Electronic Book Review - Lexia to Perplexia http://electronicbookreview.com/tags/lexia-perplexia en Notes Toward a Proleptic History of Electronic Reading http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/newsflash <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Matthew G. Kirschenbaum</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-27</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/x%3Dreader">New Readings</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The final section of <span class="booktitle">First Person</span> includes essays by N. Katherine Hayles, Jill Walker, and Nick Montfort under the rubric of New Readings. The first two are close readings, of Talan Memmott’s <a class="internal" href="/imagenarrative/perplex"><span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span></a> and <a class="outbound" href="http://www.onlinecaroline.com"><span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span></a> respectively; Montfort gives us something more akin to genre theory (his specific subject is interactive fiction). Anyone who follows the volume in sequence will notice that while it moves from cyberdrama to games and simulations to hypertext and even chat, its final pages are devoted to the humble act of reading. For some this might seem a quaint gesture, a whiff of those cigars in the drawing room Michael Joyce once wrote about; that would be wrong.</p> <p>Robert Darnton, perhaps the best known historian of the book working today, notes that histories of reading are elusive. Despite some success with what he terms macro-analytical methods - predominantly the domain of Continental scholars who have scoured catalogs and public records to compile vast stores of data on the demographics of reading from the sixteenth century forward - and further success with micro-analytics - the study of individual readers and their collections; Carlo Ginzburg’s Menocchio is the archetype here - we are still far removed from the cognitive seat of reading: “We do not even understand the way we read ourselves, despite the efforts of psychologists and neurologists to trace eye movements and map the hemispheres of the brain” (151). Darnton proposes five basic strategies for furthering the history of reading, and I would like to briefly present them here, with specific reference to their application to electronic media.</p> <p>A predictable academic exercise, you say. Sure. But talk of new media readers and readings is topical enough these days. In the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts has recently released a report entitled <a class="outbound" href="http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf">“Reading at Risk”</a>, which concludes that there has been a precipitous decline in what it terms “literary reading” during the past twenty years. While the report draws no single conclusion as to why this is so, in several places it goes out of its way to observe that we live in an era of pervasive electronic media.</p> <p>The NEA professes to be neutral with regard to the question of medium: reading is reading, regardless of whether it’s performed on the page or the screen. The danger it construes is that the nation is simply reading less, regardless of the text’s delivery media. Can this really be so? Would a more subtle account of reading in the present suggest otherwise? What does it mean that I am posing these questions on a Web <span class="lightEmphasis">page</span> of the <span class="journaltitle">electronic book review</span> addressing essays first printed in a university press volume?</p> <p>Here are Darnton’s suggestions.</p> <p>First, to recover “ideals and assumptions underlying reading in the past” (152). Here I would substitute present for past (taking a page from Lev Manovich, with his call for histories of the present). Perhaps the first step in this regard is to acknowledge that many of the most influential works of electronic literature and art that we have available to us are about precisely their own conditions of reading. <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is such a work, as Hayles’s essay makes clear; so too, however, is <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>, where voyeurism, interaction, and other forms of user manipulation and control are expressed as explicit thematics in the narrative that unfolds. A resource such as the Electronic Literature Organization’s Directory therefore lists over two thousand works ripe for examining the “ideals and assumptions” underlying reading at the present. (<a class="outbound" href="http://wordcircuits.com/comment/umd/">E-Lit Up Close</a> is an ongoing project of mine where I ask graduate students to contribute close readings of works of electronic literature to an emerging literary archive; it is open to participation from others.)</p> <p>Darnton next suggests attention to the teaching of literacy. He has in mind primers and hornbooks and the like, but I see my three-year-old niece learning her ABCs sitting in front of the PC. Is anyone out there working on children’s software in the context of the history of literacy? I hope so.</p> <p>Third, Darnton asks us to look to records of reading, in a variety of documentary forms. Here we are in luck, since electronic media are self-documenting to an extent that should make historians of pervious eras weep. Bookmark files, cookie caches, server logs, and the like are a treasure trove of raw data, conveniently already machine-readable and ripe for analytical crunching. Obviously the trick is to do something sensible or meaningful with all that data. On the other hand, not all such exploits need be relentlessly scholarly in nature. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Adam Chapman, Brion Moss, and Duane Whitehurst’s <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.impermanenceagent.com/agent/">Impermanence Agent</a></span> , which builds its storyline in response to a user’s browsing is a step in this direction, as is forensic art such as Mary Flanagan’s <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.maryflanagan.com/virus.htm">Phage</a></span> which takes its raw materials from the suppressed contents of its user’s hard drive.</p> <p>Next we come to literary theory. Here the effort is well underway. Montfort’s essay is one exemplar, and there are many others - though oddly, from reading some of the contributions to <span class="booktitle">First Person</span>, one might conclude that literary critics alone are unique among the professoriate in their inability to talk about cybertexts. Newsflash: the notion that literary theory or literary criticism more generally is about “narrative” and nothing else is as parochial as the notion that games are all about reading.</p> <p>Last on Darnton’s list is analytical bibliography. Analytical bibliography, it should be understood, refers to the study of books as physical objects, not to writing out long lists of books (bibliography of the list-making sort is properly referred to as enumerative bibliography to differentiate it from its other branches). I have written about this at length elsewhere, but here will simply say that scholars of new media could learn a lot from the dry-as-dust pages of <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/">Studies in Bibliography</a></span> . How to talk seriously about a work like Olia Lialina’s <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.teleportacia.org/war/">My boyfriend came back from the war</a></span> without being conversant in the many platforms, file formats, and software used to create its different versions?</p> <p>Hayles, Walker, and Montfort each offer essays that fit in one or more of the categories above; my objective here has been to suggest a broader framework for how a history of reading in new media, of necessity a <span class="lightEmphasis">proleptic</span> history, might unfold. If, as Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s subtitle has it, new media is “story, performance, and game” then <span class="booktitle">First Person</span> has done an admirable job of creating a common forum for all three; however, I believe there is still much to be gained from future work that charts any one of these paths more intensively. A history of reading in the present is such a project.</p> <h2>Works Cited</h2> <p>Darnton, Robert. “History of Reading.” <span class="booktitle">New Perspectives on Historical Writing</span>. Ed. Peter Burke. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 140-167.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/jill-walker">jill walker</a>, <a href="/tags/nick-montfort">Nick Montfort</a>, <a href="/tags/genre-theory">genre theory</a>, <a href="/tags/interactive-fiction">interactive fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/carlo-ginzburg">carlo ginzburg</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-darnton">robert darnton</a>, <a href="/tags/national-endowment-arts">national endowment for the arts</a>, <a href="/tags/nea">NEA</a>, <a href="/tags/reading-risk">reading at risk</a>, <a href="/tags/lev-manovich">lev manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/online-caroline">online caroline</a>, <a href="/tags/noah-wardrip-fruin">Noah Wardrip-Fruin</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1096 at http://electronicbookreview.com Moving Through Me as I Move http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/stenorthographic <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Stephanie Strickland</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-05</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Vannevar Bush wanted his Memex to intercept and capture the neural circuits of the stenographer who could reduce his words to a phonetic code on the fly, whose encoding practice was encompassed by her body. As an electronic poet, I want to do the same thing, not from the position of Bush, outside the device, but from the position of the stenographer, attached to it. In her body, words moved through her as she moved, a fluent circuit of meaning that she hosted, instigated, permitted, understood, explored, and enjoyed.