Following
the proposal of Noah Wardrip-Fruin that in reading digital
literature we must read processes, data and interactions
between man and machine I would like to add only one single
further question: what is it that characterizes or better
what
might it be that characterizes the specific
artistic element, the
literaricity of these
data performed in processes and interactions? What is or
what could it be that specifically differentiates the
experience of these projects from other ones; what could be
their
aesthetic difference?
Characterizing literature as
one of "the arts that call our attention to language,
present us with characters, tell us stories, and make us
reflect on the structures and common practices of such
activities…”(Wardrip-Fruin) seems to be
insufficient. Even though it is a first necessary turn of
texts towards themselves it is decisive to ask in what
way the text appears in the text, and also in what way
the medium appears in the medium. Both subject,
story, characters and the forms of their presentation have
to be reflected upon in a very specific way.
A prominent model to
illustrate this was created 1604 by Cervantes with his
Don Quixote: a knight/hero – who through reading
too many romances and trying to change these fictions into
reality surpasses the boundaries of normal perception,
inevitably fails, and becomes ‘insane’. This model
is mirrored in the individual episodes via ever-new and
quite intricate techniques and finally the whole first book
is mirrored in the second one. Times and again the
previously read literary texts are absurdly materialized,
first imaginarily and then quite practically, so that
literature is allowed its own crazy or paradoxical 'life' by
recounting itself as unlivable. In a similar way
Shakespeare's Hamlet is reflecting the previous
revenge tragedies, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
previous love stories, Pynchon’s Gravity's
Rainbow the long tradition of conspiracy novels. Good
crime-novels are always aware of their forerunners and good
love-poetry has read love-poetry. Literature is always
reading previous literature by confronting the experiences,
ideas, proposals how to live or love, feel or think, act or
behave with its own experiences, ideas, proposals…
creating a specific distance to the stored ones.
Even the third quality of
digital literature mentioned above, that of interactions
between readers or viewers with the literary processes
already can be found in the literatures of so-called modern
times. The reader of Don Quixote, for example, is in
just the same situation as its hero – he himself is a
reader who is supposed to take a story for real in which
someone becomes lunatic through reading. Accordingly, the
reader would have to throw away the book; he would have to
distance himself physically from the text in order
not to succumb to the fate of its hero. Times and again
great literature puts its recipients into this paradoxical
situation: They are drawn into the scenes of the literary
text and at the same time are distanced from it – they
are tensely hooked onto the medium from two sides. To bring
John Lennon's “Your inside is out your outside is
in” to mind: Readers 'inhabit' literary texts
without being able to really be in them; they start an
intense – quite physically real – interaction with
the fictitious events.
That paradoxical
'inhabiting' brings us to the newest literary forms
that are not only permanently crossing the borders between
prose, drama and poetry but are also constantly moving into
a different realm altogether. If, with Umberto Eco, we
conceive a book as a machine to trigger fantasies or
imaginations in our mind, then the latest computer-aided and
networked ‘literature’ is crossing the borders
between mind, body and machine, between neuronal, physical
and electronic processes – but only if it uses all the
possibilities of interaction a programmable medium like the
computer facilitates. And if we follow Italo Calvino's
statement that literature only exists as a never ending
interplay between the generation and reception of texts,
then the step taken by digitalizing the poetic cannot only
have been made with the unquestionable calculability of
symbolic processes. This step then rather should be a step
that turns our attention to the 'ghostlike' dimension of
symbolic processes that break open even there again and
again, creating new forms of an aesthetic perception of
non-predictability – aesthetic in the ancient
sense as ‘perception of perception’, aesthetic
difference. Aesthetic or literary demands are only
fulfilled through a double reflection: by opening up both
intertextual and intermedial realms of allusion by
simultaneously combining imaginary and physical-medial
elements of man and machine.
In a pioneering example we
can observe the poetry generated by a program Christopher
Strachey, "the first digital artist"(Wardrip-Fruin), wrote
in 1952, which can be visited on http://alpha60.de/research/muc/.
Darling SweetheartYou are my
avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your
passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my
wistful sympathy: my tender liking.Yours beautifullyM. U.
C.
Indeed, this text –
like the millions of others we can generate with the program
– is playing with the language of 'love' – but it
really presents only the most quotidian and pedestrian way
of combining words. Here language is at first nothing but
the combination of empty elements into – more or less
– meaningful ones. This and all the other examples
neither present references to other love-poems nor does this
poetry refer to itself as machine-generated, nor is it
especially reflective.
To experience more, we
always need a dialogue about the possible meanings of these
word-combinations, a dialogue about the 'intentions' we have
projected onto the machine but that are non-existent. The
nonexistent cognitive autonomy of the artificial
intelligence can create difficulties for us regarding the
creation of meaning if in the interactions between man and
machine something more is happening than just presenting us
with a stream of associations like the majority of the
so-called poetry-machines are doing (Martin Auer’s for
example http://www.martinauer.net/poetryma/_startpm.htm).
A possible blueprint of a different kind of relationship can
be experienced in Camille Utterback's installation Text
Rain. Here, if in the reception process we leave behind our
mere playful body-motion, namely the unconscious performance
or dance with the falling words, now by suspecting or
realizing that these falling words could be bound together
into meaningful compositions by moving our hands, our arms,
or our whole body to catch more than one of them and form a
whole line…then, here we start reading the poem with
our body – or could/should we say: we start
communicating with the AI? As also does the poor soldier in
Kafka's Penal Colony, deciphering the words
‘written’ in his skin.
The difference to Kafka's
text as a difference between the well-known
‘traditional’ literature and its digital inheritor
(even though we might be 'reading' Text Rain with
more joy because it is not the same painful script we are
interacting with) might be that at the end of the story the
soldier identifies the sense of the words pierced in his
skin and dies. Kafka's narration is complete, and we as
readers are in search for its possible meaning. In Text
Rain, contrary to Penal Colony, there is no end
to our reading: even though we are moving we will never get
the whole; the poem will never be completed – unless we
leave the installation to read the ‘database’
behind it.
In digital environments the
paradoxical 'inhabiting' of literature by readers
mentioned above is changing: It is transformed from a
situation in which body and an existent medium (book,
screen…) are fixed and under control to a state of
bewildering the mind: An oscillating interplay begins
between medium, body and mind, between sense and senses with
a nonexistent center of control, awareness, or
intentionality. The installation leaves us with the
troubling question: are we reading a poem…or is the
poem reading us?
dichtung-digital