Author Archives: christian

This isn’t extremely late or anything.

So, I’ve finally managed to get a solid first draft that won’t totally confuse all of you. I’m sorry this took so long, but it took me a while to figure out the format I wanted to present my project in. I’ve also been playing around a lot with transposing content through different mediums; i.e. computer voice through telephone, text through photographs, analog audio through digital video, etc… I’m not entirely finished yet, but here’s a sneek peak at what’s to come. This is only about 1/3 of my project. ENJOY and let me know what you think! I will definitely be taking all comments into consideration for the rough draft due wednesday!

Undomesticated Hypertext

The idea that feral hypertext–“projects [that] accept messiness, errors or ignorance and devise ways of making sense from vast numbers of varying contributions”–actually exist shows how incredibly complex and evolved our intelligent machines have become. The idea that something “feral” can make sense of a multitude of arbitrary information is extremely fascinating.  Once again we find new ways to make computers emulate the brain by creating “intimate extensions to memory”; feral hypertexts, unlike domesticated hypertexts, work a lot more like our brains in that they allow for interruption and aren’t strictly bounded based on linearity or guidelines.  Domesticated hypertexts needed these guidelines and rules in order to allow for a more thorough comprehension on our part. Humans need machines and programs to be straightforward in order to completely understand their purpose and to summarize their objective. Feral hypertexts, on the other hand, are a lot more free-flowing and allow for interjection, looping back, and randomness that still manages to represent some sort of “collective narrative.”  The idea of intertextuality resonates throughout feral hypertexts–all texts, are somehow interrelated and can connect to one another through algorithms that recognize similar traits in other texts–thus they form a comprehensible, yet sporadic narrative, a narrative that is definitely a lot harder to try and fully understand due to the vast extent in variations of the hypertext itself in its crude and unbounded form. 

The lack of discipline in feral hypertexts can, however, cause some problems. In Jill Walker’s “Feral Hypertexts” brings up the point that “our idea of authorship is the only thing that keeps fiction from enveloping our world.” She goes on to quote Foucault who makes the same argument in his statement: “How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: one can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.” Walker goes on to defend Foucault by bringing up the point that so many spammers, hacksters, and hoaxes exist on the internet now a days in this age of feral hypertexts and their lack of authorship.  The fictions we’ve created with these wild narratives run rampant on the internet and can sometimes be quite difficult to wrap our heads around. 

Are we paranoid of these types of texts? Should texts necessarily be bounded for the simple sake of being able to fully understand our texts? Should we cage hypertextuality so that we know it through and through from front to back? I feel if the evolution between machine and human is to continue, we must continue to explore the boundless areas of these machines we humans have created. In order to see how much we’re willing to progress should we not allow our computers to be sporadic machines merely following one of the most basic laws of physics–entropy–so that we can continue to understand the regression of these machines only to discover how different it can be. In order to build on the strengths of our creations we must know how far they’re capable of slipping into the faulty; as Walker says,  “feral hypertext draws from our collective ideas and associations to create emergent structures and meanings. That is valuable , if only we can see it and appreciate it.”

Cosmos:Humans as Humans: Lexia to Perplexia

While reading Lexia to Perplexia I couldn’t stop thinking about how different and convoluted everything looked in comparison to common electronic literature. The aesthetics of the piece kept reminding me of what my PC would look like ten years ago every time it broke–the static, the flashing, the confusion! Although, I found a lot of the techniques Memmot incorporated to be rather overwhelming and sometimes unnecessary, I must say, he does manage to make his audience think and also gets a lot of good points across even with his exaggerated format.

Memmot reminded me a lot of Language Poets in that he tried to make the acts of reading/using a computer defamiliarized to us. His method of alienating us from the passive in order to be more aware helped us become much more conscious of the way we read or the ways we interact with our computers. I remember at one point I instinctually moved my mouse in order to uncover text–right after having done so, I realized that I had done it without even thinking twice about it. Memmot’s writing, although cryptic, was very much informative in that he used ambiguous notions that get at a general sense of being–in other words, his ambiguity allowed the reader to deal more with the experience than with the absorption of the content in his text. In Lexia to Perplexia, the readers are pushed away from the quotidian experience of reading or using a computer, or as Memmot puts it: “the static body transmits the intimate detail and private fantasies, expressing and requesting the return to locally confirmed re:motions.”  I really liked that Memmot knew how to have an audience’s attention be completely focused on what they were doing when reading Lexia to Perplexia especially when considering how often we interact with computer programs now a days and how little attention we pay to whatever it is that we’re doing. 

