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Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres
While literature in computer-based and networked media has so far been experienced by looking at the computer screen and by using keyboard and mouse, nowadays human-machine interactions are organized by considerably more complex interfaces. Consequently, this book focuses on literary processes in interactive installations, locative narratives and immersive environments, in which active engagement and bodily interaction is required from the reader to perceive the literary text. The contributions from internationally renowned scholars analyze how literary structures, interfaces and genres change, and how transitory aesthetic experiences can be documented, archived and edited.
Patricia Tomaszek - 17.09.2010 - 17:19
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Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path
In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field. In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading. In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print. (Source: Publisher's website.)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 24.02.2011 - 09:48
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Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe
This thesis is about the poetic edge of language and technology. It inter-relates both computational creation and poetic reception by analysing typographic animation softwares and meditating (speculatively) on a future malleable language that possesses the quality of being (and is implicitly perceived as) alive. As such it is a composite document: a philosophical and practice-based exploration of how computers are transforming literature, an ontological meditation on life and language, and a contribution to software studies. Digital poetry introduces animation, dimensionality and metadata into literary discourse. This necessitates new terminology; an acronym for Textual Audio-Visual Interactivity is proposed: Tavit. Tavits (malleable digital text) are tactile and responsive in ways that emulate living entities. They can possess dimensionality, memory, flocking, kinematics, surface reflectivity, collision detection, and responsiveness to touch, etc…. Life-like tactile tavits involve information that is not only semantic or syntactic, but also audible, imagistic and interactive.
Patricia Tomaszek - 16.03.2012 - 16:49
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New narrative pleasures? A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions
Thesis for the degree doctor artium. EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION: This dissertation aims to address – and answer – some of the questions surrounding the ways in which the interface of the digital computer (also known as the GUI) is impacting how we experience – read – GUI narrative fictions. In my view, questions such as these are of utmost importance if we are to appropriately understand how digital technology is affecting central realms of human existence, such as our experiences of the fictions that are created and displayed in an ever increasing variety of media materialities and technological platforms. The main research questions to be dealt with in the following revolve around processes typically taking place when we read, watch, listen, experience, interpret, are engaged in, and interact with, digital hypermedia narrative fictions – what I, for the sake of simplicity, call GUI fictions. In short, how do we read GUI fictions? How, and why, is this reading different from our reading of narrative fiction in print, or of reading narrative fictions on other screens, such as on TV or in a movie theater?
Jill Walker Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 21:28
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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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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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Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that "Atari" became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics.
Alvaro Seica - 19.02.2014 - 15:13
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The Interface Effect
Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable. Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards.
J. R. Carpenter - 24.03.2014 - 12:25
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Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound
In Reading Writing Interfaces, Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Indistinguishable From Magic | Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier
Chapter 2: From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly
Chapter 3: Typewriter Concrete Poetry and Activist Media Poetics
Chapter 4: The Fascicle as Process and Product
Chapter 5: Postscript | The Googlization of Literature
Works Cited
Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.05.2014 - 02:11
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Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice
Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field.
Scott Rettberg - 21.08.2014 - 12:04
