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1. Hors-Categorie: An Embodied, Affective Approach to Interactive Fiction

   The interactive fiction work "Hors-Categorie" stages a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France bicycle race. 

   In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various bodily choices—blood doping, shaving one's legs, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects that alter the game state. My effort in writing this work—concerning doping, cyclists, bodies, and ethics—is to think through the potentialities for engaging, designing, and theorizing new media with an emphasis on the embodied nature of affect. 

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:21

2. On Moving and Being Moved

   Mark Hansen (2004) argues that the privilege of literature as a technology of communication lies not in its imitation of the flexibility of technical media, but rather in its relationship with the body. This is apparent in the processes by which we acquire alphabetic literacy (how we learn to read and write) and in the reproduction of writing through processes of inscription, dissemination and reception. Newer media technologies are tapping into this relation of intimacy with increasingly greater speed and accuracy (Kittler, Levy). The conversion of text into language calls not only on the cognitive capacities of writers and readers, nor simply on the sense of sight alone. Rather, it mobilises these capacities along with those of all the other sensory modalities, including affect. Language itself is a supramodal synaesthetic medium, as various theories of metaphor make clear. This view of language makes electronic forms a privileged site for understanding the relationship between language, the visual, and the sonic as they are channelled and processed by the senses and temporarily organised in a series of ‘central assemblies'. We take this latter term from the work of Silvan S.

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:57

3. Code: Redact <Redact>

   The "Codework Project" is an NSF (National Science Foundation) funded exploration of codework, language, performance, and embodiment, in relation to philosophies of the analog and digital. The exploration has resulted in exciting work at a leading edge of digital media practice. The project is based at West Virginia University, and continues several years of collaboration between the art/writer Alan Sondheim, WVU's Center for Literary Computing (CLC), and the Virtual Environments Laboratory (computer sciences). The work employs a range of technologies to map and remap the 'obdurate real' of bodies into the dispersions and virtualities of the digital (and back again, into real/physical spaces). We're working with both analysis and experience of coding and codework in order to understand the natures of the real and virtual. How is the real read? How is the virtual? Is reading even appropriate here? These questions play out in a series of artworks (videos, films, performance, installation) and theoretical texts.

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 13:26

4. Subjective Boundaries: Shelley Jackson's Hypertexts and the Terrain of the Skin

   This presentation traces connections between Shelley Jackson's hypertext, "Patchwork Girl" (1995), and her more recent "Skin" Project (2003-present): a 2095 word short story published only once, tattooed word-by-word onto the bodies of applicants who have elected to become words, henceforth understood as embodying these words. Both works are interested in consequential relationships between living/dying bodies and texts: what it means to embody a text, what texts do to the body. Through avoiding traditional print media, both pieces also call into question the ways we read or write and the future of the book in the age of digital media.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:28