Memmot also touches on the idea of how human being and computer interactions are somewhat similar to the way human beings interact with life/universe: “At once face to face and turned away, an avatar and I in motion towards personal intimacy, every two um.urgencies col.lide simultaneously at the terminal of humanity and possessed by a terminal attachment to the terminal elsewhere.” The human consciousness is extremely desensitized to the experiences we encounter in life that we go about it without realizing that there is a bigger picture to it all even though we’re constantly interacting with it. The same has happened between us and computers. When Memmot says: “It is the hope of communification that we minimize the space of flesh” I think of a super computer that will eventually allow us to leave our bodies and interact with this “terminal” that I believe might mean the cosmos . What if the next step in technology is a state of animation in an environment where everything is both familiarized and alienated, passive and interactive–a more evolved version of Lexia to Perplexia?

Memmot also manages to relate the connection between computer and man to human and cosmos when he says: “

Coevolution of Machine and Human Being

In chapter four of Hayles’ Electronic Literature, Revealing and Transforming, Hayles discusses the phenomena that take place during human interactions with intelligent machines. She states that as literature is further integrated into computational mediums it further impacts the way in which these programs develop and visa versa. As these processes begin to take place, humans begin to incorporate specific techniques and acquire particular methods in dealing with the symbiotic relationships we’ve developed with machines: “Evolving in active interplay with intelligent machines, the ‘human’ neither encloses  the technological nor is enclosed by it. Rather, human agency operates within complex systems in which nonhuman actors play important roles.” The cultural effects in dealing with computers aren’t only evident in our ability to passively interact with them after becoming desensitized to their bugs, but also in how we currently interact with other human beings–nowadays human interaction has changed in a variety of ways due to our constant communication via technology. Both human beings and machines have begun building off of each other while simultaneously looping into one another.  Or as Hayles puts it in pg. 138: “My body knows things my mind has forgotten or never realized; my mind knows things that my body has not (yet) incorporated.”  

In a world where we are constantly giving ourselves to our intelligent machines and where our intelligent machines are more and more becoming extensions of our mind, will we ever reach a point where the symbiosis has reached its fullest potential and if so, where and when will that point be? Will we keep coming up with new technology to “have our minds be less in our minds” until we realize that our minds were never an intrinsic part of us at all, but instead a small blip in the radar that is the network of existence?

A Poetic Freeway: An Outline

I. For my project A Poetic Freeway I plan on using a variety of mediums on which I will write my poems, all of which will be interconnected and even loop in on themselves.

A. I plan on composing a story containing somewhere from 15-25 poems all varying in length and form that address the idea of technology and the way it has affected our culture in modern society. 

1. I will use are digital text, videos (images I filmed with the poems dubbed over), recordings (mp3), and paper (writing and typewriter).

2. I plan on having there be the same amount of poems for each different medium.  The mediums

B. My project will be presented as a website that contains the videos, recordings and digital text, however, for my poems on paper I will create little booklets and distribute them to everyone in class (some will contain photographs related to the poem). 

1. Once on my website there will be a specific poem that starts off the story.

2. All of the poems will have three options of different poems after you’ve finished reading them (they will vary in which medium they’re presented).

3. At the end of each poem you will have the opportunity to choose between links that take you to different poems on the web page or I will present the title of one of the poems in the booklet and its page number as one of the three options.

4. Some of the poems will send you back to a poem that you might have already read (loop back into themselves).

II.  I want the audience to take into consideration not only the message behind each poem but the way in which reading them in different mediums affected their reading of the story. Considering I have a limited number of poems, I’m pretty sure everyone will get through the entire story. 

