http://aphasic-letters.com/noise/

Noise! 2010 is a one-day, marathon event, featuring a staggering array of artists and works including performance, sound, moving image, language, and culinary craft.

This year, curators Caspar Stracke, Danny Snelson, and Tianna Kennedy contribute an exciting and expansive approach to the event’s theme—mapping signal innovation, distortion, and destruction from the historical avant-garde to contemporary media art practitioners.

Noise! 2010 will mark the conclusion of free103point9′s organizational residence at the Ontological; join us on Saturday, June 26 to celebrate what has been an extraordinary partnership since 2006. Noise! 2010 is presented in association with the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator.

Join Hans Reichel's band? Good luck gentle reader.

“Hans Reichel (1949) is a German improvisational guitarist, experimental luthier, inventor, and type designer.” So saith Wikipedia so you know the statement has passed many semi-clueless scrutinies to emerge supported, probably not without revision.

But, yes, he is all that and more. The ‘more part’ includes creator-of-the-Flash-interactive-audio-visual-daxo.de, which we shall look at. Looking at daxo.de is also to look at Reichel’s work in all of the above categories. Daxo.de is a really cool trip through Reichel’s work. He invented, makes, and plays an unusual instrument he calls the daxophone.

But daxo.de is also a kind of work of art in its own right, as Flash art. One of the reasons I bring it up in this forum on ‘electronic literature’ is because of the nature of the narrative. Narrativity has to do with the way one thing leads to another. At daxo.de, one thing leads to another by some sort of action on our part. What are we asked to do? Sometimes we must find the clickable element amongs many possibilities. Sometimes it’s obvious. But usually there is just one clickable thing on the screen. Sometimes the advance triggers an audio-visual character to vocalize to us, or play to us, rather than an advance in the presentation.

The narrative or presentation of daxo.de is mainly about Reichel’s artistic life. His experiments in creating unusual and beautiful guitars. And then his creation of the daxophone. And its evolution, which involves the creation of 103 “tongues”, each of which creates different creature-like sounds or ‘voices’. And his work as a typographer, a maker of typefaces. One of which is a typeface of the 103 tongues of the daxophone. O yes there is a language thing going on  here.

But there are other excursions as well. For instance, http://daxo.de/pages/page8.html , the eighth piece of twelve, is not so much about Reichel’s work as it is like media art pieces of the exploding interface.  If you follow net art at all, you’ll be familiar with what almost could be described as a genre of the exploding interface. Error messages are the signature of such pieces. Usually that’s about all you get. But in Reichel’s page8, the interface does indeed explode in a totally entertaining and somewhat pointed manner.

from Hans Reichel's page8 of Daxo.de

We’re presented with quite a complicated mixer interface and, by contrast, a cartoon pair of eyes informing us that “now you can record a song of your own”. This claim turns out to be false. But it isn’t so much false advertising as the premise for a kind of satire on musical software and software more generally.

The audio environment of daxo.de is of exceptionally high quality. So we barely care that we are no closer to recording our own song as page8 proceeds.  And it’s interactive. Often the interactivity is of the ‘page-turner’ variety, just to move the presentation along. But, very often, the interactivity is more meaningful. If we are spared the difficulty of feeling like one of the band (which is OK), we nonetheless feel that our choices and actions are well-motivated, engaged, and in game with the piece or with Reichel himself, who seems to hover over the experience like a cross between the impish meercats–who invite the wreader to “PLAY WITH ME”  in one of the daxo.de pieces–and the more abstract cheshire cat of legend.

Text escapes from the troublesome interface

After we find the clickable element in the above screen, we are presented with a vocalizing red recording button. Is it burping in an infinite loop? It has a mouth. Would you trust this recording button? Well, it has character. It doesn’t look like a very reliable ‘record button’ but it’s very amusing.

When we click the ‘record button’ things begin to go wrong. The sound of an explosion. The slider controls all fall off the mixer board. Only one slider control remains, and it is twitching next to maximally peaked out audio meters. So we mouseover the twitching slider control. And, lo and behold, that brings us back to the burping record button and, otherwise, the scene we see above. The slider controls have returned. We’re ready to record. Again we press the record button.

Now you've really done it

This time we’ve really done it. The slider controls all fall off, the entire mixing board interface turns purple,  tilts 20 degrees, and animated golden nonsense letters escape from the bottom of the interface. Soon after that, the color of the interface changes again, it reverts to its initial angle, and an error message appears: “maybe somethn went rong [error #51827] – 1 mo try?”. The question mark is upside down. We can choose between “Yes” and “No”. But when we mouseover “Yes”, it turns to “No”, and when we mouseover “No”, it turns to “Yes”.  We can get the one we want, but it takes a  boolean reversal of logic. This piece has its own logic–the logic of a hypermedia work of art. It goes on for some time in the destruction of the interface and the never-fulfilled recording of your own song. But it always entertains and engages us in this comic explosion of the interface.

The troublesome interface now as art

We also note that this explosion of the interface is much stronger as art than many an interface in which you can record “somethn” or other. Too often, art-tool interfaces are heavy on the tool side and not lively enough on the art side. Reichel’s page8 is a triumph of liveliness, of art experience over the routinized digital recording experience.

There are other satires at daxo.de. In one of the twelve works, we’re asked “Join the band?”. This proposition, common in interactive audio pieces, is toyed with in a very interesting way in page4 of daxo.de.

