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Cross-Reading: un outil de visualisation de close readings
ELO 2013 brought out the question of how the theoretical discussions about specific works can be extended in space and time beyond teams. A few months before, different teams began a project of the labex Arts-H2H focusing on the design of “Cross-reading”, a tool to make a pooling of theoretical perspectives used in different parts of the world to treat works of Electronic Literature. This experience, the first large-scale in this area, has as its primary mission to cross different methodologies (or points of view) on the same object to produce a high value-added analysis, which is not only a juxtaposition of disparate contributions but a construction reflecting teamwork.The still ongoing implementation implied first the design of an ontology to harmonize the different analyses produced autonomously by each team. Analyses come from diverse backgrounds such as literature, semiotics, media and cultural studies, ergonomic experimentation and aesthetics. The ontology considers the work as a Spinozist individual in the context of the procedural model of Ph. Bootz, allowing the contemplation of both the visible "surface" and the computer program of the work.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 11:54
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Literature in a State of Emergency
Giorgio Agamben has identified the “State of Exception” as the emergent principle of governance for the 21st Century. To summarize Agamben’s argument, alongside the emergence of modern theories of governance (democratic societies with defined human rights), a state of permanent emergency has been declared in response to the various threats (terrorism, ecological disasters, migration, etc.) that have enabled an exception to the rule to persist as the emerging norm. Parallel to this crisis in politics, there is the increasing currency of the term emergence in literary criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to describe the general state of change. Increasingly, this term is used to describe change as a benign and specifically digital determinism. This paper will consider electronic literature as both a laboratory for formal innovation and a site of critique.
Scott Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 12:36
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The Materiality of the Intangible: Literary Metaphor in Multimodal Texts
The materiality of fiction narratives is, ironically, a rather intangible concept, particularly as the notion of materiality traditionally relates to specifically tangible tools of creation — such as the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s clay. The materiality of digital artifacts lies only superficially in the haptic hardware of screens, keyboards, and mice; the materiality of modes, navigation, and interaction must also be explored for their effects on metaphor and meaning. Bouchardon & Heckman identify three levels of materiality in digital literary works: the figure of a semiotic form, the grasp required to physically interact with the work, and the memory of the work — its whole compiled from the parts of code, hardware, and user/reader experience that form meaning (2012, n.p.). In presenting her theory of the technotext, however, Katherine Hayles argues that it is the conjunction of the physical embodiment of technotexts (whether semi-tangible in digital form, or as fully physical as a book) with their embedded verbal signifiers that constructs both plurimodal meaning and an implicit construct of the user/reader (2002, 130-1).
Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 12:41
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Approaching the Real: Materiality in Digital Literature
Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 13:07
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Limbo and the Edge of the Literary
Limbo, released in 2010, is a puzzle platformer that features a player character who awakes in Limbo, on the edge of hell. He must traverse a world of bear traps, giant killer spiders, and spinning gears. As with any game, the player of Limbo will necessarily fail while solving the game’s puzzles; however, this game makes those failures especially painful. The player character is decapitated, impaled, and dismembered as the player attempts to solve each puzzle. The game’s monochromatic artwork, its vague storyline, and these gruesome deaths meant that Limbo, predictably, found its way into various “games as art” conversations. However, this presentation asks whether Limbo can serve as a different kind of boundary object. Given its complete lack of text and its minimalist approach to storytelling, what is the status of Limbo as a literary object?
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:31
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Digital Games and Electronic Literature: Toward an Intersectional Analysis
The line between electronic literature and digital games has started to blur more than ever. For example, Christine Love’s 2012 Analogue: A Hate Story can be read as a literary “story” that builds on the visual novel form. However, critic Leif Johnson (of IGN) reviewed Analogue as a “game-like experience” and even a “game” that “neatly sidesteps the label of mere ‘interactive fiction’ like Love’s other games thanks to some smart design choices.” Phill Cameron (of Eurogamer) describes Analogue repeatedly as a “game” and also reflects on its deviation from the “interactive fiction” category. The slippage between the language of fiction and games, in such mainstream reviews, reveals a fascinating taxonomic undecidability. Though Analogue’s “textual” focus makes it a natural boundary object between electronic literature and digital games, this tension extends to games that incorporate minimal text or even no text at all. In this presentation, I focus on Thatgamecompany’s third and most critically-acclaimed game, Journey, which was also released in 2012. In Journey, the player guides a mysterious robed avatar through a desert and up a mountain.
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:46
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Blind Spots: The Phantom Pain, The Helen Keller Simulator, and Disability in Games
For the past thirty years, and especially since the popularization of real time 3D graphics processing in the mid-nineties, the computer and videogame industry has been caught up in a graphical arms race: a relentless and blind pursuit of ocularcentric spectacle culminating in the hypertrophy of the visual economy in games like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear 5: The Phantom Pain. Alongside this cinematic hypertrophy, a generation of players and designers have internalized the logic and codes of videogames to produce games and game practices which engage the non-visual conditions of the medium. These games have made use of atrophy and the attenuation of visual gameplay as a form of critical game design resulting in games like The Helen Keller Simulator, an unpopular internet meme that consists of a black (or blank) image with no audio, promoted as a first person videogame. While The Phantom Pain terminates in unplayable cutscenes, The Helen Keller Simulator deploys the restriction of vision to uncannily similar effect.
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:58
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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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"Make Me Think": Composing the Narrative Interface
"Make Me Think": Composing the Narrative Interface
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 15:10
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A Site for Collaborative Reading of E-Lit
As scholars experiment with collaborative, multimodal approaches to analyzing electronic literature, the tools, methods, and practices of such collaboration become increasingly an issue. How do we share, edit, archive, and publish arguments that address and evolve across multiple types of data, platforms, and disciplines? How can the approaches (data visualization, code analysis, textual explication, bibliographic history, etc.) be shared in ways that other scholars can engage not just with the final interpretations but also with the processes that lead to them? Recent publications such as 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10, represent the value of such collaborative efforts in combining media archaeology, platform studies, software studies, and Critical Code Studies. Our own work in collaboratively close reading William Poundstone’s “Project for Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit],” which we presented at ELO 2010 (held at Brown University) and are now developing as a book for Iowa UP, has prompted us to reflexively consider how the processes of our own collaboration might prove generative to other scholars.
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 15:20
