Textured Literature

Marxism & New Media Conference Keynotes & Closing

2012-01-24T12:02:00.001-05:00

We were honored to have Ricardo Dominguez, Alexander R. Galloway, and McKenzie Wark as our keynote speakers. We were no less honored to have Duke's own Michael Hardt as our master moderator and Kate Hayles as our conference closer.

Wow. What a day!

Richardo Dominguez

Ricardo Dominguez (and his younger self - in middle) on Electronic Disobedience

Alex Galloway on Marxism and New Media

McKenzie Wark "Karl Marx was never a philosopher, he was a journalist"

Kate Hayles on how the 1% became the 1%

Kate Hayles, Closing Remarks

Thanks to all for a successful conference!

Follow us on Twitter @marxismandnewme, #mnm2012, @stargould and/or at our website: http://marxismandnewmedia.wordpress.com/

(Photos by Amanda Starling Gould 1.21.2012)

asg

Marxism & New Media Conference Day

2012-01-21T23:50:00.002-05:00

Another great day of incredible presentations!

MNM Conference Day Two: Standing room only!


Robert Prey answers questions about his “Networks of Exclusion, Networks of Exploitation: Marx as a Network Theorist” presentation"

"Pieter Lemmens "Desire...is a battle (field)..."

Micha Cárdenas and Zach Blas live Tweet the MNM Conference

Getting ready for the keynote

Thanks to all for a great second day!

Follow us on Twitter @marxismandnewme, #mnm2012, @stargould and/or at our website: http://marxismandnewmedia.wordpress.com/

(Photos by Amanda Starling Gould 1.21.2012)

Marxism & New Media Conference Day One

2012-01-20T22:34:00.002-05:00

Andrew Stefan Weiner presents on the "Promises of Freedom in Contemporary Art"


Duke's Patrick LeMieux presents his art installation "Open House"

Duke's Pinar Yoldas presents on "Speculative Biologies"

Great first day! Pinar and Patrick, you were brilliant!

Marxism & New Media Conference, Duke 2012

Follow us on Twitter @marxismandnewme, #mnm2012, @stargould and/or at our website: http://marxismandnewmedia.wordpress.com/

asg

Marx_Reloaded US Premiere

2012-01-20T22:27:00.001-05:00

Our event was a hit!

The Marx_Reloaded crowd is growing (excuse my being in the way)

Abe Geil introduces (brilliantly) the film.

Marx_Reloaded viewing

Skype interview with director, Jason Barker and Duke's Shilyh Warren

Michael watching Michael...

Thanks to all who came!
asg

US Premiere of Marx_Reloaded

2012-01-17T01:01:00.001-05:00

My first curated event: The US Premiere of Marx_Reloaded.

In conjunction with Duke Literature's Marxism and New Media Conference (January 20-21), the Marx_Reloaded screening evening will be held on Thursday, January 19th at 6:00 pm in the Richard White Auditorium at Duke U.

The specially-made US Premiere pre-release copy of the video

Event Flyer (Thank you, Duke Screen + Society)

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Term Research Review Fall 2011 (Part 2)

2012-01-10T22:34:00.001-05:00

Duke Work Fall 2011 Continued

PHENOMENOLOGY OF WAYFINDING IN VIRTUAL SPACES

Project: Essay Complete

Abstract:

The study of navigation or wayfinding in virtual worlds introduces several interesting and potentially important questions: Does the act of wayfinding in virtual worlds complicate our understanding of human wayfinding and/or of human interaction with and within virtual worlds? Does wayfinding in ‘virtual’ space challenge our presumptions about spatial mediations and technohuman experience? If, in the ‘real’ world, our sense (qua sensation) of the world gives us our sense (qua orientation) of the world, how does our interaction with virtual worlds complicate this arrangement?

I argue here that phenomenology, and most particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, can help us properly investigate possible answers to such questions and can be a critical component of the emerging theory of how we navigate digital virtual worlds. Contra the theories touting the disembodied or mind-only nature of virtual space experience, I will argue that the cognitive/neuroscience studies of virtual navigation indeed provide support for the necessity of the embodied body.

Because virtual worlds are worlds constituted and categorized largely by/as perception and because we cognitively navigate virtual spaces just (or nearly just as the studies suggest) as we navigate real space, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, giving primacy to perception and to the role of the body as active perceiver, provides a phenomenological framework that can help us better understand the relation between physical man and virtual world.

Augmenting the Network: Using QR codes to annotate and gamify the Conference
Project: Ongoing

Key Concepts: Augmented Reality, Gamification, Annotating Physical and Conceptual Space(s)

QR Code NameTag

QR Code NameTag Scanned

NameTag Contact Info Revealed

Term Research Review Fall 2011 (for BH)

2012-01-10T22:21:00.001-05:00

Duke Work Fall 2011

Network Ecology and the Emergence of Human-Machine Spaces

Grant Project: FHI GDSI. Ongoing

We propose to explore modes of emergence for networks and assemblages as these formations represent the mobile and shifting vitality of human identities and habitations. Drawing on diverse perspectives ranging from Guattari's rich theorization of machinic assemblages to EO Wilson's sociobiological propositions on Consilience to Wendy Chun’s recent work on software and systems, we are thinking about the ways knowledge is transferred, exchanged, and shared through human/machine networks and how this knowledge becomes socially transformed and transformative through its circulation across wide and often non-contiguous ethical, biological, bio-political, governmental, and built spaces. If networks create new surfaces of contact between individuals–both human and machine–how do these networks and their interfaces re-generate themselves in conjunction with the new knowledge they produce? As autopoietic machines, networks manifest themselves variously in the physical materialities and in the phenomenological experience of global cities, virtual worlds, and social games. To understand these machinic assemblages requires us to calibrate our own scholarship to the emergent flows of the network. Because networks have their own particular ways of knowing, we intend to study them within their own vernacular. We will not only use interdisciplinary transliterary methods of interrogation in our research but will then map our researches and their varied disciplinary nodes into an interactive digital universe of living scholarship that will allow scholars to learn from, interact with, and contribute to the information environment. To reflect the interdisciplinary nature of our interrogation, we feel interactive transmedia/transliterary publishing methods are integral not only to our research but also to the dissemination/curation of our materials and to the establishment of a self-sustaining dynamic site for continued–and continuing–critical inquiry.

Technicity & Humanity: A Networked and Annotated Bibliography, Les philosophes francais, from Bergson to Rancière

Project Complete

How do Bergson, Benjamin, Bachelard, Heidegger, Ellul, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem, Debord, Deleuze, Virilio, Stiegler, Gorz, and Ranciere, overlap, diverge, and intertwine vis-a-vis their considerations of la technologie? By exploring the main questions, methods, and positions of each, I create an annotated interdisciplinary bibliography and a networked 'map' intralinking the ideas of each and then interlinking them to relevant critical ideas within the contemporary philosophies (loosely defined) of technicity + humanity.

GreaterThanGames Lab, co-directed by Tim Lenoir, Kate Hayles, and Victoria Szabo
Can we manipulate literary, artistic, and video game architectures to design a game capable of intervening into non-gaming space?

s-1: Speculative Sensation Lab, directed by Mark B N Hansen:

Can we engage literary texts using only our subperceptual sensory directors?

An "Education Initiative" to eliminate teachers?

2012-01-09T17:44:00.000-05:00

Today's Hewlett Foundation email title: The Hewlett Foundation Sponsors Prize to Spur Education Innovation.

So far so good.

But wait...

Email body headline: Hewlett Foundation Sponsors Prize to Improve Automated Scoring of Student Essays

Really, Hewlett? This is an education initiative?

asg

My Year in Books

2011-12-17T18:50:00.002-05:00

In the spirit of The Millions addictive annual December Year in Reading,series, a list of memorable and doubly-memorable books I've read this year.

State of Wonder, (2011) Ann Patchett
    Sucked in from start to finish.
Reamde, (2011) N Stephenson
    Just finished this one. I dissolved into its 1000+ pages until finished. Already wanting more.
Love & Obstacles, (2009) A Hemon
    Wow. Looking for an impeccable sentence or two?
Curfew, (2011) Jesse Ball
    Tricky clever. As are all of Ball's novels.
Flawless Poetry? Wislawa Szymborska
     Lovely.
Experimental Throwback? Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers (1953)
   Read it.
In translation? The Golden Age (2010 trans) by Michal Ajvaz or Self-Portrait Abroad (2010 trans) by Jean-Phillipe Toussaint or Tahar Ben Jelloun's (1996 trans) Corruption
    I instantly wanted to map Ajvaz (and will), instantly wanted to trace the travel path of Toussaint
    and found a modern day Crime and Punishment partner in Corruption
In the mood for a graphic? Daytripper (2011) by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, Thompson's (2011) Habibi and anything by Jason
      Daytripper spirals inward and out, Habibi is sweeping and epic, Jason thrills each time.
Funny mysterious (mis)adventures? Misadventure by Millard Kaufman
     Well done, McSweeney's!
Konfidenz by Ariel Dorfman
     Beautiful man (he fills a room with grace faster than any I've met...feeling very lucky to share space with him at Duke), fantastic book

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DNA Computing and Human-Computer Interaction

2011-12-15T19:06:00.001-05:00

Machine mechanics
+
Human mechanics
+
Emergent Merging.
=
DNA-based Computing & Computational Mechanical Bodies

First, machines extended the human body. Then the human mind. Now machines extend the human whole. The now-machine (also) creates Evolved Machines based upon human mind mechanics. Future machines may create the whole human.

How were the first machines conceived? and evolved? The first machines were based on force and energy: the lever, the inclined plane, the pulley. From there, the wheel, the engine, the computer.

How will we interact with machines built to mimic our mechanics?

hmm....A worthy topic for exploration.

asg

2011-12-03T01:06:00.000-05:00

Watch this: The Commons by Laura Hanna, Gavin Browning, Dana Schechter and Molly Schwartz

And then this: “As Above, So Below”

Projection on the Bridge - Immersive Surfaces - As Above, So Below from Light Harvest Studio - Ryan Uzi on Vimeo.

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(Hyper)Connected

2011-10-21T13:33:00.000-04:00

Fantastic new Sundance film project by director Tiffany Shlain: Connected

Worldwide art+film Declaration of In(ter)dependence:

An 'updated' Howl: Yelp: With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg's Howl

i saw the best minds of my generation distracted by texting...

looking for an info fix.

angle headed hipsters burning for the ultra fast heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

wow.
asg

(thanks, rk!)

Lit Nobel winner Transtromer to Speak through Piano

2011-10-07T22:49:00.001-04:00

I love this.

Tomas Transtromer To Play Piano at Nobel Ceremony
By Jason Boog on October 7, 2011 3:47 PM

"Swedish poet and Nobel Prize winning poet Tomas Tranströmer is expected to play the piano at the Nobel Prize ceremony.