Page4 is and isn’t of the ‘join the band’ variety of interactive audio pieces.  The promise, in such pieces, is usually disappointingly hollow. We are offered a simple mixing board, typically, in which we can mix up to a dozen or so sound. Not very creative. We can’t do that in Reichel’s page4. But we can play a mock game that Reichel has set up. Again, it’s very well done. The satire is very good but also the actual experience itself is quite rewarding–more than what usually transpires in a ‘join the band’ type of interactive audio piece.

Reichel has done a lot with minimal knowledge of Flash coding. This is another reason why I wanted to write about Daxo.de on netpoetic. Daxo.de is a kind of exemplar of  Flash hypermedia of a certain kind: dumb as a meercat about ActionScript programming (well, no, not quite), but wicked on the animation side, sublimely energized in its audio, fundamentally hypertextual in its narrativistic progressions, and triumphantly amusing and uplifting as a work of art in itself. See how it is done, o ye of the simple Flash thingy.

The homepage of daxo.de and its 12 pieces

Daxo.de currently consists of a dozen Flash pieces. There is some value in doing them in order, 1 to 12. Because there are references later on to things and to easier idioms of interactivity brought up or learned earlier in the sequence, though the chronology of the sequence, in terms of Reichel’s life work, is not strict, but by subject, field of endevor as “a German improvisational guitarist, experimental luthier, inventor, and type designer”.

Reichel is the inventor of the daxophone. which you can read about at Wikipedia and elsewhere–and experience in Reichel’s narrative through daxo.de in many of its stages, incarnations, and “tongues”. There is even a downloadable true-type font he made of the “tongues” of the daxophone.

And what strong music he makes with it! Unreasonably good stuff! The Flash works of Daxo.de contain quite a bit of daxophone playing. Sometimes it seems like a whole orchestra of creatures is at work.

Reichel bows or strikes the “tongue” of the daxophone to produce the creature-like sounds we hear at daxo.de. He also uses a “dax”, a wooden device he holds in his other hand. As he bows the “tongue”, he moves the “dax” along the surface of the “tongue” to change pitch, as we can see on youtube.

But that is for a different piece of writing. This one is long enough already. Go see http://daxo.de to experience the full Reichel treatment yourself. Shoo now. Go see it and hear it. This is one of the best hypermedia works of its kind that I’ve experienced.

To be a digital writer, it’s probably best if you like to write, or at least not hate it.  Then, if you can pull as many muses into your corner as you can, that might help: history, music, dance, astronomy, and art….

Patience is a virtue with digital writers, as you will have to explain what you do to a great many people who have never heard of it….

Having a thick skin and (again) more patience will help protect you from the slings and arrows of outrageous critics.  Critics love to criticize, and when it is something new and without precedent, they will laugh and grind it under their heels….

(2) Do I need to take a class in digital writing to be a digital writer?

Most of the digital writers working today teach courses they never took when they first started out.  A truism of the avant-garde: there are no teachers in your field, so you have to teach yourself, so you can become a teacher.

(3) Is it true that digital stories were on the web back in prehistoric times, when humans lived in caves?

This is totally true. Plato writes about it in his “Allegory of the Cave.”  Caves were a perfect place for projecting digital works, and cave dwellers were among the first to recognize this (before them, it was nomadic tribes, who used deer hide tents).

The web back then was less sophisticated than it is now–being constructed of stone, goat’s intestines, elk horns, and camel hair–but its reach was global, with fewer system outages and faster download times.

In the Middle Ages, this technology was lost, and only recently reconfigured through electronics.

(4) Are digital writers flesh and blood people, or are they virtual, like their stories?

It depends where you meet them.  If you meet them online, they are virtual, and their primary substance electrons and code…

If you meet them in the flesh, their virtuality plays second fiddle to the fact that, at any moment, they could bleed all over your favorite carpet.

(5) Is it easy to be a digital writer?

If answers were songs, try this (sung to the tune of “Yesterday,” by the Beatles):

Digital

All it takes is
lots of time

and what you make

may be fine
if going digital

is on your mind.

(And so on, with feeling…)

(6) Does it cost a lot of money to be a digital writer?

After you have made the initial investment in a good computer, some software, a sound recording device, and whatever other tools you need to make multimedia works of literature, the overhead is remarkable low.  It would be best (to build branding and reader loyalty) to have your own website, so add about $10 a year for the registration of a domain name.  Then add another $10 a month for server costs (provided you don’t go viral, in which case you’ll need a bit more than that).  Finally, if you use them, there’s the periodic cost for royalty-free images or audio files purchased online–most of the code you’ll need will be free–so tack on another $200 a year.  At these rates, your total for a year of publishing digital literature is approximately $330, which is cheap compared to most other businesses.

Since you won’t make much (or any) income, it’s money down the drain, but don’t worry: you can list it as a business expense on your income tax (I’d love to hear your conversation with the IRS agent).

(7) Can I make any money being a digital writer?

Let’s do the math:

Expenses a year (see #6 above):           $330
Income publications:                                 $0
Income readings:                                       $0
Income exhibitions:                                   $0
Work sold:                                                 $0
––––––
TOTAL:                                                 -$330

Your talent? Priceless.

(8) Is there a website where I can read some electronic literature, and learn about the authors who create it?

