Electronic Book Review - eduardo kac http://electronicbookreview.com/tags/eduardo-kac en &Now Conference Review http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/festivarian <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Rob Wittig</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-25</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><a class="outbound" href="http://www.nd.edu/~andnow/festival.html">&amp;Now Conference</a><br /> April 5-6, 2004</p> <p>W: Compared to the Holocaust Conference going on up in Massachusetts this weekend, I think &amp;Now was an especially fun place to be. The preisenters were freaks for the most part, freaks and Lydia Davis, from the fringes of word art. Those who write and have other people publish books of stories or poems were probably in the minority. There was abundant electronica, collaborative text-collage performance, multimedia performance fiction, text-image-sound, and even a critic.</p> <p>Compared to AWP in Chicago last month (4600 in attendance), the frightening barren gothic oppressively mirthless tornadoproof Cambridge WWII Air Raid ambiance of Notre Dame University and small number of people in attendance ensured an opportunity to feel satisfied one had connected with a good number of other attendees without the distractions of being in an interesting city. FC2 was the largest and most mainstream publisher represented on the book table. Xexoxial Endarchy had the largest table. Except for the spooky Crucifix-encrusted hotel rooms with twin twin beds (did we have to show a marriage license to get a king-sized?) across the street from the happenings, the vibe was quite good.</p> <p>Compared to E-Fest at Brown this February, the electronic work was presented in a fitting context: experimental literature, the focus being words rather than computers. Gone was the flavor of the dichotomy, print against electronic, “the End of Books.”</p> <p>Instead we see fires of enthusiasm burning across the country, their wires leading back to the ELO, Coover, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Experimental literature is also a better context to present electronic work than professional literature (as with the generally underattended freak show Web Fair at AWP). <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> was booed off the stage but we were totally drunk.</p> <p>S: Don’t believe the hype. <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> were stone cold sober, and warmly received by the six or seven folks attending our presentation (McCaffery’s strip tease with <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> was pulling from our draw, otherwise there would have been multitudes). Aside from that I totally agree with William. There was an exquisite vibe at the &amp;Now conference and several exquisite corpses as well. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been to a conference at which the writers outnumbered the critics.</p> <p>In terms of a way to introduce electronic literature to literary culture, &amp;Now was a near-ideal environment. Almost everyone at &amp;Now was doing something well outside the mainstream: subversive fiction, fiction that involved combinatory and/or balloter techniques, fiction that was concerned with materiality in a way that most fiction is not: aggressively weird word-works. Nearly everyone there was writing in a way that is not taught in writing workshops. Perhaps because of that, there seemed to be an openness to new forms. Hypertext is just one of many strange things that writers can do with words to interesting effect. &amp;Now was a gathering of writers who work in forms outside of the mainstream, and there was a remarkable spirit of simple curiosity. I only missed one morning session and wish that I had been able to attend all of the sessions. A bunch of writers were sharing their strange work with other writers. You felt compelled to attend, and listen, and watch. Although the principle medium was print, there were a variety of stories told in fragments (Lydia Davis’ exceptional short short stories among them), stories that involved combinatory strategies, stories that were overwritings of other stories, stories that made use of aleatory material, stories that utilized multiple media (such as books published with audio CDs) or Debra DiBlasi’s multimedia performance, stories that were authored by multiple collaborators, stories that used images, drawings, collages, and photographs as narrative material. One refreshing aspect of the conference was that there were no sharp divisions drawn between electronic and non-electronic work. Stephanie Strickland’s e-poem “V:Inverse” appeared in the same session as work presented by two experimental novelists.</p> <p>As William noted, one thing that is often lacking at gatherings of electronic literati is what for lack of better term I would call a literary context. While ELO, DAC, trAce, Hypertext, etc. conferences are always informative and often exhilarating and it’s beneficial for those of us working in the field to get together on these occasions to share ideas and renew our sense of community, sometimes there’s a sense of disconnect from writing and the arts made for other media. Likewise, when e-writing shows its face at professional gatherings such as the MLA and AWP, it often seems marginalized, something only begrudgingly included in the sub-basement of literature. &amp;Now was a refreshing turn from that. Steve Tomasula did a great job of bringing writers working on margins together in South Bend.</p> <p>The conference also got me thinking that one thing the ELO should do is help people like Steve who are interested in putting together such festivals to mobilize an e-writing contingent. While folks like Miekal And, Stephanie Strickland, Rob Wittig, Mark Marino, and <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> were present at &amp;Now, Steve mentioned to me that he was hoping a few more electronic writers could show up. And it would be interesting to see other combinations: a festival of electronic writers and avant garde painters, a festival of electronic writers and designers, a festival of electronic writers and performance artists. While the combinations of electronic writers, theorists and critics; electronic writers, librarians, and archivists; electronic writers, and digital artists; and electronic writers and programmers that we see at the dominant conferences in our field are fruitful ones, it would also be refreshing to participate in more gatherings that are focused more essentially on sharing interesting work made for multiple media.</p> <p>I think that the e-writers in attendance learned as much about making interesting work from Lydia Davis’ generous asides about her writing process and her anxieties about creating as we do from any critical analysis of hypertext structures. Although her output of fiction has not been prolific, Davis has managed to create four landmark books, <span class="booktitle">Break It Down</span> (1986), <span class="booktitle">The End of the Story</span> (1995), <span class="booktitle">Almost No Memory</span> (1997), and <span class="booktitle">Samuel Johnson Is Indignant</span> (2001), at the interstices of a literary career dominated by translations of French literature. Davis writes gems which, in their brevity, help us find poetry in the banal details of everyday life. Davis described writing as a kind of daily struggle - she said that she arrived at the short-short form by setting a constraint of writing two new “things” every day for a period. Some of the “things” developed into longer stories, others into aphorisms of only a paragraph or a few sentences. Davis also said that when she puts together a book, she does not restrict herself to new material, but digs deep into her notebooks to revive stories from her past. She doesn’t necessarily see her books in a progression. Her books of short fiction are arrangements from a pool of writing that stretches back decades. She quite humbly described writing as a process very much like gardening, an activity which yields fruit over a long period of time. In response to a question by Rob Wittig, she said that she keeps notebooks obsessively - different notebooks for different activities and even in different rooms of her house, and that most of her published work originated in those notebooks, in observations jotted down in interstitial moments of her life.</p> <p>Michael Joyce, the author of the legendary hypertext <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>, a story, was one of the writers in attendance. Joyce, having <a class="outbound" href="http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/">semi-publicly retired</a> from electronic writing, is now working with artist Alexandra Grant on her paintings and wire sculptures which utilize texts by Joyce to create word-images and word-sculptures that transfer some of the ideas and structures of hypertext into a physical space. Although Joyce isn’t writing for the electronic media anymore, in a way he is still writing hypertext. Like many of us, Joyce is using some of the ideas from his electronic work in a different medium. I think that Joyce’s transition is emblematic of a dialogue that we all should be engaged in. What can game-makers learn from sculptors? What can e-poets learn from architects?</p> <p>Ultimately it matters less that we are electronic writers or digital artists than it does that we are writers and artists, experimenting in forms old and new. Perhaps the division between electronic writing and print writing will eventually break down and we will simply create and study 21st Century writing, which manifests itself in different forms in multiple media.</p> <p>R: I agree with William and Scott. Kudos to Steve Tomasula for a great gathering! It lived up to its billing - “festival” indeed!</p> <h2>DESIGNERS AND WRITERS</h2> <p><a class="outbound" href="http://www.stephaniestrickland.com">Stephanie Strickland</a>, during a discussion of teaching-for-money and art-making-for-soul and design-world-compared-with-literary-world (over gigantic bloody-rare steaks), said it best: “Designers know how to play, and they get the conceptual stuff right away.” There it is. The two points that keep me traveling back and forth between the literary and design worlds and matchmaking collaborations. Many solid experiments with such commingling were on display at &amp;Now.</p> <h2>PERSONAL FIRST IMPRESSIONS</h2> <p>It’s been a while since I’ve been in a literary setting (and this one was much more fun and lively than the usual). I tried to use that freshness to make some simple observations.</p> <p>1_Not many of us are interested in this kind of writing.