Tranströmer lost his ability to speak and the use of his right arm after suffering a stroke in 1990. Since then, he has continued to play piano with one hand. According to The Independent, the poet will express himself through the piano. If you would like to write a note to the poet, the Nobel Prize website will let you “post your greetings to the 2011 Nobel Laureate.”

Here’s more from the article: “Swedish musicians have adapted for him compositions designed to be played with one hand. Neil Astley, the poet’s friend and the founding editor of Bloodaxe, Tranströmer’s British publisher, said the Swede often expressed himself through music, and anticipated a performance at the Nobel ceremony.” (Via Publishers Weekly) "

I love that.
asg

Terminological Divides and Ambiguities

2011-10-01T23:19:00.001-04:00

What does that mean?

1) There seems to be a recent interest in studying ‘Material Culture’: As opposed to what? Are there non-material cultures? Can one point me to a culture una(e)ffected by materials and/or materialities?

2) Spatial Humanities: How would one define and limit this field? Are there humanities that are not somehow fundamentally - or at least fundamentally touched - by the spatial?

3) Global Humanities: How would one (or, say, a university department...) define this one? When one tacks the adjective global onto the field humanities, how does this alter the discipline? Does this simple alteration encourage that we (as mostly Western-educated scholars) simply alter our previously non adjectivally-enhanced humanities by tacking a 'global' object onto our Western-oriented studies? Can we (as Western-educated scholars) ever actually call ourselves global humanities scholars if we do not actively interrogate non-Western, global metaphysics and non-Western ways of seeing/being as we study those global, non-Western materials and practices? Can we be global humanities scholars if we live only within the provincial Western paradigm? Or, to make an alternate argument, in our contemporary globally-connected world, is the 'global' adjective nearing obsolescence?

4) Digital Humanities: Again, who owns this term? And, really, how many different ways can we actually find to define this ambiguous (meaningless?) term?

Words just seem to be meaning less lately...

5) Same problem with ‘Visualization’: FlowingData.com lists the various terms we use to represent this idea: http://flowingdata.com/2011/09/29/the-many-words-for-visualization/

6) Following the recent excitement about 'material culture' is the growth of 'Object-Based research': And what were we doing before? Haven't we always studied - at some level - some sort of object? Nota bene for those who think these questions about 'material culture' and 'object-based' approaches are 'new': Weren't Heraclitus and Parmenides debating this long before even Socrates arrived?

...

And finally, why are the Humanities and the Sciences each individually and simultaneously fighting the same digital-age battle regarding digital scholarship, collaboration, digital publication? Why are we not coming together to figure this one out? http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_science_transfer/P3/

Update: On non-Western philosophy. Part 1 here: http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2009/12/what-is-non.html and Part 2 here: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/11/non-western-philosophy-part-3.html#more

asg

CFP Marxism and New Media @ Duke

2011-09-28T23:02:00.000-04:00

CALL FOR PAPERS / CALL FOR PROJECTS: MARXISM AND NEW MEDIA
DUKE UNIVERSITY PROGRAM IN LITERATURE (DURHAM, NC)
JANUARY 20 & 21, 2012
KEYNOTES: ALEX GALLOWAY (NYU) and RICARDO DOMINGUEZ (UCSD)
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: OCTOBER 30, 2011
CONTACT: marxismandnewmedia@gmail.com and http://literature.duke.edu/marxism-and-new-media-conference
New media technologies are leading to the emergence of vibrant public spaces in countries like China and Tunisia, facilitating previously restricted dissent and political deliberation. Similarly, scholars, journalists, and activists are using networking and social media to organize coalitions and mobilize resistance in contexts as diverse as the Wisconsin protests, the Wall Street protests, and the so-called “Arab Spring.” In an ironic self-critique, smartphone applications like the newly released “Phone Game” are even exposing the global working conditions and problematic material production of contemporary consumer technology through their very gameplay. With the implicit resistance to hegemony and material critique in these examples, Marxism offers both methodological and interpretive tools for interfacing with new media, not least among them a dialectical analysis of the global relations of production. However, writing in the Nation, Chris Lehmann has recently argued that the Internet is less the harbinger of post-capitalist cyber-Utopia than a “digital plantation” in which unpaid digital labor and leisure time become transmogrified into ad revenue. In their article, “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism,” John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney likewise argue that the Internet and related media signify not the suspension of the laws of capitalism, but rather their final perfection.
It seems, then, that a number of unresolved questions linger concerning the ways new media both participate in and creatively resist institutional power. As such, we hope to provide a fresh articulation interrogating the intersection between the theories and practices of new media technologies and Marxist critique. For example: how should we consider the economic, environmental, and human costs incurred in the production of new media technologies? How might resistance and radical change emerge among the ongoing institutionalization, and the incumbent conservatism, of both Marxism and new media studies? How will we navigate through the internal divisions of an academy that has eagerly appropriated new media as a strategy to “reinvigorate” the humanities through renewed funding and (often) corporate partnership?
We invite both papers and creative/artistic work that address these issues and others that deal with the engagement of Marxist thought and the study of media technologies. Papers may intervene at points of seeming incompatibility, address the current place of this convergence in one or many institutional and cultural settings, or perhaps look forward to emerging discourses relating to this intersection.
Possible paper, project, and panel topics might include:

New Opportunities for Resistance, Wikileaks, Hacking and Hacktivism, Pirate Culture, the Arab Spring, the Jasmine Revolution, and Anonymous
Immaterial Labor, User-Generated Content, the Knowledge Worker, Affective Labor, Precariousness and “the Precariat,” the Digital Plantation, and the Attention Economy
Intellectual Property, Copyright, Creative Commons, Open Access and Open Source Practices, and Virtual Property
New Forms of Collectivity, Wikipedia, Crowdsourcing, Flash Mobs, Smart Mobs, and Partcipatory Journalism
New Regimes of Control, Censorship, Filtering, Firewalls, and Search Engine Rankings
New Media Art
Critical Code Studies
Critical Game Studies
Biomedicine and Biometrics
Energy, Ecology, Tech Trash
The Open University
‘Re-Visualizing’ Marxism
Ideology, Contact Zones, and Interfaces

Please send a 250-500 word abstract to marxismandnewmedia@gmail.com by October 30, 2011.
ORGANIZERS
Zach Blas, Gerry Canavan, Amanda Starling Gould, Rachel Greenspan, Melody Jue, Lisa Klarr, Clarissa Lee, John Stadler, Michael Swacha, Karim Wissa
CONTACT
marxismandnewmedia@gmail.com

Original Copies: Clement Valla

2011-09-28T20:20:00.001-04:00

Fantastic ArtistTalk tonight @ Duke: Immersed in Every Sense: Original Copies, Clement Valla

Experimental art, socio-technical systems, human/computer relationships

Clement Valla, Seed Drawing (c)

Valla asked: What happens when you mechanically ask random people to mechanically copy the Copyright sign?
Valla's answer:

More at: http://aahvs.duke.edu/news-events/vals/valla and http://clementvalla.com/

asg

Photo Tech Early and Current

2011-09-20T20:55:00.002-04:00

Current Rotoscoping technologies bring history to life:

ARCHIVE PHOTO INSERTS FROM MOTALKO from Miklós Falvay on Vimeo.

Early (1904-1916) 'digichromatography' technologies bring color to (life) photography:

=

More here on Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky's digichromatography shots.

asg

Illusion as Muse...

2011-09-20T20:28:00.000-04:00

How can we use this illusion in transliterary, transmedia art works?

The brain may be(come) an author's/artist's best friend...

asg

Giving literary tech a bad name...

2011-09-19T19:10:00.001-04:00

Digital technologies allow for innovative transliterary/transmedia expression and vastly creative digital art potentialities: See the Boston's CyberArts Fest and the Electronic Literature Organization for just two of many example galleries of digital arts (literary, visual, and otherwise).

(sigh)...they also allow for digital literary UN-creative expression as recent articles attest:

It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing.': http://chronicle.com/article/Uncreative-Writing/128908/?sid=at

20 Companies Use Computer-Generated Stories to Save Money on Writers: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/20-companies-using-computer-generated-stories-save-money-on-writers_b37987

The Virtual Academic: Random Sentence Generator: http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/index.htm

Sigh with a qualification: If these are used for artistic or pedagogical experimentation, I say play on! All - or at least most - other uses, (sigh)...

asg

Technology's techno-material non-neutrality

2011-09-19T14:43:00.000-04:00

Technology is not neutral, says Mickey Z here.

On a purely techno-material level, technology causes massive (toxic) waste and exploits 'nature' of her natural resources. This techno-waste causes what Mickey Z calls "environmental racism" as much of the world's techno-waste is exported (um, dumped) "to countries like India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ghana" the waste is toxic to these nations.

On a purely numerical techno-access level, technology (shoot, electricity even) is lacking in large regions of the planet. Mickey Z quotes, using this Scientific American article as a source:

In Australia, 60.4% of the population has access to the Internet. In Asia, that number is 19.4%. Pretty stark difference, huh? Get ready for this one: In North America, 74.2% of the population has access to the Internet. In Africa, that number is 6.8%. If you think it can’t get worse than that, try this on for size: In six African nations—Burundi, Chad, Central African Republic, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone—only 3 to 5% of people can access electricity. In fact, 79% of the Third World (1.5 billion people) has no access to electricity.

It must also be noted that even in the most wealthy of countries, techno-droughts exist.

It is important not to forget the purely techno-material considerations when we think technology. We must look at the lives and movements of the actual materials and how those cycle back to touch the other, more popular considerations of the techno-social, techno-critical (is Google making us Stupid? Is the Internet making us Smarter? Are Online Social Networking sites making us less Human?) that seem to get more air time (media space).

The question of techno-material is even more important with the immanent Internet of Things: If the world and all her objects (including this author's lost trousers) become tagged with computer chips, how will we ever deal the growing population of techno-material waste?

Quick blip on the Internet of Things:

A Critique A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID
Report prepared by Rob van Kranenburg for the Institute of Network Cultures with contributions by Sean Dodson. Website for project here: The Internet of Things Council.

asg

Minimizing Brain Clutter(s): Cures via Brain and/or Behavior

2011-09-13T21:43:00.001-04:00

Hypermedia (non)attention (distraction) Cures

New research - from neuroscientists and from behavioral psychologists - not only points toward the technoscientifically-enhanced evolution of cognitive load but also suggests possible potential curatives.

Neuroscientific neural shifting: Changing neurons to change attention(s)...

