In this 5-minute lightning talk, I introduced my work-in-progress chapter on database criticism. A video of the presentation is available on YouTube, see below.
Budapest
Hungary
In this workshop, we seek to provide possible answers to the question: what does the replacement of writing by code mean for the future of reading and interpretation? With increasing reliance on algorithms and big data, does interpretation even have a future? What constitutes reading today, and what could hermeneutics look like in a digital age? Hermeneutics traditionally refers to the method and study of textual interpretation. Modern hermeneutics has its origin in textual exegesis, the interpretation of the Old Testament. It revolves around building bridges—between the present and the past, the familiar and the strange. In a time of post-truth, filter bubbles, and alternative facts, such perspectives are worth remembering and reiterating.
In our information age, we can predict to an increasingly precise degree what kinds of messages will resonate with us, and we can simply filter out the rest. In the Humanities and Social Sciences, the shift to datafication transforms our research fields in far-reaching ways, including how we think, how we formulate our research questions, and what answer we find. Was interpretation, then, a historically necessary, but equally contingent mode? In what terms do we need to think about it as we move into a culture of big data, distributed AI, convergence, and globalization? Where does our influence end that that of the black box begin; and where does the analysis of the machine end, and our responsibility begin? After all, data still is, and needs to be, interpreted. The workshop brings together scholars from diverse disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences to engage in a cross-disciplinary dialogue on these matters.
(source: event page)
This digital artwork by Amira Hanafi was commissioned by the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, as part of the Navigating Risk, Managing Security, and Receiving Support research project.
It was made in response to research conducted in five countries (Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, and Mexico), where researchers spoke with human rights defenders around issues of security, wellbeing, and perceptions of ‘human rights defenders’ in their countries.
Reading through these transcribed and anonymized interviews, I was struck by the range and depth of emotions expressed. The speakers’ experiences resonated with me in their resemblance to the emotions I feel as a practicing artist in Egypt. This website translates my reading of these interviews into visual patterns, through a system of classifying sentences by emotions expressed and evoked.
The title of this work (we are fragmented) is taken from the words of one of the human rights defenders who participated in the research.
After reading through the interviews that were shared with me, I created a classification system to coincide with the range of emotions I read in the text. I based my classification system on a few popular classification systems. It contains a set of 6 parent emotions, each with 6 subcategories, for a total of 36 classifications.
Reading the interviews again, I recorded my emotional experience by classifying sentences to which I had an emotional reaction, or in which the speaker explicitly expressed an emotion. It was a highly subjective exercise. Ultimately, this website offers personal maps of my reading of the research material, processed through language and emotion.
Alongside my visual interpretation of the research, you can directly access the source material for each classification on this site. Click on any colored circle, and you will see the direct quote from the individual defender on which that classification is based. I hope for this work to give an alternate way of reading through the research shared with me by Juliana Mensah and Alice Nah.
This paper explores the concept of narrativity throughout space by analyzing the distributed novel Implementation (Rettberg and Montfort 2012). Distributed narratives are literary texts that are distributed across different spaces and times to create divergence rather than unity (Walker 1). Implementation consists of 240 stickers with text fragments and people are invited to put up stickers in a place of their choice on public surfaces. The stickers could then be photographed and added to the project website.The practice of putting up the stickers highly influences the way in which the actor views the space, connecting elements in the text fragment to elements in their surroundings. The actor who places the sticker might not have noticed certain elements if it hadn't been for the text on the sticker. Once the sticker is placed in its context, the opposite occurs: the surroundings influences the reading of the narrative.This diffraction between narrative and space is highlighted by the act of photography and online collection, as the digital interface shows the immediate context of the sticker but makes the city as a whole invisible. For the 'analog' reader, however, the context of the whole city is highly visible as the sticker has to be found inside the city. The combination of analog and digital practices of Implementation thus highlights the representation of the city as a visual practice. In this way, the city becomes part of the work and vice versa in both physical and digital settings.
