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1. Sensory Modalities and Digital Media

   My presentation will discuss the use of information and social networking software in electronic writing with the aim of identifying and analyzing several important new directions in literary criticism in the digital era. 

   As I argue, one of the most significant pedagogical outcomes of media convergence within the literary arts centres upon criticism’s necessary de-emphasis of traditional genre-based modes of analysis and assessment. While digital works may resemble, perhaps even aesthetically mimic, the various analogue formats upon which they are based, both the qualitative and quantitative distinctions between texts, audio and image-based forms remain conceptual, not actual. Subsequently, the primary interpretative paradigms for all forms of digital cultural production tend to emerge via spatially accrued tensions and patterns between the work and its literal location within an information network. 

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 15:45

2. Provocation by Program: Imagining a Next-Revolution Eliza

   What program could have the effect on today's popular consciousness that Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza had in the mid-1960s? Eliza ignited numerous productive controversies about language, intelligence, and people's relationships to computers. The system has been hailed as the first and most important work of electronic literature. While other, more complex works have been innovative, challenging, and literary in ways that are perhaps more sophisticated, Eliza was an incisive program of great impact. We consider the provocative program within the contexts of computing from the 1960s to the present. Then, we identify several qualities, some of them not very obvious, that a similarly provocative literary program would need today.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 16:26

3. Avatars Sharing Agency: Metaphor in Interactive Narrative Environments

   This paper considers how the avatar focuses the metaphor of interactivity in video games and interactive narrative environments. It argues that, despite serving as the on-screen representation of user input, the avatar has some independent agency (whether through design or representational practice) that influences its behavior. Thus, rather than merely relying upon it as her transparent stand-in, the player must negotiate with the avatar to achieve her goals. The negotiation serves to dramatize interactivity as an imperfect conduit between the textual and extra-textual worlds. While not so evident in video games, this imperfection sustains the metaphor of interactivity, deepening expressivity in interactive narrative environments.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 16:32

4. Digital Poetry Beyond Avant-Garde Readings: Proposing a Digital Lyric

   Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 17:10

5. An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing

   Turning to an entirely invisible process that we can only know by its product, Mark Sample considers the meaning of machine-generated randomness in electronic literature and videogames in his paper, “An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing.” While new media critics have looked at randomness as a narrative or literary device, Sample explores the nature of randomness at the machine level, exposing the process itself by which random numbers are generated. Sample shows how early attempts at mechanical random number generation grew out of the Cold War, and then how later writers and game designers relied on software commands like RND (in BASIC), which seemingly simplified the generation of random numbers, but which in fact were rooted in–and constrained by–the particular hardware of the machine itself.

   (Source: Loriemerson.net description of MLA 2013 Special Session: Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old & New Media)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 20:03

6. The Risk of Reading in Digital Literary Creation

   Modernity is by definition a time of discontinuities and ruptures. And just as writing is now a spatial art, art itself has taken on a certain literary validity in a fertile exercise in artistic permeability. Any ‘modernity' is associated with a certain need to renew the means of expression. The permanent redefinition of the condition and status of the artistic not only redefines the field of art, but also the possibility that artists become experimenters of the possible. Today the creative possibilities offered by the technologies in general and the Internet in particular reinforce and exploit to the limit the communicative intentions of works of literature. In this paper we would like to make a critical analysis of the 2007 edition of the "Ciutat de Vinaròs" Literary Awards winners: Stuart Moulthrop and Isaías Herreros

   (Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 20:29

7. The Aesthetics and Practice of Computational Literature

   While aesthetic practices in photography, film and music have undergone significant transformation due to the affordances of computational tools, the practice of creative and critical writing has remained largely unaffected. As programmable environments further populate the cultural environment it is increasingly important that we understand the ways in which those designed specifically for literary contexts may serve to challenge traditional notions of the writing endeavor. Our paper will provide a brief historical framework for the emergence of generative literary writing practices, a description of a new authoring environment (RiTa) for use in both the production and teaching of digital writing, and an analysis of specific concepts—including layering, materiality, authorial intent, constraints, and distributed creativity—that the use of this environment meaningfully engages.

   (Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 22:13

8. Augmented Reality Storyworlds: Building Spatial Hyperfictions in the York Future Cinema Lab

   What constitutes compelling and meaningful literary content in augmented reality environments? For this presentation I'd like to give an overview of how we are trying to answer that question in the Augmented Reality Lab (part of the Future Cinema lab, Dept. of Film) at York University. The lab is equipped with Intersense IS-900 and IS-1200 trackers, optical and video see-through diplays and we use a variety of software solutions—chiefly DART—the Designers Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART) developed by Jay Bolter and the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Lab (GVU) at the Georgia Institute of Technology but also AR Studio, and a unique MAX/MSP interface to AR Toolkit that we're building ourselves. Students in the lab also work to build stories using RFID tags and with more traditional hypermedia work on fogscreen. The core emphasis in the lab, though, is on the kind of stories that might work for these new screens and environments.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 22:32

9. Corporeal Poetry: Experiments with 3D Poetry in the MOVE Lab

   This presentation discusses 3D electronic literature in production in the MOVE Lab, the Motion Tracking Virtual Environment Lab located at Washington State University Vancouver. Specifically, it will talk about three projects—Rhapsody Room, Things of Day and Dream, and Dancing—the methods used to create them, focus of the research underlying their production, and future plans for work generating from the lab.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 23:15

10. Towards an Art of Rhetoric in Electronic Literary Works: The Figures of Manipulation

    On the basis of electronic literary works, we can identify specific rhetorical figures in interactive writing: the figures of manipulation. It is a category on its own, along with figures of diction, construction, meaning and thought. For example, the figure of appearance/disappearance (responding to an action of the reader) is as a key figure among the figures of manipulation.

    What is emphasized in such figures is the coupling action/behavior, which could be considered as a basic unit in interactive writing. This coupling can be conceived independently from the medias (text, image, video) it relies on. Thus, it seems relevant to have an a-media approach when defining an art of rhetoric in interactive writing.

    (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

    Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 23:32

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