media archaeology

The paper describes the procedure of porting of one of the first known poetry generators in Russian from a description of a program algorithm published as an article in the USSR Academy of Sciences: Automatics and Telemechanics in 1978. Boris Katz, a computer linguist at MIT in the moment, and at that moment mathematical mechanical faculty of Moscow university graduate was working on the generator in 1972 - 1975. The generator is based on Stone, 1916, the collected poems by Osip Mandelstam. This work was inspired by his elder colleague, a professor of Moscow University, E.M.Landis. Katz started his research on machine poetry and was asking colleagues if they knew anyone working on the theme in the Soviet Union, and they failed to point him to similar work.After several years of developing the program on BECM - 4 (Big Electronic Calculating Machine) he noticed Michael Gasparov’s book Contemporary Russian verse. Metrics and rhythmics. 1974, that analysed contemporary and traditional poetic verse and general laws of organization of Russian verse. This made a considerable contribution to the work.In order to understand the context in which On Program Composing Verse was produced we have to note that unlike in other language contexts the first generated poems in Russian appeared later than musical compositions, even though the beginnings of statistical analysis of literary texts dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. Another component that proved necessary for the computational poetics in the Soviet context was the study of structural properties of literary texts such as metrical analysis of Russian verse undertaken by Vladislav Kholshevnikov, Boris Tomashevsky and Michael Gasparov. So it was important to gain both qualitative and quantitative knowledge in regards of the properties of the poetic text in Russian.Porting or recreating this generator involved creation of a database in which every word of the Mandelstam’s Stone has been classified and included into a database. The program was created by a computer scientist Boris Katz in 1978 for BECM. A poet and computer programmer Anna Tolkacheva used java script for porting the original program. The paper will report on the principles and choices made during the process, as well as the mistakes made at the first iteration of the project and methods implemented for correcting them.

Periods of rapid technological change also redraw our sense of cultural and geographical periphery. Routes of transport and travel, communications infrastructures, and networks of cultural production extend, transform, and redirect the perimeters of our personal and collective imagination. In this lecture I will examine how Ireland’s location at the geographical margin of Europe has also rendered it a focal point of technological experimentation and exchange, and has closely entwined it with the story of electronic literature. I propose that the peripheral imagination informing this relationship can also encourage the kind of cultural dissent needed to tackle the consequences of unchecked technological ambition to the fragile environments of the Anthropocene.

The aim of current thesis is to propose an applicable model of an archive for works of digital and electronic literature in the context of a media laboratory that would document, collect, preserve and maintain works by native artist/authors in the Turkish scene. This thesis is both intended as a co-mediation that investigates and critiques the material infrastructure of the contemporary archival practices with a trajectory on the now-speculative forms of archival evolution such as DNA- storage through a media archaeological observance of existing examples of media laboratories that focus on the preservation of works of digital and electronic literature; and, rendered as a proposal for an actual archival project that would be utilized so as to establish a certain media laboratory for the archival, collection, documentation, preservation and maintenance of such literary works that defy the print-culture-bound dimension of traditional humanities. It aims to encourage the mediated thinking. By employing works of digital and electronic literature as digital objects, it also provide an ontological grounding for the media inherent thereof. Throughout the thesis, a media archaeological critique is reached in terms of contemporary archival studies through the notion of World Literature, that is the base of Comparative Literature, in order that a sense of interdisciplinary practice may be developed with media studies at large and computational arts for the betterment of knowledge preservation, and sharability thereof.

Keywords: Archive, Digital Literature, Electronic Literature, Media Archaeology, Media Laboratory

Anthony Enns juxtaposes two models of German media theory in reviewing new works by Oliver Grau and Friedrich Kittler.

Walter J Ong argues: ‘The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word’. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of enunciation in which written words refuse repose. This essay argues that although spoken, written and printed words operate within radically different temporal planes, spoken words also have thing-like properties and written and printed words also move through time. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of signification unforeseen by Ong in which written words refuse repose. Jay David Bolter argues that digital writing ‘challenges the logocentric notion that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language ... The writer and reader can create and examine structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech’. N Katherine Hayles argues that, in digital media, the text ‘becomes a process, an event brought into existence when the program runs ... The [text] is ‘‘eventilized,’’ made more an event and less a discrete, self-contained object with clear boundaries in space and time’. Jean-Jacques Lecercle argues that language is a constructed system, constantly subject to change ... ‘We therefore need to conceive of language not as a stable, arrested system, but as a system of variations’. This essay draws upon a diverse corpus of literary, media and performance theory and practice to establish a critical framework for examining the performance of variable texts throughout the entire apparatus of hardware, software, networks, bodies and spaces within and through which they operate and propagate. This framework is applied to a number of examples of digital writing which incorporates variability, instability, transformation and change into the process of composition, resulting in texts which are both physical and digital, confusing and confound boundaries between speaking, writing and reading.

This essay takes a media archaeological approach to putting forward haunted media as theory of mediation able to address contemporary networked writing practices communicated across and through multiple media, multiple iterations, multiple sites, and multiple times. Drawing upon Derrida’s invitation to consider the paradoxical state of the spectre, that of being/not-being, this paper considers the paradoxical state of long-distance communications networks. Both physical and digital, they serve as linguistic structures for modes of transmission and reception for digital texts. Composed of source code and output, these texts are neither here nor there, but rather here and there, past and future, original and copy. The in-between state has been articulated in terms of ‘medium’ in Western philosophy since classical times. The complex temporaility of this in-between state is further articulated in this essay through Alexander Galloway’s framing of the computer, not as an object, but rather as “a process or active threshold mediating between two states”. The theoretical framework for haunted media put forward in this essay is employed to discuss a web-based computer-generated text called Whisper Wire (Carpenter 2010). Whisper Wire 'haunts' the source-code of another computer-generated text, Nick Montfort's Taroko Gorge (2008), by replacing all of Montfort’s variables with new lists of words pertaining to sending and receiving strange sounds. Drawing upon heuristic research into Electronic Voice Phenomena, and citing Freud’s notion of repetition as a hallmark of the uncanny, Whisper Wire will be framed as an unheimlich text — a code medium sending and receiving un-homed messages, verse fragments, strange sounds, disembodied voices, ghost whispers, distant wails and other intercepted, intuited or merely imagined attempts to communicate across vast distances through copper wires, telegraph cables, transistor radios, and other haunted media.

The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing insofar as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and those of Atlantic Canada are separated by three and a half thousand kilometres of ocean. Yet for centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. These comings and goings have left traces. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond, and through these networks, they become informed by the networks’ structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks’ code languages. Writing coastlines interrogates this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance, and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? This thesis takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions. This practice-led research refers to and infers from the corpora and associated histories, institutions, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences of the visual, media, performance, and literary arts, as well as from the traditionally more scientific realms of cartography, navigation, network archaeology, and creative computing. "Writing Coastlines" navigates the emerging and occasionally diverging theoretical terrains of electronic literature, locative narrative, media archaeology, and networked art through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art (Bergvall 1996, Hall 2008). Central to this methodology is an iterative approach to writing, which interrogates the performance of writing in and across contexts toward an extended compositional process. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to a theoretical framework and methodology for the creation and dissemination of networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory. (Source: Author's Abstract)