"[Dr. Julio] Martinez-Trujilo and his team have identified neurons in the dorsolateral sub-region of the primate prefrontal cortex that selectively filter out important from unimportant visual information....He believes the key to the “brain clutter” and impulsivity shown by individuals with dysfunctional prefrontal cortices lies in a malfunction of a specific type of brain cell... The key to the normal functioning of these “filter neurons” is their ability to, in the presence of visual clutter, selectively and strongly inhibit the unimportant information, giving the rest of the brain access to what is relevant" (citation: MedicalXpress, April 2011)

“What we found when we looked at the behaviour of the neurons in the prefrontal cortex, was that an animal’s ability to successfully accomplish a single action in the presence of visual clutter, was dictated by how well these units suppressed distracting information.” (Martinez-Trujilo qtd in article above)

Provocative, hopeful insights for persons and patients alike.

Behavioral Shifting: Changing acts to better handle (or better teach) media attentions...

Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning" by Richard E. Mayer and Roxana Moreno

"[B]ased on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, we examine the concept of cognitive overload in which the learner’s intended cognitive processing exceeds the learner’s available cognitivecapacity. Third, we examine five overload scenarios. For each overload scenario, we offer one or two theory-based suggestions for reducing cognitive load, and we summarize our research results aimed at testing the effectiveness of each suggestion..." (abstract)

"Overall, our analysis shows that cognitive load is a central consideration in the design of multimedia instruction." (abstract)

Important - even if seemingly obvious - insights here for persons, professionals, students and instructors.

Mindful Infotention: Another method via Howard Rheingold

in video:
and in word

asg

Impermanent (water) Printing

2011-09-12T22:17:00.000-04:00

Transliterary Storytelling: Wow

2011-09-09T00:54:00.001-04:00

Sand + Sound + Light + Video + Projection + Hand (brush) strokes...

Video Games and Neuroscience

2011-09-08T00:56:00.001-04:00

Excerpts from The Top 10 Weird Children Of Video Games and Neuroscience
by Erin Robinson, August 23, 2011 at Gamasutra.com

The Tetris Effect: WOW

"And yet, people with this type of amnesia [anterograde amnesia] can learn to play Tetris just fine, and even get better with practice (although not as well as people without brain injury). And it gets weirder. Have you ever spent a lot of time doing something repetitive, particularly something new, and then tried to fall asleep? Have you noticed the intrusion of visual images related to what you were just doing? Those are called hypnagogic images, and you guessed it, the amnesiac patients still saw things that looked like Tetris blocks despite having no recollection of playing the game."

Addiction: Predictable
Pharmaceuticals used to treat drug addition are shown to be effective in treating gaming addiction.

Pain and VR: A case of attention?
Children felt less pain when connected to VR equipment...
"It is thought that the VR games interrupt and distract the way that current thoughts, including pain, are processed by the brain. The mechanisms for that process aren't clear, but VR games seem to at least reduce the perception of pain."

Avatars and Self-perception: Revealing?
What does your avatar reveal about your inner pscyhe?

Video Games and Schizophrenia: WOW #2
"People with schizophrenia experience fewer symptoms after playing video games"

Proof for Transliterary Pedagogy: Cheers...and bring on the (classroom) games...!
"It turns out there's plenty of evidence for this phenomenon: gamers are, in general, better at processing visually complicated information."

Article Highly Recommended. Check it out: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6466/the_top_10_weird_children_of_video_.php

Addition... Another Gamasutra article on Neuroscience and Gaming and the (proposed) biological basis of (gaming) fun: Ethos Before Analytics by Chris Birke

asg

Exposing Invisible Cities

2011-09-08T00:18:00.001-04:00

Presentation Prep here

asg

Duke GDSI Call for Partners...

2011-09-08T00:14:00.001-04:00

Duke Grad students: Looking for partners to join a working group for the FHI Graduate Digital
Scholarship Initiative.

Project topic: The ecology of living (human) networks.

Project Questions, roughly articulated: From digital worlds to physical cities,
how do human networks, as ?living forms? created from living forms,
manifest and maintain themselves? On what ecological, theoretical, and/or
phenomenological levels do emergent technorealistic virtual networks ? like
Second Life ? differ from planned (or programmed) environments like
professionally engineered cities? Do digital networks challenge traditional
views of energy, entropy, and life? Are smart cities really a smart idea? What
happens when we can no longer separate physical environments from digital ones
and/or can no longer distinguish physical environments from their co-emergent
digital iterations? Many physical cities now rest (exist) above/upon a layer of
digital urban data that compose and contain them; other physical cities have
their own digital iterations: Do these hybrid living networks/spaces demand a
new brand of ecology?

If you are interested in joining me to form a working group based either strictly or
loosely upon these ideas, please contact me. If you know anyone who might be
interested, please pass the message. There is space here to engage a variety of
topics including, but not limited to, biology, ecology, architecture,
engineering, networks, technology, gaming, digital cities,
digital/technoscientific ethics.

 
FHI GDSI:  http://www.fhi.duke.edu/projects/graduate-digital-scholarship-initiative

asg

Chatbot to Chatbot

2011-09-01T23:34:00.004-04:00

The Ethical Question(s)

2011-09-01T00:09:00.001-04:00

A (very) brief touch (turn) upon the ethical questions of digital literary media and digital humanities scholarship.

Nodes to explore:

1. The intersections (and interfaces) of digital media, literature, ethics, and philosophy.

2. The ethics of virtual places and spaces. What issues arise when we lose the traditional boundaries–most relevantly those distinguishing real from virtual, open from closed, private from public, human from nonhuman–that once formed the bases of our ethics?

3. The ethical considerations involved in teaching digital methods and the responsibilities implicated in the teaching of transmedia literacies to digital natives.

4. Digital archives, digital artifacts: How do we approach ethical curation of digital arts and literatures?

5. The ethics of digital and digitized bodies.

asg

Worlds Here (critical theory academy) and There (digital publishing)

2011-08-25T00:38:00.001-04:00

An recent exchange between two perspectives:

JR, professor of electronic publishing (and scholar and artist too...but here speaking from the perspective of publisher), posts: "Why trade publishing is failing when it comes to digital versions, summed up in bullet points. The Laboratorium: When Editors Don't"

ASG response: I'd argue that the solution here is not to fix the "obvious design mistakes" but to rethink the digital work (at least...though it would be even better - and soon probably necessary - to move toward exclusively born-digital works) and to find relevant digital correlates to these marks of traditional publication that print readers have been trained to depend/rely on.

JR: As I see it the obvious design mistakes and the digital work are one in the same. I mean, all printed books are born digital. Word files and InDesign files can be converted. The things Gimmelman identifies are simple things that would be caught in a quality test or proofing of the material.

ASG: I believe my concept of 'born digital' differs from yours as used here. All print works might be necessarily touched by the digital as required by modern publication methods but they are not deliberately made to be digital art(i)facts. The books you speak of here do not use the digital as a medium and thus do not integrate/exploit the potentialities of the digital medium. A born digital work was/is born as a digital work to be a digital work. I like Stephanie Strickland's piece here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/182942.

JR: That's a different world entirely. The born digital works you're focused on are a breed unto itself. I really don't see these issues in that zone of true electronic work. The marks of print that we rely on already have correlations in digital work (footnotes and endnotes as links are the simplest components that are missing in a lot of e-books). The other marks from the article, real quotation marks, typographcal and content based mistakes are the same in both worlds. (I'm afraid we're really looking at two different things here, you're talking about how langauge is used in "Alphaville," me how it's used in the "Jersey Shore." As Beckett once said "Cabs Are Here.")

ASG: I guess I am also projecting a bit: Do you think future iterations of ebooks will evolve the print-based typographical marks we currently use into something(s) different but correlative? Will they always be 'same in both worlds'? Question then for digital-native students: How would you design future digital typographies?

JR: I think the horizons are much vaster now. It's hard for me to frame some of the work by certain authors (right now I'm only recalling Danielewski, Safran Foer and Egan- damned prep for the semester) without seeing them as creations developed from a web-based view of the text, the reader and the page. There's other theoretical underpinnings as well, but in terms of display, it's print influenced by the web (there's that fish book too with the fonts that change color in different chapters). But for every outlier (and I include the above and all work from the electronic literature collections as outliers), there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of content collections that have been set in the print-based book mold and that format is not going to disappear. Even if it does we have hundreds of thousands of work that exist as ghosts in some form of digital format (How many ghosts does it take to sink a pirate ghost ship? How many forgotten public domain works to clog Google Books and Amazon? Angels on a pin head?) It's a good question about digital typographies, but since we're still having trouble with the present (did you know the Kindle has trouble rendering borders around certain formats of text? And that ADE doesn't recognize Small Caps? These are the problems I struggle with on a daily level more so than text that contracts and expands with user experience. I'll leave that up to you and your studies.

...

I address this more here: http://texturalliterature.blogspot.com/2011/08/born-digital-vs-digitally-adapted.html

asg

Notes on the Uns (Inspired by un # 1 below).

2011-08-25T00:11:00.000-04:00

Unprintability, Untranslatability, Unreadability

With the increasing ubiquity of man-machine interaction, will we face more impossible uns as 'smart-machines' automate previously possible acts?

Notes on the Uns:

Unprintability: http://netpoetic.com/2011/08/unprintability-part-1/. Sandy Baldwin's poetic work, Lurid Numbers, deemed 'unprintable' by the printer (machine).

From author's publisher "they cannot print this book and there is nothing I can do about it. [...] this is something completely new and I have to say I am perplexed by the mechanizations of modern times. The printers are not opposed to you or your work, this is a situation of a printing process that is highly automated and this registers exactly like a printers error to their machine. It is not a human that we must cajole into agreeing that this is art, which was my first take on this, as with the printer who cannot spell. This is a matter of a quality control camera that will reject books that look like this. I talked with a lot of people in the company and even had my lawyer call them to see if great weight would move the immovable. But no, their system will literally stop when it would try to produce your work."

Untranslatability: Moving directly then from un #1 'unprintability,' let's consider how a machine might translate one of the English Lit canon's most inimitable (and irreplaceable) works: Ulysses... Would the machine send Joyce a "the system will literally stop when it would try to produce your work" message? How smart must a smart-machine be in order to smartly recognize the importance of Joyce? If machines become our gate-keepers, who will be left outside?

Unreadability: Several streams here: 1) Certain breeds of (stubborn) readers consider, without exemption, all machine-related (digital) literature to be unreadable. Full stop. 2) For those who will consider reading digital literature, there are actually pieces deliberately designed to be 'unreadable': Several digital literary pieces are programmed to disappear or to self-erase as they are read. They are mechanically un/re-produced as they are read. 3) Other pieces are, like the unprintable print piece above, generated by smartly-programmed computers...sometimes these author combinations that are not quite so smart - the resulting generated text is rendered rather unreadable due to computer-spouted gibberish. 4) ePub problematics: ePub formats like to drop tables, graphs, and illustrations; they like to skew images and alter typography. Not so smart, not so readable - especially not readable as intended. With ePub, the systems, when trying to produce the work(s), literally un-produce the work.