</p> <p>2_Across the board, across age, medium, and strategy, there is a pretty consistent writing style here - a flat, pseudo-scientific or pseudo-historical prose with few rhythmic changes to break the smooth surface. Like a style that has forgotten that it began as a parody. Little variety in sentence structure. A specialized Literary Vocabulary used only in work like this. The flat style feels to me like it’s used to distance writer and reader from emotion, as though emotion can only be handled through a heavy fire-suit with yard-long tongs. I was going: I want Speedos and bikinis! Hugs and kisses! I want confetti! Extravagance! Baroque style! Generosity! Jokes and stunts! Color and drumming! Silliness-and-seriousness, rather than seriousness-and-seriousness.</p> <p>3_As people, the writers seem like a group of courageous shy people.</p> <p>4_The Norwegian student who traveled all the way from Oslo for the festival was quite surprised that nearly all the writers earned their livings by teaching at the university level.</p> <h2>BAJA</h2> <p>David Matlin (whose reading I missed, unfortunately) spoke eloquently over breakfast of the cultural energy of the Northern Baja California region of Mexico, particularly the cities of Tijuana and Mexicali. Adds to the list of clues that makes SW California / NW Baja sound very happening these days.</p> <h2>DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE</h2> <p>A wonderful discovery of the festival for me was the painting of <a class="outbound" href="http://www.forumgallery.com/2003/e_tomasula.htm">Maria Tomasula</a>, which some of us got to see during one of the two parties held on festival nights at Casa Tomasula. Precise, eerie, smart, haunting, the panels occasioned lively conversation and a chorus of oohs and ahhs. She has a show coming up soon.</p> <h2>MARTONE-ISMS</h2> <p>Author <a class="outbound" href="http://www.gutcult.com/litjourn2/html/MM1.html">Michael Martone</a> read his hip-pocket definition of Postmodernism = the shocking of the avant garde by the middle class (e.g. Jerry Springer, et al.) Nice quip. It struck me overall at the conference that there was a danger of believing that one’s education in historic avant gardes somehow confers automatic avant garde status on one’s own work. For all the quirky craftsmanship and dedicated pursuit of weirdness in the &amp;Now Festival writing, this particular avant garde still seemed to me to be pretty much in the caboose of culture. Martone also has developed a nice image of universities as “cold storage” for cultural practices (like the cold storage for nearly-eliminated diseases the government doesn’t quite want to get rid of yet). Reminded me of my old vision of Grand Opera performances, and certain poetry readings as “historical reenactments” of a once-living art form (a la reenactments of Civil War Battles).</p> <h2>BIG PICTURE</h2> <p><a class="outbound" href="http://www.ekac.org">Eduardo Kac</a> ‘s short, but punchy, presentation - a speculative list of possible bio-literary projects like texts written in bee-dance language for an audience of bees, or molecules created to spell words, or texts translated into DNA sequences and then read back generations later - was refreshing.</p> <p>After a couple of decades of computing science being the pet scientific discipline of progressive writers - what one might call the Space Age - biology is now the pet scientific discipline of progressive writers; in particular 1) genomics, and 2) the neuroscience of emotion; Literature as an elaborate method for triggering the production of seratonin and dopamine.</p> <p>What this may mean in practical terms is that presentations of computer-based or computer-assisted literature may no longer begin with descriptions of the technology, but will launch right into performance, mood, and story. The computer itself is moving into the background as a tool or substrate.</p> <h2>CGP</h2> <p>What makes <a class="internal" href="/musicsoundnoise/jammin">Larry McCaffery</a> different from so many critics is his ATTITUDE of CGP - Curiosity, Generosity, Playfulness.<br /> It’s refreshing.</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/larry_sm.jpg" width="500" height="375" /></span><br /><span class="caption">-Larry McCaffery</span></p> <p>W: One of the things I most admire about Larry as a critic is that, increasingly, he is less interested in literature than in the desert. And he’s right: the desert is more interesting. He took us driving in Borrego, frightened us a bit, and at the &amp;Now conference he always had something good to drop into the Q and A. He knew Lydia from San Diego circa 1980 when they would play Boggle together on the edge of things. He knows everybody. He’s Vollman’s chauffeur and Federman’s caddy/archivist. Starting as a science fiction or Robert Coover scholar, he drifted along every cool fringe. His specialty may be his interviews, available in several volumes as well as many periodicals. His influence on FC2 led to the imprint Black Ice books, with its rigorous list, dedicated to a high weirdness-to-consumer-cost ratio. Among their titles is the malignant classic <span class="booktitle">Hogg</span>, by Samuel Delany. Larry has pushed criticism in directions that are fearsome, experimental, and strikingly nonacademic, including some wonderful <a class="internal" href="/musicsoundnoise/jammin">essays on rock and roll</a>. See his collage-essay in the <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> (Barthelme number). Or see the recent issue featuring <a class="internal" href="/internetnation/bungaku">Japanese fiction</a>, edited by Larry. In fact Larry’s been all over the Review for quite awhile, and <span class="journaltitle">American Book Review</span>, and the <span class="journaltitle">Journal of Experimental Fiction</span> (Federman issue). See <span class="journaltitle">Storming the Reality Studio</span>, the cyberpunk anthology, for a stinging taste of the 1980s. That was my first McCaffery. See the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery">avant-criticism McCaffery Archive</a>, updated when Larry feels nostalgic. But usually he’s looking into the future.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/william-gillespie">William Gillespie</a>, <a href="/tags/scott-rettberg">Scott Rettberg</a>, <a href="/tags/and-rob-wittig">and Rob Wittig</a>, <a href="/tags/stephanie-strickland">stephanie strickland</a>, <a href="/tags/lydia-davis">Lydia Davis</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-martone">Michael Martone</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/eduardo-kac">eduardo kac</a>, <a href="/tags/larry-mccaffery">larry mccaffery</a>, <a href="/tags/experimental-writing">experimental writing</a>, <a href="/tags/unknown-0">unknown</a>, <a href="/tags/avant-garde">avant garde</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/alexandra-grant">Alexandra Grant</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/digital-writing">digital writing</a>, <a href="/tags/steve">Steve</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1063 at http://electronicbookreview.com Camille Utterback responds in turn http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/tabular <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Camille Utterback</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-03-22</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/multitiered">Unusual Positions</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>First, thank you to both respondents for their insightful and kind comments!</p> <p>To respond:</p> <p>Matt Gorbet critiques my implication that “poetic” interfaces do <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> allow users to maintain control of the interaction, stating instead that it is precisely the simplicity and clarity of this control that allow my examples to be successful. I agree that whether a work is artistic or purely functional, the connection between a user’s actions and these actions’ effects on the system must be clear and immediate. If a user cannot easily understand how his or her actions affect an interactive system, then the interactivity is irrelevant from the user’s point of view. The same effect may as well be randomly generated. Certainly there may be conceptual reasons for incorporating information about a user’s actions into a piece where no direct mapping is evident. For instance, works that collect data from the world and respond to this data raise a rich set of questions about surveillance, synesthesia, and dynamic systems. These types of works might more aptly be described as “responsive” rather than “interactive” systems, as they do not directly engage an individual via the body-centric interfaces we have been discussing.</p> <p>Let me clarify my implication that poetic interfaces are somehow “unpredictable.” In the examples I cite, <span class="lightEmphasis">how</span> a user triggers a response from the interactive system is quite clear and predictable, but the <span class="lightEmphasis">entirety</span> of the system’s response to the user’s actions is not predictable. The structure of the interaction is simple and direct, but the user’s control over the system is not absolute. This tension is what makes the works compelling. In Small and White’s <span class="booktitle">Poetic Garden</span>, for example, it is clear that manipulating one’s finger on the touch pad controls the size and position of the blue glow in the waterfall. It is also clear that the blue glow will interfere with the words’ trajectory down the waterfall, in a fashion similar to objects in the physical world. The structure of the interaction is clear and predictable. Despite the fact that the user understands the parameters of the interaction, the user cannot always keep the words from “slipping from one’s fingers,” as the words turn and move in the imaginary current. Additionally, when the user does stop words, they morph into surprising and unpredictable new words. The user can expect the words to morph when stopped, but can never know for sure what the words will change into. When something unexpected happens <span class="lightEmphasis">within</span> clearly defined parameters of interaction, it is not frustrating, but intriguing.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> employs a similar dynamic of varied responses within a clearly defined structure of interaction. In <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> it is readily apparent that holding out one’s hand or any other object will stop the letters from falling. Which letters will fall next, and whether one can catch enough letters to form legible words, however, is unpredictable. As with the <span class="booktitle">Poetic Garden</span>, there are also moments when the letters “escape” from one’s control by falling or flowing out of one’s reach. But because the structure of the interaction is clear, these moments of surprise become pleasurable, not confusing. Both the <span class="booktitle">Poetic Garden</span> and <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> are successful in part because the structures of their interactions are clear in the ways that Gorbet describes, but these pieces hold the user’s interest because the systems’ responses are varied, and not completely determined by the users.