A.            My hope is that everyone can write a paragraph describing their experience while reading the poems.

B.             At the end, I hope to have a discussion about the different experiences everyone had.

Computer Game vs. Literary Tradition

Katherine Hayles in an attempt to try and expand the breadth of knowledge available in the cybertext world decided it is essential to include both the computer game and literary tradition when studying cybertext.  Unlike George Landow who tried to explain cybertext as something utterly pertaining to the world of literary tradition, Hayles decided that it is essential to take into consideration the technical and critical aspects behind cybertext. If anything, she is expanding on Aarseth’s idea that we have to focus on the “white areas” of cybertext in order to further understand it. I believe what Hayles is saying is that in order to first identify these “white areas” we can’t forget that both computer games and literary tradition play integral parts in the medium of cybertext–she argues that creating new discourse is the only way we can delve into the world of cybertext even further. In an attempt to create new discourse, Hayles comes up with new terminology such as cyber|literature and multicourse. She believes that killing off either parent would kill off cybertext as a whole. Hayles, if anything, isn’t trying to obscure the idea of hypertext, but is instead, as Aarseth suggested, trying to expand the subject. She believes that when we study cybertext we have to look at the interactivity, multiple narrative pathways, criticism, point of view, literary allusion and narrative voice when it comes to cybertext. She believes that the effectiveness of the text on the reader is what matters more than the structure behind it. All in all, what Hayles is trying to do is “craft a vocabulary that opens the way to consider how computational operations work together with linking structure.

In “A Riposte to Nick Montfort”, Hayles talk about how cybertext isn’t all technological and how cybertext does exist in print novel. She touches on the fact that it is necessary to pay attention to the way that different mediums of cybertext effect the way the reader approaches cybertext and the nuanced effects that different kinds of texts within those mediums also effect readers. Hayles is, in my opinion, one of the greatest pioneers in cybertext theory. She believes in the idea of incorporating every and all possible  theories behind cybertext–she doesn’t think one must limit the boundaries of theories behind cybertext (which is actually cyber|literature) because in doing so one would limit the boundaries in trying to understand cybertext.

Looping Back to Cybertext

So, after re-reading Aareseth’s introduction in “Cybertext” I’ve realized how aware and conscious of his wording and terminology Aarseth is.  When it comes to computers, technology,  and digital devices, it is very easy to group everything under an already existing concept in order to understand these new forms and methods in text and mediums.  Our society now, for far too long, has tried to relate everything back to history and categorize everything under very broad umbrellas in order to feel like we know what we’re dealing with and how to deal with it. 

Aarseth, in his explanation of ‘cybertext’, clarifies that cybertext is not completely separate from literary text, but that we must distinguish between the two in order to learn more about the former.  He doesn’t believe in the idea of strictly using all of this pre-conceived theories created by literary theorists and applying them to the world of cybertext; although, he states, some of them may  be valid: “I argue that existing literary theory is incomplete (but not irrelevant) when it comes to describing some of the phenomena studied here, and I try to show why and here a new theoretical approach is needed.” Aarseth argues that literary theorists are quick to assign several concepts and ideas to the medium that is cybertext simply because of their ‘given understanding’ of the medium that is the computer.  But Aarseth believes we must think more about the “white spaces” that we haven’t allowed ourselves to dive into. We must consider the areas of cybertext that don’t completely fit in with all of these “literary theories” and study it in order to not forget about it. Have we already become to passive and just clumped all of cybertext together with all of these other literary forms that we may never fully understand the phenomena that is cybertext, or will we eventually (maybe even unintentionally) discover these “white spaces” as soon as we invent and discover other mediums that far exceed the capabalities of cybertext?

A poetic freeway

For my project I was inspired, in fact, by the name of this course. Writing Machines—seeing as I consider myself a poet, I really wanted to incorporate my lyrical skills into this project. This aspect of my project reminded me of the idea that Landow brought up considering “poetic machines” and how they work according to analogy and association. Throughout the course, I’ve realized how much passive interaction is involved when it comes to machines and human beings—my goal in this project is to move away from that. I was also inspired by the website we had to explore for last class: “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot”.  I wanted to incorporate the idea of interaction yet not have it be one that’s as passive as clicking on links or pictures that lead to different sites. I wanted to use Landow’s idea that technology isn’t merely that which is digitally developed in today’s society.  