This paper analyses the work by means of a new materialist "diffractive reading" (Barad and Haraway) between the narrative and its urban context. I propose to regard the urban space as a ‘text’ and read how this (con)text interacts with the narrative stickers. My paper will also outline future plans for empirical experiments Implementation.
This paper explores the concept of narrativity in the city by analyzing the project Queering the City of Literature (#QtCoL), a distributed narrative inspired by Implementation (Rettberg and Montfort). Distributed narratives are literary texts that are distributed across different spaces and times to create divergence rather than unity (Walker 1). Implementation and #QtCoL build on several modern-day practices: both of the works consist of text fragments that participants were invited to put up in places of their choice on public surfaces. The texts were photographed and posted online.
This paper analyses the work by means of a "diffractive reading" (Barad and Haraway) between the narrative and its urban context. Central to my analysis is my observation during the of #QtCoL event, which I co-organized, to understand the choices and experiences of people while choosing locations for text fragments. The practice of putting up the texts highly influences the way in which the actor views the city, looking for an appropriate place for the narrative. The actor is invited to connect elements in the text fragment to elements in their surroundings. The actor who places the text might not have noticed certain elements if it hadn't been for the text fragment. Once the text fragment is placed in its context, the opposite occurs: the context influences how the narrative is read. Once the text fragment is placed, the surroundings influences the reading of the narrative.
This diffraction between narrative and context is highlighted by the act of photography, which shows the immediate context of the text but makes the city as a whole invisible. For the 'analog' reader, however, the context of the whole city is highly visible as the text has to be found inside the city. The combination of analog and digital practices thus highlights the representation of the city as a visual practice. In addition, the invitation to post images of the project on social media furthers the experience of ‘taking up space’ and having a presence, not only in the city but online as well.
(source: ELO 2018 website)
CODE STORY is a visual and literary arts project, which includes nine digital code portraits. Which includes nine static, physical photographs, and nine dynamic, virtual Web pages.
The Digital code are compromised of standard codes with values ranging from 0 to 255. It is the value, sequence, and most importantly the interpretation of these codes that determine what information is represented. The Codestory project investigates possibilities for a creative interpretation of digital code.
If you think of digital code as digital DNA, and datasets as genetic maps, then you are understanding the creative thrust of this project.
The Codestory project uses digital code to create new visual and literary portraits, which portraits are rendered both as physical photographs and as virtual Web pages. Each photograph and corresponding Web page is created using digital code from a unique dataset. A dataset is constructed of digital code from an original portrait photograph; processed digital code that can be dynamically combined and recombined with virtually endless variation.
Also; the Screenshots provided only illustrates one (of each of the nine generative artworks) of many possible outcomes, following the inherent generative features of the artworks.
Programmable computation is radically transforming the contemporary media ecology. What is literature's future in this emergent Programming Era? What happens to reading when the affective, performative power of executable code begins to provide the predominant model for creative language use? Critics have raised concerns about models of affective communication and the challenges a-semantic affects present to interpretive practices. In response, this essay explores links between electronic literature, affect theory, and materialist aesthetics in two works by experimental writer and publisher William Gillespie.
Focusing on the post-digital novel Keyhole Factory and the electronic speculative fiction Morpheus: Bilblionaut, it proposes that: first, tracing tropes of code as affective transmissions allows for more robust readings of technomodernist texts and, second, examining non-linguistic affect and its articulation within constraint-based narrative forms suggests possibilities for developing an affective hermeneutics.
My project was prompted by calls for more in-depth critical interpretations of works of electronic literature; an appreciation of how Gillespie problematises tropes of proximity and distance used to characterise modes of critical reading; and a desire to explain Gillespie's commitment to both conceptual, constraint-based writing practices (facilitated by computational media) and the intentional production of meaningful narrative affect. Ultimately, my analyses showcase Gillespie's countertextual achievement: assembling a network of texts, both electronic and analogue, that functions as a literary ecosystem resistant to the instrumentalism of the neoliberal publishing industry. Gillespie's Spineless Books provides an exemplary model of and working platform for collaborative, conceptual, and countertextual literary writing across media.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
The Programming Era, as I define it, is the period when the affective, performative, and transformative power of executable code begins to provide a powerful, and potentially the predominant, model for creative language use.