Unavoidability: Are the uns unavoidable? And is this so unsettling?

asg

On Literary Analysis and Google NGram

2011-08-16T21:55:00.005-04:00

Moretti's (fantastic) recent quote: "It's like the invention of the telescope," Franco Moretti, a Stanford professor of English and comparative literature, says of Google Books. "All of a sudden, an enormous amount of matter becomes visible." quoted in The Chronicle.

The public discu(r)ssion mounts:

Analyzing Culture with Google Books: Is It Social Science?: "OPINION: Discovering fun facts by graphing terms found among the 5 million volumes of the Google Books project sure is amusing — but this pursuit dubbed ‘culturomics’ is not the same as being an historian."

An article at American Scientist: "There are other things we (and our computers) can do with the words in books. We can count them, sort them, make comparisons among them, search for patterns in their distribution, classify them, catalog them, analyze them. Yes, these are nerdy, mechanical, reductionist assaults on literature—but they are also methods of extracting meaning from text, just as reading is."

Erez Lieberman Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel on Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books (video)Mathematicians who helped create Google's Ngram text analysis project discuss the possibilities... And their initial article, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Book," in Science.

At Information is Beautiful, the NGram Viewer is a vehicle of beautiful information.

Linguist Steven Pinker discusses the NGram project in an MIT Podcast "Communications Forum: Humanities in the Digital Age. Pinker sees it as a research tool to track linguistic patterns.

This guy might disagree:Why Google Ngrams F---ing Sucks

Back, then to the Chronicle article about Moretti: "When presenting work, they often face the same question: "What does this tell me that what we can't already do?" Their answer is that computers won't destroy interpretation. They'll ground it in a new type of evidence.

I'd say that Moretti has properly located this type of textual analysis. Even considering Google's vastly deficient data set (they not only have NOT scanned many, many books, but very many other books lack proper classifying meta-data, and still others have been so poorly scanned that words are not recognized by Google's OCR software) which makes large-scale, specific cultural/literary analysis slightly dubious, the NGram viewer can point toward general trends and topics and patterns that might be of interest or of worth to literary scholars.

asg

Self-Monitoring and Feedback Loops

2011-08-15T23:15:00.007-04:00

Data Point One: Personal feedback loops encourage behavioral modification. 'Your Speed' signs, for instance, actually work; statistics show these signs motivate drivers to reduce speed, on average, by about 10% (stat). In Wired's "Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops" (June 2011), Thomas Goet explains feedback loops:

A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual...This is the relevance stage. [T]hird stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals

Data Point Two: Smart-meters/smart-monitors like FitBit allow users to quantify their daily motions. Nicholas Felton has been tracking and then visualizing his personal daily data for years; his annual report, the Feltron Report, is a display of beautiful (self-quantifying) data. This guy went through grueling (and gruesome...) self-biometric experimentation in order to achieve a plan for 'self-optimization' (bio-sensitive transhuman status?). At the Quantified Self you can explore 'self knowledge through numbers.' MIT is getting into the act by measuring life.

Connection question: How and when do these - feedback loops (dp1) and biometrics (dp2)- collide?

Connection answer: Doesn't one almost already nearly suggest the other? If we self-monitor and then self-adjust (or eerily follow a regime of extreme self-optimize as that guy did) aren't we tapping the power of feedback loops? Goet, in his Wired article writes:

The mathematician Norbert Wiener expanded on this [feedback loop] work in the 1940s, devising the field of cybernetics, which analyzed how feedback loops operate in machinery and electronics and explored how those principles might be broadened to human systems.

aha.Collision. Cybernetic machinic computational monitoring systems (and computational methods) such as those listed above 'teach' self-monitorers about their own (self) human systems. We use electronic feedback loops to track our (usually internal) bodily feedback loops and then use that data to initiate behavioral change via relevant, consequential feedback loops that cause us to 'recalibrate'. Another interesting contribution here comes from cofounder of The Brain Technologies Shelley Hayduk in a recent article in The Atlantic:

So how do we examine ourselves -- our thoughts and experiences? One method is introspection, and it's going digital....We are the aggregation of how all our thoughts, feelings and experiences connect. This gestalt forms a perspective of the world as we see it. It's kind of like a miniature version of the world in our heads -- a "mental model" if you will. We use our mental models to store, analyze and decide everything. When we make a decision we check our mental models and use them to try to predict what will happen in the real world. ....Technologies that enable us to see and explore our mental models can help us reinforce, analyze, and improve them.

(It is important to note that Hayduk is trying to sell a mental modeling program product here.)

So then, we come to the sidebar debate:

Sidebar debate: There is an argument that lifetracking and self-monitoring bring us closer to our natural states - that it helps us better know our natural, previously unknowable selves. (See, for example, Brennan Moore, Max Van Kleek, David R. Karger, Mc Schraefel: Assisted Self Reflection: Combining Lifetracking, Sensemaking, & Personal Information Management and Wolf, G.: Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life.)

I am dubious. Isn't this just another step toward a sort of biomachinic singularity? Speaking here of the coming singularity, transhumanist/futurist George Dvorsky says "...I already see signs of this pending intelligence explosion happening all around us...It’s becoming glaringly obvious that humanity is offloading all of it’s capacities, albeit in a distributed way, to its technological artifacts." Are not biometrics another form of offloading? Though it might seem like we are getting ‘closer to' our (natural?) selves by paying more (unnatural?) attention to our (natural?) selves, is this really what is happening? How quickly does biometric life measuring stretch into self-optimization and thus become an offloading/transhuman extension?

asg

Mystery Book, Beautiful Book

2011-08-15T00:00:00.006-04:00

manuscript MS 408, The 'Voynich' Manuscript

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8532458/The-Voynich-Manuscript-will-we-ever-be-able-to-read-this-book.html

Code? Language unknown?* Infinite Jest?

*Is a language 'unknown' if it was once known?

Born-digital vs digitally-adapted ebooks

2011-08-14T01:05:00.003-04:00

Compare:

Fantastic series on ebook ipad app design: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/storytelling-gets-an-upgrade-reach-out-and-touch-it/.

Not-so-fantastic so-called 'hybrid' book: http://www.observer.com/2011/08/melville-house-goes-hybrid-with-novellas-by-chekov-conrad/. Gross misuse of the term 'hybrid'? I'd argue perhaps yes. This is very little more than a book with a companion website. What is hybrid here? QR codes are not born-digital narratives.

One more, then, on Social-reading as the future of the novel: http://www.salon.com/life/imprint/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/08/04/book_future_imprint.

asg

Culture Machines and Meaningful Uploading

2011-08-11T01:29:00.008-04:00

Rifts on Lunenfeld's 'How computers can cure cultural diabetes' found in July's New Scientist.

Pointing toward the new in New Media: One space is now all spaces. one tool is now so multipurpose that is serves many simultaneously opposite purposes, one access point serves as the unbounded center of an infinite unfolding.

"The second half of the 20th century saw a collection of geniuses, warriors, pacifists, cranks, entrepreneurs and visionaries labour to create a fabulous machine that could function as a typewriter and printing press, studio and theatre, paintbrush and gallery, piano and radio, the mail as well as the mail carrier. Not only did they develop such a device but by the turn of the millennium they had also managed to embed it in a worldwide system accessed by billions of people every day. The networked computer is an amazing device, the first media machine that serves as the mode of production (you can make stuff), means of distribution (you can upload stuff to the network), site of reception (you can download stuff and interact with it), and locus of praise and critique (you can talk about the stuff you have downloaded or uploaded). The computer is the 21st century's culture machine."

Pointing toward the very human aspect of the digital humanities - or toward the digital aspect of the human:

"Humans are unique in their capacity to not only make tools but then turn around and use them to create superfluous material goods - paintings, sculpture and architecture - and superfluous experiences - music, literature, religion and philosophy. Of course, it is precisely these superfluous things that define human culture and ultimately what it is to be human."

Pointing toward meaningful interaction...

"The networked computer offers the first chance in 50 years to reverse the flow, to encourage thoughtful downloading and, even more importantly, meaningful uploading.
What counts as meaningful uploading? My definition revolves around the concept of "stickiness" - creations and experiences to which others adhere. Tweets about celebrity gaffes are not sticky but rather little Teflon balls of meaninglessness. In contrast, applications like http://tumblr.com, which allow users to combine pictures, words and other media in creative ways and then share them, have the potential to add stickiness by amusing, entertaining and enlightening others - and engendering more of the same. The explosion of apps for mobile phones and tablets means that even people with limited programming skills can now create sticky things....Not to break it down too much, watching is ingesting is downloading and making is exercising is uploading.

"Of course people will still download. Nobody uploads more than a tiny percentage of the culture they consume. But the goal must be to establish a balance between consumption and production. Using the networked computer as a download-only device, or even a download-mainly device, is a wasted opportunity of historic proportions."

asg

Prehistoric Transhumanism?

2011-08-11T01:16:00.003-04:00

"In A History of Ideas About the Prolongation of Life (1977) Gerald J. Gruman traces the origins of what he calls life prolongation. Starting with some of the earliest ideas up until 1800, Gruman investigates an array of practices [of 'life extension'] that stem from multicultural perspectives." (via http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/08/09/ideas-on-life-extension/)

Can we equate today's transhumanism discourse to the ancient (re)searches of life-prolongation/life extension?

asg

Turning toward an archaeology of the now...

2011-07-27T01:25:00.002-04:00

An immediate Archaeology? An Archaeology of the immanent (imminent) now? An archaeology of the present-tense object-moment? Can we adopt an archaeological perspective towards our contemporary objects and aspects?

Answer: Yes?

Argument 1:
Barry Sandywell tells us Aristotle defined arche as "sustaining source" or "power of being"...as "the element or principle of a thing, which although undemonstrable and intangible in itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that thing" (see here and here)

Argument 2: Foucault
Archeaology:

"this term does not imply the search for a beginning; it does not relate analysis to a geological excavation. it designates the general theme of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs. archaeology describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive."

(michel foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge)

Argument 1 + 2 = A seed for an idea of an approach to an archaeology of the present?

The new media are 'new' only in relation to seemingly 'old(er)' manifestations of media. We are thus inevitably always already stuck, (s)lightly in an archaeological discourse. So then, let's move that forward and think about thinking about archaeology of new (current) media in dialogue with Foucault and Aristotle.

Questions then:

1. What is the sustaining source of new media arts (including literary, of course) practices?

Information? Art? Literature? Experimentation? Possibility? The body?

2. What is the power of being of new media art?

Electricity (at base), Networks (visible and invisible, social and infrastructural), Global span?

3. What are the already-saids to be questioned?

Oh, the heavy, heavy list of already saids...

