|
|
Reading
Digital Literature: American-German
Conference Brown
University |
October
4 - 7, 2007 | Roberto_Simanowski
/at/ Brown [.] edu
|
Reading
Digital Literature: American-German
Conference Brown
University |
October
4 - 7, 2007 | Roberto_Simanowski
/at/ Brown [.] edu
Chris
Funkhouser:
Kissing the Steak: The Poetry of Text
Generators
Peter
Gendolla:
The
Art of Poetry
Machines
Katherine
Hayles:
The
Literary as Distributed Cognition in
Strickland and Jaramillo's
Slippingglimpse
Fotis
Jannidis:
Understanding S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or
the hermeneutics of popular digital
art
Rita
Raley:
List(en)ing
Post
Francisco
Ricardo:
Reading the Discursive Spaces of
Text Rain. Transmodally
Jörgen
Schäfer:
Looking
Behind the Facade: Playing and
Performing an Interactive
Drama
Thomas
Swiss:
Reading "Wrong": Flash Work by
Motomichi Nakamura, Nils Muhlenbruch,
and Yoshi Sodeoka
Mark
Tribe:
Reading
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries: An
Ornithology of Digital
Art
Karin
Wenz:
The Demon Machine or 79 Ways to Face a
Demon
Kissing
the Steak: The Poetry of Text
Generators
Syntext, developed by Pedro
Barbosa and Abílio Cavalheiro
in the early 90s (later partially
re-versioned on the World Wide Web),
is a collection of fifteen computer
programs from the 70s, 80s, and 90s
that automatically generate various
styles of poetry in DOS. Though the
texts made by each of the programs
are thematically unrelated, through
these pioneering works by Barbosa,
Nanni Balestrini, Marcel
Bénabou, and others, each of
the predominant fundamental
attributes of text-generators is
clearly divulged. Syntext,
despite being primitive on the
surface, powerfully brings to light
the expressive possibilities,
versatility, and variation within
permutation texts, and provides
sufficient evidence upon which a
typology of computer poems can be
established.
Work
| Bio
| Statement
The
Art of Poetry
Machines
The history of machine-aided poetry
from Swift to Roussel, Bense, the
Oulipo-group and David Link's
Poetry Machine 1.0*
represents the idea of aesthetic
creativity as an interplay between
‘poetic’ algorithms and
‘human’ control of the
poetry-generator, with more or less
interesting results. By examining
Christopher Strachey's Love
Letter Generator and confronting
it with traditional poetry, the talk
attempts to ascertain whether in
this way it is possible to isolate
or retrieve the literary
process.
Work
| Bio
| Statement
The
Literary as Distributed Cognition in
Strickland and Jaramillo's
slippingglimpse
slippinglgimpse by Stephanie
Strickland and Cynthia Jaramillo
stages a three-way conversation
between poem-texts, with phrases
appropriated from photographers,
videographers, and programmers, with
Paul Ryan's videography of dynamic
fluid systems, with complex
algorithmic interactions between
text and dynamic images. The
two main conceptual issues at stake
here, as I see it, are 1) the
relationship between human and
non-human cognizers, and 2) the
intricate play between dynamic
and static systems. The
first involves natural systems
such as
wind/water interactions, human
readers/writers, and
machine cognizers; the second
involves emergent
patterns amidst continually
changing flux (and
implicitly, electronic text vs.
print). There are
also meta-issues involving
interactions between the two
main issues, for example, how
deterministic
machine operations can
nevertheless lead to emergent
and unpredictable results, and
how human cognizers excel in
recognizing patterns amidst noisy
systems (perceiving the
emergent patterns as such).
Work
| Bio
| Statement
Understanding
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or the
hermeneutics of popular digital
art
Computer Games have long been viewed
as a preparatory hell for juvenile
deliquents before they blossom into
rampage killers. But this view has
changed not the least because
nowadays most people under 30 have
actively played games. Nevertheless
there still seems to be a deep gap
between computer games and art. My
talk will try to close the gap by
using concepts developed in the
studies of popular culture to
describe the new and already famous
game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in relation to
the paradigms of the ego-shooter
genre. In contrast to the Cultural
Studies approach and their focus on
the reception process, this talk
will focus on the game and view it
as a work of modern popular art and
try to contribute to a hermeneutics
of this kind of art.
