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1. Cybertext Narratology

   "Cybertext Narratology" combines Espen Aarseth's textonomy and typology of cybertexts to three advanced models of narrativity: narratology (Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince), postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale), and the combinatorial and procedural writing(s) of OuLiPo (Marcel Benabou, Jacques Roubaud).

   The basic and most important distinctions, categories and concepts derived from these approaches are systematically examined, expanded and rewritten in order to map out and include narrative possibilities and practices inherent to and emerged with literary cybertexts and digital textuality in general. The matters of tense, mood and voice are closely studied as well as those of trans- textuality, audibility, reliability and narrative situation.

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:19

2. Ergodic Characters

   While much of the attention towards ergodic fiction has been focusing on plot (either dynamic or multiple-path), its characters still lack complexity and expressiveness. In this paper we will explore two different techniques to face this problem.

   One major issue in videogames is the lack of personality in user-controlled characters. In other words, the author of a videogame cannot give a deep personality to her character, because the user will be the one who will control it. For example, you cannot design a melancholic, non-violent character, if there is a knife available in the environment. Many users would just take the knife and start a Doom-like game, turning the originally pacifist character into a serial killer. The designer can obviously prevent the user from manipulating harmful objects. However, through this arbitrary rule, users will see their freedom limited. This would also diminish the environment's coherence: why some objects can be manipulated and other cannot?

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:24

3. Intervals and Links: The Indeterminancy of a Link's Possible Future

   This paper proposes that link node hypertext can be conceived of as a postcinematic discourse and that a major mechanism of this geneology is available through the comparison of the hypertext link to the cinematic edit. I wish to consider the hypertext link from the point of view of Deleuze's cinematic 'sensory motor schema' where the link can be considered as analogous to Bergson's zone of indetermination between perception and reaction. This work builds upon recent theoretical work that has attempted to define hypertext as a temporal or cinematic medium.

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:32

4. Hypermedia, Eternal Life, and The Impermanence Agent

   The story of hypermedia, in which the Web is a recent chapter, begins with a vision of transforming the brain's associative connections into media - media that can be infinitely duplicated and easily shared - creating pathways of thought in a form that will not fade with memory. In recent years, hypermedia has begun to permeate our lives. But it is not as we dreamed: constantly growing, with nothing lost, only showing what we wish to see. Instead we find 'Not Found' a nearly daily message.

   The story of software agents begins with the idea of a 'soft robot' - capable of carrying out tasks toward a goal, while requesting and receiving advice in human terms. In recent years, a much narrower marketing fantasy of the agent has emerged (with a relationship to actual agent technologies as tenuous as Robbie the Robot's relationship to factory robots) and it grows despite failures such as Microsoft Bob. Now we often see agents as anthropomorphized, self-customizing virtual servants designed for a single task: to be a pleasing interface to a world of information that does not please us.

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 15:14

5. The trAce Experience

   trAce, an online organization located at Nottingham Trent University, UK, offers educational and cultural opportunities for writers. We will be presenting and discussing some of the products related to that process.

   Janet Holmes, Boise State University (USA)
   "The trAce Experience: 'The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot'"

   Marjorie C. Luesebrink, Irvine Valley College (USA)
   "The trAce Experience: Collaborative Aspects of Fibonacci's Daughter"

   Christy Sheffield Sanford, trAce (USA)
   "The trAce Experience: Virtual Writer-in-Residence - Creating a New Profession"

   Sue Thomas, Nottingham Trent University (UK)
   "The trAce Experience: Connecting Writers in Real and Virtual Space"

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 16:29

6. Introduction to net.art (1994-1999)

   Brief introduction to net.art written by two prominent net.art artists. The text is written as a list with a set of instructions on how to make net.art.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 06.02.2013 - 14:37

7. Lucid Mapping: Information Landscaping and Three-Dimensional Writing Spaces

   This paper documents an interactive graphics installation entitled Lucid Mapping and Codex Transformissions in the Z-Buffer. Lucid Mapping uses the Virtual Reality Modeling Language to explore textual and narrative possibilities within three-dimensional (3D) electronic environments. The author describes the creative rationale and technical design of the work and places it within the context of other applications of 3D text and typography in the digital arts and the scientific visualization communities. The author also considers the implications of 3D textual environments on visual language and communication, and discriminates among a range of different visual/ rhetorical strategies that such environments can sustain.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 28.06.2013 - 13:21

8. Towards the Recognition of the Shell as an Integral Part of the Digital Text

   Although the theory of hypertext fiction does not regard the Shell as a text, writers of digital fiction, have long started to blurr the boundaries between the Reader and the “main” text. Both interpreters of (fictional) hypertexts and pt-ogrammers of hypertext-environments need to acknowledge this fact in order to accomodate current wrltlng practices.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 28.06.2013 - 14:44

9. Lines for a Virtual T[y/o]pography: Electronic Essays on Artifice and Information

   This dissertation is comprised by five interrelated electronic essays (plus a VRML installation) on artifice, information, and aesthetics. Each essay has been conceived as an intervention in the current critical discourse of new media studies. The essays oscillate loosely between the twin graphical themes of typography and topography, evoking what a recent writer in ArtByte magazine has called (in another context) "a vast network of dislocated visual events." The first essay, "A White Paper on Information," argues for a fundamental shift in the nature of information in the midst of our current "Information Age," a shift recognizing information (data) as a historically and epistemologically distinct category of representation; this shift, I argue, is a direct result of the rise (since the mid-eighties) of computer graphics and information design as leading-edge research areas in computer science.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 29.06.2013 - 01:22

10. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

    In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

    Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.06.2013 - 23:21

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