Do a Google search on “Electronic Literature” or “E-Lit” or “Hypermedia” or “Digital Literature,”  and here is some of what you get:

Born Magazine–http://www.bornmagazine.com

Chico.art.net–http://www.csuchico.edu/art/net/

CONT3XT.NET–http://www.cont3xt.net/

Digital Technology and Culture–http://digitaltechnologyculture.motime.com/

Drunken Boat–http://www.DrunkenBoat.com

Eastgate–http://www.eastgate.com

electronic book review–http://www.electronicbookreview.com/

Electronic Literature Directory–http://eld.eliterature.org

Electronic Literature Organization–http://www.eliterature.org

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008–http://vancouver.wsu.edu/programs/dtc/elo08/media.html

Electronic Literature Organization Library of Congress/Archive-It Project–http://www.eliterature.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Electronic Poetry Center–http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/

FILE (Electronic Language International Festival)–http://www.file.org

furtherfield.org–http://www.furtherfield.org/

Grand Text Auto–http://www.grandtextauto.org/

Hermeneia: Literary Studies and Digital Technologies Group–http://uoc.edu/in3/hermeneia/cat/

Hypercompendia–http://www.susangibb.net/blog2/

Hyperrhiz–http://www.hyperrhiz.net

The Iowa Review Web–http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/

Java Museum–http://www.JavaMuseum.org

netpoetic.com–http://www.netpoetic.com/

newmediaFIX–http://www.newmediafix.net/

New River Journal–http://www.TheNewRiver.us

nt2–http://www.labo-nt2.uqam.ca/

Rhizome.org–http://www.rhizome.org

trAce archive–http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/

Turbulence.org–http://www.turbulence.org

Vispo–http://www.vispo.com

Word Circuits–http://www.wordcircuits.com/index.html

WRT: Writer Response Theory–http://www.writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/

And the list goes on…

(9) Are digital writers happy people?

You can’t get much happier than a digital writer.  Because they practice in an emerging form, they have nothing to lose.  This makes them reckless, and beyond sadness.

(10) If I wanted to be a digital writer, how would I begin?

Read the FAQs above. If you have any questions, make up your answers.

Matt K's Lovely Book

It’s been a while since Matthew Kirschenbaum’s book (Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, MIT Press, 2008) appeared and different responses have been generated meantime. I’ve finished reading it recently with the kind of feeling one has when (s)he finds a confirmation of something that up to that point presented itself only, more or less, as an intuition. In other words, something ‘often thought but never so well expressed’. Therefore, I felt compelled to write a line or two about it, if only to underline a few points it makes which seem to me extremely well demonstrated.
I do not wish to dwell too much on the presentation of the concepts proposed here, but I prefer to situate this research, in its own terms, in reference to what has been accomplished so far in matters of theoretical perspectives on digital literature.
With this study the theory of digital art in general and of e-literature in particular takes one step further. I would use the author’s reference to Kenneth Thibodeau’s tripartite model for digital objects as a means of classifying the theoretical debates which have accompanied the development of this branch of literature. The first – in a historical order and also most largely spread – is a theoretical perspective which favors the conceptual aspect of the digital object, its phenomenological manifestation on the screen. It is this particular orientation – which is subject to ‘screen essentialism’ (Nick Montfort) or, largely speaking, to ‘medial ideology’ (a term coined by Kirschenbaum in analogy with Jerome McGann’s ‘Romantic ideology’) – that forms the object of a thoroughly convincing criticism. Matthew Kirschenbaum is very good at unveiling the rhetorical nature of the theoretical language of this orientation, exposing the ideology lying behind mere prepositional tropes.
The second and one-level deeper into the structure of the digital product is the critical theory which tries to formalize what lies beyond the screen and to connect it with the surface phenomena. The examples invoked here are E. Aarseth and L. Manovich. However, this second generation theoreticians still work at a symbolic level, or deal with what Kirschenbaum calls ‘formal materiality’, namely data interpreted by software. What constitutes his own original contribution and may be considered a real conceptual ground-break is what he describes as ‘forensic materiality’ corresponding to the physical nature of the object. In his own words – a grammatology of inscription on a magnetic medium. It is true that references to what lies beyond the screen and to the material aspects of the digital object have been numerous, but none so systematic and moving in such an organized manner from the icons on the screen deep into the materiality of the hard drive. Most of the perspectives aware of the pitfalls of ‘screen essentialism’ have tended to focus on the code, which, as Kirschenbaum shows, is not the ultimate frontier. To prove his point, and in this he succeeds very well, the author returns to the era roughly covered by the interval 1980-1992, which serves to measure the conceptual distance generated by the mere difference in technologies. As he puts it ‘greater storage capacity will dematerialize the media as their finite physical boundaries represent no longer a concern’ (p. 34).
The dematerialization is not only a digital media problem. It is also a widely unacknowledged aspect of print literature. However, it is the area of various book studies that informs Kirschenbaum’s attempt to define the notion of ‘electronic textuality’. This is the second point when the author proves that his perspective is unbiased by any essentialist claims. He does not feel the need to oppose the digital realm to the printed one. On the one hand because ‘the conditions governing electronic textuality are formal conditions – artificial arrays of possibility put into play by particular software systems’ (p. 57). In other words, notions such as ‘ephemerality’, ‘fungibility’ or ‘fluidity’ are not absolute characteristics of the digital text, but the results of the way in which the text was designed to function by different programs, which can make it stable or unstable according to specific needs. On the other hand, because the differences stand out by themselves as the description of ‘electronic textuality’ unfolds. The three extensive analyses proposed as model examples serve to configure a particular type of textuality, which he justly calls ‘thick textuality’ – combining screen appearance with machine inscription.
One question that might be addressed here concerns the contribution of the analysis of the ‘forensic materiality’ to the overall meaning. After all, no matter how much one may criticize the focus on the screen output, it is for this level that the digital product is built as a rule. Reading the other levels is a work for the specialist. The answers vary according to each text. In the case of Mystery House the supplementary information offers details about the ‘reading’ habits of the owner of that particular disk. This is similar to the marginal notes that readers usually leave on the printed books, which represent an important source of information for the literary studies focused on reading practices. Concerning Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, on the other hand, the question of materiality (including, apart from magnetic inscription, every possible document connected with its ‘writing’ – be it a coffee stained scrap paper) becomes more stringent as it serves to differentiate versions and editions of the same text and this results in significantly different reading paths in the text. This is not far from what in print literary studies is called genetic reading. As for the last extensively analyzed example – W. Gibson’s Agrippa – its present-day material permanence is in complete contrast with its conceptual design and with the way in which it was supposed to be interacted with.
After reading Mechanisms, I can make a guess as to what partly prompted Johanna Drucker to make the assertion that generated a lot of debate concerning the existence of valuable examples of electronic literature. After all, the three works which the author focuses upon correspond to the ‘beginnings’ of e-literature. The first is admittedly a very simple game that even its contemporaries would not have given a second try. Afternoon may be placed at the other end of the scale, but I would say that its ‘literary value’ is mostly due to its closeness to traditional literary texts, to the fact that it is, as it calls itself ‘a story’, which is all the more obvious when contrasted with present-day e-literature. As for the last one, Agrippa, it might be disputable if it is an e-text proper, considering the fact that its simple presence on the internet does not make it e-literature (especially since was not created for this medium). A poem placed on the internet is not an e-poem, it is obviously a poem on the internet. On the other hand, I don’t think the aesthetic value of these works was the primary criterion which guided the author’s selection. His research addresses questions of reading practices, preservation and editing processes. This is the third significant contribution of this study, because one cannot think of editing and preserving electronic works (or preserving works electronically) without taking into full consideration their ‘materiality’ in the most literal sense.