</p> <p>Bush exhibited some justified fear as to whether her practice would be complete and accurate according to his standards:</p> <p class="longQuotation">A girl strokes [the stenotype’s] keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what the speaker is <span class="lightEmphasis">supposed</span> to have said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. (Bush 1994, section 3, paragraph 3 [emphasis added])</p> <p>He also wanted to capture the neural knowledge she attained by intervening in the production of the text:</p> <p class="longQuotation">The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand? (Bush 1994, section 8, paragraph 6)</p> <p>Hers is a somatic practice that deflects not only the threat of analytic dispersal, into “simplified language… nascent form… intelligible only to the initiated,” as Bush characterizes her code, but also the threat of obsessive recombination and confusion, the multiple overlapping streams of speech she is asked to transcribe.</p> <p>The notion of “moving through me as I move,” as a paradigm for interaction, intends to install the stenographer, and not her employer, as the crucial creative/receptive presence in digital art. Hers is an egalitarian position that can be stated of, and by, each element in a dynamic network. “Move through me as I move” is as much the “voice” of a hypertext as it is of the writer/encoder. It is also the voice of the network addressing all those hosting it and served by it. In the case of work open to multiple authoring, or to synchronous reading and performance, the command “move through me as I move” represents the utterance of each of the performers and participants speaking to all the others. In this mutual command there is an implicit promise of fluent mutual adjustment to whatever comes.</p> <p>The stenographer, however, is more than a writer/reader/monitor; she is also the operator of an appliance. This position is described by Talan Memmott (2001), here explicating his theory/fiction hybrid, <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, winner of the 2000 trAce/altx New Media Writing competition:</p> <p class="longQuotation">With a document that is acted upon, unfolded, revealed, opened rather than read, full of holes to elsewhere, hiding secret inScriptions, filled with links like mines and traps and triggers – we are no longer talking page or screen, but appliance. Navigating the Lexia of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is kind of like getting a new device and trying to figure out how the heck it works… (Memmott 2001)</p> <p>The stenographer moves within an unforeseeable context. Communicating by “strokes” in an energized yet languid atmosphere, she is absorbed, alert, and somehow also free to gaze about the room – the aspect that most disquieted Bush. She participates in a form of dancing in which the lead changes many times a minute, her moments of apprehending/encoding activity giving way to deep moments of passive reception in a regular alternation or oscillation.</p> <p>An oscillating, or flickering, pattern has often been invoked with regard to electronic art. Katherine Hayles has said, “We have only begun to construct a semiotics that takes into account the different functions signifiers perform when they cease to be flat marks and become instead layers of code correlated through correspondence rules” (Hayles 2000). In recognition of the layered dynamic interactions between text and code, she proposed the term “flickering signifiers” for text onscreen. Both Richard Lanham (1993) in <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word</span> and Bolter and Grusin (1999) in <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> have remarked the importance of an oscillation between the viewer positions of “looking at” and “looking through”; that is, between experiencing works primarily as heavily mediated and “windowed,” in the software sense, or primarily immediate and immersive, as in looking through transparent glass. I would like to propose a third kind of flickering or oscillation, the oscillation that occurs between the processing of alphabetic text and the processing of image in works that use both. A digital writer who uses image and text is in fact writing a score for their shifting interrelation.</p> <p>Flickering or oscillating poems differ from pure sound and pure image work in the following respect: whereas sound layered on sound creates new sound, and image on image makes a new image, alphabetic text, superimposed on alphabetic text or on image, does not reliably yield legible text. In the poems that explore this truth, one flickers between seeing the viewable and reading the legible. Jim Rosenberg (1996) and (Mary-Anne Breeze 2000) are poets who approach this movement very differently.</p> <p>Rosenberg (figure 15.1) works with the words and phrases of a standard vocabulary but overlays them in a dense blur of self-interfering micro-information. A presenting image of tangle is literally drawn apart by hand into legible text, but no sooner do words come into focus than the slightest mouse movement dissolves them back into blur. These texts thus move through the reader, as she moves, at exactly the pace her hand/brain browses – and superimposed on that oscillation, one experiences a constant trembling across the view/read cusp.</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/rosen15-1.jpg" width="400" height="273" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.1: Jim Rosenberg, The Barrier Frames (Eastgate Systems)</span></span></p> <p>Mez, on the other hand, in a practice she calls “M[ez]ang.elle.ing,” leads us to confront the legible with strategies ordinarily reserved for the viewable. A good characterization of her work comes from a source that, on the face of it, has nothing to do with poetry. Michael Cohen’s (1992) ” <span class="booktitle">Blush</span> and <span class="booktitle">Zebrackets</span>: Two Schemes for Typographic Representation of Nested Associativity” describes two tools that treat words and documents as pictures, in order to create denser data without loss of legibility. Cohen has understood that one can intensify both the density of picture data and the legibility of read data at the same time. He says of these tools:</p> <p class="longQuotation">Creative orthography frees words from traditional… constraints, allowing textual re-presentation of multidimensional concepts by projecting multilayered structure into linear text. Extended electronic typography… provides additional parsing cues… (Cohen 1992, 449)</p> <p>If we add the idea of both packing and unpacking compound symbols, we have an excellent description of Mez’s practice, excerpted sentences of which, from her e-mail writing, appear in figure 15.2:</p> <p class="longQuotation">Re][stuttered][[sutured][: not][net][.art<br /> Date:<br /> Wed, 21 Feb 2001 10:56:26 +1100</p> <p class="longQuotation">][the x.press][ed 4 time,<br /> 4 the answer,<br /> 4 the dreamic caul 2 a][r][mories][][</p> <p class="longQuotation">][jumper lead.ing 2 a p][asse][o][mo][lished cliff-curve][</p> <p class="longQuotation">.drain the cu][s]p n datadrown.</p> <p class="longQuotation">……………………………………+<br /> …………..+[not.art is][net][a rutting corpse-knot]+<br /> ……………………………………+</p> <p class="longQuotation">+please stop+</p> <p class="longQuotation">+++ please l][ectro][][gl][isten +++</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Figure 15.2: Excerpts from Mez’s email writing</span></p> <p>What Mez attains, that Cohen, in his search for greater legibility, does not attempt, is the feat of keeping us in motion from one view/read cusp to the next, seeding the screen with many cues for reading backwards, up and down, and slantwise, as well as forward. Indeed, we are often stopped in our tracks, caught in a kind of pleasurable stutter and thrown back to rescan the whole field, a perceptual act more often associated with image. Mez’s text/image pictures allow for multiple, plural, and contradictory readings of her text. In her article, “The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing,” Mez (2000) lists fourteen goals or techniques, which include:</p> <p class="longQuotation">2 phone.tic[k-tock]aulli m-bellish a tract ov text in2 a neo.logistic maze;</p> <p class="longQuotation">2 network 2 the hilt N create de[e]pen.den[ting]cies on email lizts for the wurkz dis.purse.all;</p> <p class="longQuotation">2 uze computer kode kon.[e]vent.ionz spliced with irc emoticons and ab[scess]breviations.</p> <p>She says, in an e-mail to the Webartery list [December 20, “Visual Minds” thread (2001a)]: “I personally tend 2 b drawn 2wards the fragment, the smaller echos/works, and I think this reflects my n.herent need 2 m.ulate the network packet/communication mentality….” She is drawn, that is, to emulate her partner, the network, to follow its lead even as she leads it through her constructions.</p> <p>By contrast, Jim Andrews (2001a), who gives us the term “langu(im)age,” works with individual letters which he can animate and overlay with sequences of sound loops in his <span class="booktitle">Nio</span> (figure 15.3) engine.</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/nio15-3.