hacking

This article examines an aesthetic experience associated with the digital, which is characterized by the ability of the reader to interact, participate, and manipulate literary works created in this format. First, a map of Chilean digital literature will be presented and then two aspects will be analyzed which allow a description of an aesthetic of the digital: hypertextuality and cultural hacking. As a result of this analysis, and considering that digital literature is that which is created to be read on the screen of an electronic device, two poems will be investigated: A veces cubierto por las aguas by Carlos Cociña and Clickable poem@s by Luis Correa-Díaz.These texts allow us to think about the status of literature and poetry in the digital era, linked with an aesthetic experience which emphasizes intervention and the wish to participate.

Caren Irr on ®TMark.com.

(Source: EBR)

In pervasive gaming, the city is transformed into a platform for public storytelling and play. In this paper I will address the potentialities and challenges inherent in devising a city-specific pervasive narrative. Play is the ultimate learning tool for humans, so much so that researchers see “play as essential not just to individual development, but to humanity’s unusual ability to inhabit, exploit and change the environment” (Dobbs). One of games’ most intoxicating aspects is their pervasive nature.

Pervasive games blend real world interaction with imaginative play. They may or may not be tied to a specific location, but they invade the player’s life. They have the ability through two-way interaction to change the nature of the world around us. A pervasive game might send you emails or ask you to take a photograph of an object or person in your environment and upload it to the game’s site. A pervasive game might make you feel paranoid as you begin to fear you cannot distinguish between game events and ‘real’ life. The game is real, but exists in a different semiotic domain from everyday life (Montola 10). Having much in common with dreams, science fiction, and film noir (where the world is familiar but the rules have changed), pervasive gaming is an ideal tool for engaging players in digital culture. Telephone City: A Mystery is an alternate reality game that I am designing for Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford. Brantford used to be the number three manufacturing city in Canada and is the place where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Now ravaged by the tidal forces of globalization, Brantford is a city of obsolete technology, empty factories and haunted industrial sites.

The city functions as equal parts public space, stage, and “operating system” within the game as locals explore it and learn to transform themselves and their environment through social media narratives (de Waal). Starting from the assumption that game strategies are boundary objects, that is to say conceptual moments, acts or places that simultaneously inhabit and intersect social worlds, I will discuss my use of boundary objects as sites of transformation for the players. These social spaces are metaphorical places that function like the informational equivalent of pervasive gaming as they connect people simultaneously with the game through their smartphones and with other players through cooperative action. Phones are both the vehicle of delivery and the subject of the work as they meet in the middle in Telephone City: A Mystery. Phones act are a metaphor and a cardinal technology as they collaborate to transform players, local stories, andcity spaces.

Works Cited

- De Waal, Martijn. “Some notes on the design of pervasive games.” Mobile City: Mobile Media and Urban Design. Blog. (Accessed 13 Dec 2013). Web.
- Dobbs, David. “Playing for all kinds of possibilities.” New York Times Online. (22 April 2013). (Accessed 11 Dec 2013).
- Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Eds. Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2009.

(Source: author's abstract)

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Source: amazon.com

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.