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Infinite Interfaces and Intimate Expressions: Hand-Held Mobile Devices and New Reflective Writing Spaces
In my presentation I will examine hand-held mobile interfaces and the complex possibilities they provide for self-reflective digital writing. As technological innovation has minimized the writing space and increased its portability, the interface has been radically altered. With the keyboard reduced to fingertip control and the screen transformed to a compact-sized mirror, intimacy between user and device is increased, along with the infinitesimal possibilities for personal production afforded when writing goes on the move. With reference to location-based mobile "writing," I will explore this new form of self-reflective digital expression and theorize models for engaging this new personal interface.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 23:07
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Blurring of Public and Private Space in New Media Art
This paper seeks to address the discourse of the blurring of public and private space in new media art, specifically in Mouchette.org and Life Sharing by Eva and Franco Matteos. Both pieces utilize an understanding of the social systems inherent in new media art as a set of relations that require the user to complete. This system, dependant upon the relations that the user, the artist and the artwork creates a discourse on the concept of public and private space that is predicated on the notions of interactivity.
(Source: Author's abstract from ELO 2008 Conference site)
Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 23:11
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Digital Modernism
A prominent strategy in some works of contemporary electronic literature is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call "digital modernism." This paper examines digital modernism as a strategy relevant to rethinking not only the origins of electronic literature but the ways in which we discuss and understand the field of electronic literature in general. I examine Bob Brown's Readies machine (circa 1930), an avant-garde attempt to speed up text and thus transform literature and reading practices, in relation to works of electronic literature by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and William Poundstone. These contemporary works employ Flash to create a flashing aesthetic that resonates with Brown's goals for the Readies. Situating electronic literature within this forgotten but distinctly literary history of machine-based textual experimentation exposes the importance of reading today's new, new media literature in relation to the a movement from the early decades of the twentieth century which sought to "make it new" in the new media of its time.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 23:29
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Original Chat: Exploring the Origins of the Turing Test
The chatbot, or conversational agent, is a new media art object that has been around since Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), which is included in ELO's directory of e-lit. These programs have since been adapted for electronic narratives and interactive dramas. Instigating this area of research, Alan Turing's thought experiment/dare, the Turing Test (1950), claimed that computers would soon be able to perform conversational exchange convincingly as humans. While many use the Turing Test to contextualize a discussion about chatbots, few have examined the origins of the Turing Test itself. Crossing the history of technology in this vision of a chatbot legacy, I will outline one new theory of the origins of the Turing Test, suggesting a lineage from the military-industrial complex that helps us to re-examine our interaction with artificial agents in electronic literature from IF works such as Emily Short's "Galatea" to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' "Facade."
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 10:45
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Implied Code as Mental Geography
The "implied code" is a mental model of the operational logic of an interactive work. We might describe this as a kind of interior map in the mind of the interactive user, a private cartography created while wandering the territory of the code. In hypertext fiction, representations of the corpus of the text through "maps" (e.g. a garden, quilt, or body) have played with the disjunction between the map and the territory of node-link navigation. In interactive fiction (IF), map-making both an authoring and user engagement strategy is a tradition that stretches back to the foundation of the genre in 1970s speleunking. Later, paratextual maps of various kinds were often bundled with 1980s corporate works. The tensions between these authorial, descriptive maps and user-created, experiential maps (both mental and physical) are still explored in today's contemporary IF. Like the implied human in Turing's test, these implied psychogeographic landscapes are often not what they appear, however this artifice is one fundamental aspect of their art electronic literature.
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 10:47
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Brautigan Bibliography and Archive: Digitizing a Literary Life
I discuss the digitization of the literary life of author Richard Brautigan, a novelist, poet, and short story writer often cited as the writer to best capture the zeitgeist of the counterculture movement in San Francisco during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This digitization creates not only an archive, but a literary bio-bibliography as well, one that is written not from the perspective of an individual author or archivist (myself), but rather as an upshot of heretofore unachievable associations and interconnections of multiple kinds and sources of information (biographical, bibliographical, historical, ethnographical). The result is a 3-D knowledge base, a "data hive" with a unique and individual electronic literary presence
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:07
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Musical Time with Kinetic Type
Musical Time with Kinetic Type
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:10
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From Audio Black to Artful Noises: Looking at Sound in Electronic Literature
The interplay between sound and image was a vexed issue for practioners and critics of the 20th century art screen art. As the story goes, some argued for a "complex interaction of sound with image" (Kahn 142) others for the political necessity of non-synchronized sound. Early on, "the dream" of "correlating sound and image" through localization (Altman) to deploy sound so as "to reinforce the reality effect" and to "induce[...] spectators to center their gaze." (Polet). There is a sense of disappointment in this trajectory, from the "talkie"to Dolby Surround, by which the sound track comes to maintenance of an illusionistic 3-dimensional visual space.
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:36
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Digging For The Roots Of Interactive Storytelling
This paper is a writer's reflections on the pre-computer origins of interactive narrative. It seeks out forms of human expression dating back to prehistory that can viewed as the precursors of contemporary interactive storytelling and contemplates what can be learned from these forms that can be applied to contemporary works of interactive storytelling. The examined forms include the participatory myth-based dramas of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks; coming of age rituals in traditional societies; games that blend spiritual beliefs and athleticism; and various Judeo-Christian and pagan religious practices.
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:46
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Scott McCloud's The Right Number: Gaining Currency with Multimedia Technology and Digital Publishing in the Web Comics Revolution
Scott McCloud has been at the forefront of a movement to redefine comics on the Web. Though himself originally a print comics artist, McCloud has advocated moving away from print paradigms and publishing venues toward the "infinite canvas" he envisions on the World Wide Web. In advocating for digital publishing and interactive art, McCloud, much like Peter Greenaway on new media, believes the visual potential of comics can be radically developed, perhaps moving away from traditional print conventions, such as linear formats linked to the sequential and opaque page; static word/image art; or spatial and temporal coordinates dictated by the format and materiality of the graphic novel or comic book. But the radical shift to digital media has also meant reconsidering the means of publication, distribution, and compensation outside of the print industry.
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:52