There’s writing by Anne-Marie David Jhave Johnston, Edward Picot, Cindy Poremba, Xavier Malbreil, Rebecca Cannon, and myself.

There’s writing by Poremba and Malbreil about Jason’s work. Johnston writes about The Molleindustria, Italian games of social commentary / satire. Picot reviews a new online game, Machinarium, by the makers of Samorost. Anne-Marie looks at “persuasive games”: games as rhetorical tools. And Rebecca Cannon looks at the work of the Australian Anita Fontaine. Also, I’ve written a new essay called Art, Games and Play, Which looks at the relationship between art and games. My video interview with Dom Lopes about his book A Philosophy of Computer Art and my review of that book are there also.

Anne-Marie has been editing this online publication since 1997, and this is her last issue. I’m not sure if the magazine is going to continue or if that’s it. But she has done terrific work over the years with this magazine concerning net art. You could easily call it the most significant online magazine in Canada concerning net art. Many thanks to Anne-Marie for All Those stimulating issues. She’s doing a doctorate in Philosophy in Montreal. Let’s hope she continues her work in net art also. It’s a terrific last issue.

———————————————-

There’s a sense of excitement about computer art in Dominic Lopes’s book A Philosophy of Computer Art (Routledge, 2009) that he communicates at the outset: “Few generations in all of human history have been lucky enough to witness the birth of a new art form” (p. 1). But he doesn’t gush and the book is actually a model of clarity in art criticism. It’s readable, clear and well-reasoned, as we would hope for in a book of philosophy. But it’s also got the human touch; it’s not remote.

One of the things he does is convince us that the term “computer art” has its advantages over the more generic term “digital art” as the one we should use to refer to art in which the computer is crucial as medium. What does he mean by “medium”? He says “a technology is an artistic medium for a work just in case it’s use in the display or making of the work is relevant to its appreciation” (p. 15). That’s the best definition I’ve read of “artistic medium”.

Perhaps the greatest contribution the book makes is in giving us a different way of writing about art than we have seen before. Or at least I hadn’t. Just what that way involves is something I want to get at in this review. But, also, I’d like to cover what I see is the book’s major flaw. The flaw is significant, but doesn’t sink the book. Partly because the different way of writing about art that the book represents and develops is clearly going to have some impact via further writing—perhaps by Lopes, perhaps by others—of more books that take the form and method further concerning philosophies of computer art or other arts. Lopes seems to be aware of the preliminary nature of the book. The book may turn out to also be ‘seminal’.

In the book’s second paragraph, he says:

“This book’s title announces its topic as “computer art” rather than “digital art,” and the choice of words is deliberate. As I’ll explain, computer art isn’t the same as digital art. Moreover, computer art is a new art form and digital art is not” (p. 1)

This distinction between digital art and computer art is important and one that those involved in both fields need to understand and appreciate. Here is his definition of digital art:

“An item is a work of digital art just in case (1) it’s art (2) made by computer or (3) made for display by computer (4) in a common, digital code.” (p. 3)

This would include many digitized movies, digitized photographs and so on. It would also include scans of traditional paintings where the scans have been scanned to display them on monitors/computers. If the scans were not made to display the scans on computers (but to print them out, say), then this definition probably wouldn’t describe the scans as ‘digital art’. But the important thing is that this definition of ‘digital art’ is quite broad and does not, in the least, attempt to describe a notion of computer art any more significant than traditional paintings scanned. We all can grant that such stuff can be ‘digital art’, but I think, equally, we would all disagree with the notion that such things have any significance as computer art: whatever artistic significance the paintings may have, computers are totally irrelevant to it. But how might we define ‘computer art’? Here is Lopes’s definition:

“An item is a computer art work just in case (1) it’s art, (2) it’s run on a computer, (3) it’s interactive, and (4) it’s interactive because it’s run on a computer” (p. 27)

Clearly this definition could hardly stress the importance of interactivity more. The problem is that there are types of art that we surely should describe as ‘computer art’ that are not interactive. A great deal of ‘generative art’ is not interactive. For instance, AARON, which Lopes discusses, is a computer program written by Harold Cohen that somewhat autonomously draws/generates pictures. It is not interactive with the audience at all. But surely we should describe this program as ‘computer art’ if, by that term, we mean art in which the computer is crucial as medium.

Consequently, I think we have to conclude that Lopes has written a philosophy of interactive computer art because his definition of computer art limits it to a range that computer art itself is not, in fact, limited to. But Lopes’s book is quite good as a philosophy of interactive computer art. That does have value. Interactivity is a very important characteristic of some computer art, a characteristic that often does move us to want to describe a piece as ‘computer art’. So many people seem to want to describe digitized movies or just anything with animation, or just email, as computer art if it appears on a computer screen. It’s refreshing to read a book where some attempt is made to think of characteristics that are important to computer art. Interactivity is often such a characteristic. But interactive computer art, nonetheless, is a subset of computer art.

Here is how Lopes defines interactive art:

“A work of art is interactive to the degree that the actions of its users help generate its display (in prescribed ways)” (p. 37).

And here is his definition of user interaction:

“A user interacts with a work of art just in case he or she acts so as to generate its display in a prescribed manner” (p. 37).

The term ‘interactivity’ is thrown around to mean many things, in discussions of art, but Lopes’s discussion is useful in pointing out that computer interactivity is not simply a matter of the user’s experience changing according to her input or interpretation, but the display of the piece itself changes/reacts to the user’s input.

Also, he acknowledges that interactivity is not new to computer art. For instance, we can imagine plays in which the actors improvise based on interaction with the audience. But improvisation based on interaction with the audience isn’t the basis of a whole art form. Whereas it is in interactive computer art.

If Lopes’s definition of computer art limits the book to expressing a philosophy of interactive computer art, we might ask how the definition could be broadened to encompass the full range of the sort of works we generally regard as computer art.

Now this is one of the situations where some familiarity with the theory of computation comes in handy. Lopes is commendable in pointing out “what a little philosophy can do” (p. xi) for critics and fans and thinkers about computer art in his book. But he is not a computer scientist. Here is what a little computer science can do.

What separates computers from other machines is programmability. Programmability is what gives computers their radical flexibility, as machines. Flexibility to the point that there is no proof, and probably never will be, that there exist thought processes of which humans are capable and computers are not. Which is to say that programmability provides flexibility, very likely, to the point of the dynamic fluidity of thought.

So what we need in a definition of computer art is something that goes to the heart of programmability or the dynamic fluidity and power of processing afforded by programmability. Interactivity is possible because of programmability. Without programmability, interactivity has to be very limited. It’s the difference between interacting with a Coke machine and a contemporary computer. The computer is capable of an ever-changing range of decision-making, whereas the Coke machine is, well, still the Coke machine. Programmability turns computers into universal machines. What that means is that a computer can accomplish any task that any machine can do that operates by executing algorithms. And that seems tantamount to saying that a computer can accomplish any task that any conceivable machine can accomplish (though some computers are slower than others).

Interactivity is supported by programmability, and so is generative art and whatever the full range is of computer art. Such a philosophy will be a bit trickier, though, than one that simply depends on interactivity. Trickier, but accurately broader. A different book.

One of the valuable things Lopes does is destroy several common but muddy arguments against the value of computer art. For instance, he looks at the argument that interactive art—particularly if it’s game-based—is incongruent with meditation, and with meditative art. The argument we sometimes hear is that interactive computer art demands continual engagement that prevents meditation. Just like a computer game demands attention to the details of the interaction, thus preventing meditation on the larger picture.

Lopes points out that the sort of meditation the critics value can take place between playings. And that we commonly do this concerning our thinking about games. Think of the meditations that have been written about chess or baseball, hockey, or soccer. These weren’t worked out during play. But that didn’t stop them from being written and from being meditations.

Speaking of games, Lopes has interesting things to say about the relation of computer art to computer games. He sees many computer games as computer art, as you might infer from his definition of computer art. He sees computer games as being the most popular form of computer art. Of course it doesn’t have to be Sophocles to be art. And, to his credit, he doesn’t buy the argument that because games are entertaining they can’t be art. Lopes likens the place of the very popular computer games within computer art to the place of Mozart’s chamber music within music or Calatrava’s PATH within architecture.

Another flaw in the book—though less important than the previously mentioned one—is that Lopes states, early on in the book, that “The challenge for the rest of this book is to demonstrate that the invention of computer technology gave us a new art form. Not digital art but computer art” (p. 19). But he never demonstrates this. He acknowledges he hasn’t done it in the book’s last paragraph. However, he has talked about interactive works enough, through the course of the book, that most of us, I suspect, will be fairly convinced that interactive computer art is a new form of art. Convinced by Lopes’s talk of it and our own experience of such work. But even if we’re not, what we wanted was a philosophy of computer art (whether it’s a new form of art or not). And what we got is a philosophy of interactive computer art. So we don’t care so much whether he established that computer art is a new art form. We’re happy to have the philosophy of interactive computer art, but wish he could have expanded it beyond interactive works.

