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1. The Aesthetics of Materiality in Electronic Literature

   According to the French author and theoretician Jean-Pierre Balpe, “all digital art works are first conceived outside the framework of a pragmatic relation to materiality. Any manifestation of digital art is but a simulated moment of an absent matter.”

   However, I wish to show that there is at least as much materiality in the digital media as in other media. Of course, as a formal description, digital and material can be distinguished. Digital media correspond to formalization, insofar as formalization is understood as the modelling of a given reality through the use of a formal code. But because digital media refers to the effectiveness of digital calculation, it can be considered as “material”, at least on two levels:

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 15:39

2. Continuous Paper: Print Interfaces and Early Computer Writing

   Paper written for ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, on August 20, 2004 (Scott Rettberg presented). The investigation into early computer writing starts with the observation that "early interaction with computers happened largely on paper: on paper tape, on punchcards, and on print terminals and teletypewriters, with their scroll-like supplies of continuous paper for printing output and input both." Montfort traces back history and challenges the "screen essentialist" assumption about computing.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 20.01.2012 - 23:39

3. The Aesthetics and Practice of Computational Literature

   While aesthetic practices in photography, film and music have undergone significant transformation due to the affordances of computational tools, the practice of creative and critical writing has remained largely unaffected. As programmable environments further populate the cultural environment it is increasingly important that we understand the ways in which those designed specifically for literary contexts may serve to challenge traditional notions of the writing endeavor. Our paper will provide a brief historical framework for the emergence of generative literary writing practices, a description of a new authoring environment (RiTa) for use in both the production and teaching of digital writing, and an analysis of specific concepts—including layering, materiality, authorial intent, constraints, and distributed creativity—that the use of this environment meaningfully engages.

   (Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 22:13

4. With Code in Hand: An Inventory & Prospectus for E-Poetics

   Poetry is a field of writing/programming that presently finds itself disorganized in its sense of relation to digital practice. This is uncharacteristic for a literary genre that has been at the forefront of innovation in the 20th century. What is instructive at this point is an inventory of innovative poetic practice in the digital media. This paper offers a catalog of poetic practice from hypertext through new media to programmable media. The inventory also considers the tropes & materiality of such practices before offering a prospectus for e-poetry in an attempt to demarcate a field of practice for the work of innovative poets in the digital media.

    

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 17:02

5. The Materiality of the Intangible: Literary Metaphor in Multimodal Texts

   The materiality of fiction narratives is, ironically, a rather intangible concept, particularly as the notion of materiality traditionally relates to specifically tangible tools of creation — such as the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s clay. The materiality of digital artifacts lies only superficially in the haptic hardware of screens, keyboards, and mice; the materiality of modes, navigation, and interaction must also be explored for their effects on metaphor and meaning. Bouchardon & Heckman identify three levels of materiality in digital literary works: the figure of a semiotic form, the grasp required to physically interact with the work, and the memory of the work — its whole compiled from the parts of code, hardware, and user/reader experience that form meaning (2012, n.p.). In presenting her theory of the technotext, however, Katherine Hayles argues that it is the conjunction of the physical embodiment of technotexts (whether semi-tangible in digital form, or as fully physical as a book) with their embedded verbal signifiers that constructs both plurimodal meaning and an implicit construct of the user/reader (2002, 130-1).

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 12:41

6. Approaching the Real: Materiality in Digital Literature

   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.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 13:07

7. Spars of Language Lost at Sea

   Our poetry generator, Sea and Spar Between, was fashioned based on Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Both in its original edition and in the edition expanded with comments—cut to fit the toolspun course—it exemplifies seven different ways to seek and grasp text: 1) by porting code; 2) by translating text strings and processes; 3) by contrasting the page/canvas experience via a link or URL with the experience of reading code via “View Source”; 4) by harpooning a particular stanza and using the browser’s capability for bookmarking; 5) by creating human-readable glosses of code for readers who may not identify as programmers; 6) by relating its depthless virtual space to the import of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés as interpreted by Quentin Meillassoux; 7) by foregrounding non-translatability as a characterizing sieve for natural languages.

   Arngeir Enåsen - 14.10.2013 - 15:35

8. 80 days: Breaking the Boundaries between Video Games and Literature

   “Moveable books” predate the printing press. Such experiments, including popular pop-up books of the nineteenth century, pushed against the boundaries of two-dimensional storytelling by crafting ways paper can mechanically foster motion and depth. iPad artists and game designers experiment with device-specific expressive capacities. I call moveable books designed for iPad “playable books” to invoke their ergodic filiation with videogames. In this presentation, I analyze one playable book, 80 Days (2014) by Inkle Studios, which won Time Magazine’s best game of the year and was named by The Telegraph a best novel of the year. Crossing the “border” between literature and videogames, 80 Days invites us to consider how popular modes of human/computer interaction in games shape new forms of reading in device-specific ways. I discuss how 80 Days’ gameful attributes adapt and contest Jules Verne’s 1873 novella Around the World in Eighty Days. The game gives the reader a physical experience of the original story’s chief mechanic, racing to beat the clock.

   Hannah Ackermans - 06.02.2017 - 15:59