Cibertextualidades 3

The third issue of the academic journal Cibertextualidades has just been published by Fernando Pessoa University Editions, with essays on cyberliterature, digital culture and new media.

The organizers, Rui Torres and Sergio Bairon, have chosen to discuss the relation between Knowledge and Hypermedia, proposing a reflection about the conditions of knowledge production within digital media platforms. The articles selected for publication articulate different theoretical positions, negotiating the implementation of models of hypermedia reading in different contexts. Amid this diversity, it is possible to identify an interaction between human/social sciences and communication/information technologies which transform the way we perceive and produce literature, communication, and culture. There is also a common concern with methodologies for the use of hypermedia as a tool for the creation and the communication of science. In this sense, relevant academic hypermedia productions which question the modes of representation of both analytic and reflective thinking are reviewed and analysed.

This issue discusses typologies and taxonomies for the understanding of cybertextualities.

The articles, fully available on the UFP’s Digital Library, are all written in Portuguese, but I will provide here a translation of the titles:

• Production of knowledge in digital media, Rui Torres & Sérgio Bairon
• From verb to pixel: Interfaces of the poetic in hypermedia, by Débora Cristina Santos e Silva
• Flash script POEX: The digital recoding of the experimental poem, by Manuel Portela
• Is there a new ‘Cordel’? Imaginary, tradition and cyberculture, by Maria Alice Amorim
• Educating for hypermedia reading: Methodological challenges, by Fabiano Correa da Silva
• The zoon tecnologi.com: Emerging entity of the information neocyberestructure, by David Parra Valcarce
• The im@ge thinks: Quantic aspects of the cybernetic image, by Luis Carlos Petry
• The digital medium and media production, by Lawrence Shum
• Analysis of hypermedia language productions, by Arlete dos Santos Petry
• TECNOMPB: Conceptual taxonomy for a technocentric approach to cultural forms, by Sergio Basbaum, Ilana Seltzer, Lucas Meneguette & Lucca Vicente
• A meaningless encyclopedic-poetic attack in cyberspace, by Fabio Oliveira Nunes & Edgar Franco
• Randomness and the creation of new reticular structures, by Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri
• «Page»: The reconfiguration of communication design in digital culture, by Sofia Gonçalves
• What’s common between thesauri and ontologies, by Rodrigo de Sales & Lígia Café

Paper versions can be bought at Ed. UFP website.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Create and control tiny sound-creatures in the shape of letters that react to gravity or each other and generate rhythms and soundscapes.

http://joerg.piringer.net/abcdefg

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a sound toy, a performance tool and an art work in its own right. You can play with the letter-creatures and watch and listen how they interact with each other or use them to produce soundscapes like you would with an electronic musical instrument. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz blends art, biology, fun and physics to create a unique, dynamic and interactive sound ecology.

This app is the result of my ongoing research of vocal sounds and their relation to dynamic typography in the form of performance, video and software art.

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey
wings by Claire Ashley

The Living Newspapers is a live installation consisting of pairs of ‘museum visitors’ seemingly engaged in pedestrian conversation. These conversations are actually comprised of real-time data harvested from the social networking environment, Twitter. The performers in The Living Newspapers act as subtle embodiments of the collective voice of social discourse.

The Living Newspapers takes place each Tuesday-Sunday from 11:00 – 1:30pm and again from 2:30 – 5:00pm with pairs of performers in rotating shifts. The project is revealed as a performance twice daily, in the middle of each shift, when the performers transform into two winged figures. The image constructed is based on The Winged Figures of the Republic, a New Deal era sculpture permanently installed at the Hoover Dam.

The Living Newspaper was a genre of socially engaged theater funded by the federal government in the 1930’s. The plays were constructed from factual information on culturally pertinent topics (such as the syphilis epidemic or the economic plight of farmers) and were were often designed to educate or mobilize their audiences. This contemporary re-imagining of the form is driven by a computer program that constructs dynamic dialogue from cultural chatter. The texts, gleaned by thematic searches or geographical proximity, are received by the performers through discretely worn earphones connected to a networked mobile device.

The piece is performed by: Holly Abney, David Alcalde, Sarah Archer, Joseph Belknap, Sarah Belknap, Doro Boehme, Maggie Cappelletti, Chris Cuellar, Chelsea Culp, Carla Duarte, Karen Faith, Elizabeth Furani, Alexine Haynes, Joshua Kent, David Kodeski, Tet Keong Lee, André Carlos Lenox, Evan Lenox, Gwenn-Aël Lynn, Abina Manning, Lauren McCarthy, Remington Messinger, Jennifer Mills, Jenna Rieker, L. Ruby Sage, Edmund Sandoval, Ali Scott, Colin Self, Molly Shea, James Smith, Edward Thomas-Herrera, Carolina Wheat

Hide and Seek is curated by Tricia Van Eck.

