programmable media

The question of electronic literature – its definition, existence, significance, relationship with literature (plain and simple) – has always been bound up with questions of media and medium. New media. Electronic media. Media qualified by digital, computational, networked, programmable and so on. And all of these terms hypostasize practices while encapsulating and concealing an even more fundamental problem concerning their medium in the sense of artistic medium. Historically, as of this present, an electronic literature exists. It exists significantly, as corpus and practice, and as an institutionally supported cultural formation. It has established a relationship to literature as such, and this is also, to an extent, institutionally recognized. However, questions and confusions concerning media – signaled understandably but inappropriately by the absurd, skewmorphic misdirection of “electronic” – remain encapsulated in “literature” itself. The medium of literature is not letters or even writing. The medium of literature is language. And this latter statement is a contradiction, arguably an assault, by literature, on language itself, as if the art of language could be entirely encompassed by an art of letters. The future historical role of “electronic,” digital, computational and programmatological affordances will be that of enabling artists and scholars to overcome our long-standing confusions concerning literature and writing, but not by replacing literacy with digital literacy. It has become a commonplace of the discourse surrounding electronic literature to say that the predominant practices of aesthetic language-making are currently produced in the world of (print) literacy and that this has been problem since the advent of “electronic” literacy. It has been a problem for far longer than that. Our predominant art practices – of visual or fine art – are currently produced, chiefly, in the world of visuality. Qualifying (visual) art with “digital” or “electronic” is less and less necessary because “digital media” simply allow visual artists to explore visuality in new ways, continuous with those of previous practices and institutions. For art, media may have changed but the artists’ medium is consistent. By contrast, digital media will enable us to discover that aesthetic, artifactual language-making may also take place in the world of aurality, in the world of what we can hear and, in particular, of what we can hear as language, and faithful to language as artistic medium, as aurature. (source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Twenty-six years after its original publication in French, I examine and propose to revisit a traditional literary theory bound to the book-as-object for the realm of literature in programmable media: paratext theory as envisioned by French narratologist Gérard Genette (translated into English by Jane E. Levin, 1997). To Genette, paratext is that which accompanies a text. He differentiates and distinguishes paratexts according to location of appearance and the sender of paratextual information. Two concepts are relavant: peri- and epitext. Genette speaks and identifies peritexts as those elements of the book dictated by a publisher devoted to the cover, typesetting, format etc. and epitexts which exist outside a book in the form of notes and interviews. Both elements merge into what Genette calls paratext theory, all of which carry out a functionality. Among others, Genette envisions paratexts to fulfill a “literary function“ which serve for guiding a readers reading; a claim under critical exploration in this presentation. Investigating the theme of this conference, I question how paratext theory may help to locate the literary in electronic literature. How do the paratextual elements, or, more specific in the here presented context: how do peritexts that surround and point to a texts existence in fact point to a work’s literary content? Given the very informational original nature and functionality of paratexts, it should be expected to locate a work’s text in these liminal devices that accompany works of electronic literature. Methodologically, I take into consideration, compare, and search for locating the literary in different peritexts to one and the same work. Among others, the Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) that presents readers with encyclopedic articles on creative works is of particular interest to this study. The paper examines selected article contributions from the ELD, as well as work descriptions in the Electronic Literature Collection and asks how these locate the literary of a work. Text in an peritext is located if substantial engagement with a texts literary content is identified. This is true if a description relates to the themes and a work‘s motifs, if it presents a work’s characters, time, space, and setting of the imaginative writing. Optionally, the literary may also be located in a presentation of how a work’s material strategy and behavior relates to the content of a work. The paper intends to make the e-lit community attentive to locate text in paratexts to creative works. This is relevant if a works technical obsolesence is considered. Despite of archival work, if a paratext is all that is available should a work no longer be accessible, one should wish for a paratext that formally is as extensible as possible and as comprehensible as possible when it comes to a work’s literary content that is no longer readable. Such a proposal conceives paratexts as cultural heritage. It relates to Philppe Bootz’s and Alexandra Saemmer’s writing on the theory put forward in the discussion of the “lability of the device“ and builds on Saemmer who in an article states “I [thus] consider the paratext as an ultimate defence against the lability of our digital creations, as well as a part of my work“ (90).

