medium

Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Chris Crawford

Medium and Meaning was a session held at the 2016 ELO conference.

Session 1.2: Medium & MeaningMacLaurin D110Chair: Rui Torres, University Fernando Pessoa

• “From eLit to pLit,” Heiko Zimmerman, University of Trier
• “Generations of Meaning,” Hannah Ackermans, Utrecht University
• “Co-Designing DUST,” Kari Kraus, University of Maryland College Park

In our contemporary, increasingly transnational world, national literatures may seem increasingly arbitrary—even more so in the context of electronic literature, whose barriers of circulation tend to be marked by transnational, rather than national, groupings based on, for example, language or access to certain technologies. In contrast to the frequently (hyper-)nationalized literatures of mainstream literary study, electronic literature is often framed as an international or transnational literature. There are very good reasons for this: for example, the medium of electronic literature naturally lends itself to transnational dissemination and readership through the global reach of the internet. However, this transnational approach, which frequently exhibits an unacknowledged bias towards works produced in the US, also frequently ignores the ways in which an understanding of national contexts may enrich the understanding of a work. Through this paper, I hope to facilitate discussion regarding the relative merits and demerits of a transnational or national framing of electronic literature by using my own larger project, which focuses on works responding to Canadian contexts, and its sub-study of the decidedly transnational setting of J.R. Carpenter’s Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl as a case study. This paper begins by briefly describing my larger project, which examines works of electronic literature that consider how gendered, queer, racialized, and economicallydisenfranchised identities navigate physical, regionalized Canadian spaces of the past, present, and future. In this project, I examine e-lit that uses temporally- and spatially-dynamic techniques to explore how marginalized identities operate on the peripheries and navigate Canadian spaces and historical contexts, and how these works trouble the dominant narratives that these marginalized groups encounter and resist. As a part of this study, I look at J.R. Carpenter’s works of electronic literature, which transform the aesthetics of predominantly male-authored printbased forms into non-linear, female-narrated digital explorations of girlhood and the formation of gender identity. In this paper, I briefly consider the thematic trajectory of Carpenter’s works (from a focus on Nova Scotia and North American maritime settings, to Montreal and urban settings, to a transatlantic aesthetic) before diving into a short case study of her work Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, set in a transatlantic space. The location of the work’s narrative in transatlantic waters means that this work is less obviously situated within a Canadian space, thus troubling my framing of her work within a Canadian context and making this work a perfect candidate for a study with a transnational approach. However, this work is also very much informed by the diasporas of the British Isles towards the now Atlantic Canadian shores, and the pre-digital communication networks that grew out of the transatlantic relationship between these two landforms. Thus, I argue that an understanding of both Canada’s history of colonization and exploration and its transnational underpinnings enriches our understanding of this work in which a girl’s appropriation and transformation of narratives of past colonialist endeavours is a subversive repurposing of those words in service of a feminist journey of personal discovery.

Responding to the conference theme of “peripheries,” user experience and interface design are frequently on the periphery of electronic literature. Attention to these details, however, can effectively immerse readers in sensory-rich literary aesthetics. User experience and interface design also prompts authors to consider differently-abled readers, viewers, and/or inter-actors, often themselves on the peripheries. This presentation proposes practices for embodying user experience and interface design in works of electronic literature. The desired end result is to enable creators of electronic literature to best utilize the features, affordances, and constraints offered by the digital context of their medium to promote affectively powerful literary experiences.

In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering study in media theory. McLuhan proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.

Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

The collaborative development of text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) has afforded writers an electronic medium for the discussion, production, and publication of e-literature. A MUD is designed to provide an immersive and interactive experience, and is achieved by the creation of a code-based structure that supports a literary text. However, when multiple contributors are involved there is a tension between the inherently fixed nature of literature and the more fluid versioning of software. In many software development environments, ownership over a work is considered to be counter-productive, whereas authorship of literature is assumed more freely and, as a means of contextual explication, is actively encouraged. MUDs must therefore function under colliding principles of authorship and ownership. The production of a large MUD’s literary text is conceived similar to the cinematic production of a film, with the lead designer of a MUD assuming the role of a ‘director’. The production and proliferation of electronic literature presents new and unique challenges to both the longitudinal administration of a MUD and to the coherence of the literary text. Cohesion of both work and text is hindered by the potentially out-dated, though still functioning, software code of earlier versions of the MUD. Further complications arise during the integration of a new literary text with the already established text of the MUD: style, grammar, language, and thematics, for example, must be uniform. A creative writer, whose intent is to produce a new literary text for a MUD, may be confronted by an already-established literature, into which his or her literary text must be incorporated. The limitations of the code base itself may likewise limit the creative scope for expression. A contributor is limited to only those interactive elements that are supported by the underlying coding architecture. Old versions of code must remain compatible with newer versions, and the opportunities for coherent revision of the entirety of creative output are limited by available developer expertise and the scope of the exercise. A MUD is structurally and creatively dynamic, yet all elements must cohere. We discuss the collaborative development of creative works within the context of software communities, and how systems such as auteur theory have difficulty in providing a theoretical framework for multi-author software projects that have creative outputs, even in those hierarchical projects where they would seem most appropriate. We outline how players in these environments encounter a rich and varied literary experience that is an amalgamation of multiple authors and styles of writing. We discuss relevant models for analysing and understanding this type of e-literature, and provide guidelines for how they can be altered to allow for a more effective application.

For one of my courses this fall, my first semester in the new Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University, I created a short Flash piece on medium and a hypertext project on medium as metaphor, looking at eight texts—four print authors and four new media works. This presentation focuses on these projects.