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.3: Jim Andrews, Nio</span></span></p> <p>He is not primarily, or at all, concerned with providing a reading experience. He says:</p> <p class="longQuotation">Much of my work is lettristic in the sense that rather than working with words and extended texts, I work with individual letters. Part of my attraction to working this way is philosophical and sonical… but part of it is also out of interest in treating literary objects/material, and individual letters are quite well suited to such treatment. Individual letters are graphically more interesting than whole words… [they] take up less memory, and are thereby manipulated more quickly. And they spin nicer than words do, for instance, because of their shapes. There is more variety in their shapes than there is in words. And they are quite mysterious to me. Geometry and basic architectures of language. (E-mail to Webartery list, February 10, 2001, on thread “re: teaser 2” [2001b])</p> <p>Later, he says: “… it’s really when you get down to the word and the letter, rather than the paragraph, that language cracks open and code spills out” [Webartery list, February 24, on thread “checkout counter”]. One feels the difference from the stenographic model, a model of accommodation rather than breaking and entering. But one also feels, and can sympathize with, an attraction to a different arena, the world of the purely sonic and visual, where compounds stay themselves and are thereby experienced more fluidly. However, oscillation does occur in Andrews’s <span class="booktitle">Nio</span>, between the visual and the sonic elements, and this oscillation is elegant, playful, and deeply pleasing.</p> <p>My own work investigates oscillation between image, text, sound, and animation, both within and between linked units. In this way, several states or layers of oscillation, a set of cross-rhythms, come into being.</p> <p>In 1995, I translated my book-length poem <span class="booktitle">True North</span> to Storyspace. The <span class="booktitle">True North</span> themes of navigation and embeddedness moved from being print <span class="lightEmphasis">concepts</span>, refracted in language, to being the steering <span class="lightEmphasis">mechanism</span> and constitutive <span class="lightEmphasis">structure</span> of the hypertext. The Storyspace software provides many ways to operate the poem, but they are not intuitive: to move fluidly one must spend time learning the rich interface. For this textually driven work about navigation, I designed the two most important orienting elements to be visual. The first of these is a set of mouse-drawn Storyspace maps. Figure 15.4 shows two of them, “The Mother-Lost World” and “There Was an Old Woman.” Figure 15.5 shows two others, maps of the sections called “Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind” and “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting-In Numbers.”</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-4.jpg" width="400" height="274" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.4: Maps from True North: “The Mother-Lost World” and “There Was an Old Woman”</span></span></p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-5.jpg" width="400" height="266" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.5: Maps from True North: “Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind” and “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting-In Numbers”</span></span></p> <p>The emblematic map shapes, with their legends of node names, can be read by themselves. These sitemaps, functioning as pattern poems, give a very fair idea or sampling of <span class="booktitle">True North</span> – a mode of understanding that may supplement, or substitute for, following links and reading text. Such a displacement of text by image, that also functions recursively as a guide to text, is itself a distinct mode of oscillation – one which coexists with the familiar reference oscillation between a map and what it maps.</p> <p>The coloring of a few words on each page is the second orienting device (figure 15.6). Since Storyspace does not use color to signify text-links, instead requiring the reader to press a key to reveal boxes around link words, each color operates visually to suggest a connection between similarly colored words: each color is an embedded link, but one traceable only by human memory, not by software.</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-6.jpg" width="400" height="289" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.6: Word colors suggest connections, but not places to click</span></span></p> <p>A different kind and rate of oscillation occurs in <span class="booktitle">To Be Here as Stone Is</span> (1999), a digital poem written collaboratively with M. D. Coverley. This poem is composed of two very different sorts of screens: six highly visual ones with sound that use complex Anfy Java applets (figure 15.7) and thirteen primarily textual ones where lines of verse are overlaid on a visual background (figures 15.8a and 15.8b) itself layered with a text ribbon. The links between these promote a rapid exchange between two kinds of attention, between primary viewing/listening and primary reading/searching, for the links must be sought for, by cursor scanning, on the textual pages. The experience of strongly discernable shift resonates with the text of this poem that shifts the reader from photons to cosmos and back.</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-7.jpg" width="400" height="230" /></p> <div align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.7: A Java applet screen in To Be Here as Stone Is</span></span></div> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-8a.jpg" width="400" height="234" /></p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-8b.jpg" width="400" height="234" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.8a and Figure 15.8b: Primarily textual screens in To Be Here as Stone Is</span></span></p> <p>In the Flash poem, <span class="booktitle">Errand Upon Which We Came</span>, Coverley and I (2000/2001) choreographed animation for the alphabetic text as well as for accompanying images and sound. The reader/operator of this text may press the silver butterfly to the screen if she wishes to read with complete accuracy, but she may prefer to oscillate between sampled reading and periods of viewing. The words of Errand address the reader, speak to her of fragmented mobile text; speak to her, in fact, of the very act of reading she has undertaken: in response, she may actively intervene in the poem to read or redirect it, or she may attend to it as a movie.</p> <p>In figure 15.9, we see a moment in the life of the Flash stanza that begins with the question “space?” floating down from the top of the screen, followed by a second question about knowledge-mining. A flock of butterflies flies in from upper right and circles around toward screen center. A third and fourth question, about “go(o)ds” refusing to go to market, appear onscreen. They imitate the butterflies’ circling motion. At the end of the Flash movie we see two dimnesses in the central far distance, one, the almost out-of-sight V of butterflies; the other, the lines of the last two questions, now collapsed to one extremely faint line poised at the butterflies like a lance. The question is posed visually as to whether the image and text must attack each other, or may perhaps exist in oscillating accommodation.</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-9.jpg" width="400" height="232" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.9: Moment of Errand Upon Which We Came</span></span></p> <p><span class="booktitle">The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span> (Strickland 1999), coded with the help of Janet Holmes, creates a seeming disjunction of image and text on each of its 33 similarly designed pages. The pages are highly visual, but their unmoving text asks to be read. Images from Jean-Pierre Hébert’s (1999) <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span> – a device shown at SIGGRAPH 1999 that inscribes algorithmic patterns in sand with a steel ball – are the ones most prevalent in the <span class="booktitle">Ballad</span>. In figure 15.10 both <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span> and a <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span> pattern can be seen. Other images suggestive of digital or mathematical culture, such as a Metro card, webcam photos, a core dump, or an animated fractal, accompany the text of a love poem, a ballad of love gone wrong or at least not entirely right, between two characters called Sand and Soot. At one level, the disjunction of image and text mirrors the difficulties of this pair; however, the particular discordance, or nonreference, that seems to exist <span class="lightEmphasis">between</span> image and text will, at some point, spring into resonant oscillation for the reader who either sees, or reads, an avatar of carbon-based chemistry in Harry Soot and one of silicon life in Sand.</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/room15-10.jpg" width="200" height="134" /></p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/sandsoot15-10x.jpg" width="311" height="230" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.10: Sisyphus and a Sisyphus pattern</span></span></p> <p>Four key images in the <span class="booktitle">Ballad</span> were created by Alex Heilner and shown at the Sixth Annual Digital Salon. On his contributor page within the <span class="booktitle">Ballad</span>, Heilner (Strickland 1999) explains: “This series of `microbe’ images… seeks to invert traditional understanding of our internal and external environments. Large, orthogonal, built objects… have been re-imagined here to represent the most basic organic living beings….”