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1. Reconstructing Mayakovsky

   Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies.

   Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:38

2. Evidence of Everything Exploding

   The third part of Jason Nelson's artgame trilogy.

   Video games are a language, a grammar or linguistics of various texts. The sounds, the movement, the graphics, the rules or lack of rules, everything about a video game is a component of language.  A digital poetry game must combine all these elements, strange and interactive stanzas, crossed out and obstructed lines, sounds and texts triggered and lost during the play.  Indeed the game interface becomes a road to inhabiting the digital poem, to coaxing the reader/player into living and creating within the game/poetry space.

   Scott Rettberg - 25.03.2012 - 21:26

3. William Poundstone and the Aesthetics of Digital Literature

   This paper will discuss the work of Los Angeles-based writer and digital artist William Poundstone. Poundstone, who makes his living writing books for a popular audience on subjects such as cryptography, philosophical and mathematical conundrums, economics and even a biography of Carl Sagan, has a growing, but still quite small, reputation as one of the most intellectually challenging, playful, and artistically distinctive web artists. His ““New Digital Emblems”” is probably his most ambitious work, and operates somewhere between a documentary about the history of visual and ludic writing——ranging across centuries and focusing most profoundly on the Renaissance emblem books——and an original artistic creation, as it includes several of his own ““digital emblems.”” Other works, such as ““Project for Tachistoscope,”” challenge our ways of reading as this narrative is presented as a mix of basic ““Wing Dings””-style iconography and text, presented in synch one image/word combination at a time.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 12:53

4. Machine Subjectivity, Politics and Digital Arts

   Although human interaction with technological artifacts often involves treating them as if they are alive, the dominant discourse in our society portrays technology as the instrument of its human master. In the context of computing, our desire of absolute control over machines manifests itself both as the human computer interaction (HCI) community’s emphasis on “usability” and as popular culture’s apocalyptic imagination of the out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) systems trying to eliminate humanity. It is revealing that, for instance, the word “robot” comes from “slave” in Czech. This paper examines the social and aesthetic limitations of this narrow instrumental view of technology. It proposes an alternative interaction model based on machine subjectivity, that is, constructing and perceiving computer systems as an independent entity in its own right.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:42