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See Spot Link. Link, Spot, Link: How to read and appreciate electronic literature (Workshop)
Abstract
What is the difference between reading on screen and reading electronic literature? Between an e-book and an e-lit piece? Electronic literature, or eliterature, uses computer technology as an integral part of the work to convey meaning. Find out about the literary art of links, images, sounds, and motions. Make connections between images and text, between sounds and words, between motions and implications. Uncover an exciting new world where writers expand beyond the page and embrace the screen with an array of new literary techniques.Agenda
This workshop will cover 4 basic elements of electronic literature: links, imagery, motion, and sound. For each element, we will read a portion of works to see these elements in action, take part in an exercise to explore writing using these elements, and discuss techniques to recognize and understand these elements.Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 15:41
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Logging In
Sandy Baldwin's presentation theorizes the rhythms and flows of the logging field as cognitive activities of the virtual subject. He describes a psychoanalytics and poetics of login, first in the protocols of unix .cshrc and .login files, as well as machine logs. These primary site of net inscription intensify and wane. They must be fed: you must login. The iterative inscription of the subject deepens the signifiers of login into buccal organs of incorporation. The second part of his paper focuses on Captcha software, which combines repeated Turing tests with enormous amounts of text production, all put to work in the background as the largest distributed OCR project in the world. Finally, he examines artists using login to produce work, with examples from Alan Sondheim, Noemata, and Mouchette.
(Author's abstract from the 2008 ELO Conference)
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:09
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I like IRC & SMS
Rita Raley's presentation focuses on the use of IRC and SMS in multimedia installations, net-based projects, and street performances. Projects discussed will likely include "Listening Post" (Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin), "RE:Positioning Fear" (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer), "Urban Scrawl" (Sushma Madan and Neil Noakes), "TXTual Healing" (Paul Notzold), and "Simple Text" (Family Filter). While the chat messages used in "Listening Post" are datamined rather than solicited, the other projects are instances of user-driven media. One clear tension to explore, then, will be that between surveillance and participatory culture. Other themes and issues will include public vs. private space, locative media, and electronic English.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:12
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Hors-Categorie: An Embodied, Affective Approach to Interactive Fiction
The interactive fiction work "Hors-Categorie" stages a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France bicycle race.
In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various bodily choices—blood doping, shaving one's legs, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects that alter the game state. My effort in writing this work—concerning doping, cyclists, bodies, and ethics—is to think through the potentialities for engaging, designing, and theorizing new media with an emphasis on the embodied nature of affect.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:21
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Hors Catégorie
Hors Catégorie is an interactive fiction by Chris Calabro and David Benin developed in 2007.
It is possible to play it on almost every system, even on Smartphone.
The used Software is a z-machine Interpreter, which is a game’s requirement as the player needs it in order to emulate an Infocom machine.
It takes place entirely in a single hotel room, with several subrooms. Unlike many adventure-like interactive fictions, location, possessions, and strength are not the main obstacles of this game, but rather player knowledge and moral choices. The point is to explore the inner conflict of the protagonist and shape his character. This is why the typical presence of interactive fictions’ obstacles makes Hors Catégorie innovative and different because here they are the player moral choices.
The title of the game comes from the 'out of category' classification of difficult climbs in the Tour de France, where the game is set. The protagonist is a rider in the Tour, just waking, getting ready to take on the day's current stage.
How to play:
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:24
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Cavewriting: Spatial Hypertext Authoring System
In experimental hypertext fiction workshops at Brown University, undergraduate writers work with programmers to create interactive literary experiences in immersive virtual reality. To involve the writer more directly in the process of implementation, we have created CaveWriting: spatial hypertext authoring system. Authors can manipulate a graphical front-end to position text, multimedia, and 3D models within virtual space, apply special effects, and create hyperlinks which initiate theatrical events. The result can be previewed at any time inside a desktop window. This talk will cover the past and present of cavewriting at Brown and its future at UIUC, UCSD, and beyond.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:36
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Meta Discourse: An Investigation into Possibilities of Meta-Fictions in the 21st Century
The old rites of literature are quickly starting to come to a head, and as we move through the 21st century we will find ourselves staring into new modes of expression of literary concepts that we have known only on the printed page for centuries prior. Meta-fiction not only allows for new ways of approaching a narrative but also new ways of approaching literature in general, including electronic literature. Questioning the boundaries between the reader and the writer, the audience and the performer, the characters in the text and the ones reading it, one might say that meta-fiction was one of the first forms of hypertext mediums in which the reader was encouraged to draw on outside influences and information to arrive at the heart of the text. This understanding of meta-fiction, then, makes it an appropriate place to begin an analysis of new modes of discourse and the variability of the messages presented. In such a textually-conscious style of writing, how does the narrative alter according to the mode of presentation while still retaining a questioning and awareness of the literary roots?
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:39
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Hypermediating the Game Interface: Grand Theft Auto and the Alienation Effect
One of the most controversial computer games in recent years has been "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" (Rockstar Games 2004). Much of the controversy surrounding the game (including the disparaging critiques of the likes of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) centered around the relationship between the game's simulation of violence, sex, and racial stereotypes and the potential for this game interface to affect the real-world actions of its players. Though "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" is often considered to simply be a gang-violence simulator, this paper will argue that the relationship between the digital interface and the potentially-affected material space can be altered in such a way as to create a sense of distanciation. Drawing from Bertolt Brecht's theory of the Alienation Effect (which is echoed in Bolter and Grusin's theory of the hypermediated interface), I will demonstrate how the customization possible in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" provides a framework for distanciation and socio-political critique essential to Brecht's theory.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:44
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Blending the Crossword with the Narrative: An Examination of the Storygame
Interactive narrative cannot be understood as only literature or as only game, nor even as a combative relationship between the two. Narrative-oriented "games" are neither novel nor movie, but they are likewise significantly different beasts than conventional, competitive games. They rather draw elements from both. We will come to terms with the concept of the storygame by examining the historical role of games in stories and stories in games to come to understand how the two forms combined into the modern storygame, focusing on the key traits of interactivity and immersion.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:47
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On Moving and Being Moved
Mark Hansen (2004) argues that the privilege of literature as a technology of communication lies not in its imitation of the flexibility of technical media, but rather in its relationship with the body. This is apparent in the processes by which we acquire alphabetic literacy (how we learn to read and write) and in the reproduction of writing through processes of inscription, dissemination and reception. Newer media technologies are tapping into this relation of intimacy with increasingly greater speed and accuracy (Kittler, Levy). The conversion of text into language calls not only on the cognitive capacities of writers and readers, nor simply on the sense of sight alone. Rather, it mobilises these capacities along with those of all the other sensory modalities, including affect. Language itself is a supramodal synaesthetic medium, as various theories of metaphor make clear. This view of language makes electronic forms a privileged site for understanding the relationship between language, the visual, and the sonic as they are channelled and processed by the senses and temporarily organised in a series of ‘central assemblies'. We take this latter term from the work of Silvan S.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:57