</p> <p>Gorbet also provocatively raises the question, “If these pieces are the haiku of the genre, how might we go about creating the Homer?” The problem with this question is that the goal of the <span class="booktitle">Iliad</span> or the <span class="booktitle">Odyssey</span> is not expressly to question or examine its own literary structure. When we read Homer via text in a book, the book structure is (currently at least) rendered invisible due to its functional status - much like a canvas is rendered invisible in Renaissance painting. As Gorbet points out, the interactive works I cite are more akin to haiku, or perhaps more accurately, to concrete poetry, because they are examinations of form as well as content. The structures of interaction in these pieces are meant to be part of the subject matter, not invisible substrates for the content.</p> <p>Gorbet asks how might one “turn the page” in <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span>, but the goal of <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> and the other works I cite is not to create a broad system to accommodate many narratives, but to create a form specific to the idea being conveyed. This coupling of form and content is what distinguishes an individual artwork from the development of a medium or formal convention. The questions Gorbet’s team wrestled with when developing the <span class="booktitle">Tilty Table</span> - how to move through content, how to “chose a different chapter” - are important questions when developing a functional form. If one were making art out of a <span class="booktitle">Tilty Table</span> however, the question would be instead, what type of emotional content is implied by the tilty-ness of the table, or by the sensation of the text disappearing off the table’s edges? Does this physical interaction of tilting and balancing imply a content that is somehow unstable, that shifts as it slides, and that stabilizes as the user balances the text on the table?</p> <p>Gorbet is right that certain body-centric pieces and interaction design might allow for longer or more involved narrative structures than others. Even in these instances, the structure of the narrative is critical to the content of the work. In <span class="booktitle">See/Saw</span>, my collaborator Adam Chapman developed a narrative with a structure that is hinged to the physical action of the see-saw. The narrative consists of a cyclical audio monologue that loops without a logical beginning or end, as long as users see-saw continuously. For each phrase in the monologue, Chapman also wrote a split narration - a phrase told from a position of power and a phrase told from a position of compromise. When users stop the see-saw on a certain phrase of the monologue - holding one user “up” and one user “down,” the audio track fragments into the two phrases - heard by the “up” and “down” participant respectively via speakers embedded near them in the see-saw. The “up” and “down” clips expand on the word that each participant can see projected behind the other participant. Each participant is only party to their own “point of view” - both literally and metaphorically. The narrative Chapman developed cannot be heard or read in a linear sense at all. Its structure as well as its meaning derives from the temporal and spatial interactions with the see-saw.</p> <p>My initial essay cites works that explore unusual interfaces between physical bodies and symbolic spaces. Adrianne Wortzel, in her response, is right to point out that all my examples deal with interfaces that connect the body to representations via external means. Her examples of works by Stelarc and Kac helpfully round out the discussion by pointing to the opposite, perhaps more controversial, strategy of connecting technology to the body by appending or internalizing that technology. To Wortzel’s categories of extending the body, attaching things to it, and ingesting or physically morphing the body, one could add another complication. What happens when our machines or technology internalize <span class="lightEmphasis">us</span>? This is the goal of much AI research, but artists have also probed in this direction. Natalie Jeremijenko’s <span class="booktitle">Voice Box</span> pieces are examples of machines that quite literally capture something of us into themselves. My newest project, <span class="booktitle">Potent Objects</span>, also explores this line of inquiry.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Potent Objects</span>, another collaboration with Adam Chapman, does not address bodily engagement with network media, as Wortzel conjectures, but does wrestle with the “dichotomy of control and losing control” she describes. <span class="booktitle">Potent Objects</span> explores our social anxiety about machines that can feel or emote, as well as our complex feelings about the increasing necessity of “interacting” with these machines. The series draws attention to the confused state of “interactivity” (in which users feel both in control and out of control as they adopt a certain mode of behavior in order to cause a machine to respond to them) while at the same time pointing at deeper emotional states implied by the physical grammar of interactivity.</p> <p>Each <span class="booktitle">Potent Object</span> is a stand-alone object that functions as an interactive and visual pun. The pun or metaphor represented by each object will be illustrated by the object’s physical form and the interaction it requires to react. Some objects will try to “learn” about certain emotions or interactive behaviors via onboard cameras or sound recording chips used to capture and incorporate a user’s activities into the object’s own repertoire of “emotion.”</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Held</span>, for example, will be a small, sensual, egg-shaped object with an embedded video display. The video screen will cycle through images of past users “holding” the object. When the user picks up this object, a tiny camera activated by the motion will capture a short video clip of the user’s hands. When the user puts the object down, the clip of the user’s hands will be added to the object’s “memory” displayed on the LCD screen. The object embodies and reiterates its memories of being held, while at the same time the visualizing of its memories entice you to hold it again. The object both compels you to hold it, and is “held” in a continual pattern of remembering this holding.</p> <p>By coaxing a machine to respond to us, we enter into a physical and emotional dialogue with it. When users shake or hold a potent object in their attempt to interact with it, they become partners in the device’s project of trying to “feel.” Ultimately, the object’s humorous “misunderstanding” or failure to truly embody the enacted emotion reinstates the human/machine boundary. Our emotional entanglement with these objects is represented by the traces of our interactivity, which the objects keep in their literal and figurative memory.</p> <p>What emerges from the collective examples given by Gorbet, Wortzel and myself, is that whether our interfaces with our machines are functional, poetic, external, appended, ingested, or any number of unimagined shapes, this territory is not neutral ground. What is at stake ranges from the formats of new media through which we will read and imagine, to how we will explore the limits and reaches of our physical bodies, to how our information about our bodies will be captured and represented given new technologies. Boundary negotiations between our physical selves and our symbolic structures are not new to the human condition. All the examples I chose for my initial essay explore physical interactions with text or spoken words. Our manipulations of text are a subset of our interfaces and interactions with technology in general. Text is itself our first virtual world - the first technology of representation we have externalized, as well as effectively appended and ingested. Will our new interfaces refigure our relationship to the world and our stories as radically as the technology of writing? The answer is clearly <span class="lightEmphasis">yes</span>. The works discussed here point to the very beginnings of <span class="lightEmphasis">how</span>.</p> <p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/unpaginational">back to The Pixel/The Line introduction</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/adrianne-wortzel">adrianne wortzel</a>, <a href="/tags/matt-gorbet">matt gorbet</a>, <a href="/tags/poetic-garden">poetic garden</a>, <a href="/tags/text-rain">text rain</a>, <a href="/tags/iliad">iliad</a>, <a href="/tags/odyssey">odyssey</a>, <a href="/tags/homer">homer</a>, <a href="/tags/tilty-table">tilty table</a>, <a href="/tags/see-saw">see saw</a>, <a href="/tags/stelarc">stelarc</a>, <a href="/tags/eduardo-kac">eduardo kac</a>, <a href="/tags/natalie-jeremijenko">natalie jeremijenko</a>, <a href="/tags/voice-box">voice box</a>, <a href="/tags/potent-objects">potent objects</a>, <a href="/tags/adam-chapman">adam chapman</a>, <a href="/tags/held">held</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1028 at http://electronicbookreview.com Unusual Positions http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/multitiered <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Camille Utterback</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-28</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>All forms of “interactive text” demand a physical body with which to interact. When we use the now-common interface that consists of a mouse and keyboard as input devices, and the computer screen as display mechanism, it is easy to forget the body whose eyes perceive the screen, and whose hands and fingers manipulate the mouse and keyboard. In her book <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span>, N. Katherine Hayles (1999) has eloquently explored how “information lost its body.” Hayles investigates the theoretical, historical, and literary maneuvers through which modern society has dissociated information from a body or medium. The consequent elevation of abstraction over embodiment is mirrored by a corresponding lack of computer interfaces that meaningfully engage our bodies with the information and codes represented in our machines. The degree to which our physical interactions with machines is impoverished is illustrated by a common saying in the university department where I teach. The saying describes the “human-computer interface” from the computer’s point of view – “when the computer stares back at you, it sees you as one eye and one finger.” <cite id="note_1">This saying is originally attributed to Joy Mountford.