</p> <p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-11.jpg" width="400" height="231" /></p> <p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.11: Manhattan as microbes</span></span></p> <p>Thus, in figure 15.11, we see that Heilner has represented the island of Manhattan so that it reads as a collection of floating microbes. Scale is elided on the Web, as it is in the stenographer’s practice, where events in the conference room, in her brain, in her hand, and on her code-filled writing machine are nearly simultaneous. Many different scales can be present to the same screen, as if they belonged together, as if they cohered there as “naturally” as they do in the stenographer’s body. But a change in scale is a change of context: the view/read cusp will shift differently for zoomed text than it will for text that is panned. In fact, this kind of zoom or scale-changing cusp may be a particularly important one in a world where we are asked to process simultaneously scales from the nano to the cosmic.</p> <p>Delivered to and through new media, we find new understandings. Delivered to and through new media, the bitstream displays varying modalities that our bodies and brains have long been used to processing differently. We shift differently, we censor differently, we move differently, to sound, to text, to image, and to animation. Today, perforce, we are learning to oscillate differently, in new “ratios,” as Blake or McLuhan would say. The stenographer at her stenotype was an early pioneer of this environment. Her continual active choice to attend or to blur her focus, to remain poised or to flow within the moving stream, is a task we take up. We will not all take it up the same way. We bring many biophysical and cultural heritages to the task. It is for this reason that my collaborators and I choose to make work that can be operated, and thus read, across many modalities at many rates and rhythms of oscillation.</p> <h2>Responses</h2> <p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/pathpicking">Camille Utterback responds</a></p> <p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/somatic">Rita Raley responds</a></p> <p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/stenographied">Stephanie Strickland responds</a></p> <h2>References:</h2> <p>Andrews, Jim (2001a). <span class="booktitle">Nio</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.turbulence.org/Works/Nio/">http://www.turbulence.org/Works/Nio/</a>.</p> <p>—. (2001b). E-mail to Webartery list, February 10, 2001, on thread “re: teaser 2.” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery">http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery</a>.</p> <p>—. (2001c). E-mail to Webartery list, February 24, 2001, on thread “check out counter.” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery">http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery</a>.</p> <p>Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin (1999). <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</p> <p>Bush, Vannevar (prepared by Deny Duchier) (1994). “As We May Think.” <a href="http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/">http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/</a>. [dead link]</p> <p>Coverley, M.D., and Stephanie Strickland (1999). “To Be Here As Stone Is.” <span class="booktitle">Riding the Meridian</span> 1, no. 2 (1999). <a class="outbound" href="http://califia.hispeed.com/SI/stone1.htm">http://califia.hispeed.com/SI/stone1.htm</a>.</p> <p>—., and Stephanie Strickland (2000/2001). “Errand Upon Which We Came.” <span class="booktitle">Cauldron &amp; Net</span> 3 (Winter/Spring 2000/2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://califia.hispeed.com/Errand/title1a.htm">http://califia.hispeed.com/Errand/title1a.htm</a>.</p> <p>Cohen, Michael (1992). “Blush and Zebrackets: Two Schemes for Typographical Representation of Nested Associativity.” <span class="booktitle">Visible Language</span> 26, no.3/4 (1992): 436-449.</p> <p>Hayles, N. Katherine (2000). Commentary section of “The Dinner Party.” <span class="booktitle">Riding the Meridian</span> 2, no. 1 (Spring 2000). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/templates/Dinner/hayles.htm">http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/templates/Dinner/hayles.htm</a>.</p> <p>Hébert, Jean-Pierre (1999). <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://hebert.kitp.ucsb.edu/sand/sand.html">http://hebert.kitp.ucsb.edu/sand/sand.html</a>.</p> <p>Joyce, Michael (2000). <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture</span>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.</p> <p>Lanham, Richard A. (1993). <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p> <p>Memmott, Talan (2000). “Lexia to Perplexia.” <span class="booktitle">The Iowa Review Web</span> (September 2000). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/index.html">http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/index.html</a>.</p> <p>—. (2001). Interview, <span class="booktitle">Rhizome</span>, January 16, 2001. <a class="outbound" href="http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2145">http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2145</a>.</p> <p>Mez (Mary Anne Breeze) (2000a). E-mail to Webartery list, December 20, 2000, on thread “Visual Mind.” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery">http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery</a>.</p> <p>—. (2000b). “The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing: Constructing Polysemic &amp; Neology Fic/Factions Online.” <span class="booktitle">Beehive</span> 3, no. 4 (December 2000). <a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com">http://beehive.temporalimage.com</a>.</p> <p>Rosenberg, Jim (1996). “Barrier Frames.” <span class="booktitle">Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext</span> 2, no. 3 (1996). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.well.com/user/jer/j/barrier_frames_4.html">http://www.well.com/user/jer/j/barrier_frames_4.html</a>.</p> <p>Strickland, Stephanie (1999). <span class="booktitle">Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span>. WordCircuits. <a class="outbound" href="http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/">http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/</a>.</p> <p>—. (1999). <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/perception">“To Be Both in Touch and in Control,”</a> <span class="booktitle">ebr</span> 9 (Spring 1999).</p> <p>—. (1998). <span class="booktitle">True North</span>. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/vannevar-bush">vannevar bush</a>, <a href="/tags/memex">memex</a>, <a href="/tags/stenography">stenography</a>, <a href="/tags/encoding">encoding</a>, <a href="/tags/decoding">decoding</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/altx">altx</a>, <a href="/tags/trace">trace</a>, <a href="/tags/oscillation">oscillation</a>, <a href="/tags/flickering">flickering</a>, <a href="/tags/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-lanham">richard lanham</a>, <a href="/tags/jay-bolter">jay bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-grusin">richard grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/remediation">remediation</a>, <a href="/tags/jim-rosenberg">jim rosenberg</a>, <a href="/tags/mez">mez</a>, <a href="/tags/mary-anne-breeze">mary-anne breeze</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 990 at http://electronicbookreview.com Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia (sidebar) http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/haylessidebar <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Katherine Hayles</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-03</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesone.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p> <p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylestwo.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p> <p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesthree.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p> <p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesfour.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p> <p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesfive.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span><br /><span class="caption">23.sidebar.1-5. Screenshots of Lexia to Perplexia (2000).</span></p> <p style="text-align:right">back to <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/creole">Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1060 at http://electronicbookreview.com New Readings http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/x%3Dreader <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Pat Harrigan</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-04-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Oulipopo - a younger relative of the Oulipo - explores the potential of the mystery story, describing and creating new configurations of the elements that compose the mystery genre. The group’s 1971 founding text, by Oulipo cofounder François Le Lionnais (1998), asks in its title, “Who is Guilty?” Of the many possible answers, Le Lionnais considers numerous examples from the literature - although one possibility has no example: “x = the reader.”