4. What is its level of existence? Its ontology? Epistemology?

Does it have only one level of existence? Aren't there multiple nows and beings in the digital?

5. What is the enunciative function that operates within it?

6. The discourse of its formation?

7. What is the general archive to which it belongs?

Visual Arts? Media? Culture? Literature? Expression?

7½. Une petite demi-question then, could Foucault's Nietzschean genealogical approach (and here I'm only halfway being cutely clever) - added as demi postscript to the archaeological method - meant to elucidate the character of transition, provide the character of transition to fill the gap between a past-tense and a present/future-tense archaeology of new media?

hmmm...

asg

Thoughts on HyperText Lit

2011-07-23T01:17:00.005-04:00

The critical hypertext conversation used to be one that emphasized hypertext literature's nature as one offering dual-authorship and user-freedoms. In actuality, though, all free-choices were always already predicted and programmed. It was only ever a case of optional pre-chosen path choice. In hypertext fictions, the choices to be chosen are offered within prescribed and predicted (and predicated) boundaries. The whole story is always already written even if that story has various interlocking forking paths.*

Early hypertext writers touted the novel flexibility of their narratives. Yet, contrary to such claims, the story does not, of course, actually change with each reader, it is only the navigation of the story that is changed. And hasn’t this always already always been the case with any story/fiction/novel/art work? We’ve always been able to enter and exit a novel/art work at will, been able to read a novel/art within or without our own various contexts, been able to change our contexts in order to reread the art/novel in a different context, been able to stop and start and review and restart at will. Furthermore, we can read a novel/art work at one particular space-time in our lives and then read it again in another particular space-time and experience a wholly new experience.

The value of hypertext as a research object then emerges perhaps not on an ontological level - i.e. describing hypertext literature as a unique and distinct phenomena (because hypertext IS, as is any other narrative, one story written whole (though hypertext stories may have various interlocking parts veiling the original ‘whole’) and not one literally endless or reader-personalized) - but perhaps on a phenomenological level: the way a reader experiences the hypertext story might suggest to the reader that freedom of choice IS in fact a choice and thus the reading experience seems to be one characterized by user-freedoms. Perhaps that phenomenologically felt choice alters the nature of the reading environment? Perhaps that seeming-to-be is actually what we are going for in the first place?

Epistemologically speaking then - speaking of how/what we know based on how/what we feel (phenomenologically) and how/what actually IS (ontologically) - we see the (de)illusions of the pro(e)mises of hypertext fictions. But perhaps there is value in such delusion?

*When teaching hypertext to a group of youth several years ago, I first taught them that the page had to be created before we could do the linking. The full story must be written before the story parts can be split and offered (as options) to the reader.

asg

The Shape of Stories

2011-07-22T23:44:00.002-04:00

Spell Check Collaboration

2011-04-24T00:12:00.000-04:00

In our present pomo-hyperexteded world of machine(self)-correctors, spell checker machinery has become an oft-surprising collaborator. Spell check sometimes perfects me, sometimes critiques me, and sometimes assists in my creation.

Latest example: When trying to express to a friend via email that I was "dizzyingly busy," my spell check partner alerted me to the fact (is language ever a fact?) that 'dizzyingly' is in fact not an accepted actual word. Instead it suggests the following options: dazzlingly, disarmingly, pityingly, and annoyingly. aha! If my hypothetical word 'dizzyingly' embodies all four of these then it most definitely deserves a dictionary mention. I intended my adverb to simultaneously embody each and all of these.

thank you spell checker machine

Nota bene: Spell checker machine would make an easy, elegant, dada-poetic poetry partner. Or a quick cheap digital-spontaneous sentence generator.

play.

asg

Provocative Poetic Pause via Grace Paley

2011-04-23T23:36:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from
Thank God there is no god

…but if we are responsible con-

sider our frequent love for one another

because this is nowadays we may be able

to look over great distances into

each other’s eyes these are the tele-

phonic electronic digital nowadays

famous for money and loneliness but we

have defeated Babel by accepting the words

of strangers in glorious translations if

we can be responsible if we have become responsible

(emphasis my own)

p.20, Grace Paley, Fidelity Poems, 2008

asg

The Shape of Words

2010-08-16T23:20:00.000-04:00

What do words look like without their letters?

What does Play look like? Blow? Break? Split? Light? Space?

This film, Words, by filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante at Everynone proposes a clever series of answers.

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Simple, brilliant, and beautiful.

via The Casual Optimist

asg

Stories from Graphics and Graphics from Stories

2010-07-19T16:55:00.001-04:00

For most, reading is visual. Storytelling is visual. Narrative is visual. Even factual, data-driven, opinion-free reportage is visual. The visual textures of a work or piece of art or writing mean; and they work–both deliberately and unintentionally–with the untextured content to create meaning. From typeface to medium, from spatial layout to textual form(at), from color to size, from graphic support to multimedia links, every element becomes a legible sign contributing to the text.

An interesting example:

Gestalten.tv presents New York Times editors on Visual Reporting

Link here: Finding the Unique Visual Story at The Casual Optimist

Visualizations can craft a story's perspective. Though intuitively speaking the opposite seems true–especially in reportage, stand-alone infographics and graphics designed to visually support a story can (and do) shape and/or re-shape, at the very least, the reception of the story and the level(s) at which the story is understood.

asg

The art of Beautiful Visualizations

2010-06-26T17:36:00.008-04:00

Canadian Artist and Graphic Designer Marian Bantjes + TED = Intricate Beauty by Design.

"At the intersection of word and form, Marian Bantjes makes her art..."

Key Points for Textured Literature:

Bantjes says that one of the things Religion "got right" (presumably speaking of the past...Illuminated manuscripts come to mind) is their "use of visual wonder to deliver a message."

Bantjes says this "marriage of art and information is woefully underused" in today's adult literatures. This marriage is, she points out, quite typically "reserved for" children's literature.

She argues, brilliantly, that "visual wealth [should be used to enhance intellectual wealth."

Thank you, Marian.

asg

(re)Definition of Textured Poetry (Excerpts)

2010-05-06T13:53:00.008-04:00

---

TEXTURE:

Etymology: Latin textura, from textus, past participle of texere to weave — more at technical

Date: 1578

1 a : something composed of closely interwoven elements; specifically : a woven cloth b : the structure formed by the threads of a fabric
2 a : essential part : substance b : identifying quality : character
3 a : the disposition or manner of union of the particles of a body or substance b : the visual or tactile surface characteristics and appearance of something
4 a : a composite of the elements of prose or poetry b : a pattern of musical sound created by tones or lines played or sung together
5 a : basic scheme or structure b : overall structure
[from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/texture]

A textured work of poetry is one “textured” with extralinguistic features that give a poem a certain visual surface texture.¹ The artistic nature of textured poetry—its aesthetic situation—is one characterized by illuminations, graphics, typographic inconsistencies, and images; it has voiced parts, moving parts, interactive parts, invisible parts and linked parts. A textural work of poetry is not per se categorically different from an untextured piece, but it is perhaps distinct in the ways it is phenomenologically felt, cognitively experienced, and aesthetically seen. The difference lies in the thresholds, the designs, the densities, and the felt sensation; the textured poetic piece does presume to serve an apoetic purpose, it does not position itself as an entirely unique artistic quantity, it simply approaches and executes its poetic function differently. The textured poetic work varies from the untextured poem in its depths, its intensities, and its intersections. It is this difference that makes unique the relationships, interactions, and interventions the reader exchanges with the text.

The natural environment of a poetic work, no matter its level of texture, is one with an implicit physical and material shape. Poetry’s conscious (and self-conscious) intention is to lyrically break from the structured strictures of traditional prose form. With their purposefully designed architectures, textured poets make the implicit materialities and physicalities of the poem manifest and manifestly meaningful. A textural poet is one who integrates textured gesture and visual pronunciation into the Coleridgean soul of the poem.²

¹This use of “texture” here is distinct from the use of “texture” in the literary work of the New Critics. The New Critics of the mid-twentieth century used “texture” to refer to the poem’s linguistic poetic devices (e.g. imagery, metaphor, metre). For more, see John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism, 1979.

² In 1817, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that the “language of poetry” is not just its words but is the formal and harmonious construction, and “reconciled interpenetration” of its various elements and energies. He said of poetry: “FANCY [is] its DRAPERY, MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere…and [these] form all into one graceful and intelligent whole.” From: Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter xviii and xiv.

asg

MORE THAN JUST PLAY: Textured poetry as Political Voice

2010-04-26T13:33:00.011-04:00

TEXTURED POETRY

Textured poetry can be more than just play. It can be deliberately messaged. As a form, it has in the past been used explicitly to convey and perform a political message.

Examples:

1. Futurism à la Marinetti: “The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt” From the Futurist Manifesto. Futurist poetry rejected all pre-established concepts of form/meter/style and merged word art with image art to create an inflected poetic environment. Marinetti's revolt was typographic, emblematic, and cartographic; with type and image and layout designs, he rewrote the cartographies of the printed poem.

Marinetti, "Montage + Vallate + Strade x Joffre," 1915:

2. Dada à la Tzara: anti-consumerist, anti-war, anti-art. "Épater la bourgeoisie!" Berlin Dada was particularly (and aggressively) political. The dadaists created sound poetry, automatic poetry, and non-technological generative poetry. They used, among other textures, collage, montage, assemblage, bricolage, impromptu performance, and cut-up/mash-up techniques to create nontraditional poetries. In his poetry, Tzara would use the language and layouts of broadsides and marketing advertisements to embed political, consumerist, and capitalistic undertones into the nature and presentation of his anti-anti works.

Tristan Tzara, Une Nuit d’Echecs Gras, 1920. From Cottington, p. 127.

3. Surrealism à la Breton: Ultra-leftists, Communist, Anarchist. "La Révolution surréaliste." Looked to Marcuse, Benjamin, and Marx for philo-political inspiration. The Theory and Techniques of Surrealist Poetry, Alan Gullette, 1979. The surrealists used many and varied methods to create poetry that, according to Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, expressed "the true function of thought."

4. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: movement in opposition to capitalism and bourgeoisie values.L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine.

Terms used when speaking about these textured, layered, nontraditional poetries:

“Revolutionary, Rebellion”

“Progression”

“Exhibitionist”

“Freedom, Liberty”

“Anti, Against”

“Anarchic”

DIGITAL POETRY

Many digital works are expressly and loudly political. In Death Moves it Forward, by Jodi Zellen, for instance flash poetry, jarring battle images, and clashing-clanging sounds of radio broadcasts make the intensity, disruption (and death) of war evident.

Generative poetry ‘fed’ from live google searches—searches of things people want and need and desire—makes evident the whiles and whims of the wired, technological class (if we can so call it).

