human-machine-relation

With this paper it is my intention to reevaluate the use of the adjective “haptic” with respect to a growing demand for tangibility between human and machine, namely through multisensory experiences made available by mixed reality/virtuality. From a haptological philosophic perspective, a tradition oscillating between the emphasis on vision and the emphasis on touch, this paper also intends to analyze notions of touch, gesture and contact, in their multiple meanings, in which the latter serves as a probe to explore the idea of cybrid bodies within processes of haptic perception in HumanMachine Interface (HMI).

This paper argues that attending to the tropes of circularity featuring in print-based literature proves to be a useful foil for an analysis of electronic literature. Based on the idea that digital literary mechanisms do not obliviate previous circularity-inducing structuring motifs in analog literature, such as labyrinths, chess, rivers, and clockwork, this argument arrives at a crucial time for literature, which is currently the object of intensified debates on beginnings and ends, especially in the context of digitality and multisensory perception becoming central to some aspects of its processes. Accordingly, circular motion is here analysed in its depiction and actuation across several kinds of literary / literal machines, in reflection also on how sensory perception both mediate and is mediated. If literature is conditional upon a series of unique, though interconnected, mechanisms, it seems reasonable not to discard a certain circularity of the senses that is brought into play there and, indeed, given both thematic and formal substance in analog and digital works. In other words, representations generated at the confluence of both biological and technological bodies cannot but instigate a circularity on which they are dependent: an idea which this article examines and critiques with reference to canonical and electronic literature, particularly Borges, Beckett, and Joyce.

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.

Pedro Barbosa recalls in this interview his memories of the first studies and works of electronic literature back in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Porto. Starting from considerations about his collaborative works he makes a comparison between printed literature tradition and the age of new media focusing on the paradigmatic change of this very transitional period with live in and the differences of the creative work. Furthermore he makes an interesting statement on regard of the aesthetics of new media by comparing works of electronic literature with the oral tradition. In the end he mentions some of the milestones of electronic literature that he considers important.

Posthumanism, according to Cary Wolfe, "names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore" (xv-xvi). This conference paper brings the framework of posthumanist philosophy to bear on the field of electronic literature, at a critical moment in time wherein our conception of the human, and of literature, are fundamentally questioned through digital technology. I argue that humanist philosophy is explicitly tied to the rise of print literature, via Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), while posthumanism is linked with digital media (Wolfe 2010) and, by extension, electronic literature. Furthermore, posthumanism interrogates assumptions of autonomy and subjectivity inherited from humanism, and via cybernetics articulates an image of the human as another information-processing machine. Electronic literature's reliance and amalgamation of natural and artificial languages (most noticeable in “codework”) reflects the posthumanist critique of the supposed binaries between human and machine. To this end, my presentation provides close-readings of electronic literature in order to determine whether authors of electronic literature work with either a humanist or posthumanist understanding of human subjectivity and literature (which is often itself a framing device for subjectivity).

To adequately address this issue of writing and language in relation to Being, I turn to codework. This term originated with Alan Sondheim, and refers to work which feature a mixture of language and code, in what Katherine Hayles has deemed a ‘creole’ language. I will be providing a detailed reading Mez Breeze’s, _the data][h!][bleeding texts_ (2001), which even from the title suggests the incursion of programming language onto natural language. In order to explore the humanist or posthumanist lens offered by works of electronic literature, I turn to the work of Jason Nelson, Stephanie Strickland, and Steve Tomasula. The former is discussed as one of the most unique and prolific writers in e-lit, and the latter two are discussed for their unique position as working in both print and digital media.

Of course, I will also address the issue of codework as literary object. As John Cayley remarks in an essay on electronicbookreview, “the code is not the text (unless it is the text).” It is clear that codework is a term for literature which addresses code in some way, and Cayley suggests that most codework simply illustrates a potentially subversive act of transparency. Again, I explore codework under a posthumanist lens to interrogate how media technologies frame and construct our understanding of the human.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

"I’m attracted to the openness of interpretation and creation in digital poetry.  With such digital poems as Annie Abrahams “Being Human” and Maria Mencia’s “Birds Singing Other Birds Songs” it’s now commonplace to declare that we cannot say for sure whether these poems are poems, whether the poets are poets.  We cannot even say who is poet and who is machine, who is reader and who is writer let alone what the poem means. We certainly cannot say how to judge these poems, where they fit in relation to literary studies.  I should also say, though, that I dread this openness it at the same time as I’m attracted to it--this struggle to overcome an attachment to sure-footedness, to turn away from the safety of a backward-looking study of what’s been sanctioned as history, and emerge into new modes of relation."

Source: cited from the introduction to the presentation