intentionality

Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” as a complementary concept to “close reading,” which has emerged alongside computer-based analysis and manipulation of texts, finds its mirror image in a sort of “distant” production of literary works—of a specific kind, of course. The paper considers the field in which literature and new media creativity intersect. Is there such a thing as literariness in “new media objects” (Manovich)? Next, by focusing on the websites that generate texts resembling and referring to sonnet form, the article asks a question about the new media sonnet and a more general question about new media poetry. A mere negative answer to the two questions seemingly implied by Vuk Ćosić’s projects does not suffice because it only postpones the unavoidable answer to the questions posed by existing new media artworks and other communication systems. Teo Spiller’s Spam.sonnets can be viewed as an innovative solution to finding a viable balance between the author’s control over the text and the text’s openness to the reader-user’s intervention. In conclusion, two concrete reconfigurations of the experience of (new media) literature—and through it the surrounding world—are considered: the experience of time in Spiller’s News Sonnets and the spatial dimension as implied in his project SMS Sonnets. News Sonnets uses current news obtained via RSS feeds from various sources, which makes the “messages” contained in the lines of the sonnet a potential stimulus for readers’ immediate action. SMS Sonnets expands the territory where the communication takes place beyond the text-reader confrontation and into the community of participants in an interactive (non-artistic) communication system.

(Source: English abstract in Primerjalna književnost 36.1)

This presentation looks at electronic literary practices and the modes and methods of meaning-making there in. Using his own creative work as an example, Memmott discusses how the poetic formation and rhetorical outcomes of the work are integral to the ‘text’ of the work, and integrated into what could be called an environmental grammatology. From programming to visual design, the word to the image, user interaction to instrumentality -- we have moved from “Work to Text” to Work...

Literary fiction works are often driven by the emotions and personalities of their characters. In this project we explore such subjective human dimensions through a text-based computational narrative work centered on the notions of daydreams, memories, brief reveries – hallmarks of literature invoking stream-of-consciousness techniques. As central to our work, we present the novel notion of "scales of intentionality," techniques allowing user interaction to vary the narration of a character's intentionality and agency within a story world. This notion allows our work to exist simultaneously as a critical technical practice and an expressive cultural production.

(Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

Miles has contributed three nodes to this issue of JoDI. In "Intent is Important (a sketch for a progressive criticism) he discusses the question of authorial intent, arguing that hypertext criticism must not only consider a work's literary merits but also consider how what may seem to be technical imperfections can be intended, crucial aspects of a work.

(Source: editors' description)