Kathryn Cramer

This paper presents a feminist, platform-conscious approach to reading and preserving a work of early, pre-web electronic literature: Kathryn Cramer's short Storyspace hypertext fiction, "In Small & Large Pieces" (1994). Ensslin adopts a postphenomenological approach centered around Material Engagement Theory (MET), which was originally developed by cognitive archeologists and anthropologists to reflect the material significance of extended, embedded, embodied and enactive cognition, also known as "e-cognition" (Ransom and Gallagher 2020), for human development and subjectivity. Glossed briefly, "extended" refers to the relational idea that "minds and things are continuous and interdefinable processes rather than isolated and independent entities" (Malafouris 2016: 9); "embedded" foregrounds the situated, spatially contingent nature of these processes and relationships; "embodied" emphasizes the fact that the things we interact with become cognitive extensions of the human body, and that "human-technology relations are not representational relations but embodiment relations" (Ihde & Malafouris 2018: 205); and "enactive" signifies that "cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is the enactment of a world" (Varela et al 1991: 9; Iliopoulos 2019). What we learn, know, understand and feel is therefore a product of our active, embedded and embodied interaction with the things around us, and that includes technologies of reading and play. Applied to reading electronic literature, MET can help us understand how the materialities of e-literary creation and experience have a recursive, reciprocal and diachronically dynamic effect on our relationship with a work, but also more generally with our own understanding of what we do and who we are in the field and the community. Ensslin examines how MET can account for how emulation-often stigmatized as legally fraught and inauthentic-can become an integral part of restorative and productive co-reading.

This paper was a contribution to the panel, "On the Effect(s) of Living Backwards", at the ELO 2021 Conference.

From its earliest beginnings, electronic literature has eschewed canonization and institutionalization by manifesting itself as a “set of [dynamic] practices” (Pawlicka 2017; Ensslin 2007) that have responded to and generated new and perpetually morphing forms and methods of writing and reading. This processual, personalized and platform-contingent textuality can only adequately be studied in a concerted approach that takes into account the numerous platforms on which electronic literature has been accessible pre- and post-Web. Similarly, it raises important questions about original design and intent, and the breakage thereof across platforms. 

To demonstrate how platform contingency can lead to complementary, diachronically pertinent analyses, this panel focuses on a seminal, pre-web hypertext published in issue 1:3 (1994) of the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext. Kathryn Cramer’s In Small and Large Pieces first appeared in a folio containing two 3.5-inch floppy disks for Macintosh and PC, and later on a single CD-ROM requiring 2 MB RAM and a hard disk drive. It was originally written in Storyspace 1.08 and used 875K (Grigar et al. 2019). To access the work in its original format, historical machines such as a Macintosh Classic or Performa are required. However, there are other platforms on which the text can be rendered and emulated, including for example Eastgate’s Tinderbox and Windows XP emulators like Oracle VM VirtualBox. Focusing on these three hardware and software constellations and their individual aesthetic and embodied affordances, this panel will explore the ways in which reading “the same” work in different technological environments yields platform-specific analytical nuances, and how, collectively, these readings open up new forms of collaborative, connective textuality. Our work will deepen our understanding of how platform-conscious readings can shed light on discrepancies between reader experience and original design and intent, and how contemporary technologies might make it possible to bring back an obsolescent work. In doing so, we explore how platform studies can operate synchronically and diachronically, especially if combined with post-pandemic forms of remote collaboration and presentation that enable scholars to read from their own site-specific premises. 

Our presentation will begin with some introductory notes from Kathryn Cramer about the genesis of her work (8 min). This will be followed by three short analytical demos from the other panellists, with Grigar reading from a Macintosh Performa 5215CD (8 min), Pisarski from Tinderbox (8 min), and Ensslin from VirtualBox Windows XP (8 min). Cramer will close with a commentary on the analyses (8 min), followed by plenary discussion (20 min). 

References:

Ensslin, Astrid (2007) Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. London: Bloomsbury.Grigar, Dene, Nicholas Schiller, Holly Slocum, Mariah Gwin, Andrew Nevue, Kathleen Zoller, and Moneca Roath (2019) Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media, Volume 2. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/rebooting-electronic-literature-volume-2/i…, Urszula (2017) “An essay on electronic literature as platform,” Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, 33, 430-444.