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Executable Landscapes: Speculative Platforms for Ecological E-Literature
The contemporary digital environment is made possible through a matrix of behemoth infrastructures that traverse the orbital, atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial domains. These infrastructures manifest not only in the narrowly technical sense, but encompass the manufacturing chains, regulatory interfaces, and geopolitical contexts that enable (or forestall) the development, deployment, and maintenance of digital systems at a global scale.
Underpinning all these aspects are the flows of energy and materials constituting the liveable Earthly ecology. The latter comprises the ultimate baseline ‘platform’ on which specific digital platforms, as more commonly expressed, are enabled—but which, being so defined, can obscure these far larger structures and processes in which they are embedded.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:09
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On the Platform’s Ruins: Practicing a Poetics of Obsolescence
Visual artists, writers, and other cultural producers have long leveraged networked technologies to establish platforms that circulate cultural products in participatory contexts intentionally distinct from cultural institutions. As technologies change over time—including deprecated plug-ins, changes to HTML, and linkrot—these platforms fall into various states of decay. In this paper, I examine an example of a platform, the Net Art Latino Database (1999-2004), an effort to document net-based artworks vulnerable to obsolescence that overall stands as a precarious monument to an earlier era of digital culture. As the platform slowly falls out of joint with current web technologies, the Database illustrates practices of cultural production that respond to the decay of the very technologies being used.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:13
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Platform Collaboration, Creativity and Determinism in Virtual Reality (VR): An artist paper the making of The Key To Time, a work for VR, domes and CAVEs.
Addressing conference themes of platform utopias, determinisms, identities, collaborations and modes, this conversational presentation discusses ways that concepts of time, space and narrative are expanded in The Key To Time https://unknownterritories.org/keytotime/. The Key To Time is a surreal and lyrical work for immersive, cinematic art experiences such as domes and 360 degree cinemas as well as for individual viewing on head-mounted virtual reality devices. Bridging 1920's silent film and virtual reality, the surface story draws viewers into a playful exploration of genre, identity and desire. In doing so, the work unravels narrative underpinnings of myths, genres, and technological constructs of time.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:17
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Art of the Pan-Opt-in-a-Con: FarmVille and the Gamification of the Digital Landscape [Original: The Tyranny of Completion; Or, How Electronic Art Can Engage the Firehose]
Toward the end of 2020, one of the most culturally impactful web games of all time shut down—at least, the original, Flash-based version did. FarmVille, by social game studio Zynga, was not outstanding for its gameplay mechanics nor for its imaginative qualities. In fact, social games like Farmville are defined by game designer and scholar Ian Bogost as “games you don’t have to play.” Rather, FarmVille was special because it tapped into 2009-era Facebook’s lax user-generated notification system, and its developers succeeded in creating a user-operated spam cannon disguised as a game. What made FarmVille a cultural phenomenon is best represented by the metanarrative about how it manufactured and sold compulsive behavior to a new audience. By targeting ludic luddites with its folksy facade and “freemium” business model, FarmVille ushered in a new era of games that encouraged users to exchange money for in-game effects.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:20
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American Utopia - Analyzing the Far-Right politics of BioShock: Infinite and Trump's America
Video games are mirrors to our contemporary reality that reflect our society's philosophies, rhetoric, and more. Published in 2013, BioShock: Infinite offered a glimpse into the reality of a Utopian America ruled by conservative far-right identity politics. In 2016, Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States brought to the forefront of America what is often ignored. In this essay, I argue what Utopia is to the far-right by analyzing the society of Columbia, the use of media in the state, and more. Overall, I argue that politics and ideas of Utopia can be simulated into video games to understand far-right narratives of Trumpian politics better.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:24
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The Generated Word: Metonymic, Generic and Operationalist
The formal patterns of the codex book remain evident in literary forms no longer bound by the material efficiencies of the paper platform. For some works, like Judd Nelson's "The Jew's Daughter" or Jason Nelson's "Evidence of Everything Exploding," the printed page becomes a platform for the mutability of the screen, while others like Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's _Between Page and Screen_ or Steve Tomosula's _VAS: An Opera in Flatland_ explore the tension between the printed and the projected word.
Still other electronic works embrace the physical material of a bound, published book as their final form,, and in this paper, I propose a framework for considering the differences among computer-generated books relative to their characteristics and apparent purposes. By articulating three broad genres, I attempt to draw in more diverse networks of influence that bear on the present moment.Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:27
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Digital Narrative and Temporality
We sometimes hear it said that our relationship with time has been altered. In companies and administrations, the adoption of New Management strategies means that employees feel themselves subjected to ever increasing urgency and stress. The “FOMO Syndrome,” the anxiety generated by our fear of missing out on something in a world in which we are exposed to a constant flow of information and access to other people’s narratives (or at least to their stories), is a phenomenon inherently linked to the digital environment. The Covid-19 crisis has no doubt accentuated this tendency, with its injunction to stay increasingly connected (particularly to social media and video conferencing platforms), and to immediately respond to digital notifications and sollicitations on a 24/7 basis.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:32
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Transformative Reading and Writing Synthetic Archives with Language Models
This paper reflects on Electronic Literature projects I created between 2017 and 2020 through interrogating how each project collaborates with an increasingly complex non-human component. Riffing off of Donna Haraway's concept of "significant otherness" and making kin, I speculate on the differences in the significance of the otherness that is engaged with in projects using methods based on combinatorics/chance, statistical models, and vector semantics (contemporary neural-network based language models like GPT-2). While recognizing that each approach involves a reduction in human agency, this reflective paper focuses on the increasing complexity to which this agency is relinquished and how to deal with presenting this relationship between human and non-human actors. Culminating in a series of projects using OpenAI's GPT-2, the need for a self-reflexive "transformative reading interface" is introduced as a concrete instantiation of Katherine Hayles' concept of a "technotext." A transformative reading interface links a corpus of text to text generated by a language model based on that corpus.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:37
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A narrative approach to ambient literature: embodied spoken monologue and enhanced interactional metalepsis
This paper will focus on “ambient literature” (Abba, Dovey, Pullinger 2020) as a kind of tradition-inspired literature of the future. Thus I will propose to look critically at traditional theoretical concepts and devices and analyse how apply them to characterise and realise such reading experiences. My starting point will be enhancing the concept of interactional metalepsis (Bell 2016 or Bell, Ensslin and Rustad 2014), then I will go for proposing the concept of “embedded dramatic monologue”, a form of narration built upon tradition and useful in creating immersive ambient reading experiences.
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:04
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Distributed Memories: CompuServe’s Gamer’s Forum and the Halcyon Days of the Adventure Game Toolkit
This paper shares the story of the rise and fall of The Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), a Pascal-based design system written in 1987 by David Malmberg, based on Mark J. Welch's 1985 Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS). It was the leading platform for parser-based interactive fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Text Adventure Development System (TADS) as its upstart competitor. The use of these early (pre-Graham Nelson’s Inform 6) parser-based interactive fiction platforms was supported by an annual AGT contest, and a design community that stayed in touch through BBS-communities, the largest of which was Compuserve’s Gamer’s Forum. Malmberg ceased to support AGT in 1992, (the final release was AGT 1.7) but the contest continued until 1994. The competition was rebranded under new management, and with an expanded community and continued on as the Interactive Fiction Competition, (which has been run since 2016 by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation).
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:22