</p> <p>This configuration, in which the reader is guilty, would seem impossible in a mystery story. For a computer game, on the other hand, it might seem to be the easiest configuration - the design of id’s <span class="booktitle">Doom</span> (Green, Petersen, and Romero 1993) being much simpler to emulate than Infocom’s <span class="booktitle">Deadline</span> (Blank 1982). Yet there is clearly something incorrect about the comparison. In what sense, after all, is the player of <span class="booktitle">Doom</span> a reader? <cite id="note_1">Establishing that the <span class="booktitle">Doom</span> player is a murderer is left as an exercise for the reader.</cite> It may be that the term “reader” should not be used here.</p> <p>And yet, the <span class="booktitle">Deadline</span> player clearly is a reader - and something more, or at least something different. What’s taking place here? To begin to answer, the three essays in this section fashion new modes of thinking to grapple with new forms of reading. Or perhaps it would be better to say that they create new theoretical positions appropriate to emerging textual forms - for although there have certainly been critical discussions of responsive texts in the past, much of these discussions have focused on concepts not appropriate to the works discussed here.</p> <p>The first text under consideration is Talan Memmott’s (2000) <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> - which <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/creole">N. Katherine Hayles</a>, in her essay, describes as her “tutor text,” for exploring ways that computation and network technologies are “fundamentally altering the ways in which humans conceive of themselves and their relations to others.” <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is a work built on and of the web, pushing web techniques to their limits, and requiring a reading that constantly adjusts to its unpredictable modes. In the next essay, <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/signed-up">Jill Walker</a> offers a reading of <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> (Bevan and Wright 2000-01), a technically wide-ranging Internet work that incorporates web pages, e-mail, streaming video, and response forms, as well as audience-tracking and customization techniques. Not only does <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> require a new type of reading - it also produces a new permutation of “Who is Guilty?” in which the reader becomes an accomplice to murder. In this section’s final essay, <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/formalist">Nick Montfort</a> considers a class of works known as Interactive Fiction - a class to which <span class="booktitle">Deadline</span> belongs, as well as the landmark <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> (Anderson, Blank, Daniels, and Lebling 1977-79) - which still boasts a culture of active authors and readers, who use freely available tools to create new work and distribute it over the Internet. Montfort locates his essay within our continuing story/game discussion, and defines a number of possible categories of experience that may expand this discussion beyond the dualism.</p> <p>As the last essay in this book, it is fitting that Montfort’s respondents are <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/playpattern">Brenda Laurel</a> and <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/homonym">Janet Murray</a> - two of the founders of the cyberdramatic perspective with which our discussion began. In this volume the editors have attempted to group together thematically similar essays, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that any of the essays included here could be fruitfully compared with any other - and that we have convened this wide-ranging discussion specifically because it is not possible to understand this emerging field without such a diverse assemblage of viewpoints. We hope that this book may serve as a sort of core sample of the new media “story, performance, and game” field at this stage in its development, and that as this field continues to expand, it will prove useful to the next generation of new media practitioners.</p> <h2>Response</h2> <p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/newsflash">Matthew Kirschenbaum’s response to New Readings</a></p> <h2>Reference: Literature</h2> <p>Le Lionnais, François (1998). “Who is Guilty?” translated by Iain White. In <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span>, edited by Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie. London: Atlas Press, 269-270.</p> <h2>References: Games</h2> <p><span class="booktitle">Zork</span>. Timothy Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling; Infocom. 1977-79.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>. Mark Blank; Infocom. 1982.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Doom</span>. Shawn R. Green, Sandy Petersen, and John Romero; id Software. 1993.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/oulipopo">oulipopo</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/francois-le-lionnais">francois le lionnais</a>, <a href="/tags/who-guilty">who is guilty</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo-compendium">oulipo compendium</a>, <a href="/tags/doom">doom</a>, <a href="/tags/deadline">deadline</a>, <a href="/tags/infocom">infocom</a>, <a href="/tags/id">id</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/metaphoric-networks-lexia-perplexia">metaphoric networks in lexia to perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/jill-walker">jill walker</a>, <a href="/tags/how-i-was-played-online-caroline">how i was played by online caroline</a>, <a href="/tags/nick-m">nick m</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1059 at http://electronicbookreview.com Bill Seaman's response http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/enfolding <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Bill Seaman</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-02</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/creole">Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>When we address “Metaphoric Networks in <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> ” the concept of understanding computers as environments becomes important. The computer enables us to explore new forms of authorship and inter-authorship. As multivalent functional machines, computers make possible new approaches to the sciences, the arts, and the humanities, often employing metaphor in a salient manner. The potential of the computer to augment communication and understanding - as well as to provide new perspectives related to knowledge acquisition, meaning production, and human consciousness - becomes subtly enfolded in <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>. Yet, disruptive language use, miscommunication, ambiguity, personalized language forms and punning playfulness also embody the potential for evocative meta-collapses of meaning production. These evocative meta-collapses invariably extend meaning through their rich poetic ambiguity, generating a kind of oscillation between meaning and meaning collapse. This is where Memmott enfolds theory and practice within an experiential frame. He enables theoretical concerns to be addressed within an experiential mixed-semiotic network of resonant meaning oscillations.</p> <p>The environmental qualities that the computer and related systems of connectivity provide open out what some might consider new language potentials. Bolter and Grusin in <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span> describe the process of new media forms being constructed out of older media. Certainly this is partially true of computer-based environments. Yet the computer opens up some new language potentials that stem from the operative nature of cybernetic systems, the mutability of media-elements in computer-based environmental space, the spatial nature of environments and the distributed/connective nature that such systems enable.</p> <p>When we speak of “metaphoric networks” one must begin to consider what relation metaphor has to computer code and the generation of computer-based media-elements. One can not underestimate the importance of metaphor in communication processes.</p> <p class="longQuotation">Metaphor - A transferring to one word the sense of another, from metaphorein; meta, over and pherein, to bear. A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another different thing by being spoken of as if it were that other; implied comparison, in which a word of phrase ordinarily and primarily used of one thing is applied to another. [ <span class="booktitle">Webster’s</span> ]</p> <p>This response text was itself written within the framing environment of the “desktop metaphor.” Inside this metaphor one asks, where does the metaphor leave off and the text take over? We look at the computer screen closely and we see a set or field of pixels. The pixels are presented through an underlying code functioning within a particular software/hardware environment. This software/hardware environment enables the creation of a particular “language” space. The pixels form patterns that look like words or images. We read these patterns as words or images or some word/image hybrid. Thus, this light configuration is “likened” to a word or image or word/image hybrid and we understand it as such. We compare the environment of the screen to our embodied memory of past relationships, gleaning the shape of words and images, symbols, formulas - patterns. In general these are not fixed figures in <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, presented through the auspices of the computer - they are generated, malleable and operative time-based configurations that are authored to be responsive to interactive exploration. Thus we might describe computer networks themselves as being literal and “metaphoric networks” in that they enable the circulation of metaphors through technological means. We have the vehicle of light, hardware/software, and connectivity, forming an evocative, richly ambiguous, extended environment of “implied comparison” brought about through cognition. The computer also enables the nesting of metaphor, in that the word or image produced through light configurations can also function as a metaphor in itself.