'Een hele echte' is a story told through emails that readers receive in the course of 14 days. In the story, Helen is looking online for a new bass gitar. She stumbles upon Tarak, who is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence entity. Helen experiences the enormous influence of her live on the internet, which is completely taken over by Tarak.
Zo'n coole basgitaar als ze Kim Gordon van Sonic Youth zag bespelen in een oude videoclip, die wil Helen als ze eindelijk weer muziek gaat maken. Online loopt ze Tarak tegen het lijf die virtuoos kan zoeken en haar leidt naar de overtreffende trap van de BC Rich Mockingbird Bass, namelijk het exemplaar waarop Kim Gordon speelt in die clip. De Echte!Wie zich aanmeldt volgt veertien dagen het avontuur dat Helen meesleurt tot op louche nachtelijke parkeerplaatsen achter een winkelcentrum in Sydney Australië. Tarak blijkt geen mens maar een vorm van kunstmatige intelligentie. Dat is interessant en erg handig. Tot Helen ervaart hoe de enorme invloed van het internet op haar dagelijks leven in handen valt van een wezen dat zich aan geen enkele menselijke beperking of overweging houdt. Spookachtig en vervreemdend, is zacht uitgedrukt, wat er dan gebeurt. Vragen over wat een intentie, wat contact, begrip en menselijke authenticiteit zijn als we met AI omgaan dringen zich op. En wat bezielt Tarak?De basis van het vervolgverhaal is een tekst bestaande uit emails die Helen aan de lezer stuurt. Maar de omgeving waarin die tekst verschijnt is verrijkt met real-time berichten uit newsfeeds, weer-apps, en losse chatberichten van Tarak, die zich aanpassen bij de locatie en het tijdstip waarop Helen zich in het verhaal bevindt, en bij de locatie van de lezer. De digitale alledaagse werkelijkheid van Helen en lezer is het decor waarin het vervolgverhaal zich afspeelt.
In Jilly Dreadful's hypertext work The Spectral Dollhouse, the death scenes are staged; the blood is (presumably) fake; and the owner of the house is, or was, a doll; and yet it looked like we'd seen ghosts after ouiji-ing our way through this work, which in the author's words, investigates "the literary oppression that women face in regards to the procreation of their stories and bodies" as well as the question of whether (and/or how) photography is representational of reality. In a way, though, we had seen ghosts, as Dreadful admits, "fiction haunts nonfiction," resulting in a piece that balances sure-footedly on the line where truth and artifice abut one another, with Dreadful taking handfuls of each to make one replete with the other.
Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/13Fall/editor.html
On Joseph McElroy’s Fiction as a lifelong, dramatic investigation of noesis - that abstract butevocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined(through Phenomenology) asthose ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.
Labyrinth… is a Polish interactive hypertext novel. Textual layer of the artwork is broadly inspired by postmodern books including If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. It is referenced in the text both by a literary (by a note hold by one of the characters) and a metatextual structure of intertwining storylines (however a-story-within-a-story concept is replaced with a looping hyperlink chain). Because of that metatextual play the format of the hypertext (which is a MS Windows application written in C#) is important and significant itself. Although GUI could be initially seen as just a side-effect of using electronic medium, it in fact constitutes the mentioned metatextual layer. The text among with references to literature contains a lot of references to GUI widgets, algorithms and cognitive schemata typical to interfaces of computer programs. It is in fact a proof-of-concept of using (currently unused in literature) poetics of application interfaces to express fictional narratives and give them new emergent value. To achieve that goal, the hypertext is intentionaly written differently compared to classical hypertextual literature of the 1980s. It is intended not to be ergodic (although it somehow is). Even if the plot is non-linear (in fact it is a loop with side-chains) the fictional world is stable and remains consistent between different reading sessions. The text is to be read more like Wikipedia (reading about constant reality in custom order) rather than Afternoon, A Story (where different reading sessions produce different fabular sequences). Instead, the novel is paraconsistent on a storyline level. It has two endings. The fake one is offered only to be rejected by a reader (the GUI buttons should result in an action inside the story, not just in showing the next lexia!) leaving him inside a story loop which should be traversed like a labyrinth – to find the exit. And its exit is a side-chain of the novel which branches in the middle of a plot. In a result a question remains: Which part of the story was real and which was a dream? The branching one or the looping part with fake ending? (source: ELO 2015 catalog)
Phantom Agents is an episodic fiction that programmatically weaves sequential narration with random selections of text and image. Li and Pym are partner agents inside a broken augmented reality game. They solve complex plot problems in a plot that is proliferating beyond all reason. They collect data at virtual parties and forget all about their first bodies. They observe and are observed observing. Agency, identity, point of view and reality are slippery as both the fictional characters and the reader/user navigate cine-poetic juxtapositions, make meaningful narrative connections and progress, episode by episode, towards an understanding of the network that includes them.
