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Authorship and agency in networked environments
This text discusses how our understanding of authorship has evolved over the past few decades and how this process is now being effected by developments in network and communications technologies. Situating the discussion in relation to post-structuralist theory, Actor Network Theory and the anthropological work of James Leach the impact of network technologies are considered, with particular attention to the emergence of distributed forms of authorship and models of expanded agency. The work of two artists who engage network and communications technologies in distinct ways is discussed in order to evoke perspectives on emergent forms of authorship and agency. The work of Mez Breeze is considered as evidencing a shift in authorship from the human author to an agency of computability embedded in the formal structures of the language employed in the work, suggesting that the text operates as an automatic generative system that constructs the reader as computational interpreter.
Simon Biggs - 21.09.2010 - 11:04
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The Creative Imperative
Expanded concepts of agency permit us to question what or who can be an active participant in creative activity, allowing us to revisit the debate on authorship. We can ask whether creativity might be regarded as a form of social interaction. How might we understand creativity as the interaction of people and things rather than as an outcome of action?
Whilst creativity is often perceived as the product of the individual artist, or creative ensemble, it can also be considered an emergent phenomenon of communities, driving change and facilitating individual or group creativity. Creativity may be regarded as a performative activity released when engaged through and by a community and thus understood as a process of interaction.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.09.2011 - 16:34
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At the Time of Writing: Digital Media, Gesture and Handwriting
This paper examines the way literary practice in digital media illuminates traditional literary processes that otherwise remain unremarked, and conversely, what the literary concept of ‘address’ might contribute to an understanding of the way digital media are reinventing literary agency. It explores handwriting as an embodied praxis linking thought with corporeality through the medium of gesture, and its transformations in text-based new media art. Handwriting (and especially signatures) has long been thought to make personality traits manifest. Its expressive gestural and kinematic aspect can be illuminated by Werner’s theory of physiognomic perception in which two-dimensional diagrams are shown as consistently corresponding to and eliciting a small number of categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) in viewers. Diane Gromala’s ‘Biomorphic Typography’ (2000 onwards) in which the user’s keystrokes generate biofeedback input which combines with the behaviours assigned to typography to animate text in the present time of writing draws on these conventions and complicates them in the process.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 15:32
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Creativity as a Social Relation?
Social science in general and anthropology in particular has long attended to core concerns with the structure and form of societies, and with the constant interplay of individual and collective elements. These concerns are obvious: how we understand the emergence and form of human worlds necessitates an approach to creative agency alongside the conditions under which that agency is exercised. As Marx famously wrote in 1852, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. But recent scholarship in the field of anthropology has taken theorising beyond the familiar impasses of structure and agency through an emphasis on practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977) and on to the embodied and improvisational nature of knowledge and social action (e.g. Ingold 2000, Hallam & Ingold 2007). Creativity is central here. But creativity conceived not as individual genius (an approach that generates questions about how the individual and the collective collide; one clearly linked to other assumptions Westerners make about the bounded-ness of individual minds, and the proprietary nature of the self), but creativity as an emergent (and necessary) aspect of social relations.
Elisabeth Nesheim - 27.08.2012 - 13:33
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Narration, Intrigue, and Reader Positioning in Electronic Narratives
Argues that we still have very poor language for discussing the place of the reader in electronic—or computer-mediated—narratives, and that little work has been done to evaluate the relevance of core narratological concepts like narrator, narratee, and implied reader as tools to describe the process of reader positioning in electronic narratives. The author sees Aarseth's analysis of interactive fiction in terms of an intrigue, with an intriguee and an intrigant as one of the most sophisticated analyses of the reader's position in electronic writing, and extends this model.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 16.09.2012 - 20:16
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Avatars Sharing Agency: Metaphor in Interactive Narrative Environments
This paper considers how the avatar focuses the metaphor of interactivity in video games and interactive narrative environments. It argues that, despite serving as the on-screen representation of user input, the avatar has some independent agency (whether through design or representational practice) that influences its behavior. Thus, rather than merely relying upon it as her transparent stand-in, the player must negotiate with the avatar to achieve her goals. The negotiation serves to dramatize interactivity as an imperfect conduit between the textual and extra-textual worlds. While not so evident in video games, this imperfection sustains the metaphor of interactivity, deepening expressivity in interactive narrative environments.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 16:32
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Narrating Artificial Daydreams, Memories, Reveries: Toward Scalable Intentionality in Expressive Artificial Intelligence Practice
Literary fiction works are often driven by the emotions and personalities of their characters. In this project we explore such subjective human dimensions through a text-based computational narrative work centered on the notions of daydreams, memories, brief reveries – hallmarks of literature invoking stream-of-consciousness techniques. As central to our work, we present the novel notion of "scales of intentionality," techniques allowing user interaction to vary the narration of a character's intentionality and agency within a story world. This notion allows our work to exist simultaneously as a critical technical practice and an expressive cultural production.
(Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:54
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Bodies in Code
"Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings.
Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual."
(Source: Publisher website)
Elisabeth Nesheim - 15.05.2013 - 12:18
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A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games
Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience (Laurel 1986; Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall, and Reilly 1992; Blumberg 1996, Hayes-Roth, van Gent, and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed that combines plot and character into a full-fledged dramatic experience. The game industry has been producing plot-based interactive experiences (adventure games) since the beginning of the industry, but only a few of them (such as The Last Express) begin to approach the status of interactive drama. Part of the difficulty in achieving interactive drama is due to the lack of a theoretical framework guiding the exploration of the technological and design issues surrounding interactive drama. This paper proposes a theory of interactive drama based on Aristotle's dramatic theory, but modified to address the interactivity added by player agency.
Scott Rettberg - 25.06.2013 - 14:39
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Digital Poesi. Æstetisk Analyse og det Mediales Rolle i Kunstværkers Kommunikation
ENGLISH SUMMARY Digital Poetry: Aesthetic analysis and the role ofmediality in the communication of artwork Digital poetry (language-based digital art) is a global, interdisciplinary movement consisting of poets, artists and programmers who study and develop opportunities for programmed writing. Digital poetry combines writing with animation, images and sound. There are moving letters, interaction and autogenerative programming. Some digital poems also consist of actual programming code. Digital poetry can be colourful, expressive, technologically advanced, organic, delicate and minimalistic. The thesis consists of analyses of selected examples of digital poetry and investigates, discusses and demonstrates how digital poetry can be analysed. This results in a wide range of theoretical issues concerning genre and intermediality, media philosophical questions regarding technologies of writing and issues related to programming, materiality, temporality and agency. The thesis is a methodological reflection on which concepts should be applied and what new set of questions should be asked in the analysis of digital poetry and contemporary digital art in a broader sense.
Patricia Tomaszek - 28.06.2013 - 17:21