            For my project I plan to use a variety of different types of mediums, some of which we’ve come to disregard as mediums (writing) in order to compose a chain of poems that are all interconnected and linked together, although they won’t all be on the internet. I want my project to take my audience’s ideas and opinions into consideration. I will compose a series of poems, all of which are a part of one fluctuating and interconnected story, kind of like Afternoon: a Story , only they will all be written up in different forms of mediums. Think of it as one of those detective stories we all used to read as children, only instead of going on to a different chapter, you’ll either have to go onto a recording I did on tape, a site on the internet, a piece of paper I wrote a poem on, or a video. I wanted to come up with a project that’s almost “hyperinteractive”, if you will. After reading each poem, you’ll have to make a decision based off of your opinion on the poem that will lead you to a different one that will be on a different medium. By the end, hopefully, everyone will have gone through different readings of the story after having gone through different routes in my poetry. My goal is to see how the different mediums and different paths shaped my audience’s idea of the story.

Hypertext 2.0

Landow’s “Hypertext: an Introduction” was definitely all about the postmodern in that it highlighted the importance of looking past the linear concepts common in society and instead applying old methods to new technologies and visa versa in order to produce the hyperreality of a medium that utilizes multilinear systems with “nodes, links and networks.”  In other words: “hypertextuality embodies poststructuralist conceptions of the open text.” The idea of having an all encompassing network that allows one to store information, link information to that information and so on and so forth is mainly what Landow addresses in this chapter; he talks about the hypermedia and and how it doesn’t only include text, but hypertext, information, sound, and animation as well and how they’re all linked together through nodes and networks.  Landow’s poststructuralist view also encompasses the idea that technology is not only digital, but it’s also our books, our pens, and our structures of education.  This reading resonated with a lot of our previous readings regarding Socrates and also Kirschenbaum’s  Mechanisms. Landow talks about Newton’s/Socrates’ arguments that books lead to learning “without exertion, without attraction, without toil, without grounding, without advance, without finishing…” and how these scholars completely overlooked the fact that the institutions of higher learning were in fact technological themselves. This connected with Kirschenbaum’s ideas that we have become completely desensitized to the process of using a machine because electronic technology “removes or abstracts the reader/ writer from the text.” Landow then brings up the argument that we only notice and pay attention to the “new” because everything else we’ve been exposed to seems natural to us. So, this brings me back to the initial concepts brought up in this log post–if we keep using old media to remind us of what’s lacking in the new and if we keep applying the concepts of new media to old, will we ever get to a point where both overlap completely? Children now a days are so used to computers, iphones, t.v.’s, etc…they don’t appreciate the now estranged value behind books and epistolary communication. Will we ever reach the point where technology is the natural and the  natural becomes our technology, where this elaborate hyperreal system of links and nodes reverts us back to our most primitive modes of technology?

Gramophone, Gramophone

In Friedrich Kittler’s “Gramophone”, one of the statements that stood out to me the most was, “Only that which reminds us of something else makes an impression” (pg. 30).  The argument that the phonograph, a medium through which we can record our voices and have them be played back out to us, is analogous to the brain was by far the most fascinating for me.  After having read about Braudillard’s idea of the simulacrum, Kittler’s idea that that which reminds of something else is what impresses us was a very logical argument. 

The idea that our brains are like phonograms, or better yet, that phonograms are like our brains is very indicative of the idea of the simulacrum. In Kittler’s Gramophone, he discusses the argument that our brains might work like how phonograms do when he states, “Invisible lines are incessentaly carved into the brain cells, which provide a channel for nerve streams. If, after some time, the stream encounters a channel it has already passed through, it will once again proceed along the same path. The cells vibrate in the same way they vibrated the first time: psychologically, these similar vibrations correspond to an emotion or a thought analogous to the forgotten emotion.”  Therefore, the phonogram is like our brains in that the inscriptions made by our voices can be played back when they’re traced over with a needle is similar to how our thoughts follow paths that have been formed by memory. However, one of the main aspects of the simulacrum is that it destroys it’s original model and becomes the new original. Does this then mean that the phonogram completely obscures how one thinks of the brain? Have we become so used to different mediums through which we convey emotion and ideas that our brains are no longer seen as the mechanisms through which we operate? When Kittler says, “an unimaginable closeness of sound technology and self-awareness, a simulacrum of a feedback loop relaying sender and receiver. A song sings to a listening ear, telling it to sing,” one is reminded of the fact that were it not for the playback of the song, we would never have had the song in our brains to begin with. What does this say about the importance of our interpretation of the song, or does our interpretation even mean anything anymore considering it’s what the phonogram is playing back that allows us to perceive the song to begin with?