</cite></p> <p>With much of my artwork – in both traditional and digital media – I have attempted to draw attention to the connections between human bodies and the symbolic systems our bodies engage with. The digital medium interests me because it is a perfect site to explore the interface between physical bodies and various representational systems, be they language, the linear perspective used in three-dimensional rendering, or the various forms of computer code itself. In my digital works my strategy for this exploration has been to develop interfaces that honor and engage more of the body than just “one eye and one finger.” Interfaces, by providing the connective tissue between our bodies and the codes represented in our machines, necessarily engage them both. How and to what extent new interfaces may engage the body, however, is up for grabs.</p> <p>Practical interfaces are about maintaining the user’s sense of control. In this scenario representations on screen must respond to the user in a logical and predictable way. Artists can explore other possibilities. In this essay I discuss interactive works by myself and others that incorporate poetic rather than practical interfaces to text or spoken language. In these text-based pieces, the characters function as legible signs, but also take on their own behaviors and responses to the user. These behaviors do not fit the normal obedient role of digital text that is cut, pasted, and clicked. These characters draw attention to themselves through their “misbehavior” as they become active objects, or overstep their bounds in other ingenious ways. Conversely, the pieces that provide unusual interfaces to spoken language question the line between bodies and language by physically putting the user in an unusual “position” with regards to the words. In each case the relationship between the symbolic and the physical is simultaneously thrown into relief and muddled.</p> <p>In David Small and Tom White’s (1997-98) <span class="booktitle">Stream of Consciousness: An Interactive Poetic Garden</span> installation, text escapes from the flat screen and spills out into the viewer’s physical space (figure 18.1).</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbackone.jpg" width="501" height="744" /></span><br /><span class="caption">18.1. David Small and Tom White’s (1997-98) Stream of Consciousness: An Interactive Poetic Garden. (Webb Chappell)</span></p> <p>The installation consists of a garden with rock slabs, plants and water flowing from one level of a multi-tiered fountain to the next. Words and phrases projected down onto the water appear at the top pool of the fountain and swirl and flow with the water as it cascades through the garden, disappearing with the water as it drains out of the bottom pool. The “physically” modeled behavior of the words produces the convincing illusion that the text is floating on and carried along by the water. The text appears to have entered the viewer’s world where forces like gravity and fluid dynamics affect its course. While the text still carries its symbolic weight as words, it also <span class="lightEmphasis">becomes</span> the physical objects of leaves or detritus carried along by the water’s flow.</p> <p>The illusion that these characters are somehow objects as well as signs is furthered by one’s ability to physically alter the course of the letters as they cascade down the fountain. As viewers press or push their hands on a small pressure-sensitive pad, <cite id="note_2">The pressure-sensitive pad used in this installation has undergone changes through the course of exhibiting the piece. Originally the interface was a liquid-filled bag with a video camera inside that tracked pressure as changes in light. At the installation of the piece in the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, the liquid bag was replaced by a commercially available pad, which is more responsive and robust.</cite> glowing blue areas appear in corresponding areas of the fountain. The size and shape of the glowing area depends on the size and pressure of your touch. By positioning your “hand” in the path of the letters you can block their flow down the fountain, causing them to swirl in new patterns, and eventually change their meaning as they morph into new words.</p> <p>The words that Small and White choose to “float” down their fountain hint at the conundrum of the simultaneously virtual, physical, and signifying text in this piece. In one sequence of text the characters are symbols from the periodic table of elements – “Ni,” “Ca,” etc. These symbols morph into the word for their corresponding element when you stop them midstream. The boundary between words “standing for” elements that make up the physical world and “standing in” for those elements as a physical object in the fountain is blurred as you push and pull them around in the water, manipulating them with your fingers instead of your mind. The tension between the intangibility of the projected text and its behavior as a tangible object (which you can “touch” via the interface) parallels the tension between the text’s position as a signifier for a real object and the real object it represents.</p> <p>Pressing and sliding one’s fingers over the pressure-sensitive pad in this installation provides a more sensual experience than interacting with a mouse, but the interaction is still confined to a relatively narrow channel. The interpenetration between the real and the symbolic in this piece is in fact quite lopsided. While the text seems to have escaped into the physical realm of the fountain almost completely, “you,” via the pressure-sensitive pad, are present in the abstract world of these symbols only in the form of a blue glow that changes its position and size.</p> <p>In <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span>, by myself and Romy Achituv (1999), text again takes on the behaviors of objects that respond to forces in the real world, and also to the physical gestures of viewers (figure 18.2).</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbacktwo.jpg" width="504" height="366" /></span></p> <p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbackthree.jpg" width="505" height="376" /></span><br /><span class="caption">18.2 Text Rain by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv (1999).</span></p> <p>In <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> however, the interface of video camera and tracking software allows a viewer’s entire body to engage with the text. In the <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> installation viewers see a mirrored black-and-white video of themselves on a large projection screen. Colored letters in the projection fall down on them from above, like rain or snow. The characters can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. If a person accumulates enough letters along their outstretched arms, or any other dark object, they can sometimes “catch” an entire word, or even a phrase. The letters are not random, but lines of a poem by Evan Zimroth (1993) about bodies and language. <cite id="note_3">Falling text is excerpted from “Talk, You” by Evan Zimroth, published in <span class="booktitle">Dead, Dinner, or Naked</span> poems by Evan Zimroth, TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 1993. Used with permission.</cite></p> <p>Similarly to the text in the <span class="booktitle">Poetic Garden</span>, the text here continues to serve its symbolic function as an decipherable code, but also as an “object” viewers can engage with as if it were a real physical entity. In <span class="booktitle">Stream of Consciousness</span>, physical interventions cause the text to morph and mutate; in <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> the physical act of catching letters is necessary in order to read the text at all. The act of reading takes on a physical dimension.</p> <p>Using a video camera as an input device allows the letters in <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> to respond to a wide variety of human gestures and motions. There is no “wrong” way to interact with this piece. Because most of one’s body is visible in the virtual space of the screen as well as in the physical space in front of the screen, a pleasurable confusion results between the screen space and the real space. Because no complicated apparatus is involved to become “immersed” you can easily feel present in both the physical and virtual space simultaneously, or seamlessly shift back and forth between the two.</p> <p>It is also significant that this interface allows participants to engage not only using their whole bodies, but also with other people’s bodies in the installation space. People often cooperate to catch letters – holding hands or stretching coats and scarves between them. The video interface allows people to be physically engaged with the text, but also to engage with each other while interacting with the text.</p> <p>In another piece of mine, <span class="booktitle">Drawing from Life</span> (2001), the text’s behavior is even more tightly coupled to the viewer – it becomes them (figure 18.3).</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbackfour.jpg" width="505" height="378" /></span><br /><span class="caption">18.3. Drawing from Life by Camille Utterback (2001).</span></p> <p>Upon entering the installation space, participants encounter a live video projection of themselves, but their images are completely transformed into the letters “A,” “T,” “G,” and “C” – the letters representing the four proteins of DNA. The letters are color-coded based on the color associated with each protein from computer-analyzed gels scientists use when decoding the genome. The color saturation of any particular letter is based on the brightness of the color in the incoming video, so some amount of detail about each person is visible. It is remarkable how recognizable individuals are even in this abstracted form.</p> <p>By abstracting live imagery of a viewer’s body into the letters that compose DNA, the installation raises questions about our embodiment and the code that is both part of, and helps produce our “selves.” As in the previously described installations, here again the boundary between flesh and abstraction is questioned by the content of the interactive text as well as by its behavior.</p> <p>When viewers recognize that the projected imagery is a translation of themselves, they “test” the correspondence by moving parts of their body – tilting their head, waving their arms, etc. Once the connection is made, viewers “play” with manipulating their transformed symbolic “self” using their physical body. The ease with which one controls one’s video image is comparable to the experience of controlling one’s image in a mirror. By distancing this connection through the abstracting of the live image into letters, viewers become more aware of the discrepancy between the abstraction and their bodies. The letters also continually flicker and change between the characters, as if they had a life of their own. Viewers recognize that this abstraction is simultaneously “them” and “not them.” The image of DNA characters “stands in” for them, and on some level “stands for” them in the way that genetic code does, and in the way that the letters “stand for” the proteins themselves.