</p> <p>Memmott’s choice to explore the notion of codes on a series of different levels, in light of the above, becomes quite interesting. This includes the misuse of standard textual codes through the employment of non-standard punctuation, the displacement of mathematical symbols, the rebus-like exploration of textual and symbolic formulas, the displacement/replacement of computer-based code words, the creative employment of symbols as well as the exploration of context-relevant neologisms. This text of light embodies an oscillation between computer-based code and text, as well as between the literal and the metaphorical. Often Memmott disrupts the textual meaning in the service of generating graphical and/or pictorial meaning. The work also oscillates between self-referentiality and external reference. The conceptual territory that the work reveals is elusive. Does the computer present an environmental territory or the dissolution of territory, or a form of territorial oscillation?</p> <p>The work also invites exploration of an extended notion of “creole”: “A creole is a new language that arises when two different language communities come into contact.” This exploration of creole potentially moves beyond the integration of English with programming languages. If we also consider images, glyphs, and symbols to be “language,” here Memmott is perhaps beginning to address a mixed-semiotic creole that merges visual language with textual language - here both languages are supported by an underlying code language and operational variables functioning within a particular connective computer-based hardware environment. Even if one does not accept this as a computer-related extension of linguistic creole, one can consider the work to be functioning as a “metaphoric network” that is likened to the concept of creole through the environmental neighboring of image, text and code, where the “code” operates on multiple levels.</p> <p>This creole embodies a circulation of “codes” and their disruption including the textual, the imagistic/graphical, and through computer-based code-related text and symbols. This “creolization” is accomplished through a series of textual puns and visual word/graphic/code plays as well as through the operative nature of the interactive encoded environment. The narrative that one gleans through navigation of this environment is associative and generates a rich conceptual field. The operative, mixed-semiotic nature of the environment enables the exploration of meaning potentials brought about through dynamic interaction.</p> <p>A hinting at “metamorphosis” oscillates and envelops both human and machine change within the “posthuman” cybernetic circuit. Memmott constantly explores multi-language condensations, generating a shifting flow of evocations. We might say that he is exploring meta-metamorphosis. Such a strategy of oscillation moves between resonance and collapse - between the legible and the illegible in a sphere of meaning production that enfolds sense, nonsense and the extended sense of his created language. The work is a machine of attraction and repulsion which drives the interactant to continue despite the ambiguities, drawing them into the game of deciphering this multi-modal media environment.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is experienced through the oscillating body of an image/text that enfolds the performative with the semiotic polyvalent. At one moment we literally bring about the collapse of textual legibility at the service of graphic resonance - the literal and metaphorical layering of “texts.” The “terminal identity” of the image/text creole is made operative through interactivity. Meaning emerges through computer-based use. The work operates on the associative powers of the interactant - a delicate equation that balances the meaning force of words, symbols, text, and images in an ongoing process of evocative experiential meaning “summing.” Peirce states that “meaning is that which the sign conveys” [Peirce, 171]. Here we are exploring a circulation of shifting sign configurations.</p> <p>Our new task is to define approaches to this image/text/code creole in part through the literal and metaphorical understanding of “syntax, verb forms, and vocabulary.” We must also recognize how new “hybrid” languages might function differently from the “languages” that they are born of. These new “hybrid-languages” need not generate meaning based on the rules we have become accustomed to through our long history with textual meaning production. Perhaps as the creole between the language of images and texts (of various kinds) is explored, we need to define new elucidating approaches to meaning production that are environmentally appropriate to this enfolding of mixed-semiotic collections, light patterns and operative processes.</p> <p>We are now at the point of exploring an expanded set of media-element collections in computer-based environments, as an extension of language as we know it (notice I avoid the term media-vocabulary). We are also becoming involved with the potentials of computer-based processes that become operative in general computer-based environments. We must expand the nature of the concept of creole to address the variable media-neighborings that are generative of meaning in mutable, interactive, computer-based, authored environments. Beside the languages of texts, code, symbols and 2D images, we should also include the languages of digital sound, 3D images, digital video, etc. We must begin to address the complex meanings embodied in avatars, bots, and other new responsive computer-based entities and forms. Our collection of mixed-semiotic media elements and processes should also include an extended understanding of media-behaviors - the potentials of encoding behavior, of artificial life and artificial intelligence as applied to authored poetic computer-based media-environments. In particular we must come to understand how computer-based spaces enable new environmental qualities of meaning production. We should also include the relevance of the interface, and of extended context as elements of meaning exploration - enfolding the computer-environment with the potentials of differing forms of embodied experience in the world-at-large.</p> <h2>References</h2> <p>Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999</p> <p>Peirce, Charles Sanders. <span class="booktitle">Collected Papers</span>, Volume I-VIII. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931, p.171</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary</span>, Dorset and Baber, 1983</p> <p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/fleshcode">Eugene Thacker responds</a></p> <p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/materialmetaphor">N. Katherine Hayles responds</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/creole">creole</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/jay-bolter">jay bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-grusin">richard grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/websters-dictionary">webster&#039;s dictionary</a>, <a href="/tags/code">code</a>, <a href="/tags/semiotics">semiotics</a>, <a href="/tags/charles-sanders-peirce">charles sanders peirce</a>, <a href="/tags/embodiment">embodiment</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1056 at http://electronicbookreview.com Eugene Thacker's response (excerpt) http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/fleshcode <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Eugene Thacker</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-02</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/creole">Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It is this feeling of being overwhelmed by a complexly sensitized work that may form one point of departure for the body-technology interface in hypertext works. The connection here is, as Hayles points out, multiple and neuronal; the dynamic character of the text prompts a range of actions in the computer user, which in turn completes one turn of the cybernetic loop in the dynamic text. What is happening in such instances? One suggestion – which Hayles alludes to – is that a particular type of network is in the process of being formed: “To create new kinds of textual bodies is inevitably to write new human bodies, as we continue to produce the technologies that produce us.” Whether this relationship is benign or antagonistic ultimately depends on the particular hypertext under consideration. But what works like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> demonstrate for us is that there is always tension, dynamism, and a certain ambivalence in this relationship between flesh and code.</p> <p>To extend Hayles’ reading of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, we might take this mediated relationship between bodies and technologies a little further: If the body of the subject engages in a kind of distributed agency in “reading” works such as <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, then what happens to the specificity of the embodied subject as marked by gender, race, language, and cultural difference? In other words, <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, in articulating a relationship between flesh and code, also puts a challenge to us: to what degree does language account for the markers and meanings of embodied difference? To what degree does it account for our relationships to technology and media?