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Getting Your Hands on Electronic Literature: Exploring Tactile Fictions with the Reading Glove
“Interactive narrative” is a loaded phrase that invokes different dreams for different populations of people. For new media theorists like Janet Murray (1) and Brenda (2) Laurel, it elicits visions of participatory stories enacted within immersive simulated “holodecks.” For theorists of hypertext and interactive fiction like Jay David Bolter (3) and Emily Short, (4) it suggests branching textual environments and rhizomatic tangles of linked lexia. For researchers in computer science and AI, it has manifested in simulations of believable human characters (5), and intelligent storytellers that direct the action in a simulated storyworld along desirable narrative paths (6). Within the digital games community, theorists like Henry Jenkins, (7) Celia Pearce, (8) and Jim Bizzocchi (9) suggest broad framings of narrative that allow it to infuse and enhance gameplay. Outside of academic research, interactive narrative conjures images of “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, role-playing games, and improvisational theater.
Patricia Tomaszek - 01.07.2013 - 17:57
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Tangibles and Storytelling
Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) are systems with the goal of giving a physical aspect to accessing information from a digital medium. Combining physical interactions with digital information in order to evoke a sense of interactivity and control over a system. Coupled with storytelling, these user interfaces become potent information relays, as well as being effective edutainment tools for younger audiences. This is because of physical interactions are extremely significant in providing stimuli for the memory, thus facilitating learning.
In this paper, we discuss and evaluate several different research papers about various different tangible user interfaces designed to facilitate interactive narratives and storytelling. These systems provide insight to the dynamics of interactive storytelling, and how these tangibles can be used to deliver non-linear storylines and detach the users from the role of a passive observer to an active role in the stories.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 16:08
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"A Visual Sense is Born in the Fingertips": Towards a Digital Ekphrasis
In this article, the significance of the rhetorical and modern definitions of ekphrasis will be discussed through the lens of digital literature and art. It attempts to reinscribe the body in ekphrastic practice by adding touch to the abstracted visualism of the eye, and emphasize defining features of the ancient usage: orality, immediacy and tactility. What I call the digital ekphrasis with its emphasis on enargeia, its strong connections with the ancient definition, and on the bodily interaction with the work of art, conveys an aesthetic of tactility; digitalis=finger. By tracing and elucidating a historical trajectory that takes the concept of ekphrasis in the ancient culture as a starting point, the intention is not to reject the theories of the late 1900s, but through a reinterpretation of ekphrasis put forward an example of how digital perspectives on classic concepts could challenge or revise more or less taken-for-granted assumptions in the humanities. In this context ‘the digital’ is not only a phenomenon that could be tied to certain digital objects or used as a digital tool, but as an approach to history, with strong critical potential.
Scott Rettberg - 03.07.2013 - 14:03
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Growing Intimate With Monsters: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the Gothic Nature of Hypertext
Described by Robert Coover as “perhaps the true paradigmatic work” of the “golden age” of hypertext literature, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) provides not only a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but an opportunity to consider the ways in which the gothic as a genre serves to problematize the somatic dimension of our writing technologies. In its capacity to touch the reader directly, at the level of the nerves, tissues, and fibres of the body, Patchwork Girl recalls the debates concerning the affective force of the gothic novel, and, in particular, the threat it was thought to pose for women readers. The gothic, in this sense, emerges as the deep and unsettling recognition that the technological is the formative ground of subjectivity, the very condition of our becoming. What Jackson calls “the banished body,” the monstrous materiality of subjectivity, haunts not only the eighteenth-century faith in the powers of rational powers of intellection, but our own post-human dreams of transcendence.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 06.07.2013 - 09:27
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Unusual Positions: Embodied Interaction with Symbolic Spaces
A discussion of poetic installation artwork with physical or embodied interfaces.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.08.2013 - 15:05
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Scripts for Infinite Readings
Material representations and simulations of reading motions can be embodied and enacted through expressive uses of formal devices in programmable works. These interactions between reading self and embodied codes are reflexively choreographed in ways that illuminate the performativity of cognition and interpretation. Meaning production through acts of reading that become scripted in the textual field will be analyzed in 'The Readers Project' by John Cayley and Daniel Howe.
Scott Rettberg - 06.09.2013 - 11:53
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Distant Readings of a Field: Using Macroanalytic Digital Research Methods to Data Mine the ELMCIP Knowledge Base
The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase) is a human-edited, open-access, contributory Drupal database consisting of cross-referenced entries describing creative works of and critical writing about electronic literature as well as entries on authors, events, exhibitions, publishers, teaching resources and archives. The project has been developed by the Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen as an outcome of the ELMCIP project. All nodes are cross-referenced so users can see at a glance which works were presented at an event, and follow links to see which articles have been written about any given work or which other events they were presented at. Most records provide simple bibliographic metadata about a work or event, but increasingly we are also gathering source code of works, PDFs of papers and dissertations, videos of talks and performances, and other forms of archival documentation.
Scott Rettberg - 06.09.2013 - 15:55
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The Ethos of "Life": digital writing and the temporal animation of space
When we strip the lexical band-aid ‘embodiment’ off the more than 350 year-old wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body, we find animation, the foundational dimension of the living. Everything living is animated. Flowers turn toward the sun; pill bugs curl into spheres; lambs rise on untried legs, finding their way into patterned coordinations. The phenomenon of movement testifies to animation as the foundational dimension of the living.
We propose that the importance of movement in the distribution of space and time is one of the things digital media works make palpable. While western aesthetics – consonant with its spatialised images of subjects and objects – has traditionally paid more attention to spatial form, this is being challenged by new forms of mobility made possible by digital media. These provide both the opportunity for immersion in mediated and programmed/programmable environments, but also the opportunity to move through existing and technologically augmented environments in different ways, using different surfaces and forms of literary inscription.
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 15:05
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On Writing & Digital Media (Performance Research 18:5)
This issue of Performance Research will enfold an understanding of digital text within the context of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, integrational linguistics, the performance of self and gender, and performance writing. In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital apparatus (dispositif). This includes machinic performance, the performance of codes and scripting, the performativity of language itself on the screen, the semiotics of the click, interactivity between digital language and the body, and how digital texts ‘perform’ us as social beings.
(Source: Description from Performance Research website)
Scott Rettberg - 15.10.2013 - 12:58
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Between Floors: The Ups and Downs of Mediated Narrative
“Between Floors: The Ups and Downs of Mediated Narrative” and the accompanying creative remediation project, “Between Floors: Love and Other Blood Related Diseases,” meld theory and practice of print with electronic literature and installation art. I argue that as the medium changes, the narrative is transformed. The narrative can be reconstructed and pieced together as the reader or viewer becomes increasingly involved, even embodied within the work. This embodiment is what Nathaniel Stern calls “Moving and thinking and feeling” (1) and can result in a more direct emotional experience. The form, structure, and medium (sjužet) rely on authorial intention, yet as a narrative becomes more interactive and experiential the feedback loop shifts, placing meaning, message, and construction of narrative (fabula) between media and reader/viewer. This necessarily complicates the notion of authorship, yet within an embodied space, such as the installations included in this analysis, there is a potential for greater emotional understanding between author/artist and reader/viewer.
Melinda White - 31.05.2014 - 16:17