DIGITAL-POLITICAL CRIT

Much of the current epoetry political critique focuses on cyberpolitics and on the always-already political/consumerist/technological medium of the digital e-poetic environment. This critique is incomplete because it inorganically separates the work's medium from the work as a whole.

Current Cyber Technopolitics: Technology as auraless simulacrum mediations parading as authentic art objects (Baudrillard, Benjamin, McLuhan); cyberspace as reorientation of subject/object, self/other, privacy/publicity, individual/global, local/networked, (Deleuze, Guattari); cyberspace as environment with problematic genders and sexualities and as playground for our already-extended posthuman, cyborg bodies (Hayles, Haraway).

None of these is sufficient; few of these are satisfying. So, then, where do we start? Or, from which theory/critique do we continue?

How do we effectively evaluate the political-socioeconomic-ethical considerations of digital poetries? And, what is the function of such an assessment?

asg

Poetic Touches

2010-04-11T23:29:00.015-04:00

Poetic Touches

How do you touch print poetry?

With your eyes? With your voice?

When your eyes touch the poem, do they do so
slowly?

quickly?

gently?

deeply?

When you read a printed poem, do you read its words aloud?
Do you break the poem’s silent sphere?

                                          Do you gesture,
                                                                      touch,
                                                                                    art-iculate
                                                                                                  an atmospheric voice?

How does print poetry touch you?

With its words? With its shape?

A poem’s words provide linguistic surfaces for your eyes to touch.

A poem’s typographic presentation provides topographic surface maps for the brain to parse.

ok, then.

ePoetic Touches

How do you touch digital poetries?

With your eyes? With your ears? With your body?

.sight.sound.touch.

The cartographic distribution of astatic digital planes
has peaks and dips

(it speaks and dips)

for sensory exploration

When reading digital poetries, our cognitive attentions are charged and challenged and charmed in ways unmatched
by printed poetry flatscapes

The eyes are touched by visuals by motion by language
The ears are touched by sounds by tones by musics by voice
The body is touched as it performs in complicit duplicitous participation

ok.then.

How does how you touch your poetry touch your poetic sensibility?

As you interact with the work, creating interactive interdependencies,
and
as you relate to the work, creating interdependent relationships,
how do these poetic touches inform & perform the interactions & relationships?

did you read this aloud? did you read it twice? did you leave a footprint comment?

why not try and touch again?

asg

Lichtenstein and Digital Literature: A short diversion

2010-04-05T23:50:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from an interview between David Bowie and artist Roy Lichtenstein found in Ray Gun: Out of Control, 1997, p.98.

DB: “When you begin a painting or a sculpture, do you find that the finished work often contains information that you had not intended?

RL: Yeah. I think there’s no doubt about it.

RL: (In response to a question about his (1990s) Chinese landscapes) “they look contemplative and all of that, but they are really still made of graduated dots that are purely mechanical lines…”

Artistic Parallels:
Digital literature often “contains more [unintended hypermediated atmospherically-interfered/interfaced] information” than printed literature. Neither the author nor the reader can control the ambient digital weather.

Lichtenstein’s works [Or, electronic literary works] are “contemplative” wholes made from “graduated dots” [Or, parts] of “mechanical line” [Or, digital data].

Thank you, Mr. Lichtenstein, for the visual illustration of the experimental electronic literature project…

Image, "Landscape with Bridge" c/o The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

asg

e-Poetic Dimensions: Surfaces, Absences, Subjects and Spaces

2010-03-30T14:25:00.006-04:00

Special Considerations in the evaluation of digital poetry. Because e-poetry cannot be properly evaluated using only print poetic standards, the what-else? questions must be identified before they can be answered. What else must we consider when evaluating e-poetic dimensions?

TOPOGRAPHY & HOLOGRAPHY…the poetic play of multimedia surfaces

If the printed page has a topographic surface, could we say that the electronic 'page' has a holographic surface? A holograph is a reconstruction (or re-production) of a pattern of light meant to reproduce an original (or reproduced) image. Or, according to m-w.com, a holograph is “a three-dimensional image reproduced from a pattern of interference produced by a split coherent beam of radiation (as a laser); also: the pattern of interference itself.”

Interesting semantic relatives

Hologram “Etymology: Late Latin holographus, from Late Greek holographos, from Greek hol- + graphein to write—more at carve: a document wholly in the handwriting of its author; also: the handwriting itself” (m-w.com)

Holographic principle: “The holographic principle is a mathematical principle that the total information contained in a volume of space corresponds to an equal amount of information contained on the boundary of that space.” (physics.about.com) more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sidebar-the-holographic-p

By combining the quantum mechanical principle, the etymological Latin grandfather understanding, and the modern digital interfacing tool, we get the perfect explanation of the digital page; it is reflective, reflexive, contrived, patterned-by-interferences, layered, multiple, there-and-not-there, hand-written (in HTML code), and defined by its own information containment.

GAPS & ABSENCES in poetry.

The poetic page—in both digital and print—has visual gaps, typographic spaces, and information absences that all participate in the actual understanding of the poem. Mathematically, the poem then becomes both singular (what is there) and double (as a sum addition of what is present plus what is absent). There is much meaning in the absence. In music, a pause—illustrated by a symbol glyph—is an articulated absence.
The connections and relationships between the gaps and the spaces (both present and absent) are important semiotic gestures.Absences can be nothingnesses and can be present thingnesses.

When compared to the printed poety page, the e-poetic presentation allows for a different experience of gaps and absences and stops and pauses. E-poetic gaps can be animated and visually articulated in ways unavailable to print poetries. The gaps can be ‘filled’ with something extratextual such as an image or a sound. Alternately, the gaps and pauses can be digitally emphasized—they can call attention to themselves—in ways perhaps more climactic than are possible to render on the printed page. A sudden blackness or blankness or silence in an otherwise spectrumatically dynamic e-poetry piece can have great impact. The gaps can be experienced and not just ‘read’ as they are upon the page. Pause-control is also a consideration. In a printed poem, a reader can choose when and how to honor and/or voice (or unvoice) the printed pause. The e-poetic piece can control the pace and space and delivery of the words, images, sounds, gaps, and pauses.

SUBJECT(ivity)S & OBJECT(ivty)S

Interactive fiction introduces the ‘subject’ to the ‘object’ and merges the two. The boundaries blur and burst. The subject becomes the object and the object the subject and the interplay of the connections and relationships can be ambiguously unstable and simultaneously multiple. Subjectivities and objectivities are actively interchanged and exchanged. The e-poetic work requires we rethink the body’s object and the subject’s body…as well as the body object and the subject body.

The digital object is problematic because it has no tactile existence. Is an object an object without a tactile existence?

Who is gazing at whom? When we interact are we gazing at ourselves?

TEMPORALITY(s) & SPACE(s)

Contextually, the digital page has an altered or absent temporal context and can exist, at once, in many times and in many temporal dimensions. Experientially, the experience of time in the digital poem can greatly differ from the temporality of the printed poem.

Digital space(s): (nonlieu heteropic location + extra-palimsestic dimension)

Is the location of an e-poem a delusive space? An illusive (or elusive) space? Is it a utopian place (root meaning of utopia = “not place”)? Is it a potentiated or future place? Is it a space at all? Why do we insist on implicating time and space in the metaphoric description of an idea that exists in neither time nor space? Because both time and place can be arbitrary and abstract in the digital space, both can be manipulated and made more or less meaningful. These manipulations become not only evaluative criteria for the scholar but also artistic devices for the poet.

Does digital poetry reside only in its holographic projection? If so, what does this mean for our study?

CONTEXTUAL DIFFERENCES & DISTANCES

What happens to the context of the work when the spaces are unspaced—and multiply placed—and the object is subjected to the subject’s subjugation? What happens to the context when the e-poetic work’s physicality is understood as holographic? What happens to the context of the work when the work’s context becomes inevitably attached to the reader’s inevitable contexts? The e-poem, having no topographical location or published book package, flies itself (appearing and disappearing, flickering and radiating) into the contextual scene/screen of the reader-subject. What happens to the context when the poem must be interactively ‘re-written’ by the subject? How do these contexts differ from those of the compiled-and-published poetic book product? How does the experience of the navigational approach (i.e. the path you take to reach the poem's page) affect the poem? For all intents and purposes, does the hypertextual webpage-jumping path provide the surrogate experience of opening a book and moving through its introductory pages? And, how does the e-poetic artist properly prepare (and control) the reader’s arrival and entrance into the e-poem? Is the reader more distanced from the context of the e-poem or just differently distanced? Is the e-poem fundamentally different from the print poem? How greatly do their differences distance them?

MULTIMEDIA ATMOSPHERES

Techno-renderings of poetry introduce new media art and audio-visual cinematic elements. How do we evaluate these elements singularly as ‘extra’ elements when they are intimately intertwined with the production and presentation of the e-poetic Text? Can we say the e-poem is good if the ‘extra’ elements are poor? How deeply interdependent are the multiple elements?* Do these considerations distance the evaluator from the essence of the piece? Do the multimedia atmospheres distance the e-poetic work from its Literature origins?

*According to Matthieu Ricard, “interdependence” comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “to be by co-emergence.” He explains this gives ‘interdependence’ two complementary interpretations: 1) “this arises because that is” and 2) “this, having been produced, produces that.” This explanation works well for our purposes here as it accentuates the essence of the Text—that no element exists on its own and no element has its own, singular cause. From The Quantum and the Lotus.

asg

Where art thou?

2010-03-22T19:40:00.003-04:00

The physical and/or virtual situation of the literary art object is one of the primary interrogations of self-aware ‘experimental’ work. Here we interrogate the interrogation.

AT WHAT POINT ART? Is the printer’s print or the carver’s print block the art? Is the play or the performance the art? Is the technology source code or the resulting flash animation the art? Where lays (and lies) the Benjaminan aura? If the carver’s block is the art, are the printer’s prints ‘aura’-less copies? If the printer’s prints are each individual art works, is there an original work that retains the artistic ‘aura’?

AT WHAT RE-VERSION ART? Are mash-ups art? Why do some (few) mash-ups feel like art while others (most) feel like unartistic trivialities? Is Damion Searls’s book-of-what’s-remaining, ; the whale, art? Is David Shields’s book Reality Hunger art?*

AT WHAT DEPTH ART? Digital art introduces the physical and theoretical concept of the screen. A reader or view looks onto AND into the screen. Can we look into or through a window without seeing the window? Does the window then become part of the scene/screen? The window/screen is a frame for viewing and a container for action and a lens through which perspective is filtered.

Lev Manovich says that digital technology has ‘erased’ the differences between media and has made the multimedia document the ‘integrated standard.’ He argues thus that the concept of the artistic medium is ‘rendered useless.’ But is it? Don’t we see the screen? Don’t we know that code hides behind the visual representation and that the visual representation hides within the screen?