“Recombinant poetics”, a term coined by artist/scholar Bill Seaman, refers to a techopoetic practice in which the display and juxtaposition of semantic elements are generated by computer algorithms, rather than through an author’s predetermined composition. Although inspired by traditions of combinatorial literature and the use of constraints to generate narrative or poetic forms, recombinant works of art produce variable “fields of meaning” (Seaman/Ascott) for the user/reader/viewer. Recombinant authors program discrete semantic elements, media stored in arrays or databases, to display through random, semi-random or variable processes, often in conjunction with user-interaction. Examples of recombinant poetics in works ofdigital poetry and art are abundant. Digital narratives that foreground recombinant processes are less common, because they tend to dismantle or dissolve themselves as sequential narrative in favor of more non-linear, emergent meanings. However, narrative authors since Laurence Sterne have tried to harness life’s variability and randomness inside their fictions by embedding non-narrative representations of contingent experience within a narrative framework. Through digression, semantic shock, dream logic, parataxis, meta-narrative, stream of consciousness, authors disrupt narrative logic in order to produce affect in the reader/viewer, which in turn contributes to the realization of a fictional world.
Phantom Agents is a playground of familiar identification processes inside a near-future culture that is dominated by database logic. The work is narrative and poetic, deterministic and variable, book-like and cinematic in an effort to explore a networked version of what John Ashbery calls “the experience of experience.” In this work, I create a recombinant fiction that uses computational procedures (random selections of image and text) to produce the affect of variability and randomness alongside or as counterpoint to narrative sequencing.
(source: ELO 2015 catalog)
New mobile technologies shape the way, in which people communicate and perceive the reality. Our basic position is the nomadic cockpit (expression coined by the author of this paper) in terms of being armed with many of navigating and controlling mobile screenic devices (from cell phones and tablets to consoles, cameras, and various players). When we move around in our surroundings armed with such devices we perceive the data shown on the screen of such a device, meaning that both the visual and aural interfaces are integrated in our experience of walking or riding environment. Virtual data approaching from the remote context on the screen are related to and coordinated with our basic, non-mediated perception from the physical here and now, meaning that the digital technology, provoking one’s hands on controls activity becomes incorporated in the experience and understanding of our being-on-the-move. This paper aims to explore the way in which the present mobile culture enters some movements in new media art and e-literature that presuppose the interactions between the moving bodies and the words and images on the move. We are witnessing various projects in mobile and locative media that deploy mobile phones in order to broaden the presence of new media textual and non-textual contents and its experience. In this paper we refer to some examples of e-literary projects shaped for mobile screenic devices (e.g. Bauer's and Suter’s AndOrDada) as well as for new media ones, such as EDT’s The Transborder Immigrant Tool. The comparison between the use of mobile and locative media in e-literature and in new media art demonstrates significant differences between them with the regard to their tasks and applications. Rather than foregrounding the pure artistic (aesthetic) features the new media art refers first and foremost to activism, hacktivism, repurposing, tactical media, tactical biopolitics and to the use value of its projects as persuasively demonstrates The Transborder Immigrant Tool, which was created with the task of reappropriating wordily available technology to be used as a form of humanitarian aid. The Virtual Hiker Algorithm installed on the simple mobiles guides border crossers in the hostile desert condition toward the nearest aid sites (e. g. to the water and first aid points). When new media art project is displayed on the screen of one’s nomadic cockpit, we need to look at it not in terms of aesthetic practice but as the production of goals for the nomadic user to solve, puzzles that require it to enact its kinesthetic and proprioceptive features, in unusual conditions. On the contrary, e-literary projects formed in mobile and locative media are often about the demonstrations of technical advances in this field; they revolutionize the means of production, they invent the new genre in which the textual creativity is deployed (e. g. Aya Karpinska’s zoom narrative), they gain the importance in terms of avant-garde of the medium, but their tasks are not so transgressive and radical in terms of the social interventions. Unlike the new media art ones they do not enter the not-just-art (term coined by the author of this paper) in terms of an activity that seeks to change the very condition of life.
