literary interaction

Simultaneously with the mainstreaming of digital text in the form of e-books and the parallel normalizing of participatory hypertext in the form of social media, we see a growing interest in alternative new forms of printing and book production, including artistic explorations of the book and its cultural historical forms. As part of what has been labeled the post-digital, artists and authors explore dominant and alternative models of digitization in combination with a renewed understanding of the materiality of the book (see e.g. Ludovico 2012, Cramer 2013, Lorusso 2013-, Andersen and Pold 2014). This post-digital literary interest can be understood as an interest in how the materiality of the book is transformed and reinvigorated because of the digital revolution, but also as a critical and media archaeological reflection of the current state of the digital revolution. In this way, the post-digital explores and questions what literary media are becoming after the hype of the digital revolution has passed. In short, it resets the hype before exploring the literary media again and allows us to begin exploring the qualities of the literary across and between media.

As part of such an exploration, this paper will based on both experimental and analytical approaches explore literary platforms such as Ink After Print (Fritsch, Pold et al. 2014) and experimental writing processes such as Datafied Research/Peer-reviewed Newspaper (Jamie Allen, Christian Ulrik Andersen et al. 2014) in order to develop a theoretical concept of literary interaction as a way to describe and conceptualize reading-writing related interaction and interfaces beyond immediate functionality and usability. The concept of literary interaction will be developed from reflections on three interconnected levels:

The media: How combinations of books, screens and online media relate to a post-digital media reflexivity.
The interface: How critical and physical, affective interfaces promote a social and performative reading.
The text: How the combinatory (“uncreative”) writing and the users’ active attempts at creating a syntagmatic reading from metaphoric, metonymic and phatic sign structures result in either meaningful moments where all three levels resonate with the text, or realisations of sheer seriality and randomly generated meaningless-ness, where the output is just the system.

We will aim to relate literary experiences from electronic literature and post-digital publishing to cross-disciplinary concerns around interfaces and interaction. In this way and in relation to the discussion of the changing conditions of digital text we aim to relate to the conference's theme of the end(s) of electronic literature.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The interactive literary installation Ink (Accidentally, the Screen Turns to Ink, created by the authors in a collaboration with Roskilde Library, CAVI and Peter-Clement Woetmann) is a unique experimental public display created in 2012 for the library space and exhibited at more than ten Danish libraries, at conferences, festivals and events. Ink is unique in being a large, public, social and performative digital literary installation designed to give library audiences an experience of digital literature through an affective, ergodic proces. Ink has been presented at several conferences, including the ELO 2013 conference in Paris.

With this paper we aim to develop a post-hoc reflection and prepare for a new version of Ink by exploring a theoretical and conceptual framing of what we term "post-digital literary interaction" in order to propose a collaborative invitation for further experimenting with the infrastructure facilitated by the setup. Concurrently with the actual crafting of the installation, we have deviced a model for conceptualizing the dynamic processes of sensing and sense-making through a cycle of affective, material and ergodic engagement. This model offers a way to conceptualize how the form of interaction precedes and continuously modulates an increasingly active reading process, a form of literary interaction, which is carried out and can be understood performatively - both in relation to the interaction carried out in public space, the act of writing text through the interaction and the act of reading this text.

Based on a thorough analysis of the empirical material from the first version of Ink we aim to propose a re-design of the installation focusing on making the machine's reading and the material data generating processes underlying the infrastructure visible. We consequently aim to develop a critical interface, which demonstrates the perspective of the machine on the text generation - e.g. demonstrating the algorithmic text generation to the audience or how the machine controls the reading. Through this perspective we aim to explore new techniques of text generation, e.g. workshop-based collaborative writing processes, critical explorations of net-based textual dynamics and of post-digital literary culture. In general the aim would be to explore and create an installation, which will allow for a critical reading experience of post-digital literary culture and we hope to address the ELO conference audience in order to invite for collaborations on this with a long-term plan to exhibit the results at the following ELO conference in Bergen 2015.

(Source: Author's introduction)