Morpheus: Biblionaut is a remediation of the ‘Biblionaut’ chapter from Keyhole Factory, and Gillespie and Alber’s moving work of e-lit attunes readers [...] to how Gillespie’s intricately structured novel stages scenarios of affective communication in order to raise concerns about the ways meaningful human communication gets devalued in a media ecology warped by the quantifying pressures of technocapitalism.
This essay suggests how this work of e- lit [Morpheus: Biblionaut] enables readers to make sense of a larger, complex literary ecosystem that Gillespie is creating with not just Keyhole Factory but also Spineless Books, a small, avant-garde press Gillespie founded on the palindromic date of 20 February 2002 (20–02–2002) and still operates from his Urbana, Illinois home.
What happens to more ‘traditional’ modes of language arts, such as lyric poetry or narrative storytelling, and, more broadly, humans’ ability to read, write, and make meaning, if writing computer code is valued more – based on the financial and cultural capital its authors accrue – than writing literature in ‘natural’, ‘human-only’ languages?
[T] the figure of the isolated and disoriented poet-astronaut in Morpheus: Biblionaut gives a unique spin to debates about literature’s long-term future given the prevalence of short-term perspectives in the contemporary media ecology, the devaluation of writing and criticism with an ever-accelerating publishing cycle, and the benefits and limitations of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ readings.
Morpheus: Biblionaut performs important cultural work by foregrounding concerns about reading’s future in the Programming Era while preparing readers for the challenge of interpreting Keyhole Factory, a conceptual, constraint-based novel that can seem dauntingly esoteric if readers don’t practice both close and hyper readings of the codex book and the digital text and consult the web-work map that constitute the Keyhole Factory textual ecosystem. These three components comprise a larger ‘Work as Assemblage, a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and otherwise intermediate one another’.
By design, Morpheus: Biblionaut demands deep attention and rewards close, sustained re-readings, which become increasingly significant as the reader picks up on subtle clues about and allusions to Keyhole Factory. Its formal constraints require readers to practise attentive-reading strategies that are at risk in post-digital media environments, while its content prompts readers to read the piece self-reflexively. The senselessness the Biblionaut experiences in the isolating environs of deep space, readers can infer, is akin to the indifference to meaning he experiences in the isolating publishing environs of cyberspace.
And when Keyhole Factory is read as part of an even larger, deliberately designed literary ecosystem, including texts published by Gillespie’s press, Spineless Books provides an exemplary model of and working platform for collaborative, conceptual, and countertextual literary writing across media.
Confronted with a technocapitalistic ‘attention economy’ that undermines both the ‘psychic faculty that allows us to concentrate on an object’ and the ‘social faculty that allows us to take care of this object’ (Stiegler 2013: 81), Gillespie (in a way anticipated by Pessoa) has decided to develop an elaborate literary system enabling him to become a ‘self-effacing’ literary presence.
As a motif, the government’s indifference to the Biblionaut’s reading-and-writing abilities is but one of many incidents in which interpretation is rendered irrelevant by the ontologisation of meaningful human language into affective, but asignifying, forms.
Approaching a literary artwork simply as a technology for producing affective responses in the reader instrumentalises the work, rendering much of its full affective dimension irrelevant (the inevitable modulation of non-linguistic affect into linguistic, and hence, inherently significant forms, for instance). Yet the temptation to technologise the text is, understandably, particularly strong when reading works of
That this message might sound retrograde to those who feel writers working in multiple media should abandon the literary altogether suggests why the readers and writers who believe in the field of electronic literature and the ethico-political importance of sustaining human readability need William Gillespie, DIY publisher and author of affective, meaningful post-digital fictions for the Programming Era.
In Gerard Genette’s (1993; 1997) narratology, “rheme” is contrasted with “theme.” While themes are symbolic indications of what texts mean, rhemes are super-formal indications of texts themselves. The title of this article is highly thematic because it indicates much of that what is being discussed; a title like “Only an Article” would be highly rhematic due to its lack of indication of the subject matter at the expense of non-reflective form.