</p> <p>The text in Jeffrey Shaw’s (1989) <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span> installation does not respond to user’s actions per se, but instead puts the user in the position of acting within the space of the text (figure 18.4).</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbackfive.jpg" width="500" height="326" /></span></p> <p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbacksix.jpg" width="500" height="333" /></span><br /><span class="caption">18.4. The Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw (1989).</span></p> <p><span class="booktitle">Stream of Consciousness</span> puts the text into the viewer’s physical space. <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span> inserts the viewer’s image into a flat abstract space along with the text. <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span> inserts the user’s <span class="lightEmphasis">point of view</span> via computer-generated linear perspective into a dimensional space made entirely of text. In this installation the user sits on a real bicycle and pedals his or her way through a virtual landscape of text. The individual characters of the text in this installation become the architecture. Each letter is monumentally rendered in three dimensions, and takes the place of a building along the city streets of this space. The letters march off into the horizon, defining streets and avenues that correspond to real city maps of New York, Amsterdam, or Karlsruhe, Germany. In two of the cityscapes, the size of each letter in the text actually corresponds to the size of the building it represents. The text from which each city is “created” is also text about that city. The texts vary from contemporary quotes and writing to descriptions of historical events. The <span class="booktitle">Drawing from Life</span> installation conflates code with body. In a similar move, <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span> equates descriptions of cities with the city itself.</p> <p>In <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span>, in order to read the texts stretched along the city streets (similarly to <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span>) one must use one’s body. A button on the bicycle interface allows the user to instantaneously switch views between the cities, but to move anywhere within the environment requires real physical exertion. Unlike so many virtual worlds, here distance matters. One’s legs are the means of transport, but also an essential part of the equation if one wishes to read. The tension between this symbolic city – both “rendered” by text and virtual – and the physical exertion required to move through it, is the tension between the material and the abstract that has informed all of the pieces discussed so far.</p> <p>In Shaw’s <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span>, one has the illusion that one’s point of view is changing based on the changing imagery on the projection screen. As is often the case with computer interfaces, the viewer sits still while the display simulates motion. Two of my works require that one actually physically change one’s point of view to interact with the piece. In the first of these pieces, <span class="booktitle">Vicissitudes</span>, a six-foot ladder and a chalk outline on the floor provide the interface for two audio tracks (figure 18.5).</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbackseven.jpg" width="507" height="364" /></span><br /><span class="caption">18.5. Vicissitudes by Camille Utterback (1998). When a user is completely at the top of the ladder or within the chalk outline, only one soundtrack is audible, but the opposite visual – ladder or outline – is clearly in view. Between either extreme a mix of “up” and “down” is heard. Light levels of spotlights focused on the ladder and chalk outline correspond to the volume levels of the respective soundtracks, providing additional user feedback, and creating a dramatic ambiance.</span></p> <p>One soundtrack consists of interviews of people describing times in their life when they felt “up” or “on top of the world,” the other track of times when these same people felt “down” or “low.” Climbing the rungs of the ladder raises the volume of the “up” soundtrack, while lying down in the chalk outline raises the volume of the “down” soundtrack. Many of our linguistic constructs rely on physical metaphor, though they have become transparent to us due to their common usage. Through its interface, this piece explores the embodiedness of language itself.</p> <p>In a recent installation created with Adam Chapman – <span class="booktitle">See/Saw</span> – we use a see-saw as the interface to two screens (figure 18.6). One screen is positioned behind each seat of the see-saw across from each other in the installation space. As the users operate the see-saw, changing their position from up to down, their motion causes changes in words on the screens behind them. The words or phrases on the opposing screens will always exist in a state of tension or balance corresponding to the dynamic of the people on the see-saw. This installation plays with physical point of view, and the physical relationship of balance and tension between the two users as it relates to language.</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/utterbackeight.jpg" width="335" height="505" /></span><br /><span class="caption">18.6. See/Saw by Camille Utterback and Adam Chapman (2001).</span></p> <p>Of the pieces described so far in this essay, <span class="booktitle">Vicissitudes</span> and <span class="booktitle">See/Saw</span> involve the largest-scale motions on the part of the user. While these interfaces engage the viewer’s body on a large scale with a symbolic space of language, the language or symbolic space cannot exert a physical force on the viewer. In Orit Kruglanski’s (2000) piece <span class="booktitle">As Much as You Love Me</span>, the interface allows words to manipulate the user physically as well as emotionally. This interactive poem uses a specially designed force-feedback mouse. As the user uses the mouse to collect icons on the screen she hears the spoken lines of a poem. Each line of the poem is what Kruglanski refers to as a nonapology and starts with the line, “don’t forgive me for…” The more nonapologies the user collects and hears, the stronger the magnetic force on the mouse becomes, making it eventually almost impossible for the user to move the mouse. When the last line of the poem is collected (“forgive me this: I can’t remember loving you”) the force-feedback turns off in a dramatic reversal that mirrors the poem. In Kruglanski’s piece the symbolic or emotional weight of words is brought to bear on one’s physical freedom of motion. Via the interface of the force-feedback mouse, the symbolic content is viscerally enacted by the interface onto the user’s body.</p> <p>In all the pieces discussed in this essay, the symbolic world of text or language attains presence in the physical world and engagement with viewer’s bodies via unusual forms of interface. Creative interfaces that connect our bodies to this digital media allow the line to be transgressed it in new ways. In the <span class="booktitle">Interactive Poetic Garden</span> and <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span>, text becomes objects with seemingly physical properties that the user can engage with using their body. In <span class="booktitle">Drawing from Life</span>, characters take the shape of the users’ bodies, mirroring their motions and gestures. In <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span>, text forms the architecture one traverses on a physical bicycle. In <span class="booktitle">Vicissitudes</span> and <span class="booktitle">See/Saw</span>, the body on one side of the interface must “move.” In <span class="booktitle">As Much As You Love Me</span>, the interface allows the symbolic to reach into the physical world and constrain the user’s motions. The flip side of the text’s transgression into the physical in these pieces is the manner in which the user’s body enters the symbolic space of the texts – as a blue glow, a photographic image, or a point of view. What is at stake in these artistic investigations, more than the creative possibilities for “interactive text,” is the position and status of our bodies as they are increasingly represented on screens, or in the virtual space of our machines. As we create new interfaces between our bodies and our symbolic systems we are in a unusual position to rethink and re-embody this relationship.</p> <h2>Responses</h2> <p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/superwoman">Adrianne Wortzel responds</a></p> <p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/aintmisbehavin">Matt Gorbet responds</a></p> <p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/tabular">Camille Utterback responds</a></p> <h2>References</h2> <p>Back, M., R. Gold, A. Balsamo, M. Chow, M. Gorbet, S. Harrison, D. MacDonald, and S. Minneman (2001). “Designing Innovative Reading Experiences for a Museum Exhibition.” <span class="booktitle">IEEE Computer</span> 34, no. 1 (2001): 80-87.</p> <p>Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span>. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.</p> <p>Kac, Eduardo (1997). <span class="booktitle">Time Capsule</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ekac.org/timec.html">http://www.ekac.org/timec.html</a>.</p> <p>—. (1997). <span class="booktitle">A-Positive</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ekac.org/apositive.html">http://www.ekac.org/apositive.html</a>.</p> <p>Kruglanski, Orit (2000). <span class="booktitle">As Much as You Love Me</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ok-centrum.at/ausstellungen/cyberarts00/kruglanski.html">http://www.ok-centrum.at/ausstellungen/cyberarts00/kruglanski.html</a>.</p> <p>Shaw, Jeffrey (1989). <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.xspace.at/english/shaw.html">http://www.xspace.at/english/shaw.html</a>.</p> <p>Small, David and Tom White (1997-98). <span class="booktitle">Stream of Consciousness: An Interactive Poetic Garden</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/stream/">http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/stream/</a>.</p> <p>Stelarc (1997). <span class="booktitle">Parasite</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/parasite/index.htm">http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/parasite/index.htm</a>.