transmission

The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing insofar as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and those of Atlantic Canada are separated by three and a half thousand kilometres of ocean. Yet for centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. These comings and goings have left traces. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond, and through these networks, they become informed by the networks’ structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks’ code languages. Writing coastlines interrogates this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance, and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? This thesis takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions. This practice-led research refers to and infers from the corpora and associated histories, institutions, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences of the visual, media, performance, and literary arts, as well as from the traditionally more scientific realms of cartography, navigation, network archaeology, and creative computing. "Writing Coastlines" navigates the emerging and occasionally diverging theoretical terrains of electronic literature, locative narrative, media archaeology, and networked art through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art (Bergvall 1996, Hall 2008). Central to this methodology is an iterative approach to writing, which interrogates the performance of writing in and across contexts toward an extended compositional process. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to a theoretical framework and methodology for the creation and dissemination of networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory. (Source: Author's Abstract)

This paper locates narrative resonance in transatlantic communications networks through a discussion of one web-based work, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], a computer-generated narrative dialogue which propagates across, beyond, and through transatlantic communications networks. These networks engendered by generations of past usage come to serve as narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away.

This paper interrogates translation as a mode of creation and dissemination in one recent work of electronic literature, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]. To do this, translation is situated within the broader context of a string of trans variables: var trans=[lation, mutation, mediation, mission]. Trans- is a prefix meaning across, beyond, through. -lation comes from the Latin, borne, as in carried, or endured. In the translation of born-digital texts from one code language to another, what precisely is borne across, beyond, or through?

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a transmutation of Nick Montfort’s The Two, a narrative text generator written first in Python and then translated to JavaScript by Montfort in 2008. Though the nature and form of Montfort’s narrative were substantially transformed in the creation of the Python version of TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], and then further in the translation of the transmutation into JavaScript, something of the uncanny twinning of characters at work in The Two underpinned the process. This is a result of an operation of memory. In JavaScript, var= refers to a space in memory. Though a function choose(array) might be called upon to choose(trans), only one result will be returned. The rest remain in memory, as potential translations. This computer-generated text performs the act of selection from memory. Every 80000 milliseconds a new instance, one of an infinite number of possible translations, is displayed. The text displayed is doubly a translation, performed in the first instance by the JavaScript and in the second by the browser, which translates the source code into what we see on the screen. Further, text itself is about the translation from one place to another. var place=['Canada', 'England', 'Nova Scotia', 'Cape Breton', etc.]. Were this work to be translated into French, we might see: var place=[‘Canada’, ‘France’, ‘Acadie’, ‘Quebec’, etc.].

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] performs the transmediation of texts from archival sources that have already have passed across, beyond or through the code mediums of wires, switches, signals, air, ears, hands, paper. var receiving= for example, reproduces shorthand gleaned from logs kept at the Glace Bay Marconi Station, circa 1911: ['a few scraps of a private message', 'distinguishable dots', 'heavy traffic', 'something again', 'atmospherics', 'repeated \"are you there\"', 'a weak signal', 'no answers to our inquiries', 'no signals', 'strong readable signals, sending fast', 'some static', 'lightening all around'].

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is also a transmission. One JavaScript file which sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. Each time this JavaScript is called, the network, the browser, and the client-side CPU conspire to respond with a new iteration. The mission of the JavaScript source code is to generate another sort of script, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference, the live performance offering yet another reading across, beyond or through this text.

Memory defines human existence both individually and collectively: it is necessary for the evolution of the person and society. The loss of memory leads to the physical and intellectual death of identity. In order to avoid and exorcise existential oblivion, mankind has developed systems to pass on memory and preserve it. One of the oldest of these is poetry that, thanks to its rhythm and rhyme, makes the precise memorizing of a text easier. Thus it effectively communicates the deeds of heroes as well as the prayers, ideals and sentiments that characterize human beings and their culture. Society, thanks also to the heritage of knowledge that has been passed down, continues to evolve and change rapidly: the new technologies transform art, modifying the codes of language and above all the inclusion and typology of the data that constitutes the collective memory. In the era of motion pictures poetry loses some of its evocative effect and its function for transmission. The visual memory is predominant because the brain assimilates information without making the effort of concentrating and decoding input, for example from the sound to the word or from the sign to the word. Instead the image is simply there: one only has to look at it, often without even paying attention to it. The poets updated their heritage and their linguistic techniques in order for the poem not to fall into oblivion. Even in ancient Greece poetry already wove images into the different levels of narrative and memory, by using calligrams for example. As regards experimentation with sound phono-symbols. Video poetry was not just a trendy invention, on the contrary it opened up a whole new area of experimentation. The poem has always progressed in human history, maintaining and adapting the discoveries it made so that the physical, material, linguistic and technological areas that mankind had conquered became spaces for a new representation and analysis of poetry. Modern society also changes language, by mixing sounds and breaking down the meaning of words. It empties language of content and makes poetry inane, thus imposing another transformation upon poetry. In order to maintain its linguistic strength today poetry establishes a dialogue with the real or virtual space and with objects, becoming the theme and the epicentre of many video-installations.