In his new book, Michael Wutz examines how the work of four canonical novelists - Norris, Lowry, Doctorow, and Powers - register the revolutions in 20th century media technology. Such an analysis, reviewer Joseph Conte suggests, is an important extension of Kittlerian media theory to the field of American literature.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/enduring)
BA-Tale is an interactive, intermedial electronic literature piece, whose narrative is a fake myth about the formation of Slovakia’s capital—Bratislava. The way the reader engages with the piece brings about the concept of myth as an oral narrative and re-contextualizes it. The story is read in fragments—semantic units from the scattered moving text. The aspect of catching a fragment in time reminds one of listening to the oral story, although the necessity to remember the subsequent words in order to proceed adds a new aspect to this tradition. The sound is randomly computer-chosen from our database that defines for each unit a number of sounds. The semantically most important word of the unit was used as a keyword to find several corresponding sounds in freesounds.org.
Interaction: The first line of the story is marked white. You mouse over the first line and then you follow by mousing over any of the white marked words. These words group into a string. When mouse-released, another group of words turns white. By following the marked units, you can read the whole narrative string in a sequence. But you do not have to—and can create your own.
It opens, transforms into a stone, bricks and tiles and gets a name Bratislava. And Brat, the man with the seeds, slawly moves into his ruins.
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generative is the poem's last stanza of– system picks out one minipulse out of the list of the saved minipulses
generative is the visual – the leading geometry and thus also the placement of the lyrics
generative is the composition of the loops of the main melody
the concept of its being autopoietic represents the fact, that the final stanza is a minipoem that was created from the words of the whole poem, thus creating a part of it from itself
pulse is collaborative because after having read the whole poem, a reader can create her own minipoem by clicking on the projected words of pulse
its open-ended nature allows (through reader's submission of the minipoem and its saving) to extend the list of minipoems, out of which generates the stanza of the next pulses
intermediality brings about the multisensory experience as well as refers to phenomena that broaden the poem's concept above the textual semantics. The drawing of the lines helps the reader follow the path of the unpacking words prior to their emergence. Thus the reader can get better oriented. One of the sound loops consists of sound elements recorded in Bratislava city centre and thus enriches the poem by a geographic dimension.
generatívna je posledná strofa básne - systémom vyberie jednu z viacerých uložených minipulzov
generatívny je vizuál – vodiaca geometria a tým aj rozmiestnenie slov
generatívna je kompozícia slučiek hlavnej melódie
jej autopoietickosť znamená, že posledná strofa je minipulzom, ktorý bol vytvorený zo slov celej básne, čim je časť básne tvorená z básne samotnej
pulz je kolaboratívny, pretože po prečítaní celej básne môže čitateľ vytvoriť vlastnú minibáseň naklikaním zobrazených slov pulzu
otvorený koniec umožňuje (prostredníctvom čitateľovho zadania minibásne a jej uloženia) rozšíriť zoznam minibásní, z ktorých sa generuje strofa ďalších pulzov
intermedialita spôsobuje multisenzorický zážitok a tiež odkazuje na fenomény, ktoré rozširujú concept básne nad úroveň textovej sémantiky. Vykresľovanie čiar pomáha čitateľovi sledovať budúcu trasu objavujúcich sa slov. Tým sa môže čitateľ lepšie orientovať v tejto spleti. Jedna zo zvukových slučiek pozostáva zo zvukových elementov, ktoré boli nahrané v centre Bratislava, čím báseň obohacujú o geografickú dimenziu.
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Since the digital revolution of the 1990’s, the ‘end’ of literature has been often proclaimed from both a utopian and apocalyptic perspective. While the former has imagined a release of the literary from the constraints of paper and print, in the animation of letters and words, the latter has lamented the end of reading and writing as ‘we’ know it. However, as clear as the opposition between the hopeful visions of theorists such as George Landow and the nostalgic lament of critics like Steven Birkerts may be, their respective stances are easily disclosed as two sides of the same coin: both the positive and negative presentations of the end of literature build on the subtext that literature ‘is’ something; an inside (a space, or a practice) that is either creatively challenged or threatened from the outside – as if it were a backward country or a country under threat, to be opened up and developed or protected respectively. This paper challenges such a distinction between inside and outside by reading ‘literature’ as an interface of other media technologies. As I have shown elsewhere, literature – a practice so diverse that it resists a logic of identity – may have always functioned as such an interface: not a place of itself, within itself, with its own durable, static essence, but rather a point of intersection where different media and media technologies converge, and where new media technologies are imagined, projected, or (p)remediated. In this view, literature is not a precedent to but the constant effect of intermedial encounters: what scholars have perceived to be its ‘inside’, its essence, is in my view always already contaminated by its ‘outside’ – the difference between the two is artificial and should rather be seen in terms of interaction. In this view, electronic literature does not simply come ‘after’ print- and paper-based writing but is in certain crucial ways always already part of it (as scholars like Noah Wardrip-Fruin have already pointed out with respect to the cut-up & fold-in techniques of Gysin and Burroughs, or the practices of concrete poetry). Likewise, the incorporated practices of electronic literature have, in a typical feedback loop, in turn impacted recent paper-based writing. Thus, Katherine Hayles and Mark Hansen have already pointed to the remediation of digital procedures in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). In this paper, I will analyse the feedback loop between recent paper-based writing and media technologies by taking Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) as my starting point and showing how it functions as a meeting point and processor of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. Typically, like House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts is an assembly text, assembling different cultural texts (from Orpheus to Jaws and the postmodern canon) and modes of presentation. Not simply through its intertextual links, but through its performative foregrounding of its own intermedial activity, The Raw Shark Texts becomes an endless text – a text without borders, of infinite medial as well as cultural regress, that reaches into the experimental potential of the electronic to question the conditions of possibility of ‘literature’. Centrally, this concerns a play with the idea of simultaneity. The questions that I pose on the basis of this analysis centre on the issue of media knowledge, and more specifically the ways in which an ‘old’ medium like literature (old in so far as it refers to paper-based writing) projects knowledge of other media (be they digital, filmic, or auditive). By knowledge I here mean: media technologies and techniques, modes of presentation, modes of production and modes of perception (seeing, hearing, reading) as instated or at least instigated by the introduction of ‘new’ media technologies. What do we learn about these other media while reading literature? I am thus concerned with a particular form of information technology in The Raw Shark Texts. Interestingly, in The Raw Shark Texts as well as House of Leaves and other experimental fictions the intermedial impetus is not exclusively digital: they rather point back to film and the cinematic practices of montage. Through this cinematic connection, these novels perform a modernist heritage in a supposedly post-postmodern universe.