Anthony Enns juxtaposes two models of German media theory in reviewing new works by Oliver Grau and Friedrich Kittler.
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.
Over the last thirty years, we have spoken about electronic literature in terms of its newness. Scholars have emphasized new ways of reading, challenges to closure, and entirely new models for composition. From the earliest books in the 1980s through recent scholarship in this maturing field, critics have sought out the unique features of the electronic medium. Ludologists, in particular, have challenged attempts to reduce electronic literature to a variation on older print forms.
I want to offer a different perspective on the challenges posed by electronic literature by revisiting the relation between older and newer media. When a new medium emerges, it challenges the existing order and vocation of older media. Sometimes older media respond directly, such as the impressionist shift away from realism after the advent of photography. But often the influences of a new medium are more subtle and indirect, and instead bring out a potential that is implicit but latent in an earlier medium. Alan Spiegel’s Fiction and the Camera Eye and Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography are examples of scholarship revealing that newer media subtly revealed new potentials within an older medium.
In this talk I will make a case that electronic literature can be read to subtly change of the core narrative concepts that we have developed through in literature, theater, and film. Obviously, a full discussion of this change is impossible in twenty minutes, but I will take as a proof-of-concept a re-reading of the concept of narrative setting. Specifically, I will discuss electronic works by J.R. Carpenter and Jason Nelson against the formulation of narrative space and time provided by Bakhtin’s classic essay on the chronotope. Although Bakhtin’s discussion of space and time can easily and productively be applied to these electronic works, I also read this relation backwards as a critique of some of the assumptions implicit in Bakhtin’s essay – especially Bakhtin’s tendency to see a continuity between narrative space and the phenomenological world in which authors and readers live.
The upshot of this discussion is a claim that life “after” electronic literature isn’t only going to be a matter of new and emerging forms for writing, but also a transformation and deepening of some of our most basic narrative concepts.
(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Digital media and computational technologies are revolutionizing our lives by altering relations between our selves, others, and the world. Literacy studies, this course proposes, can help us better understand the digital revolution’s impact by situating its innovative technologies, those “new media” that rapidly lose their aura of newness, within a longer discursive history.
Students will study literary mediations of technological developments from the late-19th century to the present. The emphasis will be on analyzing how modern writers, active in 20th- and 21st-century literary discourse networks, have engaged with technology and responded to the technologization of culture. In an historical survey spanning several literary movements and stages of modernity, we’ll explore how literature, literary theory, and criticism have transcribed the technological imaginary and reconfigured people’s everyday lives and experiences.
Students will be introduced to several literary resources in the digital humanities. Interested students may have opportunities to collaborate in digital-humanities projects affiliated with a literary database (the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, http://elmcip.net) or one of the Web’s longest-running, open-access, literary-critical journals (ebr, the Electronic Book Review http://www.electronicbookreview.com).
This course was offered in the Spring 2014 semester to MA students enrolled in the Literacy Studies program at the University of Stavanger.
In this article, I examine computer worms and viruses as part of the genealogy of network media, of the discourse networks of the contemporary media condition. While popular and professional arguments concerning these miniprograms often see them solely as malicious code, worms and viruses might equally be approached as revealing the very basics of their environment. Such a media-ecological perspective relies on notions of self-referentiality and autopoiesis that problematize the often all-too-hasty depictions of viruses as malicious software, products of vandal juveniles. In other words, worms and viruses are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but reveal essential traits of the techno-cultural logic that characterizes the computerized media culture of recent decades.
Fred Cohen was not, however, thinking merely of digital guerrilla war but of life in general, of the dynamics of semi-autonomous programs, highlighting that the two, war and life, are not contradictory modalities, in the sense that both are about mobilizing, about enacting. In this respect, his work has also been neglected, and I am not referring to the objections his research received in the 1980s.[16] Instead of merely providing warnings of viruses, Cohen's work and Ph.D thesis presented the essential connections that viruses, Turing machines and artificial life-like processes have. We cannot be done with viruses as long as the ontology of network culture is viral-like. Viruses, worms or any other similar programs that used the very basic operations of communicatory computers were logically part of the field of computing. The border between illegal and legal operations on a computer could not, therefore, be technically resolved -- a fact that led to a flood of literature on "how to find and get rid of viruses on your computer."
For Cohen, a virus program was able to infect "other programs by modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, copy of itself."[17] This allowed the virus to spread throughout the system or network, leaving every program susceptible to becoming a virus. The relation of these viral symbol sets to Turing machines was essential, similar to an organism's relation to its environment. The universal machine, presented in 1936 by Alan Turing, has since provided the blueprint for each and every computer there is in its formal definition of programmability. Anything that can be expressed in algorithms can also be processed with a Turing machine. Thus, as Cohen remarks, "[t]he sequence of tape symbols we call 'viruses' is a function of the machine on which they are to be interpreted"[18], logically implying the inherency of viruses in Turing machine-based communication systems. This relationship makes all organisms parasites in that they gain their existence from the surrounding environment to which they are functionally and organizationally coupled.