</p> <p>Utterback, Camille and Romy Achituv (1999). <span class="booktitle">Text Rain</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.camilleutterback.com/textrain.html">http://www.camilleutterback.com/textrain.html</a>.</p> <p>—. and Adam Chapman (2001). <span class="booktitle">See/Saw</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.camilleutterback.com/seesaw.html">http://www.camilleutterback.com/seesaw.html</a>.</p> <p>—. (2001). <span class="booktitle">Drawing from Life</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.camilleutterback.com/drawingfromlife.html">http://www.camilleutterback.com/drawingfromlife.html</a>.</p> <p>Xerox PARC (2000). <span class="booktitle">The Tilty Tables</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.theredshift-xfr.com/tilty_tables.html">http://www.theredshift-xfr.com/tilty_tables.html</a>.</p> <p>Zimroth, Evan (1993). <span class="booktitle">Dead, Dinner, or Naked</span>. Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/how-we-became-posthuman">How we Became Posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/eduardo-kac">eduardo kac</a>, <a href="/tags/time-capsule">time capsule</a>, <a href="/tags/positive">a-positive</a>, <a href="/tags/jeffrey-shaw">jeffrey shaw</a>, <a href="/tags/legible-city-0">the legible city</a>, <a href="/tags/david-small">david small</a>, <a href="/tags/tom-white">tom white</a>, <a href="/tags/stream-consciousness">stream of consciousness</a>, <a href="/tags/stelarc">stelarc</a>, <a href="/tags/parasite">parasite</a>, <a href="/tags/romy-achituv">romy achituv</a>, <a href="/tags/adam-chapman">adam chapman</a>, <a href="/tags/seesaw">see/saw</a>, <a href="/tags/drawing-life">drawing from life</a>, <a href="/tags/xerox">xerox</a>, <a href="/tags/xerox-parc">xerox parc</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 1025 at http://electronicbookreview.com The Materiality of Technotexts http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/playful <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Raine Koskimaa</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-03-27</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span> is the second release in The MIT Press’s new Mediawork Pamphlet Series, which pairs leading writers and contemporary designers to produce pamphlets involving emergent technologies that are accompanied by exclusive WebTakes. This series gives much freedom to both the writer and designer, and this book takes full advantage of that freedom.</p> <p>After previous weighty scholarly volumes such as <span class="booktitle">Chaos Bound</span> (1990) and <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman (1999)</span>, Hayles is writing in a totally different tone here. In this pamphlet, she gives a “pseudo-autobiographical” account of her early academic career, through which she both recounts her own growing interest in electronic textuality and develops the notion of the materiality of writing. The solution of leaving the bulk of notes to the WebTake (not available at the time of this writing but covered elsewhere in <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">ebr</a>) is well in accordance with the autobiographical writing style - even though this tone is momentarily lost in the more or less independent essays discussing the electronic text <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> (by Talan Memmott, 2000), the artist’s book <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> (by Tom Phillips, 1970), and the print novel <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> (by Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000).</p> <p>The story of Kaye - as Hayles calls herself in the autobiography - tells of a small-town Missourian who tries to compensate for the boring intellectual environment through books found in the town library. When we combine this diet of books found in the small library without too much investment in novelties with English and American Renaissance Lit studies at Caltech, we get a picture of a person with quite a traditional literary background. The bigger the contrast, naturally, then is when she is confronted with a desktop computer and has the sudden realization of the inherent possibilities of electronic textuality.</p> <p>According to Hayles, “This book is an experiment in forging a vocabulary and set of critical practices responsive to the full spectrum of signifying components in print and electronic texts by grounding them in the materiality of the literary artifact.” The vocabulary Hayles uses mixes more- or less-known existing terms and her own neologisms, including technotexts, material metaphors, inscription technologies, media-specific analysis (MSA), remediation, and medial ecology. She explicitly wants to avoid adopting the concepts of hypertext and cybertext, as “[t]o use one term or the other is not only to invoke a particular approach but to position oneself in a highly contested field where allies and enemies sometimes count more than arguments.” Thus, she prefers the term <span class="emphasis">technotext</span>, meaning a literary work that interrogates the inscription technology (a device which initiates material changes that can be read as marks) that produces it, mobilizing reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence. It is possible to read Espen Aarseth’s <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span> (1997) as mostly neglecting the media-specific differences, but cybertext theory generally has laid much weight on media-specific analysis. Thus, it is hard to see what kind of better grip of texts like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> we can get through one more new vocabulary, instead of the cybertext theory which has well worked concepts to deal exactly with the “reflexive loops” mentioned here. Still, there is a huge need for actual, MSA-oriented treatises on all kinds of texts, no matter the vocabulary used; in that, it is very easy to agree with Hayles.</p> <p>The book design is by Anne Burdick, the design editor of the <span class="journaltitle">electronic book review</span>. Considering that the book itself is rather small in dimensions, printed black and white, on not-too-high quality paper, Burdick has managed to make this book fun to look at. On a more functional level, especially with the essays dealing with literary texts, the way to include not only the words of texts discussed, but also their visual appearance as it is in the original, works well. Anybody writing about postmodernist fiction like <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> should have this kind of typographical possibility available! But it is just this effort put to the material book object at hand that inevitably draws one’s attention to the fact that an electronic text like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> can only be partially reproduced in print - in this sense the collaboration of Hayles and Burdick manages well - and one cannot but, once again, notice the obvious need of technotextual criticism of technotexts. The problem of discussing electronic texts in print becomes even more explicit in Chapter 7, “Embodiments of Material Metaphors,” where Hayles discusses Adriana de Souza and Fabian Winkler’s installation <span class="booktitle">database</span>. Even having seen the installation live, I found it hard to follow Hayles’s description of it.</p> <p>In her reading of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, Hayles identifies three principal strategies for making the reader understand herself “as a permeable membrane through which information flows.” The first of these are linguistic ones, including neologisms, and Creole discourse mixing English and computer code. In the second category are rewritings of myth, especially the story of Echo and Narcissus. And the last one is a symbolic visual language. Hayles’s treatment of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is at its most rewarding when she deals with the computer-code-laden Creole discourse, the way the computer code “shines through” the English language, like “cell…f (and cell.f), homophones for self that conflate identity with a pixilated cell and the notation for a mathematical function.” It is, however, not quite as convincing when Hayles concludes that <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> tells “new stories about how texts and bodies entwine.” Her skillful interpretation of the linguistic and intertextual aspects of the work seems to fight against her own conclusion: even a work like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> still mainly stimulates the mental-interpretational impulses, not so much tactile or other bodily functions.</p> <p>The chapters about artists’ books and especially the reading of Tom Phillips’s <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> is the most inspired section of the book. Here, the writer’s genuine thrill when she encounters the world of artists’ books for the first time is so tangible it cannot but pull the reader along. It is here, too, that Hayles’s arguments for the need of study on the materiality of writing - indeed the slogan, “Materiality is content, and content is materiality” - gains its best persuasive momentum. Hayles’s point here about the resistance of <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> “to an immaterial realm of disembodied verbal signifiers” would be much harder to drive through without the fine layout juxtaposing the essay and passages from the work discussed.</p> <p>Obviously, Mark Z. Danielewski’s <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> is seminal in Hayles’s discussion of media-specific analysis and the materiality of writing. Here, Hayles gives a very thorough analysis of the multimediated nature of narration in the novel, especially through the film/video editing processes. But when she concludes that “as readers enmeshed in the book, we find ourselves positioned, like Will Navidson, inside the book we read, receiving messages to be sure but also constituted by the messages that percolate through the intersecting circulatory pathways of the book called House of Leaves,” we face some serious problems. If we take print books as “material metaphors” that turn words into actions in the real world, we risk losing the distinction between different types of technotexts, the very material and media-specific differences Hayles has been drawing so finely all along. <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> doesn’t differ in any fundamental way (if you do not count the best-selling figures here) from such earlier experimental print novels like Gilbert Sorrentino’s <span class="booktitle">Mulligan Stew</span> (1979) or Raymond Federman’s <span class="booktitle">Take It or Leave It</span> (1976), novels which metatextually and metafictionally reflect their own material nature, and which “invite” the reader into the fictional world (although invite may not be the right word in Federman’s case, where the “reader” is sodomized by one of the fictional characters). No matter what textual strategies are used, or how persuasively they produce the immersive experience, as readers we always stay outside of the textual world, and the relations are merely metaphorical, a fact Hayles herself makes clear when mentioning Italo Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler</span> (1981). If we compare this reading experience to that of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, we already see a difference in the way that the reader’s actions do have a visible effect on the screen. And if we go further to works like Noah Wardrip-Fruin, et al.’s <span class="booktitle">Impermanence Agent</span> and the like, the difference is even more palpable; the feedback loop between the work and the reader functions in specific ways in each case, and media-specific analysis should also be attentive to these differences.