</p> <p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/materialmetaphor">N. Katherine Hayles responds</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/embodiment">embodiment</a>, <a href="/tags/authorship">authorship</a>, <a href="/tags/code">code</a>, <a href="/tags/semiotics">semiotics</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1054 at http://electronicbookreview.com N. Katherine Hayles responds http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/intereactive <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Katherine Hayles</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-01-08</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/machanimate">Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In calling for an ethics of interactive art, Simon Penny makes crucially important points about how interactive simulations differ from visual representations. Although his primary emphasis is on interactive simulations rather than literary hypertexts, he points out that his argument also applies to the changed conditions under which readers experience electronic literature compared to print works. “In hypertext, the aesthetic work is as much in the design of the system which will present text according to the user’s behavior, as it is in the construction of the textual elements themselves.” As Paul Connerton notes in <span class="booktitle">How Societies Remember</span>, ritual motions and physical habits have an emotional force that can persist long after one’s conscious attitudes have changed; hence the emphasis among revolutionary movements on new modes of gesture, posture, and other movements. Physical motions, especially when they become habitual, carry meanings that influence thought, even though they may remain below the level of conscious attention. To perform a ritual such as kneeling in church, for example, carries implications of obedience and subservience even though one’s conscious thoughts may be entirely otherwise.</p> <p>What implications are generated by the reading practices required by electronic environments, compared to print? With print, the reader’s physical activity is limited to the relatively trivial action of turning pages. Regardless of how fast or slow the page is turned, the words remain durably inscribed, immune to the reader’s manipulations (short of such drastic actions as cutting or folding the pages). With electronic hypertext, however, the reader absorbs new assumptions about the nature of textuality through physical engagement with the electronic text - assumptions all the more powerful because they are absorbed through physical actions rather than conscious reflection. These assumptions I will call cognitive entailments, because they constitute a form of bodily cognition with powerful implications for what the text means. In recognition of these cognitive entailments, I will henceforth refer to the reader as an “interactor,” a term that more accurately captures the nature of reading in electronic environments.</p> <p>Consider for example the physical motions involved in the text I discuss in my essay for <span class="booktitle">First Person</span>, Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia.” The screen design includes mouseovers that change the text and images when the cursor touches certain areas. Since there are frequently no indications in the design where these points occur, the interactor is apt to suddenly lose a screen of text in the middle of reading and be unable to recover it without extensive backtracking and exploration. These physical enactments teach the interactor, on a level below consciousness, that the text is very unstable, or to put it metaphorically, highly “nervous” and apt to “over-react” to the slightest motion, even unintended motion, by the user. The effect is to “perplex” the interactor in ways that are different but complementary to the perplexing verbal constructions created by the neologisms and creole expressions. Among the cognitive entailments of the physical enactions is the idea that the text “has a mind of its own,” or more precisely that the text as a procedure enacted by the computer has cognitions independent of the interactor’s conscious intentionality. Yet since the interactor’s actions do trigger the changes, there is also the implication of relationality, but a relationality much more complex than that indicated, for example, by a simple “click here” link, where the computer is implicitly constructed as a passive servant confined to carrying out the user’s desires.</p> <p>We desperately need aesthetic theories adequate to account for these kinds of effects. During the decades when post-structuralism was teaching us valuable lessons about the power of discourse, the body was largely understood as an effect of discursive constructions. With the advent of sophisticated electronic literature and art, it is time to recover a sense of the body as a site for embodied cognition, cognition constructed not through words but through physical interactions with procedural works. Simon Penny makes an important beginning when he points out that “critiques of representation derived from painting, photography, film and video are inadequate for discussing the power of interactive experience.”</p> <p>In a significant sense, the electronic text is a process rather than an object. As Penny observes, it does not exist as such except when its procedures are processed and/or compiled by the computer. It can be argued that print texts too require “compiling” by the reader’s cognitive system before they exist as art works. Granted - but the processing required for an electronic work to exist is <span class="lightEmphasis">in addition and necessarily prior to the interactor’s decodings</span>. The ink marks that make up print words and images exist even before the user opens the book or glances at the page, but electronic words and images do not exist on the screen unless and until the procedures that generate them are enacted by the computer. For the interactor to be able to decode the words, the computer must first decode the procedural text and carry out the multiple encoding operations required to generate the screen images. This simply has no parallel with print, and the consequences that flow from this difference are complex, diverse, and extensive. All of which is of course grist for the artist’s mill, for it presents a vast new playground to experiment with artistic effects and their entwining relation with the interactor’s embodied enactions.</p> <p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/enviroethical">Eugene Thacker responds</a></p> <p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/litphysical">Simon Penny responds</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/paul-connerton">paul connerton</a>, <a href="/tags/how-societies-remember">how societies remember</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/cognition">cognition</a>, <a href="/tags/cognitive-science">cognitive science</a>, <a href="/tags/simon-penny">simon penny</a>, <a href="/tags/electronic-literature">electronic literature</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 964 at http://electronicbookreview.com The Materiality of Technotexts http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/playful <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Raine Koskimaa</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-03-27</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span> is the second release in The MIT Press’s new Mediawork Pamphlet Series, which pairs leading writers and contemporary designers to produce pamphlets involving emergent technologies that are accompanied by exclusive WebTakes. This series gives much freedom to both the writer and designer, and this book takes full advantage of that freedom.</p> <p>After previous weighty scholarly volumes such as <span class="booktitle">Chaos Bound</span> (1990) and <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman (1999)</span>, Hayles is writing in a totally different tone here. In this pamphlet, she gives a “pseudo-autobiographical” account of her early academic career, through which she both recounts her own growing interest in electronic textuality and develops the notion of the materiality of writing. The solution of leaving the bulk of notes to the WebTake (not available at the time of this writing but covered elsewhere in <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">ebr</a>) is well in accordance with the autobiographical writing style - even though this tone is momentarily lost in the more or less independent essays discussing the electronic text <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> (by Talan Memmott, 2000), the artist’s book <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> (by Tom Phillips, 1970), and the print novel <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> (by Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000).</p> <p>The story of Kaye - as Hayles calls herself in the autobiography - tells of a small-town Missourian who tries to compensate for the boring intellectual environment through books found in the town library. When we combine this diet of books found in the small library without too much investment in novelties with English and American Renaissance Lit studies at Caltech, we get a picture of a person with quite a traditional literary background. The bigger the contrast, naturally, then is when she is confronted with a desktop computer and has the sudden realization of the inherent possibilities of electronic textuality.