Veli-Matti Karhulahti has recently argued that the aesthetics of the videogame phenomenon are better understood through “rhematics” than the rhetoric of “meaning” that has so far dominated the analysis of cultural products, especially within literary studies:
While [videogame play] is essentially meaningless – there is no decipherable message to be understood – it is not senseless: there is a sensation to be understood. What exchanges (or more correctly, comes into being) is data that cannot be made known by signs. This sensible nonsense gives shape to an aporetic rhematic [that] cannot be understood by means of any conventional interpretative discipline, a new discipline is needed; a rhematic discipline. (Karhulahti 2013)
This paper introduces rhematics as an analytic tool that facilitates comprehending the multiplicity of aesthetic ends in electronic literature. It is suggested that the rhematics of electronic literature operate on two levels, the conceptual and the material. As the former has already been mapped out extensively by literary theorists through “poetic” functions (e.g. Burke 1941; Jakobson 1960; Eco 1989), the present focus is on the latter and its “configurative” functions (see Aarseth 1997; Eskelinen 2012). The material manipulation of electronic literary works is thus examined as an intrinsically rewarding mode of interaction that is not guided solely by hermeneutic methods of interpretation but also by cybernetic engagement (see Iser 2003).
The configurative competency of the e-reader, it is argued, must hence be taken as a serious contextual factor in electronic literary analysis. This also calls for an ontological problematization: if reading and literature are identified as noematic or hermeneutic entities, do extranoematic configurative aspects not conflict with the ‘literariness’ (cf. Randall 1988) of electronic literature?
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Ever since the early theorizing of electronic literature, both the beginning and ending of these literary works has been seen as problematic issues. In the spirit of Umberto Eco’s “open work” (in English 1989), especially hypertext works were considered challenging to the closed nature of literary work – there may be several entrances to the work, but even more importantly, there is no fixed ending but rather, alternative, optional exit points. J. Yellowlees Douglas’s The End of Books or Books without End, a cornerstone in this field, provided a detailed analysis of M. Joyce’s Afternoon, putting much emphasis on its various endings.
If the early 1990’s theoretical discussion was mainly concerned with hypertext, the current electronic literature scene with its dozens of new modes of expression, technologies and genres, has grown used to the fact that most of the works do not offer a definite ending, but either a set of alternative endings, or, no obvious ending at all. The openness of dynamic ergodic literature has become such a naturalized phenomenon that there has not been much theoretical interest in the question of ending in electronic literature lately.
The end, however, plays a crucial role in the interpretation and understanding of literature (cf. Reading for the Plot by P. Brooks, 1984 and The Sense of an Ending by F. Kermode, 1967), and this holds true for electronic literature as well. Thus, it is important to investigate the strategies of ending in digital works, and what kind of consequences they have for understanding them. In this paper, we will concentrate on digital fictions with narrative content. Tentatively, it may be stated that they all create a structure of multiple temporalities, and this multiplicity is directly related to the types of ending strategies employed.
Through analysis of various works of digital literature, both old and new, such as Califia by M.D. Coverley (2000), Screen by N. Wardrip-Fruin & al. (2003), Deep Surface by S. Moulthrop (2007), TOC by S. Tomasula & al. (2014), we will focus on the temporalities of digital fiction, both related to its nature as a programmed entity (ergodic time), and as a fictional construct (fictional time), and on what kind of endings they provide. It seems that the two main options are: 1. running out of time in the concrete sense, as in Deep Surface, where there is a strict temporal constraint and when the time ends, the reading ends as well, with a sense of failure, an abrupt ending without proper closure, and 2. running out of time in the metaphorical sense of transcending the fictional time and reaching a new level of experience, as in Califia with its circular hypertext structure and the transcendence offered by reaching the Ocean. These two strategies may be combined, too, as in Screen, where there is a “forced transcendence” as the fictional world collapses when the reader, inevitably, runs out of time in the game-like interactivity with the text.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)