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span> is an enjoyable read, and it makes the important claim that not only electronic texts but all texts in the digital era need a new perspective and a new vocabulary for critico-theoretical discussions. As a “pamphlet,” it is clearly not even trying to build a well-wrought theory, but rather attempts to partake in the ongoing discussion of the new forms of textuality. Excusable also, in a pamphlet, are interpretations that are sometimes quite far-flung, especially in the exaggerated role of bodily involvement in reading technotexts (however, we’ll definitely get there, sooner or later, and some artists like Eduardo Kac are already quite far down that path). In any case, it is never too often stated that, especially with electronic texts, there is much need for more elaborate ways to do media-specific analysis. The field is pretty open still - it is good to have thought-provoking, even playful, experiments like this to widen the discussion.</p> <p><span class="lightEmphasis">The Hayles/Burdick collaboration is also reviewed in <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">ebr</a> by Komninos Zervos. - ed.</span></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/n-katherine-hayles">N. Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/chaos-bound">Chaos Bound</a>, <a href="/tags/how-we-became-posthuman">How we Became Posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/technotext">technotext</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/house-leaves">House of Leaves</a>, <a href="/tags/eduardo-kac">eduardo kac</a>, <a href="/tags/italo-calvino">italo calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/metatext">metatext</a>, <a href="/tags/metafiction">metafiction</a>, <a href="/tags/mediawork-pamphlet-series">Mediawork Pamphlet Series</a>, <a href="/tags/designwriting">designwriting</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 845 at http://electronicbookreview.com Dali Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/webarts/hypertext <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Stephanie Strickland</div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-01-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Salvador Dali’s clocks aren’t wrong or stopped or broken. Their active faces slide like pancake batter over edges of a bureau, bend and hang across branches. Adapted to the shape of every object they meet, these clocks announce that there is no standard time in Dalí’s universe - nor, as Dali knew - in Einstein’s.</p> <p>In fact, Dali’s clocks are not clocks at all, if we mean bookkeepers that measure unvarying flow. But then the human heart is not that kind of clock either; rather, it is a fractal tempo tracker that runs concurrently to the beat of several highly variable drummers. When that stops being true, when it runs to no beat, under atrial fibrillation; or if it collapses to one stereotypic periodic behavior, losing some of those long-range correlations that tie it to events thousands of beats into the future, then it is about to die of congestive heart failure.</p> <p>Of the nine system-processes that characterize both life and knowledge in the 21st century - I refer to feedback, hierarchy, bounds, network interaction, scale, cycles, symmetries, evolution, and equilibrium - it is this last that does not characterize the Internet and does not characterize Web-specific literary works. If the last half of the 20th century fell under the spell of linguistics and genetics, I suggest that the spatial understanding of both, “genome as book,” must give way to an understanding that is inherently dynamic, inextricably statistical, and informationally multimedial in its forms of analysis; an understanding that is less about structure and more about resonance, about the ongoing fitting of moving mind to moving world through moving medium.</p> <p>My thesis is that Web-specific art and literature is where this understanding is being developed. I hope to demonstrate this with regard to works by several renowned Web artists, but to contextualize my discussion I need to explain scale and level. A sense of scale is key to understanding dynamics, the kind of scaling represented by conventional powers of ten, or some other repeated multiple, which is the basis of fractal pattern-persistence or self-similarity.</p> <h2>scale and level</h2> <p>If I look at the tracing of a heartbeat over a period of milliseconds, then seconds, minutes, hours, days, I discover that the pattern I see remains the same. Here, the concept of fractal shifts from self-similar structure in space to self-similar dynamics in time. What this means is that you can’t tell what time-scale you are looking at when you see, or hear, these patterns. Yes, an average regularity, a pulse, can be established, but this measure smoothes and destroys the huge amount of information hidden in the micro-measures, in the fluctuations, the groove, the interbeat intervals.</p> <p>A repeating fluctuation is very far from conventional ideas about good design and structure. At the time our ideas of scientific order were being developed, the gardens at Versailles and plane-perspective Renaissance paintings set a standard for European design. In these, it is precisely not the case that looking at one square inch yields the same appearance as looking at one square foot or acre. In fact, these works are designed to look as they “should” from precisely one focal or central point. In the case of focalized work, one can theoretically choose any point of view to look or read from, but the intent of the work is that only one point of view is most encompassing. The necessary movement that is involved in circulating around or in front of these works is implicitly negated, as so much dispensable trial and error on the way to the canonical prospect.</p> <h2>levels as evolutionary</h2> <p>The concept of level differs from that of scale in that level is evolutionary, not a simple multiple. Though physics consists of just those experiments you can re-run, enshrining an ideal of reversibility that permits control and prediction, the same is not true of geology or biology. The earth and life on it seem to have been run once. In them, mutations are irreversible. They are understood in terms of organized levels. From sub-atomic particles through biological macromolecules, cells, organs, individuals, societies, and ecologies, what is most important about these levels is that decisive time-based events - jumps between levels - reveal emergent properties, properties that cannot be predicted by, nor analyzed in terms of, the properties of the prior level, even though there is an unbroken line of inheritance from bottom to top, and even though there is always a part/whole relation between the levels. In the transition from any one of these levels to the next, not only is the whole greater than the sum of the parts, but the emerging qualities feed back on the parts and give them qualities they couldn’t have if isolated. Electrons, for instance, indistinguishable at the particle level, become individually important at the atomic level under the Pauli exclusion principle. Individuals exhibit consciousness, a property equally unknown to organs and to societies, for not every trait gets inherited up this chain of levels. These are hierarchies of inclusion - inheritance meaning each is impossible without the other - but they are not hierarchies of merit.</p> <h2>scale, levels and Web-art</h2> <p>Bear in mind your own experiences of reading on the Web as I attempt to bring together the concept of level with that of scale. I suggest that readings of Web-art are evolutionary in form. From a mathematical perspective, in both biology and hypertext, an intractable number of histories is possible, but in fact only one choice gets made, in terms of what emerges. Which choice gets made depends on interactions between internal rules and completely unpredictable gradients in the external environment <span class="emphasis">at that time</span>. The pathway to the present thus makes all the difference. Frozen accidents create history and are the means by which we reveal it.</p> <p>The Internet itself is a complex system with emergent levels. Because phone calls used for fax and Web access have statistical characteristics dramatically different from a typical voice call, as the phone system shifted from a voice to a data network it also shifted from a fully centralized, fully regulated system to one with fractal, or chaotic properties: the interbeat intervals of its interpacket spacing are as “bursty,” or multifractal, as the heartbeat, and equally threatened with congestive failure.</p> <p>Levels also relate to Web-art through the neurophysiology of time perception <a class="internal" href="/wuc/cognitive">Paul Harris on neurobiology and electronic textuality in ebr10</a> From the edge of awareness through to speech, these levels are related to scales by the following numbers: one-thousandth of a second for neural firing, one-hundredth of a second for neuronal pattern formation, one-tenth of a second for vocal articulation or action, and more than three seconds for narrative description. Tools from dynamic systems help us understand how humans might develop time concepts based on this physiology, particularly the retrospective and prospective horizons involved with our sense of being in a “now.” The basic event or fusion interval specifies the minimum time between events such that they <span class="emphasis">can</span> be perceived as distinct and not simultaneous. This time is different for each sensory modality. The modalities also interact with each other, and a lot of Web art explores these interactions through the use of micro-manipulated streaming sonic and cinematic effects.