That said, it’s a landmark book in that, finally, we have a philosopher creating a philosophy of computer art. It proceeds by a few very clear and rigorous definitions. Definitions of terms such as “digital art”, an “appreciative art kind”, a “medium”, a work of “computer art”, “interactive”, “computer”, and a few others. It doesn’t quite proceed in the definition-lemma-theorem-corollary way of mathematics—I’m not saying it should—but it really is well-reasoned and uses its definitions thoughtfully. It’s not a confusing book. It should be very helpful to students studying and thinking about computer art. And to artists and critics, for that matter. And while it is well-reasoned, it isn’t the work of a remote aesthete. The man is in touch, and so is his writing.

This is the main value of the book: it is admirably well-reasoned, even presenting us with a way to write about art that is more rigorous than usual, while not lacking the sort of human touch that is always needed in writing about art. It’s in this combination of factors that the book might turn out to be seminal. It’s an exciting and significant read for anyone interested in thinking seriously about computer art.

The poet William Carlos Williams once said (in the 1950′s) that “a poem is a machine made out of words”. The time during which he said it—before computers became common—makes the remark especially interesting. What I want to suggest is that Lopes’s rigorous definitions of a few terms builds a kind of machine made out of words. That has both a philosophical and a game-like quality to it in that we are interested in what the consequences of the definitions are, what they lead to. We are interested to chase down, infer/deduce the consequences. And that is a game-like activity that’s playful. Which is not out of place here, given Lopes’s take on the place of computer games in computer art and the place of logic in philosophy.

Check out Lopes’s site for further information on A Philosophy of Computer Art; it contains links to works (usually documentation about them) discussed in the book, a précis of the book, another review, and links to order the book.

Cover of Poesia Eletrônica by Jorge Luiz Antonio. Click for larger version.

Brazil’s Jorge Luiz Antonio has published a book (which comes with a CD) about “electronic poetry” called Poesia Eletrônica (198 pages). My congratulations and thanks go out to him. Congratulations because I know he has been working on this for many years and I know some of the trials and tribulations he experienced through the process. Thanks because a visual poem of mine is on the cover, the CD, and the interface to the CD–and the art is printed and presented exceptionally well. So this is not an objective notice about Jorge’s book, but one from a friend of his.

The book (which is in Portuguese) contains a three-page preface in English by Chris Funkhouser–who has written the first book on the history of digital poetry. Among other things, Funkhouser looks at the way Antonio explores how electronic poetry involves “negotiations with digital processes”:

“With software, the programming generally involves establishing frameworks in which disparate elements–whether the different elements of a visual scenario, or files that contain different verbal passages–negotiate with one another, and are negotiated by the viewer. In the creation of automatically-generated text, graphical works, or hypertexts, artists present a virtual object that the user negotiates by plotting a course through the multiple dimensions or constellations of language. When we realize that all digital poetry involves some type of link, the importance of negotiation is further heightened. In hypertext, the link (as in node-to-node connection) is the primary mechanism by which a reader negotiates text. In graphical and multimedia poems (which foreground sonic and visual elements), different elements of the works are composed together as simultaneities. Text-generators present another type of linking, between the algorithm/program and the text as it comes to the reader. Links–literal or conceptual–are always present in this extended environment; the activation of computer coding creates a textual spark that is the foundation on which any digital poem is built.”

The CD that comes with Poesia Eletrônica

‘Navigation’ is related to ‘negotiation’ but they aren’t quite the same thing. ‘Negotiation’ encompasses ‘navigation’ but goes beyond it into dialogue and protocol, for instance. It also involves the intermedial, as Funkhouser points out, in negotiation between the elements of different media. And there are other wheels for “electronic poetry in negotiation with digital processes”.

Although the book is largely in Portuguese, the CD contains much material in English. There’s an introduction by Jorge and, also, chapter 1 has been translated into English.  Here is a passage from chapter 1:

“The technopoet is put, as the romantic poet, as a technodemiurge. The romantic poet’s reaction against the Industrial Revolution, creating a subjective world, ideal, paradisiacal, resembles the one of the technopoet, that, facing the technopoly is overpowering. It is a technocentric world that offers him/her also a poetic language. The central question is to subvert the technological language, transforming it into a technopoetical language. This way, the culture doesn’t surrender to the technology, but it receives the poet’s intervention, which turns the technology into another form of poetic communication. These procedures become, then, a poeticizing of computational technology.”

We might also say that the “poeticizing of computational technology” gets some blood pumping through this technological extension of humanity, turning it from a cold metal claw into something through which human fluids and feeling flow.

The book itself in negotiation with the table.

 The section of the CD that features critical/theoretical texts contains more than 100 texts that range internationally around the world from works by Jean-Pierre Balpe (in French) to Friedrich Block (he’s German but the texts are in English) to Alejandro Banda (Chile), Augusto de Campos (in Portuguese), Chris Funkhouser, Eduardo Kac, Ladislao Pablo (Argentina), and many others.

The CD also contains a wealth of electronic poetry. The poetry section contains work by over 200 artists. In a variety of languages. From modernist poetry to contemporary computer poetry. With emphasis on work from Brazil and South America. It’s quite a remarkable resource.

