1970s and 1980s includes visual poetry, sound poetry, videopoetry, performance poetry, and computer poetry. Experimental literary objects, practices, and events often consist of an interaction between notational forms on paper and site-specific live performances. Thus the eventuality of literary meaning is dramatically foregrounded by turning the text into a script for an act whose performance co-constitutes the work. The aim of ‘PO.EX ‘70-’80: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature’ (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent this intermedia and performative textuality in an electronic database. The aggregation and marking up of this large multimodal corpus has material and interpretative implications which challenge our representations of experimental works and practices. Whether taking the form of facsimiles of books and paper collages, photographs of installations, videos of performances or emulations of early digital poems, digital remediation re-performs the works for the current techno-social context. This paper briefly sketches the infrastructure, objectives and questions raised by ‘PO.EX '70-80’ (Research project reference: PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008).