Asking simultaneously AT WHAT DEPTH AND AT WHAT POINT ART?, the question then becomes: what is the material base of the computer or virtual or digital art medium? At which point, or at which depth, exists the art? Is the image the art and the code only code? Is the image the code the art and the computer only tool? DP Corbett suggests in his article, “Visual Culture and the History of Art” (2005) that the interruption of the screen and the complications of the computer-as-art-medium may make it “impossible to assess the work [digital computer art] as a visual artifact at all.” How, then, do we find the art? How, then, do we ‘see’ the art? In which space exists the art? Is it real? Virtual? A Foucauldian heterotopic third space? An Augian non-place? Perhaps the space in which digital art exists is not a place at all but an evanescent shadow of a nonexistent place that has no static footprint.

AT WHAT MEETING/MOMENT ART? With interactive fiction, is the user necessary for the art to be art? Does the art only begin when the user begins her interaction?

IN WHAT CONTEXT ART? Does art require a context? Does an altered context (think Reality Hunger as above) alter the art? Does it negate or supersede the ‘replaced’/’original’ context?
Are these questions valuable?

*I just finished reading Reality Hunger and I think not. By removing the contexts from each of the unattributed quotes that populate his book, Shields effectively creates a sort of collage work that may justifiably mirror the digitechno pace of online information BUT, without their original voices and contextual atmospheres the unattributed quotes merely sink. His project fails because the quotes become uninteresting groups of unflavored words. Though he may call it art, I certainly do not. For more, see Michiko Kakutani's review on NY Times.com, "Texts Without Context," 3.17.2010.

asg

The (r)evolution of the textu(r)al page: (stone) - skin – paper – screen – skin - (stone)

2010-03-14T15:22:00.004-04:00

(stone) → skin → paper → screen → skin → (stone)

There are many textu(r)al spaces for literary production. Here's an abridged version of the (r)evolution...

Stone: Stories were first written on clay tablets. The Epic of Gilgamesh was originally written on 12 clay tablets in or around 1200 BC in or around Mesopotania. It is recognized as one of the first works of written literature.
**For a 21st century online version with hypertext-link annotations see http://www.piney.com/BabGilgPro.html.

Skin: Manuscript parchments were made from the prepared skin of animals. Before parchment, paper was made from papyrus. Plant-based papyrus was invented by the Egyptians around 3000 BC and was relatively widely distributed by 500 BC. Depending upon the source, skin is said to have been used as a writing paper as early as either the 6th or the 8th century BC. For images, see http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Paper-exhibit/paper3.html. Skin-as-paper (parchment) is said to have replaced papyrus by about the 1st century AD. NB: Because parchment paper was more durable and better suited for binding, the widely-spread use of parchment facilitated the early production and reproduction of the modern codex. Most of the preserved existing medieval illuminated manuscripts were written on parchment.

Paper: Paper was first produced circa 100 BC in China. Around 400 BC, paper was being made in India. By about 1250 AD, paper was being made in Europe. One of the earliest literary books to use paper in place of parchment was a book of Buddhist scripts created in China in 800 AD.

Screen: The page of the screen is paradoxically flat & set yet deep & endless. It is simultaneously a lens to peer through and a surface to touch. Brief history of the screen: the first projection screen, the Magic Lantern is recorded as being used in Naples in 1558; in 1895, the first projected movie screen debuted by the Lumière Brothers in France; by the 1930s, we had the tv screens in our homes; in 1960 the first commercial computer monitor was available. Brief touch-screen branch to the history: in the 1970s, the first touch screen was created; in the 2000s, computer monitors, handheld devices, and mobile readers began using touch screen technology; today we have touchable reading screens.

Paper + Screen = e-Paper: Developed in the 1990s development, today e-Paper technology is being used in commercial devices. Techno-cool side note: Soken, a Japanese technology company presented electronic wallpaper at a digital conference in 2008. See also a video presentation of MIT's version of electronic wallpaper.

Skin: Shelley Jackson's SKIN is a novel written, in tattoo ink, on the skin of narrative bodies.

Stone: Modern-day stone tablets? Nick Montfort, experimental author of interactive and digital fiction, wrote a narrative, Implementation, and pasted it, in parts, to the walls of public places. Brown University’s Cave digitally paints narratives on its four interior walls. Is graffiti literature?

asg

Term Alternatives

2010-03-07T21:44:00.002-05:00

An exploration of the terms, serious and ridiculous, that have been (or could be) used as near-or-very-near substitutes for "experimental" vis-à-vis art and literature:

transliterate
surfiction, critifiction (Federman)
potential or potentiated (Oulipo)
altermodern
conceptual
textu(r)al, performative (me)
supermodern (Augé)
shimmering (Shimmering Literacies)
interstitial (InterFictions)
avant-garde, nouveau
"lyrical investigations" (Lyric Postmodernisms)
____

A DO-IT-YOURSELF, MAKE-YOUR-OWN EXERCISE IN TERM-MAKING:

1. Chose one or several of the following prefixes and pair it with a relevant noun:

hyper, super, alter, post, neo, trans, sur, pseudo, cyber

fiction, art, modern, literate, text, human, poetry

2. OR, try a mash-up. Combine one or more of the following terms in any way you chose. Be sure to add prefixes and suffixes liberally:

literate fiction potential potentiated

modern conceptual textual textural

construction structure form postmodern

technology text image motion dynamic

interstitial digital electronic millennial

hybrid cyber weird punk pulp

pop future theatrical nouveau

cross innovative interrogative poetry

literature art textuality new

Some examples: neo(decon)structuralism, postpomohyperfiction, post-popcyberhyper literature, dynamicpulp fiction, crosstexturalpunk(ual) fiction, technotext poetry, imagetext hyperfiction

asg

Why study Experimental Literature?

2010-03-01T19:03:00.000-05:00

Why study Experimental Literature (Exp. Lit as defined in previous post)

Artistically: Experimental literature provokes artists and readers to approach the world—and literature and art and symbols and writing and reading—in nontraditional ways. It purposefully interrogates the static, classical methods of creative expression and encourages the innovation of potentiated forms.

Scientifically: Because language plays a role in shaping the way we think, when we use and articulate new literacies, we are training our brains to think in new ways Additionally, reading in transliterate dimensions and experiencing literature in nontraditional ways is shown to improve learning.

Academically: Experimental literature presents to scholars a polysemic, multiply-intersected, literary-artistic object that allows for a polysemic, multiply-intersected, literary-artistic critical analysis of contemporary cultural expression.

Commercially: At the advent of the mass distribution of mobile e-readers, understanding how to successfully design for digital presentation and how to integrate technology into the reading experience will become increasingly important. If we identify what makes good digital literature (and/or what makes popular digital literature), we can properly take advantage of the new reading technologies. This commercialization of digital literature will necessitate new vocabularies for discussion (for reviewing, for marketing, and for classification) and new transliterate theoretical frameworks.

Any others? Or, alternately, do you disagree?

asg

What are the Limits of Control? Does the medium control the message? Is the medium the message?: A Challenge to McLuhan with a rather lengthy set-up…

2010-02-20T13:49:00.005-05:00

...
THE LIMITS OF MEDIUM

Each medium carries inherent information and this becomes attached to the text content.
Each medium is limited in its information content. The limitations are bits of information themselves.

Take a fiction novel:

The limits of a print book are clear:
The author is limited to flat words and written language (and sometimes images, doodles, and decals) as his only available blocks of creation. The printed text, as a static text, can hold no active elements. The printed book is constrained by its pages which are the surface on which the blocks of creation are laid and by the limits of paper and ink (which are limited in size, shape, weight, color, texture, quality, availability). The printed book is subject to publishing constraints which include the boundaries and barriers of mass production, marketing, politics, commerce, economics, distribution and transportation of the book object.

If we turn that fiction novel into a film, we have new limits (and new information):
With a film, we have added visual and audio information and active, moving content. The visual information acts as an intrusion and as an expansion. The visual information limits the story because its prescribed, contrived images limit the viewer's/reader's imagination but it expands the story by extending it into/onto new spaces (screens) with and through these visuals. The added audio information intrudes and expands in similar ways. The active, moving content adds dimension and dynamic flux. Inherent limitations: the flat-on-screen presentation, the price of production and dissemination, and the technological/technical barriers of creation. The film medium not only adds but also strips information from the novel: the tactile ‘feeling’ of holding an object disappears; the film viewer is a passive recipient whereas the book reader must turn the book object’s pages; most often the typographic language is stripped and the viewer loses direct contact with the written words.

Going further, the novel-turned-audiobook has different dimensions of information and different limitations:
This medium is audio only, the visual and typographic elements are stripped. As in the film version, the introduction of actor and voice adds and detracts from the possible imaginative spanse as the prescribed/contrived performance carries specific information (like gender of the voice, voice inflection, and performative delivery). The story is being translated by the voice actor (i.e. filtered through his/her lens) before it is being ‘read’ by the listener. The print book does not have this limitation because the reader interacts directly with the typographic text.

One more medium: eBook limitations
The limitations inherent here are clear as well. Currently, most eBooks are still flat re-versions of the print book. Though the reader is directly contacting the typographic text, the reader is doing so via a screen of some sort. The information inherent in the book-as-print-object (pages, ink, etc) is stripped and the screen becomes added information. As with film, here there are technological/technical limitations. As with print books, there are limits to distribution, production, publication.

THE LIMITS OF CONTENT

What is the shape of content? Text content can be plied into many forms. A story can be filtered through infinitely many lenses and can be loaded with infinitely many bits of information. This extra information alters the shape of the content. What, then, is inherent in the content? What of the content cannot be manipulated into another shape?
Content is restricted by its unshaped, undefined, uncontrolled (blobular, globular, goo-ish) liquidity. Perhaps the primary limitation of content, then, is its inherent pliability.

AFTER THE LENGTHY SET-UP: The Challenge

Because both the medium and the message have inherent limitations and inherent information content, how can we decide which is the more important element? Is the medium the message? Is the message the medium?