The CD also contains an 86-page chronology of digital poetry from 1959 to the present complete with graphics and, in many cases, links.

There’s also an extensive bibliography on the CD with links.

I’m very impressed with what Jorge has accomplished. Of course, I wish I understood Portuguese! But there is much English in the package–and much digital poetry that can be understood independent of any particular language.

Finally, I’d like to give you contact information so you can obtain a copy of the book yourself. There are only somewhere between 250 and 500 copies of it available, and you have to contact Jorge himself to get a copy, although the book will be published in a bilingual edition, at some point, in the USA. 

Jorge’s email address is jlantonio@uol.com.br . Jorge says “People can buy the book on line by asking me. There are three ways to send money: PayPal account, bank transference, and post office international payment order. The other alternative is to offer an exchange of books and/or CD-ROMs.”

You might also want to visit his blog at http://jlantonio.blog.uol.com.br . He also maintains a list of links to Brazilian digital poetry at http://vispo.com/misc/BrazilianDigitalPoetry.htm . 

by Jim Andrews
http://vispo.com

One of the simplest ways to approach such difficult aspects would be to start by listing the most notable creations and to sum up the major theoretical contributions and this is exactly what Katherine Hayles does in her latest book – Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, 2008). This book, which has an explicitly didactic and introductory purpose, is accompanied by a CD comprising the first part of an anthology of electronic literature (edited in collaboration with Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland) and complemented by a website with additional resources.

As a matter of fact, only the first chapter, built as an extensive answer to the plain question – Electronic Literature: What Is It? – is conceived as a summary of various contributions, while the other four represent extensions of ideas developed by the author in her previous books, mainly Writing Machines and My Mother Was a Computer. This introductory chapter opens up by quoting the definition of e-literature agreed upon by the ELO. Despite its tautological formulation, the definition seems to be still functional, particularly in the case of the intermediating perspective adopted here. “The important literary aspect” it stipulates represents the inheritance from print literature which many readers of electronic literature keep at the back of their literary (in)formed minds. This may not prevent us from wondering how long the definition is going to last considering the fact that the connection with the literary tradition is wearing thin especially because the cultural background of the artists and of the public is changing, which makes them less likely to evaluate electronic literature through the lenses of customary literary criticism. However, an easily noticeable difference consists in the fact that e-literature is not limited to verbal art, as the works collected in the anthology prove. In fact, Katherine Hayles expresses preference for a term less likely to generate confusions – “the literary” – defined as a collection of “creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper”.

The definition is followed by a short inventory of the most relevant e-genres presented along a historic timeline: “Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, ‘codework’, generative art, and the Flash poem”. The next section of this chapter is a brief revisiting of some theoretical turning points, from the early approaches indebted mostly to the concepts of print literature to the most recent ones, which are more accurate in their attempts to identify the specificity of this area.

The second chapter is illustrative for the overall perspective Katherine Hayles has developed on electronic literature, a perspective whose origins can be traced in earlier works. In contrast with other points of view, her approach does not “sweep the board clean” for electronic literature. What she argues for is the coexistence and the interaction between print and electronic literature manifested in the form of “feedback loops” (one of the most frequent expressions in her books). Despite the fact that this connection is not as obvious and popular as it used to be, it is still relevant to remember that “when literature leaps from one medium to another (…) it does not leave behind the accumulated knowledge embedded in genres, poetic conventions, narrative structures, figurative tropes and so forth”; in fact, the early attempts tried to replicate this knowledge in the new medium. Even after leaving behind the first strongly print-conformist stages characteristic of the beginnings of e-literature, one can still notice that “the accumulated knowledge of previous literary experiments has not been lost but continues to inform performances in the new medium. For two thousand years or more, literature has explored the nature of consciousness, perception, and emergent complexity, and it would be surprising indeed if it did not have significant insights to contribute to ongoing explorations of dynamic heterarchies”. This balanced attitude seems the most reasonable perspective that could be adopted towards the new phenomenon since by now it has become clear that in discussing electronic literature one cannot overlook previous literary theories. Otherwise why call such works “literature” at all? Using the term necessarily means invoking the entire tradition of its interpretations even if only in order to change its meaning. This is a point which has been most of the time wrongly approached: the connection between print and electronic literature has been either denied so as to enhance the originality of the latter or exploited to such an extent that it obscured the same originality. On the contrary, the peculiarity of Katherine Hayles’s point of view consists in its flexibility: it is neither linear nor simply contrastive. The movement from print literature to electronic literature implies neither the apocalypse of the first nor the genesis of the second out of thin air: they naturally coexist in the larger sphere of media ecologies and develop a relation based on the mutual exchange of features described as “intermediation”.

Intermediation is a notion which covers a large surface and which is given considerable attention in K. Hayles’s works. In this chapter the discussion is limited to the intermediation between humans and computers. Informed by research in adjacent fields (such as artificial intelligence, neural connectionism, simulation science or computational research), the interpretation of this concept is meant to reduce the differences between machine “thinking” and human thinking in order to create a framework within which the novelty of electronic literature would be better grasped. The common ground becomes visible as a result of the new interpretation of the way in which meaning is attributed to information and of the new valorization of the “subcognitive processes”, which also generate meaning. Both computers and human beings perform such lower level interpretations that actually prove to be the basis on which high-level meanings are progressively built. The difference is given by the degree of complexity of the resulting high-order meanings. As far as the interpretative abilities of the computers are concerned, it is difficult to decide if the author’s oscillation between literal and figural formulations is caused by prudence or hesitation. Despite arguing that computers can perform “cognitively sophisticated acts”, the author refrains from roughly calling these processes understanding or cognition. When such terms appear in relation to computers, they are written between inverted commas and complemented by carefully formulated paraphrases meant to draw their semantic limits as exactly as possible: “the program can ‘understand’ the words it assembles – that is, understand not semantically but philologically and linguistically in terms of grapheme and syllable formation”; “the programs create the computational equivalent of ‘understanding’ the problem”.

