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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
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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
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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
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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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Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext
This paper combines film and hypertext theory to try and 'prise open' some hypertextual questions that have been poorly framed. It will use incorporate short film examples. It is also hoped that along the way it might provide a useful way for thinking about how, or why, cinematic theory (of one sort or another) is becoming increasingly relevant in hypertext theory.
The recent history of hypertext and the image has produced a geneology that seems to have orientated itself around one of three major axes:
- poststructural literary theories
- post-ditigal celebrations of hypermedia 'promiscuity'
- post-digital appropriations of cinema into hypertext
The first category is what could be characterised as 'canonical' hypertext theory, and is represented by the early work of people like Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, George Landow and Richard Lanham. This work implicitly locates hypertext within existing literary traditions and relies upon the insights, and appropriation of, various softened forms of poststructural philosophy (Derrida, Deleuze, de Man, Iser, et al).
Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 17:33
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Omission impossible: the ergodics of time
1. Precautions
This paper concentrates on temporal aspects of ergodic narratives. In that respect it runs counter to the still strong spatial emphasis in hypertext theory. Sadly, this emphasis often goes hand in hand with complete ignorance of narratology and with favoring the narrative models and ideals of 19th century mainstream fiction as is the case for instance with Janet H Murray´s recent book Hamlet on the Holodeck, the past of narrative in cyberspace. In order to avoid such unimaginative mistakes certain precautions had to be made.
Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 17:39
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Space for writing: a sidelong glance at the history of immersive spatial hypertext
The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop founded by Robert Coover, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word. From 2002 onward writers have explored the possibilities of spatial hypertext in an immersive environment. What this paper proposes is an exploration of the history of the twin currents of hypertext and virtual reality that merged to create this particular form of expression, going back to the early hypertext systems developed at Brown University in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson/van Dam/et al and work in immersive virtual reality at University of Illinois’ CAVE in the early 1990s.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)
Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 14:42
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Remediating Stretchtext
Seventeen years have passed since Coover's inspiring call to defy the tyranny of the line through hypertext, "where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." The profound influence of that clarion shaped the development of electronic literature and attracted the scorn of critics — Sven Birkerts, Laura Miller, Michiko Kakutani – who villified hypertext in defense of the line. Overlooked in the controversy is the embarrassing fact that, even today, we know remarkably little about inventing, implanting, and cultivating the narrative line in its organic richness. We know sequence and rhizome well, but the contours of recursus, timeshift, and renewal remain, for most writers, an arcane craft.
How may we render a satisfactory account of complex events, fictitious or historical? We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print, and though we may occasionally use links or actemes to introduce variation in presentation or in story, it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot.
Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:04
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A Little Talk About Reproduction
Adaptation of an artist's talk about the transition from making artist's books and zines to using the computer to create art work. First presented in 1998, adapted various times, but presented here in its original web design.
J. R. Carpenter - 27.03.2013 - 12:43
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The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print: Material Strategies for Innovative Fiction in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s Vas
In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel Vas: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. Jackson’s book, alluding to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about a monster composed of various bodies while the book itself is also a monstrous text: a nonlinear patchwork of links across networks of words and images.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:12
