self-reflexivity

I will outline my understanding of how writing through digital media extends the practice of self-translation (an area which has recently attracted attention in translation studies) and writing in general. As an example of technogenesis, writing with and against the intelligent machine opens a wide spectrum of interaction where the human actor both adapts to and resists the influence of the digital media. Writing through this type of translation becomes a self-reflexive practice, in which the translation functions as a mirroring device that prompts the writer to return to the “original” and then again to the “translation.” Ultimately, the outcome is a back-and-forth process in which the binary between original and translation collapses.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

Suppporting the critical reappropriation of a room of one’s own -Virginia Woolf, 1929-and contextualizing in the present Net Culture, this essay questions the redefinition of the private spaces transformed into nods of relation and inmaterial work in a Web-Society. With the hypothesis of that space conforms a new public public-private scenario for the reflection and self-management of the self, this book examines the new conditions and possibilities of emancipation and subjective construction of a connected home, the consequences of the production ways and online life from the intimate spaces and the redefinition of the new productive spheres.

A polymorphic poem (polypoem) is a generative digital artwork that is constructed differently upon each instantiation, but can be meaningfully constrained according to aspects such as theme, metaphor, affect, and discourse structure. The Generative Visual Renku project presents a new form of concrete polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and generative models from contemporary art. Calligraphic iconic illustrations are conjoined by the GRIOT system into a fanciful topography articulating the nuanced interplay between organic (natural or hand-created) and modular (mass-produced or consumerist) artifacts that saturate our lives. GRIOT, which is a system for composing generative and interactive narrative and poetic works, is used to semantically constrain generated output both visually and conceptually. On the one hand, this project extends the GRIOT architecture's support for composing graphics and has resulted in new theory to provide cognitive and semiotic groundings for the extension. On the other hand, as a work of art, it is self-reflexive in that the content concerns the modularity of consumption and production in many contemporary post-industrial societies, while the research agenda and theoretical framework are concerned with modularity of semantic units in digital media arts.

Since the industrial age, modularity has revolutionized our everyday lives. For the sake of efficiency and optimization, things and activities were shaped into mass-produced interchangeable units, including our furniture, our dwelling places, our commuting, our consumptions, our entertainments, and our identities. In consumerist societies, modularity always lies at the center, whereas the complements are just scattered peripheries. Life is a journey back and forth between clustered majorities and isolated minorities.

Digital Orientalism: Japan and Electronic Literature: Alice Ferrebe
In their 1995 essay ‘Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic’, David Morley and Kevin Robins examined the contemporary construction of Japan as a potent and threatening Other, inscrutably encroaching upon the West through precocious technological genius and insidious business practices. For Japanophobes, they claimed, ‘the unpalatable reality is that Japan, that most Oriental of Oriental cultures, as it increasingly outperforms the economies of the West, may now have become the most (post)modern of all societies’. Of course, this imagining of Japan as the land of the future (a frequent cyberpunk strategy) stands in contrast to the more traditional Orientalist vision of the nation as a repository for the ancient and exotic – the Japan of an alien, exquisite aesthetic and of arcane martial practices, pre-modern rather than postmodern.

Though his ‘East’ was Middle- rather than Far-, Edward Said has established the way in which the Orient has functioned to define and empower the Occident, its binary opposite. In 1967, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed a shift in this cultural hierarchy of West/East, as ‘electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate – our Western legacy – are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused’. This valorization of the Orient in relation to the new experiences of digital culture extends well beyond McLuhan’s early messianism. Broadly, the structures, poetics and aesthetics of Japanese literature – multiple, or undefined, viewpoints; epigrammatic verse; pictographic representation; freedom from the necessity of sensing an ending, for example – seem to suggest a far more satisfying critical match with postmodern writing in general, and electronic literature in particular, than the perceivedly linear, ego-centered discourses of the Western canon. If we are to respond to N. Katherine Hayles’s recent plea to ‘understand electronic literature not only as an artistic practice (though it is that, of course), but also as a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise’, then the Japanese literary tradition would seem to offer some potentially invaluable insights.

Yet in Orientalism Said countered any utopian notion that technologically advanced communication systems necessarily enhance inter-cultural relations with the claim that his contemporary media were actually reinforcing the symbolic stereotypes of the East: ‘So far as the Orient is concerned, standardisation and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of the “mysterious Orient”’. This paper will explore the concept of a new Orientalism within digital studies more widely and one particular Japan-inspired work of electronic literature, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Nippon. Is it a regressive practice, replicating old stereotypes, and effective in mystifying process and agency in an emergent genre that depends upon those very qualities for its specificity? Or does it refigure the Orient/Occident binary in new and potentially liberating ways? (author-submitted abstract)