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey will discuss this work as part of Art as Event, a panel talk at the MCA Theater on March 13, 2010.

“Geração sobre a fala” (“My Generation about Talking,” Nick Montfort) Tradução para o português, Cicero Inacio da Silva.

“My Generation about Talking,” a text generator which I first presented at the Software Studies Workshop on May 21, 2008, is now available in Portuguese translation, thanks to Cicero Inacio da Silva. It was made for use in a presentation, but the program is set up to allow a user to play the entire presentation or to access any of the fifteen individual voices, each of which affirms repeatedly in some way.

The program is in Python and will run from the command line in OS X and on many Linux systems. It will run on Windows after Python for Windows has been installed.

For instance, to run the English version of this program on OS X:

1. Download yes_voices.py to the desktop; if you download it to another location, move the file to the desktop.
2. Start the Terminal application and open a terminal window. An easy way to do this: Click on the Spotlight magnifying glass in the upper left, type “terminal”, and select the Terminal application. A window will open.
3. In the terminal window, type “cd Desktop” and press return to change directories to the desktop.
4. Type “python yes_voices.py” and press return.

• “Geração sobre a fala” (vozes_sim.py)
• “My Generation about Talking” (yes_voices.py)

Underbelly screenshot

Underbelly is my latest playable media fiction, created in Flash. It’s about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former colliery in the north of England. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, along with her ticking biological clock, and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of the artist’s repressed fears and desires mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal.

Earlier this week, I performed Underbelly at the Transliteracy Conference at DMU, Leicester, UK, so I thought it was high time I went public with the piece online. It’s a ‘beta version’ at present and I’m hoping to get some user feedback to help me swat any bugs (of which there’s a swarm, I’m sure) and iron out any usability issues. When you’re working alone outside any institution or formal group, it’s hard to get this kind of feedback prior to publishing, so any comments from netpoetic readers would be most welcome!

It’s been a struggle to get Underbelly into shape, partly because I was teaching myself ActionScript 3.0 as I was developing the piece. Currently, it relies heavily on AS frame-scripts because that’s what I was most comfortable with when I started work on it about 18 months ago. I suspect I have a lot of garbage collection issues, which is hardly surprising, the amount of messy code I brushed under the carpet! Initially, I attempted a more object oriented approach but, although I knew it would be cleaner, I found that it was simply beyond me at the time.

Since then, very recently, I’ve been learning how to code games in AS3 which has been a real eye-opener. It’s helped me recognise a much better process and workflow for developing playable media fiction in future. In retrospect, I realise I approached the making of Underbelly in a completely topsy-turvy way. For example, I didn’t arrive at a user interface design until very late in the process. In future I’ll design and thoroughly test the structure, storytelling procedures and UI elements in a wireframe prototype before going any further.

I’d be interested to hear what kinds of development models other artists who do their own programming use. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps it’s different for each project?

Many of the contributors to and readers of netpoetic knew Millie Niss and her work. Millie passed away November 29, 2009 at the age of 36, as has been noted here previously.

Martha Deed, Millie’s mother, has put together 111 photos of Millie from birth till shortly before her death. I’ve put those photos and Martha’s notes about the photos on vispo.com, along with a piece of writing I did about Millie.

Millie and I shared a common background in literature, mathematics, and computer science. And participated together in the Webartery list, in its early days. And we shared a passion for creating web-based works synthetic of arts, media, and technology. We could talk together about these things at length. I shall miss her.

Many thanks to Martha for allowing me and you access to these photos which are dear to her. I found them very moving and learned much about my friend’s life that I did not know, previously. Thanks also to Martha for her generous correspondence with me, in a difficult time for her, throughout the process of our doing this project. I quote one of Martha’s emails in its entirety in the writing I did; it is very illuminating concerning several issues relevant to the photos and provides us with some knowledge of the health problems Millie experienced throughout her life.

‘For Millie Niss’ also contains many links to Millie’s work, writings about her, and to Martha’s work. They worked together as a creative team sometimes known as M & M. Martha is continuing her own work and is also working on various projects involving Millie’s writings and web art. Martha is continuing in her creativity, which one can’t help but know Millie would have wished for her very much. She is continuing the Sporkworld blog she and Millie did together, for instance.

Not sure if my thoughts illuminate or muddy the digital poetry waters, but I would be ever interested in your thoughts all the same.  Oh and please do leave a comment on their site, just to let them know that covering our realm is important.

http://joshspear.com/item/spear-talks-jason-nelson/

cheers, Jason

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.