</p> <p>According to Hayles, “This book is an experiment in forging a vocabulary and set of critical practices responsive to the full spectrum of signifying components in print and electronic texts by grounding them in the materiality of the literary artifact.” The vocabulary Hayles uses mixes more- or less-known existing terms and her own neologisms, including technotexts, material metaphors, inscription technologies, media-specific analysis (MSA), remediation, and medial ecology. She explicitly wants to avoid adopting the concepts of hypertext and cybertext, as “[t]o use one term or the other is not only to invoke a particular approach but to position oneself in a highly contested field where allies and enemies sometimes count more than arguments.” Thus, she prefers the term <span class="emphasis">technotext</span>, meaning a literary work that interrogates the inscription technology (a device which initiates material changes that can be read as marks) that produces it, mobilizing reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence. It is possible to read Espen Aarseth’s <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span> (1997) as mostly neglecting the media-specific differences, but cybertext theory generally has laid much weight on media-specific analysis. Thus, it is hard to see what kind of better grip of texts like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> we can get through one more new vocabulary, instead of the cybertext theory which has well worked concepts to deal exactly with the “reflexive loops” mentioned here. Still, there is a huge need for actual, MSA-oriented treatises on all kinds of texts, no matter the vocabulary used; in that, it is very easy to agree with Hayles.</p> <p>The book design is by Anne Burdick, the design editor of the <span class="journaltitle">electronic book review</span>. Considering that the book itself is rather small in dimensions, printed black and white, on not-too-high quality paper, Burdick has managed to make this book fun to look at. On a more functional level, especially with the essays dealing with literary texts, the way to include not only the words of texts discussed, but also their visual appearance as it is in the original, works well. Anybody writing about postmodernist fiction like <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> should have this kind of typographical possibility available! But it is just this effort put to the material book object at hand that inevitably draws one’s attention to the fact that an electronic text like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> can only be partially reproduced in print - in this sense the collaboration of Hayles and Burdick manages well - and one cannot but, once again, notice the obvious need of technotextual criticism of technotexts. The problem of discussing electronic texts in print becomes even more explicit in Chapter 7, “Embodiments of Material Metaphors,” where Hayles discusses Adriana de Souza and Fabian Winkler’s installation <span class="booktitle">database</span>. Even having seen the installation live, I found it hard to follow Hayles’s description of it.</p> <p>In her reading of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, Hayles identifies three principal strategies for making the reader understand herself “as a permeable membrane through which information flows.” The first of these are linguistic ones, including neologisms, and Creole discourse mixing English and computer code. In the second category are rewritings of myth, especially the story of Echo and Narcissus. And the last one is a symbolic visual language. Hayles’s treatment of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is at its most rewarding when she deals with the computer-code-laden Creole discourse, the way the computer code “shines through” the English language, like “cell…f (and cell.f), homophones for self that conflate identity with a pixilated cell and the notation for a mathematical function.” It is, however, not quite as convincing when Hayles concludes that <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> tells “new stories about how texts and bodies entwine.” Her skillful interpretation of the linguistic and intertextual aspects of the work seems to fight against her own conclusion: even a work like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> still mainly stimulates the mental-interpretational impulses, not so much tactile or other bodily functions.</p> <p>The chapters about artists’ books and especially the reading of Tom Phillips’s <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> is the most inspired section of the book. Here, the writer’s genuine thrill when she encounters the world of artists’ books for the first time is so tangible it cannot but pull the reader along. It is here, too, that Hayles’s arguments for the need of study on the materiality of writing - indeed the slogan, “Materiality is content, and content is materiality” - gains its best persuasive momentum. Hayles’s point here about the resistance of <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> “to an immaterial realm of disembodied verbal signifiers” would be much harder to drive through without the fine layout juxtaposing the essay and passages from the work discussed.</p> <p>Obviously, Mark Z. Danielewski’s <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> is seminal in Hayles’s discussion of media-specific analysis and the materiality of writing. Here, Hayles gives a very thorough analysis of the multimediated nature of narration in the novel, especially through the film/video editing processes. But when she concludes that “as readers enmeshed in the book, we find ourselves positioned, like Will Navidson, inside the book we read, receiving messages to be sure but also constituted by the messages that percolate through the intersecting circulatory pathways of the book called House of Leaves,” we face some serious problems. If we take print books as “material metaphors” that turn words into actions in the real world, we risk losing the distinction between different types of technotexts, the very material and media-specific differences Hayles has been drawing so finely all along. <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> doesn’t differ in any fundamental way (if you do not count the best-selling figures here) from such earlier experimental print novels like Gilbert Sorrentino’s <span class="booktitle">Mulligan Stew</span> (1979) or Raymond Federman’s <span class="booktitle">Take It or Leave It</span> (1976), novels which metatextually and metafictionally reflect their own material nature, and which “invite” the reader into the fictional world (although invite may not be the right word in Federman’s case, where the “reader” is sodomized by one of the fictional characters). No matter what textual strategies are used, or how persuasively they produce the immersive experience, as readers we always stay outside of the textual world, and the relations are merely metaphorical, a fact Hayles herself makes clear when mentioning Italo Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler</span> (1981). If we compare this reading experience to that of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, we already see a difference in the way that the reader’s actions do have a visible effect on the screen. And if we go further to works like Noah Wardrip-Fruin, et al.’s <span class="booktitle">Impermanence Agent</span> and the like, the difference is even more palpable; the feedback loop between the work and the reader functions in specific ways in each case, and media-specific analysis should also be attentive to these differences.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span> is an enjoyable read, and it makes the important claim that not only electronic texts but all texts in the digital era need a new perspective and a new vocabulary for critico-theoretical discussions. As a “pamphlet,” it is clearly not even trying to build a well-wrought theory, but rather attempts to partake in the ongoing discussion of the new forms of textuality. Excusable also, in a pamphlet, are interpretations that are sometimes quite far-flung, especially in the exaggerated role of bodily involvement in reading technotexts (however, we’ll definitely get there, sooner or later, and some artists like Eduardo Kac are already quite far down that path). In any case, it is never too often stated that, especially with electronic texts, there is much need for more elaborate ways to do media-specific analysis. The field is pretty open still - it is good to have thought-provoking, even playful, experiments like this to widen the discussion.</p> <p><span class="lightEmphasis">The Hayles/Burdick collaboration is also reviewed in <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">ebr</a> by Komninos Zervos. - ed.</span></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/n-katherine-hayles">N. Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/chaos-bound">Chaos Bound</a>, <a href="/tags/how-we-became-posthuman">How we Became Posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/technotext">technotext</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/house-leaves">House of Leaves</a>, <a href="/tags/eduardo-kac">eduardo kac</a>, <a href="/tags/italo-calvino">italo calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/metatext">metatext</a>, <a href="/tags/metafiction">metafiction</a>, <a href="/tags/mediawork-pamphlet-series">Mediawork Pamphlet Series</a>, <a href="/tags/designwriting">designwriting</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 845 at http://electronicbookreview.com
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