practice-led research

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.

Traditionally, visual, computational, performing, and literary arts referred to separate corpora, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences. This persistent separation proves problematic for creating, disseminating, experiencing, and theorising multi-modal work which draws equally upon multiple artistic and scientific traditions. This paper adopts a necessarily hybrid approach to addresses a multi-modal body of practice-led research. The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a performative form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Like the broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signifies that it is intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of the printed map are QR codes which link to computer-generated narrative dialogues composed of fragments culled from a corpus of print literature. These are presented as performance scripts replete with ‘stage’ instructions suggesting how and where they might be performed. As such, these points on the physical map point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts. This paper frames the composition of this work in terms of the Situationist strategies of détournement and dérive as theorized by McKenzie Wark. Adopting N. Katherine Hayles’ conception of the digital text as ‘eventilized’, and adapting Foucault’s conception of the archive ‘emerging in fragments’ to consider the computer-generated narrative as a general system of the formation and transformation of statement-events, this paper situates The Broadside of a Yarn and three stand-alone works to have emerged from it on an axis between langue and parole, between what is said and what is done, between what Deleuze and Guattari term machinic assemblages of desire and assemblages of collective enunciation.