Asking such McLuhanesque questions after detailing the limitations of both the medium and the content (for McLuhan, the message), points to the very flaws in his either/or 'the medium is the message' statement:

The medium is not the message nor is the message the medium. It is not a dualistic either-or. The medium and the message are inseparable and one does not trump or cover or cloak or override the other. They evolve together and are thus presented, together, in an unbreakable bond. “They” thus becomes obsolete pronoun-ciation. McLuhan’s primary error was to separate the two (the medium and the message) into noticeable parts. It (the Text) is made of many ‘parts’ and made of none. It is built from the construction blocks of language, symbols (and semiotics), context (cultural and otherwise), form (with its layers of extratextual information), medium, presentation, production, authorial intent, reader interpretation, author+reader collaboration, individual and social reception. Each block is limited and provides limitations. Why did McLuhan chose to separate the entire enterprise of communication/information dissemination into only two large and cumbersome bricks? The Text is made of no parts because the Text is made of all of these parts and none of these parts is free from any of the others. The parts of the Text then become indistinguishable. To change a part is to change the Text as a whole. The Text isn’t a ‘they;’ the Text is a viable and multiple (multifaceted) ‘it’. Pregnant with all their textual, contextual, formulaic parts, the medium and the content are married as one and what exists, then, is the Text (as the whole of its inseparable multiple parts) and not some sum product of divisible, unwed parts.

asg

Timeline of Major Movements in 'Experimental' Literature

2010-02-13T13:00:00.007-05:00

NOTA BENE

This is a rough-sketch chronology of major movements. This list is by no means conclusive and is based on my conception of experimentals as innovative, atypical, systematic, and symptomatic.
The list includes firsts, bests, and influentials. Major authors and movements are in BOLD.

The Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian) 1350s*
The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer (English) late 14th century*
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish) 1605-1615*`*
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne (Irish) 1759**
-Jacques le fataliste et son maître Denis Diderot (French)–explicitly references
(and play-giarizes) Laurence Sterne. Written 1765-1780, published posthumously 1796.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll (English) 1865**
Alfred Jarry (French) Surrealism & Pataphysics. Representative works: Ubu Roi & Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll pataphysicien published, respectively, 1896 and 1911***
Tristan Tzara (Romanian/French) & Dada. 1920s***
Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges (Argentine) 1944*`*
Le Nouveau Roman. 1950s Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras*`*
Naked Lunch William Burroughs (American) 1959 & The Beats 1950s-1960s*`*
Oulipo (French). 1960. Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino †
Tel Quel (French). 1960s*`*
Hopscotch (sp. Rayuela) Julio Cortázar (Argentine) 1963*`*
Albert Angelo BS Johnson (English) 1964**
Death of the Novel and Other Stories Ronald Sukenick (American) 1969**

1970s-1980s †: [Some are iffy, and there are perhaps many authors missing, consider this a representative sample] Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Nicholson Baker, Raymond Federman (Double or Nothing, 1971), Walter Abish (Alphabetical Africa, 1974), Stephen Dixon

1990s-2000s †: [Some are iffy, and there are perhaps many authors missing, consider this a representative sample] Mark Amerika (Grammatron) Mark Danielewski (Only Revolutions, 2006), Steven Hall (Raw Shark Tales), David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Steve Tomasula, Christian Bok (Eunoia), Douglas Coupland, Rick Moody, Eckhard Gerdes, Ernest Vincent Wright (Gadsby), Irvine Welsh, Salvador Plascencia (People of Paper), Damion Searls (; or The Whale), Tao Lin, Chip Kidd, Kathy Acker, Jacques Roubaud (The Loop)

DIGITAL WORKS [Consider this a representative sample]: Shelley Jackson, John Cayley, Michael Joyce (afternoon, a story, 1987), Nick Montfort, Deena Larson, Stephanie Strickland, Jason Nelson, Robert Kendall , Stuart Moulthrop (Victory Garden, 1991), Loss Pequeño Glazier, Brian Kim Stefans, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Electronic Literature Directory: directory.eliterature.org, E-Poetry Directory: epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry

MAP KEY:
*Experimentation with Arbitrary, Self-imposed Constraints
** Textu(r)al/Typographic Experiments (Extratextural Elements)
***Cut-Ups or Mash-Ups or Production Experimentation
*`*Experimental in Form and/or Concept
† All Above Experimentation Techniques Used
(Those with more than one type of Experimentation are labeled with the most prominent experimentation technique)

asg

Establishing a Definition: Part II

2010-02-07T17:21:00.003-05:00

What is Experimental literature?

My Definition: Fiction that mixes genres merges media marries language with play with visual/sensory performance with innovation with creativity-of-(de)formation…that challenges ‘conventions’ counters ‘conventionality’ contributes to the literary conversation...that defi(n)es time space voice…that re-presents past present future ‘experimentation’…
… and that does so with an intellectual elegance that reflects genuine artistic expression.

Definition from Groundworks An anthology of Canadian experimental fiction writers:

"fiction that sets up its own rules for itself [...] while subverting the conventions according to which readers have understood what constitutes a proper work of literature."

Raymond Federman:

“The usual novel misses its mark because it limits the reader to its own ambit; the better defined it is, the better the novelist is thought to be. We should attempt on the other hand a text that would not clutch the reader but which would oblige him to become an accomplice as it whispers to him underneath the conventional exposition other more esoteric directions.” (Critifiction, 67)

Federman pseudo-mockingly calls 'traditional' novels Readable novels and 'experimental' novels Unreadable novels (NB origin of terms: After asking fellow professors why they did not teach experimental novels, the professors answered 'they're unreadable!' Thus the birth of Federman's distinctions).

Federman equates Roland Barthes's Text of Pleasure with his Readable (traditional) novel and Barthes's Text of Bliss to his Unreadable (experimental) novel:

Barthes Text of Pleasure: “the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading."
Barthes Text of Bliss: “the text that imposes a state of loss…that discomforts, unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.” (Critifiction, 71)

Federman says experimental works “slide under our eyes the mirage of tangible form.” (Critifiction, 74)

__

A book can be experimental in story: to read Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones is to navigate the narrative experimental. A book can be experimental in (de)formation: Ronald Sukenick* streams totems of unpunctuated text in (un)random patterns; Mark Amerika spins degenerative prose in digital performance; William Gibson taunts with text that disappears as it is read. A book can be a full-bodied experiment carefully mixing (merging, marrying) visual + linguistic languages: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions is less a book and more a visual-artistic-narrative experience of typed-word possibility (potentiality à la les Oulipians). Finally, a book can be not-a-book: writers experiment with narrative media to expand a book’s dimensional realities. Digital poets, hypertext fictionalists and multimedia literary artists explore the book’s potentiated expression by stretching text into experimental spaces.

*Sukenick does not accept the term ‘experimental’…but neither does he accept the terms ‘fiction’ or ‘novel.’ Though perhaps a bit too semiotically metaphysical (whether we like it or not, the world does agree upon the idea of a ‘novel’), his perspective is worth reproducing here: “I don’t write experimental fiction…There is no such thing as fiction. Instead there is a continuing fictive discourse which continually redefines itself. There is certainly no such thing as THE novel. Instead there are as many novels as there are authentic novelists…since in an exploratory situation, ever form should be idiosyncratic…Each novel is a unique definition, a definition of itself.” (In Form, 47-48)

asg

In response to the unwritten response:

2010-01-29T19:39:00.002-05:00

1. If literature is based on, and produced through (or above or below or between or beyond or within), power structures… then does traditional literature conform and nontraditional challenge? Does a distinct traditional v nontraditional divide actually exist? Does literature that is conscious of itself differ from that that is not? Is literature that purposefully addresses the established power structure(s) different from works that purposefully do not AND from those that just don’t give a shit either way (and thus neither consciously address nor consciously ignore the power structures)?

2. If literature is produced always within and never outside a contextual culture…how do we correctly experience colonial, postcolonial, transnational, and other versions of hybrid, multicultural literature? Does the multicultural writer become a product of a new culture–a sum product of the cultural parts? If so, doesn’t that introduce a new culture into the mix?...and if this is so,…
2.5 AND if literature and culture never really change…how do we explain NEW cultures?

3. If nothing (no thing) is ever new…how can we account for the singularity of individual experience/consciousness? And does not art come (as individual expression) from that singular experience? No one can ever see the world exactly as I see it and no one can express the world exactly as I express it. If nothing is ever new, how do we explain the experience of newness? And, how can we explain the phenomena of re-experiencing old situations in new ways?

4. If culture is a cloud…then what is a cloud?

asg

Before the beginning: Establishing a definition.

2010-01-24T21:20:00.002-05:00

What is Literature?

Because a specific definition for a chosen word can locate, situate, identify, classify, contextualize, and conceptualize that term, and because that term’s definition can then be (dis)located, (re)situated, (mis)identified, (de/re)classified, (con)textualized, and conceptualized based on its use (or abuse), a working definition of any vaster-than-vast word (such as Literature) must be flexible in its constitution and dynamic in its flexibility.

So then, how do we approach a definition for Literature? Do we construct a definition by Exclusion (Derrida), by Inclusion? A definition based on Criteria (Hirsch) or on Context (Kundera) or on Quality or on Resemblance (to other things ‘known’ as literature) (Wittgenstein)? Should we go with a Role-based, an Impact-based, a Function-based, an Intent-based or a Reception-based definition? Should the definition be Contingent, Conditional, Empirical, Conclusive, Universal, Relative and/or strictly Objective? Should we go with a Necessary-and-Conditional neo-Aristotelian definition or a classical The-Sum-Equals-the-Parts definition? Should we define it Prototypically (Lakoff), Semantically (Lyas), Ontologically, Categorically, Heuristically, Phenomenologically (Husserl), Heterophenomenologically (Dennett)? As an antithesis to something (i.e. as a non-something)? Should we define it vis-à-vis the writer’s act of writing (Gao Xingjian)? Most, if not all, of these have been attempted or suggested in essays, books, and dissertations.

Should we view Literature as body of work? As an aesthetic object? As art? As artifact? As cultural practice? As verbal work? As a university department and publishing meme?

Are meaning, form, context, content, medium, language (qualitatively: high v low, literary v casual; and linguistically: French v English), quality, creativity, reception, popularity, impact, innovation, singularity, uniqueness, potentiality, familiarity, novelty, utility important?

An attempt to define such a term as Literature ends only in disappointment and dissatisfaction. A too-broad definition would include such things as a DVD player how-to manual and the text on the back of your morning cereal box. A too-narrow definition would cut out many works that are now or may one day be considered Literature. No one definition or theoretical analysis of a possible definition and no one class or method of definition seems to suit. So, are we left with the pornographic I’ll know it when I see it? Yes and no.

We could instead develop a notion or an impression of Literature instead of a definition; in place of defining Literature, we are pointing towards its identifiable shape.

I'd now like to offer two 'pointing-towards-identifiable-shape' definitions (in two forms):

Linguistic: An expressive work (loosely or strictly) based on a symbol-based communication standard (language, image, verbal, digital, coded communication) with one or more literary qualities.*
Symbolic: (Aesthetics x Context) + (Linguistics/Semantics) ± Creativity = Literature.

*I do not see the 'with literary qualities' part to be an avoidance of precision (aka a cop-out). I do, in fact, see this as a precise and precisely dynamic explanation. Because literary qualities are contextual (historically, culturally, linguistically) and are thus in ever-changing flux, this 'with literary qualities' allows for a (relatively) comprehensive (r)evolving definition.

asg