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1. E-literature and the Un-coded Model of Meaning: Towards an Ordinary Digital Philosophy

   As Ludwig Wittgenstein observes in Culture and Value, “a work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.” My paper uses the Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy (OLP) perspective to show how e-lit works often encourage a coalescence of various uses of the word ‘meaning’ in literary contexts. Beside the transitive meaning [what something means], the word “meaning” can be intransitively used in at least three different ways, denoting (1) value [how much something means], (2) a specific Gestalt [meaning as expressive of a specific structure], or (3) an (apparent) appropriateness [something as meaningful element]. The difficulty to neatly separate these uses during e-reading can be put in relation with the reconfiguration of our reading experience in terms of what Anna Munster calls inter-facialization.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:52

2. Against Information: Reading (in) the Electronic Waste Land

   Digital approaches to information processing foreground the unique interdependence between
   knowledge and its representation that has been characteristic of western epistemology for the past five centuries. The essential role representation formats play in modern knowledge construction is generally accepted in all disciplines, attributing, learning and intellectual progress less to one's direct engagement with actual phenomena, and more to notational structures that convey its formulation. In this paradigm, knowledge follows exclusively from its theoretical articulation, not the other way around.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:53

3. Shakespeare in Simlish? Responsive Systems and Literary Language

   There is a moment that can happen when reading/playing an interactive fiction. The system just presented some text, perhaps quite engaging or even beautiful. And then one tries to reply, using some of the same language, only to receive an error. The underlying system doesn't can't hear the language with which it speaks. The language it displays is written ahead of time, while the language it receives must be parsed and acted upon at runtime.

   There is something uneasy about this disjuncture, and one response is to try to avoid all such problems. Will Wright's Sims speak only in gibberish sounds and visual icons, so that the surface representation of language matches the very simple internal representation of what they can discuss. Chris Crawford currently plans for his new storytelling system to avoid the construction of English-like sentences found in Storytron — instead moving to an icon language intended to help players better understand the internal representations (much more complex than those in The Sims) on which his story system will operate.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:55

4. Quantum Authoring for "Prom Week": What We Learned Writing Six Thousand Lines of Procedurally-Driven Dialogue

   "Prom Week" is an innovative new social simulation game from the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. Unlike other social games like The Sims, Prom Week's goal (as with its spiritual and technological predecessor, Façade) is to merge rich character specificity with a highly dynamic story space: a playable system with a coherent narrative. When I was brought on board as the lead author a year before release, I had no idea the scale of work I was getting myself into: overseeing a team of (at times) eight writers to create over eight hundred hand-authored scenes tightly integrated with pre- and post-conditions, inline variation, and animation choreography. Each scene had to be specific enough to be narratively satisfying but broad enough to cover as wide a possibility space as possible, putting severe limitations on how dialogue could be written.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:58

5. Adventures in Transition: Jason Nelson’s Scary Journey from Flash to J-Code and Desk to Hand

   Perhaps the most disturbing and exciting periods of a digital poet’s creative practice is the transitional period between using one technology and learning another. For the past eight years I’ve been predominately a user of Adobe Flash. I say user, because in many ways
   the software is a drug, carving response and reward pathways into the cranium fibers. My creations have been the beneficiary of a tool ideal for multi-layered/dimensional and interactive artworks viewable on all major platforms. However, it is this platform issue and Adobe’s losing
   position in its battle with the Tyrant Apple that is quickly making Flash obsolete, unplayable in the fastest growing segment of electronic devices, tablets and phones. This very well might turn around and Flash might save itself. But suffice it to say, the net/portable creative ndustries have left Flash to fend for itself.
   (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:59

6. Argot, Ogre, OK!

   All of the prior remixes of Nick Montfort's _Taroko Gorge_ rewrote the text, while leaving Nick's code unchanged or almost so. I thought that was a shame. I also thought it was an opportunity! Since they all essentially consisted of word-lists plugged into a schema, I was able to remix them together on two axes at the same time:

   * Combining the word-lists of any two poems;
   * Mutating the stanza schema.

   I also took the opportunity to randomize the color schemes of the pages. (But not the font choices or the background imagery that some of the poems indulged in. Optima for everybody, I'm afraid.)

   Nick's original poem generates a constant ABBA-C pattern, with some extra B's thrown in. This page essentially invents a new pattern (for example A-, or BC-BA, or CCC, or so on) for each block. The code for the pattern is on the left, and the generated output is on the right.

   To answer the obvious question: Yes, this page really does execute the code that's displayed in the left column, and it really does generate the text in the right column.

   Scott Rettberg - 24.06.2012 - 15:09

7. Special America

   In 2008, in Providence, RI, a strange melancholy pervaded us to which we hesitated to give the grave and beautiful name of SPECIAL AMERICA. It began amorphously. Badges left in a hallway, flash rallies alongside the insinuations of handbill slogans, an ambiguous slideshow. Over the years, SPECIAL AMERICA appeared untroubled, yet in solitude we penned personal, soul-bearing texts, melancholy slogans that made us weep whilst inducing within us a perverse sense of comfort. Composed in corporate network space, our glum poesy set the tone for a new tale of longing and loneliness. In the past, the idea of calling this melancholy SPECIAL AMERICA always appealed to us; now we are almost ashamed of its complete egoism.

   Scott Rettberg - 27.06.2012 - 10:19

8. Last Words

   The complete title for this multimedia poem is “Last Words (Ordinary People Speak at the Moment of Death / In or Around the New York City Area)” and it is both descriptive of the poem’s theme and suggestive of a key strategy. Organized around eight characters’ final words and the contexts in which those words were uttered, each one is represented by a brief “slice of death” narrative, and a poetic voice from beyond that provides an ironic counterpoint, full of Bigelow’s characteristic darkly understated humor. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Scott Rettberg - 16.10.2012 - 15:02

9. ELO: Theory, Practice, and Activism

   One of several early career participants at the Electronic Literature Organization’s Summer 2012 “Futures” panel, Claire Donato comes down on the side of non-commercial, non-entrepreneurial, educational approaches to an emerging digital literary practice.

   clairedonato - 27.06.2014 - 21:16

10. Convergent Devices, Dissonant Genres: Tracking the “Future” of Electronic Literature on the iPad

    Anastasia Salter’s “Convergent Devices, Dissonant Genres” assesses the implications of the iPad for the state of literature. Looking at “traditional” approaches that re-mediate print for digital devices, “enhanced” approaches which add “special features” to extant texts and forms, pre-tablet eliterature re-experienced in the new environment, and finally the creation of original apps with literary qualities, Salter’s work is a critical document of the impact a single interface can have on the development of literary culture in the 21st Century. (Source: Author's Abstract)

    Anders Gaard - 25.08.2016 - 15:38

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