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The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary
In 1995 in the midst of the first widespread wave of digitization, the Modern Language Association issued a Statement on the Significance of Primary Records in order to assert the importance of retaining books and other physical artifacts even after they have been microfilmed or scanned for general consumption. "A primary record," the MLA told us then, "can appropriately be defined as a physical object produced or used at the particular past time that one is concerned with in a given instance" (27). Today, the conceit of a "primary record" can no longer be assumed to be coterminous with that of a "physical object." Electronic texts, files, feeds, and transmissions of all sorts are also now, indisputably, primary records. In the specific domain of the literary, a writer working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past, because the basic material evidence of their authorial activity — manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals — is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm.
Scott Rettberg - 03.07.2013 - 13:13
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"A Visual Sense is Born in the Fingertips": Towards a Digital Ekphrasis
In this article, the significance of the rhetorical and modern definitions of ekphrasis will be discussed through the lens of digital literature and art. It attempts to reinscribe the body in ekphrastic practice by adding touch to the abstracted visualism of the eye, and emphasize defining features of the ancient usage: orality, immediacy and tactility. What I call the digital ekphrasis with its emphasis on enargeia, its strong connections with the ancient definition, and on the bodily interaction with the work of art, conveys an aesthetic of tactility; digitalis=finger. By tracing and elucidating a historical trajectory that takes the concept of ekphrasis in the ancient culture as a starting point, the intention is not to reject the theories of the late 1900s, but through a reinterpretation of ekphrasis put forward an example of how digital perspectives on classic concepts could challenge or revise more or less taken-for-granted assumptions in the humanities. In this context ‘the digital’ is not only a phenomenon that could be tied to certain digital objects or used as a digital tool, but as an approach to history, with strong critical potential.
Scott Rettberg - 03.07.2013 - 14:03
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The Database, the Interface, and the Hypertext: A Reading of Strickland's V
The uniqueness of a new-media work is the mobility of its elements, present as binary code in computer, yet capable of being mobilized into action through user interaction or through programming. Many new media works make full use of multiple functionalities of current software applications, bringing to light in unique ways the effect a well-designed interface can have on the meaning-making process. How do we read these digital texts that mutate with the touch of a key? What is the role of the medium in the meaning-making process? Though I explore these questions, I also attempt to go beyond them to see if new media works can serve as a lens to reflect on the postmodern condition. Strickland's V: Losing L'una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse (2003), with a dual existence in print and the electronic medium, is especially useful for this exploration. It is self-reflexive as it comments on both reading and writing practices. It also lies at the intersection of multiple discourses of science, technology, philosophy, literature and art.
Scott Rettberg - 07.07.2013 - 20:17
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Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia
Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia
Scott Rettberg - 08.07.2013 - 11:53
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Discourse Timer: Towards Temporally Dynamic Texts
This paper studies the possibilities of temporally dynamic digital texts. Temporal dynamics may be either dependent on the reader's use of time, or independent of it. Using the categories defined in narratology as our starting point, we outline a list of simple functions that allow a very complex temporal manipulation of narrative digital texts. We will also describe a set of authoring tools, Discourse Timer, which is specifically designed to employ these functions.
(Source: Authors' abstract)
Scott Rettberg - 08.07.2013 - 15:54
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Curating Ambiguity: The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One
Interview about the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
Scott Rettberg - 08.07.2013 - 20:57
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Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation
Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be "texts," and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games' generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. In the last few years, games have gone from media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition.
Scott Rettberg - 09.07.2013 - 00:24
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Playing with Chance: On Random Generation in Playable Media and Electronic Literature
Randomly generated content poses problems for theories of digital art: such content is resistant to structural theories, which can only provide templates, and one cannot assume a shared text for close analysis. Instead of reaching fixed endings, such works also tend to be of indefinite length or at least suggest indefinite possible combinations. I argue that the impact of such works can instead be found in how one attempts to work through their underlying grammar, based on limits in the algorithms that generate the content — not those limits themselves, but how their outlines come to be known. Repetitively iterating through these works simultaneously upholds the chance nature of the epiphenomenal occurrences while also illustrating the sameness of the underlying algorithm over time, creating a future-oriented interpretive arc. I examine two works that play off of this technique in different ways: Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge, a poetry generator which uses random generation to distill the essence of its object’s possibility, and the action role-playing game Torchlight, which attempts to elevate chance beyond a mere gameplay mechanic and toward an ethic.
Scott Rettberg - 25.02.2014 - 17:37
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Theoretical Permutations for Reading Cybertexts
"Theoretical Permutations for Reading Cybertexts" is a review essay on Markku Eskelinen, Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory (London: Continuum, 2012), and C.T. Funkhouser, New Directions in Digital Poetry (London: Continuum, 2012). Both books engage new media works and practices in ways that are transformative of the conceptual apparatus and tools of literary theory and literary analysis. Moving between the deep analysis of the Funkhouser’s and the high-level abstraction of Eskelinen’s will give readers an exhilarating sense of just how new media is changing our aesthetical experience and our way of thinking and writing about the textual experience.
Scott Rettberg - 25.02.2014 - 17:44
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Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Blueberries by Susan Gibb
La obra de ficción digital titulada Blueberries (2009) de Susan Gibb, publicada en la ELO (Organización de literatura electrónica) invita al lector/a a viajar dentro de la mente de la protagonista para descubrir sus experiencias reales e imaginarias en las que se examinan las nociones de género, sexo, cuerpo e identidad de una mujer traumatizada. En este artículo se exploran los modos verbales y visuales en esta ficción digital breve siguiendo patrones semióticos así como se interpretan los estados psicológicos por medio de componentes poéticos y tecnológicos. Se llevará a cabo un estudio comparativo de las consecuencias del trauma en la protagonista de la historia con teorías psicoanalíticas de Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, así como las de las psicoanalistas feministas: Melanie Klein y Bracha Ettinger. Se estudiarán las reacciones de la protagonista ante la pérdida de la realidad, las alucinaciones y el complejo de Electra, así como el surgimiento de mecanismos de defensa y su uso de la creatividad artística como terapia curativa.
Maya Zalbidea - 03.06.2014 - 11:07
