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  1. Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age

    29 October 1999 Keynote Address, Digital Arts and Culture Atlanta, Georgia (This speech was also published in Feed in 2000.) Coover's DAC Keynote address discussed the transition from the "golden age" of narrative-driven, text-dominated hypertext fiction, mainly produced in Storyspace, to an era dominated by the practices and attention spans of the World Wide Web, and a new focus on the image.

    Scott Rettberg - 25.03.2011 - 16:18

  2. Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: Rethinking Signification in New Media

    Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well.

    Scott Rettberg - 25.03.2011 - 21:11

  3. Literary Programming (In the Age of Digital Transliteration)

    This paper is proposed as the second part of an essay, the first part of which was presented at DAC'98, having the overall title 'Performances of Writing in the Age of Digital Transliteration'. Part one of this essay raised questions -- contextualized by reference to Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler, amongst others -- concerning the intrinsically digital characteristics of text, along with certain implications of these characteristics (and what they have entailed, specifically and especially: the Net) for traditional literary culture, for the latter's critique, and for textual, especially artistic textual practices.

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 01:23

  4. XpoMOO: Ambient Thresholds, Random Art

    XpoMOO: Ambient Thresholds, Random Art

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 12:01

  5. Three-Dimensional Dementia: Hypertext Fiction and the Aesthetics of Forgetting

    Hypertext (the non-sequential linking of text(s) and images) was first envisioned by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in its prehistory as an associational, archival storage system suitable for classifying and sorting vast quantities of information. But where library databases, technical manuals and other knowledge-based hypertexts still fulfill this function, literary hypertext overturns this proposed usage, celebrating both information overload and forgetfulness as the desired end of a reading. Promoting disassociation and an awareness of the spatio-temporal dimensions of its environment, hypertext fiction uses the aesthetics of its three-dimensional interface and structure to frustrate memory and to engender a sensory and emotional response in the reader. Focusing on M.D. Coverley's multimedia hypertext Califia, I will investigate how the aesthetics of the hypertext form become an engine of forgetfulness that drives her text through its explorations of lost memories, including the ravages of Alzheimer's, unofficial histories, secrets, missing pieces and the quest for hidden treasure.

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 12:26

  6. Visualizing Cultures in the Age of Digital Media

    "Visualizing Cultures In The Age Of Digital Media" is a hypertextual interactive work designed for DVD, that explores the ways media shape our understanding of cultural places and events. The work incorporates original material on West African performances and events recorded in Ghana as well as clips from a number of early and exemplary documentaries. The project includes an analysis of theories of montage, tropes, visual cognition, and cultural practices within the context of hypermedia and the new technology, bridging the fields of visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, visual anthropology and communication. It suggests new tools and methods of representation available to students, scholars and filmmakers and raises questions about the relationship of language to text and theory to practice in the arts of digital representation.

    (Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 12:32

  7. Present, tense, ordinary, fiction comma dot calm

    Present, tense, ordinary, fiction comma dot calm

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:01

  8. Cybertext Narratology

    "Cybertext Narratology" combines Espen Aarseth's textonomy and typology of cybertexts to three advanced models of narrativity: narratology (Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince), postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale), and the combinatorial and procedural writing(s) of OuLiPo (Marcel Benabou, Jacques Roubaud).

    The basic and most important distinctions, categories and concepts derived from these approaches are systematically examined, expanded and rewritten in order to map out and include narrative possibilities and practices inherent to and emerged with literary cybertexts and digital textuality in general. The matters of tense, mood and voice are closely studied as well as those of trans- textuality, audibility, reliability and narrative situation.

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:19

  9. Ergodic Characters

    While much of the attention towards ergodic fiction has been focusing on plot (either dynamic or multiple-path), its characters still lack complexity and expressiveness. In this paper we will explore two different techniques to face this problem.

    One major issue in videogames is the lack of personality in user-controlled characters. In other words, the author of a videogame cannot give a deep personality to her character, because the user will be the one who will control it. For example, you cannot design a melancholic, non-violent character, if there is a knife available in the environment. Many users would just take the knife and start a Doom-like game, turning the originally pacifist character into a serial killer. The designer can obviously prevent the user from manipulating harmful objects. However, through this arbitrary rule, users will see their freedom limited. This would also diminish the environment's coherence: why some objects can be manipulated and other cannot?

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:24

  10. Intervals and Links: The Indeterminancy of a Link's Possible Future

    This paper proposes that link node hypertext can be conceived of as a postcinematic discourse and that a major mechanism of this geneology is available through the comparison of the hypertext link to the cinematic edit. I wish to consider the hypertext link from the point of view of Deleuze's cinematic 'sensory motor schema' where the link can be considered as analogous to Bergson's zone of indetermination between perception and reaction. This work builds upon recent theoretical work that has attempted to define hypertext as a temporal or cinematic medium.

    Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:32

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