I do not want to address the question of whether worms and viruses are life as we know it, but underline that in addition to being an articulation on the level of cultural imaginary, this virality is also a very fundamental description of the machinic processes of these programs, and of digital culture in general. As a continuation to the theme of technological modernization, network culture is increasingly inhabited by semi-autonomous software programs and processes, which often raised the uncanny feeling of artificial life as expressed, for instance, in the various journalistic and fictitious examples describing software program attacks. This uncanny feeling is an expression of the hybrid status of such programs that transgress the constitutional (in Latour's sense of the word) boundaries of Nature, Technology and Culture. Whereas viruses and worms have come to be the central indexes of this transgression for popular consciousness, artificial life projects have also faced the same issue. As transversal disciplines such as ALife have for decades underlined, life is not to be judged as a quality of a particular substance (the hegemony of a carbon-based understanding of life) but as a model of the interconnectedness, emergence and behaviour of the constituent components of a(ny) living system. Chris Langton suggested in the late 1980s that artificial life focuses not on life as it is, or has been but on life as it could be. This is taken up as the key idea for projects that see life emerging on various synthetic platforms, silicon and computer-based systems and networks for example. [22] In a similar vein Richard Dawkins, when he viralized cultural reality with his theory of memes in 1976, referred to the possibilities of finding life even in "electronic reverberating circuits." [23]
The age of letter writing is coming to an end, just as an era of e-mail, blogs, online groups, and social networks is emerging as a new mode of communication. The work of scholars interested in what writers have to say about their work has simultaneously become easier and more challenging, depending upon the technologies used by these writers. How do we conduct authorial scholarship in an age of digital media? This paper address this question through a case study: Flores' own research on Jim Andrews and his work, focusing on the challenges and affordances offered by the current media ecology.
New technologies-- whether used for artistic or scientific ends--require new shapes to speak their attributes. Feminist writers too have long sought a narrative shape that can exist both inside and outside of patriarchal systems. Where like-minded theorists have tried to define a gender-specific dimension for art, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics demonstrates that feminist artists have already built and are happily inhabiting this new technological room of their own. This dissertation is an exploration of the architectural shapes of mnemonic systems in women's narratives in the new media (focusing on Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, M.D. Coverley's Califia and Diana Reed Slattery's Glide and The Maze Game as exemplary models). Memory is key here, for, what gets stored or remembered has always been the domain of official histories, of the conqueror speaking his dominant cultural paradigm and body. I explore at length three spatial architectures of the new media: the matrix, the unfold and the knot.
Within quantum mechanics, the science of the body in motion, the intricacies of the interiorities of mnemonic time--no longer an arrow--are being realized in the (traditionally) feminized shape of the body of the matrix. This is the real time realm of cyberspace where the multiple trajectories of the virtual engender a new kind of looking: disorientation as an alternative to linear perspective. Where women have usually been objects to be looked at, hypermedia systems replace the gaze with the empowered look of the embodied browser in motion in archival space. Always in flux, the shape of time s transformation is a Möbius strip unfolding time into the dynamic space of the postmodern text, into the unfold. As quantum interference, the unfold is a gesture that is a sensory interval. In this in-between space, the transformance of the nomadic browser takes place; she performs the embodied knowledge acquired in her navigation of the world of the text. Quantum space in hypertexts is shaped as an irreducible knot, an entangled equation both in and out of space-time, spanning all dimensions as a node in a mnemonic system. Wanderlust is the engine driving the browser on her quest through the intricately knotted interplay of time and space in these electronic ecosystems. What the browser finds there is rapture--an emergent state of embodied transformation in the experiential realm. What she acquires is not mastery, but agency, and an aesthetic interval of her own.
Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Electronic Narrative & the Limits of Memory
Chapter 1. The Archive: Memory, Writing, Feminisms i. Mnemotechnics and Quantum Feminisms ii. The Arts of Memory: What Came Before iii. Writing As a Mnemonic Technology iv. Women s Writing and Feminisms
Chapter 2. The Matrix: Information Overload i. Temporal Perspectives on Information Culture ii. Feminist Dis/Orientations iii. Space-Time Architectures: The Aesthetics of Memory iv. Archival Structures and Fractal Subjectivities
Chapter 3. The Unfold: Immersion i. Unfoldings: Bodies of Memory ii. Transformance: The Body as Interface iii. Hierophanies and Choric Space
Chapter 4. The Knot: Disorientation i. Incrementals: Where Visual Time Meets Virtual Space ii. Knots in the Cosmos iii. The Tangled Trajectories of Nomadic Logic iv. Wanderlust
Chapter Five: Conclusion(s)
(Source: LABS: Leonardo ABstracts Service)
Moving from a book culture to a screen culture requires a paradigm shift in the manner of producing culture and in ensuring its transmission, notably literary and artistic manifestations. Already in both the arts and literature, artists have appropriated the Web, radically changing its practices and language. As a result, the works produced, forged even, with new technologies are designed to be read or experienced using the Internet. Given these new formats, the usual strategies in literary theory, cinema studies and art history no longer suffice. The institutionalization of these works is not yet guaranteed either, so no bibliography or substantial listing exists. In response to this void, the NT2 Laboratory started its Hypermedia Art and Literature Directory project. ( http://www.labo-nt2.uqam.ca/observatoire/repertoire)
Since 2005, NT2 has sought to identify and describe these works created in previously unheard-of formats. In so doing, NT2 has acquired a unique expertise, solved various problems and encouraged reflection in developing a new knowledge environment. What follows in this article is a presentation of the principles and results of NT2’s endeavors.
((Source: author's abstract)
Attending to the subcultural textures, the white noise of the ongoing process (processes of both development and devolution of langague and meaning) of a literary locus -- "poetic activity" rather than "poetry" per se -- reveals its values, its sociality, its -- to use a phrase from a bygone poltical and cultural era -- relevance to everyday life. So, in addressing e-poetic culture, I'm decisively not trying to establish an alternative canon but rather attending to writing processes, and to wrting that emobidies a "space-taking" or "world-making" postliterary vision.
Considerations of performativity, diasproa, fragmentation, identity, and access, all issues that preoccupy me, are central to Internet poetics.