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"Literature," Progress, and Monsters: What is Electronic Literature?
Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 16.09.2020 - 11:07
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The broken poem: Ephemerality, glitch and de-performance in digital (and non-digital) poetry
The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break.
Åse Marie Våge Beheim - 16.09.2020 - 11:23
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Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches Toward More Expressive Storygames
Stories in released games are still based largely on static and predetermined structures, despite decades of academic work to make them more dynamic. Making game narratives more playable is an important step in the evolution of games and playable media as culturally relevant art forms. In the same way interactive systems help students learn about complicated subjects like physics in a more intuitive and immediate way than static texts, more dynamic interactive stories open up new ways of understanding people and situations. Such dreams remain mostly unrealized in released and playable games.
Mads Bratten Myking - 16.09.2020 - 11:37
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Generating Narrative in an Interactive Fiction Game
This thesis explores a niche field of Computer Science called Interactive Fiction, a field that utilizes the conventions of a regular story to offer multiple variations on how the story plays out. Our goal is to explore the possibility of developing a game that can generate a story file during game play that not only reads like a short story but reflects the events that transpire during a given game play. During development, we have determined that keeping track of various "states", we can simulate a narrative based on actions that transpire in the game.
We developed the game using a language called Inform 7. Inform 7 is a language developed for Interactive Fiction. It contains classes with functionality similar to real-life objects from a narrative stand-point and provides a system of rules that can be edited to simulate real-life actions and events. The language also bases its syntax on English and is thus easy to read and understand.
Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 14:14
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Curating Simulated Storyworlds
There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called emergent narrative: instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (The Sims, Dwarf Fortress), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, Tale-Spin). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction—emergent stories actually happen—and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure.
Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 14:43
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Digital Storytelling in Spanish: Narrative Techniques and Approaches
This thesis looks at a sample of twelve stories of electronic literature written in Spanish and focuses on the different narrative techniques that these works implement. The techniques range from simple hyperlinks to highly complex functions as in videogames. These works draw from the traditions of print literature as well as from the digital culture that has shaped this era: hypertext, algorithms, text reordering, text fragmentation, multimedia creations, and almost anything else the computer is capable of. As each work discussed here is unique, a different theoretical approach is used for each.
Steffen Egeland - 17.09.2020 - 11:54
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Textual entanglements: a performative approach towards digital literature
This thesis conducts a critical investigation into digital literature—a genre of literary expression that is integrated with, and articulated using, digital computing systems and infrastructures. Specifically, it presents a framework for evaluating the expressive capacities of this genre as it relates to particular conceptions of knowledge-making in the contemporary technocultural environment. This framework reveals how the generation of critical knowledge concerning digital literature, as crystallised through a reader’s material engagements with specific works, enacts a ‘performative’ conception of knowing and being, in which the observable world is treated as emerging in the real time of practice—as being articulated through the entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies, rather than existing as a fixed array of passive, unchanging primitives. Digital literature is presented subsequently as a model of this greater performative vision—as a means of evaluating the structures and processes that manifest it, particularly within digital systems, and for assessing its practical and political implications for art and culture more broadly.
Håkon Dale Askeland - 17.09.2020 - 20:40
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From Corporeality to Virtual Reality: Theorizing Literacy, Bodies, and Technology in the Emerging Media of Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities
This dissertation explores the relationships between literacy, technology, and bodies in the emerging media of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). In response to the recent, rapid emergence of new media forms, questions arise as to how and why we should prepare to compose in new digital media. To interrogate the newness accorded to new media composing, I historicize the literacy practices demanded by new media by examining digital texts, such as video games and software applications, alongside analogous “antiquated” media, such as dioramas and museum exhibits. Comparative textual analysis of analogous digital and non-digital VR, AR, and MR texts reveals new media and “antiquated” media utilize common characteristics of dimensionality, layering, and absence/presence, respectively. The establishment of shared traits demonstrates how media operate on a continuum of mutually held textual practices; despite their distinctive forms, new media texts do not represent either a hierarchical or linear progression of maturing development.
Odd Adrian Mikkelsen Prestegård - 17.09.2020 - 23:02
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Digitizing the Novel, 1987-2010
The novel is digital, it was digital, and it will be digital. Most authors have written on word processors and most publishers have made books with some form of desktop publishing software since the early 1990s. The first novels for digital display were written and published in the late 1980s. From a literary perspective, the question is whether such digital-born literature translates into palpable changes in the novel form, why, and how.
Mads Bratten Myking - 19.09.2020 - 15:10
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Renaissance mnemonics, poststructuralism, and the rhetoric of hypertext composition
This dissertation provides a prolegomenon for a rhetoric of hypertext composition derived from the Renaissance Art of Memory as well as the poststructural concept of the rhizome. Institutional inertia has prohibited the advent of a fully realized electronic rhetoric, and one can view the effects of this inertia in the "residual literacy" of recent computer interface designs and hypertext documents. The goal is to maximize the mnemonic efficiency of hypertext as a medium of information storage and retrieval. In order to do so, I establish an historical analogy bridging the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Study of the sixteenth century as a period of transition in mnemonic practices can help to negotiate our current moment of transition from an apparatus of print literacy to an apparatus of electronic literacy.
Andreas Vik - 03.10.2021 - 11:27
