Reading Week 1
After you have completed this week's project prompt:
take a look at the following. Please comment on this post with a paragraph of text that responds to the readings. The content of your comments are up to you. However, they can reflect what you find useful in your practice, notes you want to remember, points to discuss in class, or concerns you had. I will be checking these on Monday in order to prepare for Tuesdays class.
Please read
Brian Kim Stefans
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/databased
and take a look at
Hayles, N. Katherine. "Electronic Literature: What Is It?" Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2008, p. 1-42. Earlier web version at Electronic Literature Organization: PAD (2007).
take a look at the following. Please comment on this post with a paragraph of text that responds to the readings. The content of your comments are up to you. However, they can reflect what you find useful in your practice, notes you want to remember, points to discuss in class, or concerns you had. I will be checking these on Monday in order to prepare for Tuesdays class.
Please read
Brian Kim Stefans
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/databased
and take a look at
Hayles, N. Katherine. "Electronic Literature: What Is It?" Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2008, p. 1-42. Earlier web version at Electronic Literature Organization: PAD (2007).
posted by sgorman at
11:45 AM
3 Comments:
[My question, then, is: does text in an electronic art piece suffer its own set of limitations? Because of its place in an interactive, digital, and often 3-dimensional universe, is text not able to exhibit signs of doubt and sensibility, and given the lack of a set-up appropriate to humor - can it ever be funny?]
The electronic art piece is of course limited, as it can be argued that everything is limited in some way. In my experience, electronic writing can be funny, it can exhibit signs of doubt and sensibility, and it can reach beyond the boundaries of its ancestors, but communication via electronic media discovers both new and old restrictions, established by the technology and by the reader. I believe digital media has created a realm that extends the consequences of text far enough to create its own fresh collection of limitations.
Electronic writing is bound by reader-created limitations, similar to those experienced in other text. If the work is presented to an audience, boundaries will naturally materialize for the individual, depending on the interpretation and past experiences of the reader. Perhaps that avid opera fan would pay close attention to capital letters or to the sung word, limiting other aspects of the work by inferring that those parts were most important to the author or his intended meaning. However, the author probably expects these limits.
One unique limitation that the technology of electronic media has placed on poetry applies to the text generator. Text generators can spit out a string of words, a poem, in seconds. Knowing no background information, one might think a human had been working for hours to create that poem. Ever since I came across text generator technology, thanks to spam email, any group of disassembled sentences or grammatically funny phrases that I encounter makes my head spin. I wonder whether the text was formed by a code that extracts words from a list or by a human who cleverly selects the words. I first attempt to read the poem with the latter view in mind; the author is a human who wishes to play with the rules of sentence structure, to reveal absurdities he has found in language, or maybe to emphasize certain sounds or images. However, I then become paranoid and I wonder if I’m being tricked. I wonder if the creator is trying to prove that any string of words, regardless of whether or not time and wit went into the construction, can produce the illusion of deliberate structure.
In spite of this, it must be remembered that some human created the code that programmed the random generator, which welcomes more questions. What considerations did he make while writing the code? Were particular words prioritized? Did he put specific values on different parts of speech? Was the computer notified of certain connections he saw between words? I still cannot determine the level of intention that went into the work, but the mystery is intriguing and offers a great deal to ponder. For every poem of this breed, my mind travels to these same points, in an order governed by the text.
My thought is, electronic media increases the possible inputs by the author and leaves the reader more to investigate, creating more interesting and thought-provoking matter.
As we the digital collective inch closer toward a generative instance that is indistinguishable from creative human production, it will not be the case that most observers will be stunned at the birth of autonomous code-- this event will likley reveal the cold reality that human autonomy is an illusion produced by and almost infinitely complex, continuously recombinant series of generative instances known as the brain. Electronic literature as a field is as broad as any other because like most creative mediums, productions seek to simulate/reproduced formerly unnamed perceptions. Electronic literature is broader than many fields because its mediums grow in number and diversity as fast as the global society and/or any individual wants them to, and more importantly because Electronic Literature is a field in which, say in comparision to photography and film, is best equipped technologically to replicate the nuances of perception itself. In this world, document retreival is immediately a metaphor for memory recall, anonymity is identity fiction, and most interactions and conversations are logged automatically and ready as pigment to be used for the self-expression of the e-writer.
From the Brian Kim Stephans reading: "Thus text presents one field of meaning force that can only be understood contextually in relation to other neighboring meaning forces--other media elements and living processes. The word is not valued in a hierarchy over other media elements. Seaman, like a latter day Marinetti, is celebrating not only the liberation of words but the breakdown of boundaries between the sign of the word and the sign of other media elements including video, sound, and still image." Coming traditionally from the field of writing, I find this to be encouraging. Also, I find it interesting that the arena of digital information creates an egalitarianism among sound, image, and text since "all manner of representational systems...can be stored, accessed, and controlled by the same equipment." But, at the same time, I wonder if the claim that there is no hierarchy that exists among these representational systems can be justified in such a way. Yes, digitally sound, image, and text can be manipulated/accessed with the same equipment but that does not necessarily translate at a symbolic level. (As we talked about in Cave Writing last semester with Cayley, there is one more level of interpretation necessary with text as compared to images, for example)
I also thought Stefans observation about text in electronic art was of note: "...the tendency seems to be to use text that itself has no trace of conventional communication, and then to call it poetry because it is clearly not anything else...too often, the textual element of electronic art pieces seem to be clippings from the artist's notebooks about how he or she wishes the viewer to feel when experiencing the piece...the effect is something like that of the slogans on the walls of Communist factories." It seems that Stefans is calling for a use of text that is both substantive but not overly illustrative of the piece's intent. Perhaps this is a suggestion that text in electronic art might lend its weight more to content than to form.
Stephans also mentions how "the engineering parameters of the Cave at Brown University function as a constraint." As in, the form of the work acts as a constraint in relation to the text.
As a writer, these are identifiable problems I have run across (particularly with my experience in the Cave last semester). How to integrate text of substance into form filled with constraint? In other words, personally, as a writer, when I write something and develop a concept, it is long, complicated, dense, etc. I have found that to incorporate this text into mediums of sound/image is very difficult. Is a new way of writing to be sought? That makes me uncomfortable.
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