writing in 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)

LEA leaps into yet another bold foray, this time revolving around the world of new media poetics. Bursting at the cyber-seams, a spiffy collection of essays by myriad authors await. The proud guest editor of this edition in Tim Peterson and he’s woven together a marvelous mix of nine essays, and curated an equally exciting gallery showcasing four illuminating artist works. (Source: LEA)

The creativity support community has a long history of providing valuable tools to artists and designers. Similarly, creative digital media practice has proven a valuable pedagogical strategy for teaching core computational ideas. Neither strain of research has focused on the domain of literary art however, instead targeting visual, and aural media almost exclusively. To address this situation, this thesis presents a software toolkit created specifically to support creativity in computational literature. Two primary hypotheses direct the bulk of the research presented: first, that it is possible to implement effective creativity support tools for literary art given current resource constraints; and second, that such tools, in addition to facilitating new forms of literary creativity, provide unique opportunities for computer science education. Designed both for practicing artists and for pedagogy, the research presented directly addresses impediments to participation in the field for a diverse range of users and provides an end-to-end solution for courses attempting to engage the creative faculties of computer science students, and to introduce a wider demographic—from writers, to digital artists, to media and literary theorists—to procedural literacy and computational thinking. The tools and strategies presented have been implemented, deployed, and iteratively refined in real-world contexts over the past three years. In addition to their use in large-scale projects by contemporary artists, they have provided effective support for multiple iterations of ‘Programming for Digital Art & Literature’, a successful inter-disciplinary computer science course taught by the author. Taken together, this thesis provides a novel set of tools for a new domain, and demonstrates their real-world efficacy in providing both creativity and pedagogical support for a diverse and emerging population of users.