On the other hand, the perspective on human thinking itself is overturned as well. In order to identify the points where human and electronic interpretation abilities meet it is also necessary to rethink such notions as “human understanding” and “cognition” which are commonly correlated with “consciousness”, “intentionality”, and “agency” on the part of the thinking entity. What the author does is to try to change the established view on these terms by proving that they are culturally dependent constructions: “human intentionality too is an artifact that must have emerged from subcognitive processes” (as the experiments of Daniel Dennett would suggest); “underlying the conscious attribution of meaning are many interrelated processes of interpretation” ranging from the simplest to the most elaborated. As a result, “aboutness” “is now transformed from an absolute condition to a cascading series of recognitions”. Thus, the analogy between human and computational generation of meaning becomes all the more obvious. Yet, even in these terms, the interpretations performed by the computers are still far from actual understanding; they still work below the cognitive threshold proper: “the experience of electronic literature can be understood in terms of intermediating dynamics linking human understanding with computer (sub)cognition through the cascading processes of interpretation that give meaning to information”.

The question arising in this context concerns the advantages of a theory which, on the one hand, argues for the computer’s creative abilities and flexible manipulation of information (coming close to cognition) but which, on the other hand, stresses that this is, objectively speaking, an illusion, despite the fact that it is a strong one: “recombinant flux,’ as the aesthetic of such works is called, gives a much stronger impression of agency that does a book”; “the computer’s real agency as well as the illusion of its agency are much stronger than with the book”.

Actually, these linguistic intricacies are caused by the fact that the critic keeps in mind both the surface results and the actual processes: at the surface level the impression is that the communication between computers and humans is real; at the technical level this exchange is nothing more than a series of calculations of increasing complexity.

The benefit of this doubly oriented perspective consists in the fact that it brings out another distinct feature of present-day e-literature without falling prey to mystification, namely that its main objective and accomplishment is the attenuation of the mechanical impression and the acquisition of greater fluidity and complexity of response: “However the effects are achieved, the importance of fluidity to the analogy-forming processes is evident in the richly diverse senses in which flow has become central to (…) literary dynamics for contemporary literature”.

The next chapter also follows the logic of intermediation. The author demonstrates that the two opposite approaches to the new media – exemplified by Fr. Kittler’s and M. Hansen’s works, each favouring only one component of the computer-human system – are liable to reductive interpretations. The solution would be the development of a model which “entangles body and machine in open-ended recursivity with one another”.

A new theoretical twist is added in chapter four, which states that not only is literature changed by the programmable media, but it also contributes to the revaluation of how the new media work. This is actually accomplished by taking into account the variety of types of knowledge involved: rationality, embodied response, technological nonconscious and the peculiarities of the cultural background of each individual reader.

The last chapter nicely performs a sort of “feedback loop” in the sense that, after investigating the novelty of the electronic literary field, the author returns to its term of reference – print literature – in order to analyse the marks left on it by the new media. It must also be noted that the book has an elegant design as if to illustrate the idea stated in the last chapter concerning the increased sense of materiality that print publications have acquired as a result of their being contemporary with electronic texts (and as a result of their being, technically speaking, electronic).

On the whole, Electronic Literature offers a very coherent, well-articulated and evenly-balanced perspective on the current state of this (no longer very) young literary field, each theoretical assertion being complemented and supported by carefully explored examples.

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: a review of The Path, a “short horror game” by Tale of Tales (Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey), based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

“The two best-known versions of the tale are by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers – but there are numerous others. Sometimes Red Riding Hood meets not a wolf but an ogre; sometimes, when she gets to the house, she is fed various parts of a dismembered grandmother. Samyn and Harvey retain the gruesomeness, the allusions to dismemberment, and the violent sexuality which feature in many earlier versions, and the symbolism which lurks beneath the surface of Red Riding Hood in all its various manifestations comes through particularly strongly.”

To read the whole article, go here.
or here.
- Edward Picot

One of the instances of Sound Seeker is "YHCHI Homage Automatum"

David Jhave Johnston is a poet-programmer who has produced a large body of intermedial Flash-based net art for many years at glia.ca. His most recent project is titled Sound Seeker. He says in the “About” section that Sound Seeker is “an online real-time beat-synchronized poem animator. Sound drives the rhythm of the words: their speed and style of display can be controlled.” What you see on the homepage of the project are twelve experimental videos produced by Jhave with Sound Seeker. You can access the underlying interactive Flash app itself in the “Method” section of the documentation. In the “Motivation” section, Jhave discusses remarks by Rudolph Arnheim concerning intermedia.

This is a fascinating project that also has terrific documentation. The Sound Seeker app has interesting features, ie, code ideas, the videos are compelling, the music is fascinating in relation to the text, and the writing is very strong. This is net art of the first order and one of the strongest works of digital writing in several years.

For more work on Sound Seeker, see Jhave’s site  glia.ca.