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.
Look up the book's content: http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9781577663188.pdf
Understanding the processes of rhetorical criticism--the systematic investigation and explanation of symbolic acts and artifacts--creates opportunities for more effective communication. When we are aware of the various options available in the construction of messages and how they function to produce effects, we have the tools needed to question the messages in artifacts rather than responding uncritically. Sonja Foss, who has an enviable talent for synthesizing complex rhetorical concepts and processes into clear explanations, presents nine methods of rhetorical criticism. She carefully explains and illustrates the theory behind each method with abundant examples of applications. Interesting and lively essays, some written by students, encourage readers to develop their critical skills. Useful bibliographies list additional samples for each type of criticism. Rhetorical criticism is not a process confined to a few assignments in a rhetorical or media criticism course. It is an everyday activity we can use to understand our responses to symbols of all kinds and to create our own symbols to generate the responses we desire.
Also by Sonja K. Foss and available from Waveland Press:
with Karen A. Foss and Robert Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, Third Edition (ISBN 9781577662051);
with Karen A. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories (ISBN 9781577664963); with Mary E. Domenico and Karen A. Foss, Gender Stories: Negotiating Identity in a Binary World (ISBN 9781577667919);
with Karen A. Foss, Inviting Transformation: Presentational Speaking for a Changing World, Third Edition (ISBN 9781577667216);
with Karen A. Foss and Robert Trapp, Readings in Contemporary Rhetoric (ISBN 9781577662068);
with Karen A. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory (ISBN 9781577664970).
Titles of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Hauser, Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577662211) and Sillars-Gronbeck, Communication Criticism: Rhetoric, Social Codes, Cultural Studies (ISBN 9781577661719).
A young man experiences a recurring dream about a labyrinth in such high detail that he is able to draw a detailed map of it. Rendered as a 3D world in WebGL and best experienced in Google Chrome, 'R' explores the story of the dream - both past and present - through a series of on-screen narratives, puzzles and text-sculptures. A regularly written short story also accompanies the work.
Requires a WebGL-enabled browser such as Google Chrome (recommended) or Firefox.
Digital approaches to information processing foreground the unique interdependence between
knowledge and its representation that has been characteristic of western epistemology for the past five centuries. The essential role representation formats play in modern knowledge construction is generally accepted in all disciplines, attributing, learning and intellectual progress less to one's direct engagement with actual phenomena, and more to notational structures that convey its formulation. In this paradigm, knowledge follows exclusively from its theoretical articulation, not the other way around.
As such, the actual world cannot but appear symptomatic; its material presence reduced to little more than a kind of referential conceit. Michael Heim speaks to this very issue philosophically as early as the 1990s, recognising clear ontological paradoxes in the then newly emergent VR technology: just how our culture understands the term "reality" as an actual environment, he observes, can only weaken and become less physically uncertain "as it stretches over many virtual worlds.”2 Heim's comments recall digital culture's especially complex interactions with the material world around us; yet they capture as well the increasing ontological impasse that has developed over the course of at least a century of intellectual and artistic debate on the relationship of patterns, ordering and schema to what we perceive to be material actualities.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)