In this essay, Robert P. Fletcher demonstrates how, while putting together digital and print media affordances, augmented print may evoke in readers a sense of the uncanny. Fletcher also explains how works such as Amaranth Borsuk’s Abra (2014), Aaron A. Reed and Jacob Garbe’s Ice-Bound (2016) or Stuart Campbell’s Modern Polaxis (2014) seem to demonstrate the existence of a never-ending return of the “familiar” in electronic literature.
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.
The spectre of the body has always haunted communications media.
The Greeks conceived of the human body as a medium, or techne, through which a Muse might craft a poem.
Whisper Wire is an unheimlich poem, 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.
This paper puts 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 which are both physical and digital, and which serve both as linguistic structures and modes of transmission and reception for computer-generated texts. These texts themselves are composed of source code and textual output. They are neither here nor there, but rather here and there, past and future, original and copy. The complex temporaility of this in-between state is further articulated through Galloway’s framing of the computer, not as an object, but rather as “a process or active threshold mediating between two states” (23). This theoretical framework for haunted media will be 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 Freud’s notion of the uncanny and heuristic research into Electronic Voice Phenomena, 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.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
Whisper Wire is a haunting of Nick Montfort’s computer-generated poem Taroko Gorge (2008). It revisits, recurs, and remains persistently within, and, at the same time, disturbs, distresses, and intrudes upon the structure of Montfort’s source code.
Paradoxically, Whisper Wire produces text in excess, but what that text addresses is an absence, a lack born of distance. The source code and, in the case of the live performance iteration, the human body, become mediums for sending and receiving un-homed messages, sounds, and signals across, beyond, and through this distance. This pragmatic approach to mediation situates the computer, the source code, and the human body not as discreet ontological entities but rather as processes mediating between sites, states, and forms.
This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach.
Gothic fiction explores the threats which profoundly challenge narrative subjects, and so may be described as concerned with epistemological, ideological and ontological boundaries. In the interactive fictions these boundaries are explored dually through the player’s traversal (that is, progress through a work) and the narrative(s) produced as a result of that traversal. The first three works in this study explore the vulnerabilities related to conceptions of human subjectivity. As an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” Nevermore, examined in chapter one, is a work in which self-reflexivity extends to the remediated use of the Gothic conventions of ‘the unspeakable’ and ‘live burial’ which function in Poe’s poem. In chapter two, postmodern indeterminacy, especially with regard to the tensions between spaces and subjective boundaries, is apparent in the means through which the trope of the labyrinth is redesigned in Anchorhead, a work loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s terror fiction. In the fragmented narratives produced via traversal of Madam Spider’s Web, considered in chapter three, the player character’s self-fragmentation, indicated by the poetics of the uncanny as well as of the Gothic-grotesque, illustrates a destabilized conception of the human subject which reveals a hidden monster within, both for the player character and the player. Finally, traversal of Slouching Towards Bedlam, analyzed in chapter four, produces a series of narratives which function in a postmodern, recursive fashion to implicate the player in the viral infection which threatens the decidedly posthuman player character. This viral entity is metaphorically linked to Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula. As it is the only work in the study to present a conception of posthuman subjectivity, Slouching Towards Bedlam more specifically aligns with the subgenre ‘cybergothic,’ and provides an illuminating contrast to the other three interactive fictions.
In the order in which I examine them, these works exemplify a postmodern development of the Gothic which increasingly marries fictional indeterminacy to explicit formal effects, both during interaction and in the narratives produced.
(Source: Author's dissertation abstract)
In 2001, Florian Cramer wondered whether ‘the theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted... from perceiving computer data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in such notions as ‘hypertext’, ‘hyperfiction’, ‘hyper-/multimedia’) towards paying attention to the very codedness–that is, textuality–of digital systems themselves' (Cramer, 2001). I want to extend this focus on the codedness of computer-based textuality into a technosocial ‘phenomenology’ of the text-as-apparatus. These texts cannot be understood separately from the apparatus that displays and performs them. ‘Trilogical’ relationships exist between humans and apparatuses that are revealed during the performance of the text-as-apparatus. The trilogue acknowledges the apparatus as an entity that, while lacking consciousness, possesses a pseudo-agency with ramifications for the interpretations of such texts. The result is new types of creative relationships, in which different concepts of language compete, and hopefully combine, to create new types of meaning.