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Cyborg Tactics and Perilous Hermeneutics in Lexia to Perplexia Shifts in materiality across space.
Cyborg Tactics and Perilous Hermeneutics in Lexia to Perplexia Shifts in materiality across space¬—from monitor to cell phone screen, from private bedroom to public bus—alter experience and sway meaning. But time also entails an expectation of change that sometimes never comes: works of electronic literature often go without the steady updates to security, appearance, and functionality that corporate software enjoys, turning into strange ruins that, if not broken, carry that possibility. Eight years after the publication of Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, my paper returns to one of the book’s case studies, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, with the goal of investigating the effects of the passing years on the hermeneutics instilled in the user by the text. Focusing on the instability that time and software evolutions have sown, I argue that in this uncertain environment, the recourse of the user is a heightened emphasis on investigation, experimentation, and attempted recovery. With these motivations in mind, I turn to various palimpsests in the text, features of Lexia that straddle the divide between the literary technique and the glitch.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:24
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Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World's Longest Interactive Fiction
Blue Lacuna is an ambitious new long form interactive fiction comprising nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code. The longest work yet produced in the Inform 7 language, it is also among the most substantial text-based story games in existence, an interactive novel with an average play time of fifteen to twenty hours. In development between 2006 and 2009, Blue Lacuna features several experiments of interest to creators of long-form interactive stories. This paper describes these experiments and performs an anecdotal post-mortem on what succeeded and failed in the project's realization. I focus on how successful I was at achieving my three principal goals: 1) simplifying the IF interface so those unfamiliar with the medium can easily participate, 2) telling a story which revolves around the player's ability to make choices with real dramatic repercussions, and 3) creating a character able to form a complex relationship with the player across the span of a novel-length story.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:24
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Reading at the Thresholds of Book Covers and Opening Screens
In this article I relate Gérard Genette’s paratext theory Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997) that was originally published in French as Seuils in 1987 to theories that relate to what presumably constitutes narrative beginnings (Kellman; Richardson; Rabinowitz). Genette’s theory considers different liminal devices as that which “guide a reader’s reading” such as for example a book cover. Among other’s, I explore reader comments that reflect on their reading experience of book covers expressed in social media environments such as goodreads.com and the blogosphere. I propose that the book cover potentially foreshadows it’s content proleptically (Genette) and in a centripetal (McCracken) notion draws to a book’s content. Two examplary “openings” as thresholds to a narrative are considered: the book cover of the paper-based publication Borgerligt tusmørke by Simon Fruelund and Voyage into the Unkown (Roderick Coover), a work of literature published in programmable media.
Patricia Tomaszek - 02.07.2013 - 11:09
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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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Literacy between book, page and screen – on Between Page and Screen by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse
The aim of the speech will be to show that e-literature realizations not only could be a renovation of avant-garde or even earlier tradition, but also in many cases provoke the same kind of questions which were made by theoreticians of (e.g.) formalism or structuralism in relation to avant-garde or modern text. Looking at electronic texts we re-ask about a literacy of those works and have to renovate our conception of literary communication, re-thinking not only the category of the text (as Aarseth did), but also the character of signs and code used in this kind of communication.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 10:26
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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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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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From the Digital to the Bookbound
Dear Reader: How are you reading these words? On which device? Through which interface? Can you read the source code of this web ‘page’? Can you re-write it? Why does it matter? We have machines for that, we have apps! In Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound Lori Emerson sets out to demystify the wondrous devices of our digital age by interrogating both the limits and the creative possibilities of a wide range of reading and writing interfaces. For Emerson, interface is an open-ended term – a threshold, a point of interaction between human and hardware, between hardware and software, between reader and writer, and between human-authored writing and the vast corpus of machine-based text relentlessly reading and writing itself behind the surface of the screen.
J. R. Carpenter - 09.08.2014 - 16:06
