Traditionally, visual, computational, performing, and literary arts referred to separate corpora, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences. This persistent separation proves problematic for creating, disseminating, experiencing, and theorising multi-modal work which draws equally upon multiple artistic and scientific traditions. This paper adopts a necessarily hybrid approach to addresses a multi-modal body of practice-led research. The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a performative form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Like the broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signifies that it is intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of the printed map are QR codes which link to computer-generated narrative dialogues composed of fragments culled from a corpus of print literature. These are presented as performance scripts replete with ‘stage’ instructions suggesting how and where they might be performed. As such, these points on the physical map point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts. This paper frames the composition of this work in terms of the Situationist strategies of détournement and dérive as theorized by McKenzie Wark. Adopting N. Katherine Hayles’ conception of the digital text as ‘eventilized’, and adapting Foucault’s conception of the archive ‘emerging in fragments’ to consider the computer-generated narrative as a general system of the formation and transformation of statement-events, this paper situates The Broadside of a Yarn and three stand-alone works to have emerged from it on an axis between langue and parole, between what is said and what is done, between what Deleuze and Guattari term machinic assemblages of desire and assemblages of collective enunciation.
eventilization
Literature cannot bridge the gap between the world of the narrative and the world of the recipient. Conventional literature cannot. Digital literature can.
...what we have here is the elimination of the text, its substitution by image, sound, and action. Such operation is a common feature in digital media.
The paradigm of expression changes from creating a world in the reader's imagination based on a specific combination of letters to presenting a world directly to the audience directly to the audience through extralingual means.
By definition, digital literature must be more than just literature otherwise it is only literature in digital media.
Digital literature is only digital if it is not only digital.
In digital media, literature is digital in a double sense: It uses a small set of distinct, endlessly combinable symbols, and those symbols are now produced by binary code.
... the effect of the code -- making a word blink or tick, for instance -- is part of the 'text' and needs to be 'read' alongside the blinking, ticking word itself.
...when it comes to digital literature we need to 'read,' or let's say, to interpret, not just the text but also what happens to the text. As a rule of thumb one may say: If nothing happens to the text its [sic] not digital literature.
...when we read digital we have to shift from a hermeneutics of linguistic signs to a hermeneutics of intermedia, interactive, and processing signs. It is not just the meaning of the words that is at stake, but also the meaning of the performance of the words which, let's not forget, includes the interaction of the user with the words.
How do close readings help develop "digital literacy"--to use one of the buzzwords of digital humanities? They help insofar as digital literacy cannot be reduced to the competence in using digital technology but also entails an understanding of the language of digital media.