Work
| Bio
| Statement
List(en)ing
Post
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s
Listening Post is at once a
post (site) for ‘listening to
the web’, an installation
comprised of 21 columnar posts
(suspended chain-circuit displays),
and an algorithmically manipulated
series of chat posts
(messages). It is postmodern,
post-linear, post-print, and
post-literate. With regard to
the post-literate, this paper will
ask what Listening Post has
to tell us about new forms of
electronic English. The
conjunction of colloquial speech and
processing languages in this
installation brings into sharp
contrast the relations between
textual ambiguity and the
singularity of programming commands,
which cannot function with multiple
significations. In sum, my
reading will address the
project’s post-ness; listening
in the sense of both conversation
and sound art; and the aesthetics of
listing.
Work
| Bio
| Statement
Reading
the Discursive Spaces of Text
Rain. Transmodally
Many
multimodal digital works now
transcend established conventions
and forms of literature’s
essentially textual character by
transforming, within their own
structure, the presence and nature
of text so that it is experienced in
a new function, less lexically than
in concert with other modalities. A
proverbial instance of this
transmodal text is exemplified by
Utterback and Achituv’s Text
Rain. I begin with a distinction
over the de-modalization that
characterizes “pure
literature” and move toward the
larger ecriture that occupies the
discursive spaces of this transmodal
work, in a reading that defines
itself around experiential poeisis
and against interpretation.
Looking
Behind the Façade:
Playing and Performing an
Interactive
Drama
Following the ongoing debates
between ‘ludologists’ and
‘narratologists’, the
"interactive drama"
Façade is apparently a
response to widespread unease with
mainstream computer games. By
balancing between features of
interactivity and (neo-)Aristotelian
theory of drama, the developers
Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern aim
at enabling hybrid aesthetic
experiences that combine elements of
gameplay and performance. My paper
explores how digital media require
hybridizations of literary genres as
well as reconfigurations of the
complex interplay of human and
non-human ‘actors’ –
and it tries to point at both the
opportunities and problems of these
hybrid forms from the perspective of
literary and performance
studies.
Work
| Bio
| Statement
Reading
"Wrong": Flash Work by Motomichi
Nakamura, Nils Muhlenbruch, and
Yoshi
Sodeoka
One of the questions that frames the
subject of this conference is: With
what methods can digital literature
be approached? This paper proposes
using the avant-garde arts,
particularly surrealism, as a model
for "approaching" web-based work by
Motomichi Nakamura (Tokyo-New York),
Nils Muhlenbruch (Amsterdam), and
Yoshi Sodeoka (New York). All three
artists work collaboratively -- with
writers, dancers, ad agencies, DJs,
and so on. Under the sign of
Barthes, and borrowing Jonathan
Culler's notion that asking proper
questions in criticism and critique
is less productive than asking
improper questions, the paper will
engage surrealism's basic tenets --
invention and surprise -- in
thinking about nonlinear digital
work and developing a responsive
nonlinear criticism.
Bio
| Statement
Reading
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries: An
Ornithology of Digital
Art
This paper discusses the net-based
art work of Young-Hae Chang
Heavy Industries, a collaboration
between two artists who live and
work in Seoul, South Korea. It
focuses in particular on two
works: Bust Down the
Doors! (2000-2004), and The
Art of Sleep (2006). It examines
YHCI’s relationship to various
tendencies in digital art and to the
contemporary art world, and takes up
the central issues of the latter
work: the futility of art and the
difficulty of defining it.
Work
| Bio
| Statement
The
Demon Machine or 79 Ways to Face a
Demon
The demon machine is a
semiotic machine, combining
different sign systems into a new
meaningful whole. Although each of
the 79 parts of this art work are
complete forms in themselves, they
are also integrated into a whole -
playing with the uses of the two
words “demon” and
“machine”. Some of the 79
small forms will be analyzed
exemplarily. The use of the
different sign systems but also
their integration into the interface
and the (limited) interactive
potential will be described. The
artwork can be seen as a
continuation of montage and collage
as used since the avant-garde. The
demon machine is highly intertextual
/ intermedial: a poetic work, a
thought experiment and a theoretical
reflection on Maxwell’s demons
at the same time.