Source: Author's Abstract

In Scripting Reading Motions, Manuel Portela explores the expressive use of book forms and programmable media in experimental works of both print and electronic literature and finds a self-conscious play with the dynamics of reading and writing. Portela examines a series of print and digital works by Johanna Drucker, Mark Z. Danielewski, Rui Torres, Jim Andrews, and others, for the insights they yield about the semiotic and interpretive actions through which readers produce meaning when interacting with codes. Analyzing these works as embodiments and simulations of the motions of reading, Portela pays particular attention to the ways in which awareness of eye movements and haptic interactions in both print and electronic media feeds back onto the material and semantic layers of the works. These feedbacks, he argues, sustain self-reflexive loops that link the body of the reader to the embodied work. Readers’ haptic actions and eye movements coinstantiate the object that they are reading. Portela discusses typographic and graphic marks as choreographic notations for reading movements; examines digital recreations of experimental print literary artifacts; considers reading motions in kinetic and generated texts; analyzes the relationship of bibliographic, linguistic, and narrative coding in Danielewski’s novel-poem, Only Revolutions; and describes emergent meanings in interactive textual instruments. The expressive use of print and programmable media, Portela shows, offers a powerful model of the semiotic, interpretive, and affective operations embodied in reading processes. (Source: The MIT Press)

In September 2008 Jim Andrews shared with me the “Arteroids Development Folder:” a collection of drafts, versions, source files, and other materials that document the work that led to the publication of his “poetic shoot 'em up" Arteroids (http://www.vispo.com/arteroids/index.htm).

Jim Andrews is a programmer, poet, and musician who explores the poetic potential of language in the computer by programming elaborate behaviors to transform linguistic texts. Arteroids creates an interface based on the classic 1970s arcade video game Asteroids, where the player/reader controls the motion of the word “poetry” on the screen and fires at other words floating on the screen. The reader can change or add words to the game, personalizing its lexicon, and modifying the conditions by which they interact with the text. Arteroids is a milestone in Andrews’ artistic development because of its ambition and complexity both as a work of electronic poetry and as a work of programming. More than any of his works to date, Arteroids brings it all together—vispo (visual poetry), vismu (visual music), and interactivity—in a work that references the most native genre in computerized entertainment: the videogame.

Jim Andrews started working on his literary computer game Arteroids in 2001 when his work on Nio helped him receive funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. The earliest versions were titled "Webarteroids", preparing him to publish Arteroids 1.0 in The Remedi Project in 2002. He published version 2.02 to participate in the Augustart show in New York City (August 24 to September 2, 2002) and published version 2.5 in the Fall of 2003 issue of the electronic poetry magazine Poems that Go. The most recent version (3.11) was published in Vispo.com in August of 2006

The three versions currently available online—1.0, 2.5, and 3.11—are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg for an editorial study, because the Arteroids Development Folder contains over fifty different versions of the work in Director MX2004 files, Shockwave movies, HTML publication pages for these files, at least one commented version of Arteroids 1.0 prepared for submission to the Canada Council, Microsoft Word files with drafts of essays written to accompany the e-poem, the documented source code for Arteroids 1.0, sound files, images, Flash animations, letters, and much more. These materials are a gold mine of information for a scholar interested in studying Arteroids in depth as a work of e-literature, as a first generation electronic object, as a computer game, and as a record of an artist’s work with programmable media.

(Soruce: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

'Inner Workings' addresses itself to the methods, properties and practices of writing systems, including human writing systems, whose very signifiers are programmed. What does programmed signification tell us about the inner human writing machine? John Cayley's essay participates in relevant metacritical and metapsychological discussions - reexamining Freud's Mystic Writing Pad in particular - and is specifically sited within the context of debates on code and codework in literal art. Rather than revealed interiority, code is the archive and guarantee of inner workings than reside beneath the complex surfaces of poetics in programmable media.