</p> <p>The neuronal level relates to brain operation. Any mental act involves the concurrent participation of separated regions of the brain. The time needed to relate and integrate signals from these separate regions is called the relaxation or holding time, during which perceptual flashes are spread and organized by cell assemblies to create the synchronized firing we need in order to act, to move our mouse for instance. Again, from a mathematically intractable number of possibilities, many competing cell-assemblies, the interaction of external gradient and internal rules yields one particular “now,” without the assistance of either an internal or external clock - synchronization occurring rather by resonance, by what Goethe would have called “elective affinities.”</p> <h2>artists in the signal sea</h2> <p>From this point on in the cognizing process, on the scale of seconds forward, language does finally enter, and with it, all that descriptive narrative assessment entails. Thus the Web artist swims in many seas, fine-tuning neurocognitive and muscular response both to fluctuations in the signal propagation structure of the Net and to the emerging nuances of the way, on another level, Web traffic communicates a social environment. Web literature and art also exploit different aspects of the time-based human perception process, playing with the fusion interval limits, and – because they require a large number of actions from their readers, clicks, mouseovers, drags and drops, shifts of a joystick, scans, zooms, probes of all kinds, maneuvers to be made within a certain time frame in some literary and all game environments - playing also with the synchronized neuronal patterns that must be mobilized for action.</p> <p>A number of Web works also explicitly address questions of time, history, and memory, often using dynamic means, Web-streaming or telepresence, in order to do it. I believe they contribute, in particular, to enlarging the window of “now.” They do this by offering our perception system new calisthenics, and they do it by bringing into consciousness many more of the microfluctuations and/or fractal patterns that had been smoothed over, averaged over, hidden by the older perception and knowledge processes.</p> <p>The first artist I’d like to mention in this regard is Tom Brigham, the inventor of morphing. In “The Art of the Morph” (<span class="booktitle">ArtByte</span> October-November, 1998), Brigham explains that in a morph,</p> <p class="longQuotation">an image smoothly transforms…into another with a motion so slow as to be almost imperceptible. Yet, at precisely some specific increment, itself undetected, the content changes utterly and a different pictorial subject becomes comprehensible. (38)</p> <p>That is to say, an emergent level is experienced. A morph is constituted from a series of discrete images, as a film is made of frames; but unlike cinematic cutting, morph technology allows for the separate interpolation of different attributes of the series, such as shape, color, texture, and motion. Brigham’s work shifts the artist’s emphasis from rendering impressions to rendering the process of forming an impression. The final morph, as it enacts before our eyes, relocates our perception from custom and routine to the plane of active recognition, the ah-ha recognition we bring to interpreting optical illusions. Brigham remarks,</p> <p class="longQuotation">A transformation that hesitates and hovers between two identities engages the mind in a special way…What lies between one face and another? A variety of faces. But what lies between a face and a chair? A tougher question with more answers, and a more difficult morph. (38)</p> <p>Two other artists that work at the level of very fine transition, though in this case with verbal and not visual material, are the poets Jim Rosenberg and mez, or Mary Anne Breeze. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.well.com/user/jer/j/barrier_frames_4.html">Rosenberg</a> works with the words of a standard vocabulary but overlays them in a dense blur of self-interfering micro-information which must be teased apart by moving the mouse through many nested component layers to open the simultaneities. Rosenberg is concerned with a temporal meaning that occurs as we move through what he calls an “episode,” a set of interactive operations that cohere in the reader’s mind as a unit, which is analogous to what I have called the neuronal pattern but on a more extended timescale. Mez, on the other hand, reaches into the very structure of the word, creating an entire para-language, called <a class="outbound" href="http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/">“m[ez]ang.elle,”</a> which is readable by readers of English, but only at the cost of a dramatically slowed reading speed. She organizes textual performances which she designates as e-mail trawling, hacker attacking, open source kode poetri, or electronic channeling. Though this work uses many of the devices of so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, <a class="internal" href="gillespieele">William Gillespie on the attitude toward L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E</a> fluid spacing, bracketing, and ambiguous punctuation to obtain a simultaneity of reference that tests fixed neuronal patterns, it also tests these, simultaneously, through choreographed and random kinetic oscillations of the Web environment, re-converting the process of reading to a process of action, perhaps somewhat akin to what oral cultures undertook when print first spread through them.</p> <h2>the impermanence of history</h2> <p>Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s work, <span class="booktitle">Impermanence Agent</span> <a class="outbound" href="http://www.impermanenceagent.com">(http://www.impermanenceagent.com),</a> addresses the sense of “now” in a different way. He pushes at the edges of awareness by explicitly incorporating peripheral attention into the act of reading. <span class="booktitle">Impermanence Agent</span> is not a site to be visited or clicked through; rather, it runs in tandem with the reader’s Net browsing, in fact becoming the agent of that browsing as all requests are routed through it. An active agent, it adds to, alters, and comments on the pages readers visit, as well as taking material from those pages to create the ever-scrolling content of its own divided window, meant to be kept open for about a week in the top corner of a reader’s monitor, if its story is to be both told and lost. The agent’s own story is one of family history and grief; its private store of commentary, an ongoingly updated collection of memorial sites on the Web, cemetery photographs, and Kubler-Ross analyses of stages of grief. The agent permits elements of the reader’s browsing to invade and transform its own story to the point of extinction - although it has, in the meantime, infiltrated the reader’s main window.</p> <p>A reader intent on browsing, who has enabled <span class="booktitle">Impermanence Agent</span>, will find her attention constantly solicited, but only peripherally, by the active image in the corner of her screen, and by invasions of unselected material into her focus. The “now” of her reading is both threatened and fertilized. Her content is mirrored back to her in such a way that she feels how it cumulates and overwhelms another’s story; how a click made in a second, can, through the mechanism of selection, become amplified and feed into and feed back on the longer scale of narration, destabilizing the fixed bounds of “now” and “here.”</p> <p>An artist working differently still is Eduardo Kac, whose complex work, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ekac.org/timec.html">Time Capsule</a>, I’d like to evoke for you. Kac, a Brazilian whose family arrived in Brazil from Eastern Europe, makes telepresence work that combines robotics and telecommunications. On November 11, 1997, inside a room with parquet floors and ornate plaster ceiling in the Casa das Rosas Cultural Center in São Paulo, Kac constructed an inner room of movable white walls. On one of those hung seven sepia-toned photographs that his grandmother brought from Poland in 1939 - the actual photographs, he says in a talk given a year later, though in the gallery they are not identified in any way. On the facing wall, as of the next day, was a diptych combining an x-ray of Kac’s ankle with an enlargement of the registration screen for a Web database used to track lost animals, for on November 11, in the presence of a horde of TV cameramen, broadcast live both to Brazilian TV and to the Web, Kac had injected his leg with a 15mm microchip implant that contained a programmed identification number and that, when scanned, emitted a radio signal. He then put his leg in a scanning device, and his ankle was Web-scanned from Chicago, the scanner button being pushed by a telerobotic finger which remains in the pressed position, displaying Kac’s ID number on the scanner’s LCD display. Kac then registered himself, as both animal and owner, in a North American pet database, the first human to do so, and on the following day went to the hospital to have his permanent implant x-rayed.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">Time Capsule</span> takes place in Chicago, Brazil, Poland, the airwaves, the phone lines, around the world on the Web, and in Kac’s flesh wherever he goes, yet is called site-specific. It takes place on November 11, 12, and 13, or now on his Webpage devoted to it, or always, in his leg, or in the thirties in Poland. It is a body, a broadcast, a netcast, a database, an identification, a schedule, a sound byte, an implant, a Webscan, an x-ray, a gallery show. In these respects it resembles the spatially distributed cell-assemblies that have to be synchronized temporally in a neuronal pattern for us to take action. And an active stance is called for. The meaning of the image changes with the pathway. A man is marking his ankle with an identification number under the photographed eyes of his refugee family, a family in flight from a regime that wrote numbers on skin with needles. Without being bound to any machine he is now always readable by a machine, wearing an electronic anklet that monitors him as much as any prisoner. The temporal scales range from milliseconds to years, but where is memory, personal or collective, the kind of memory we believe ethically needs to persist? Has Kac effectively located it in the microfluctuations, or in multifractal patterns that persist beyond the persistence of any given sequence, even though we may consciously experience it as disconnected and diffuse, as both refugial and vivid?</p> <h2>a time series image</h2> <p>I’ll close by describing <a class="outbound" href="http://cadre.sjsu.edu/jevbratt/c5/onetoone/2/index_ng.html">1:1</a>, a temporal image of the Internet, created by Lisa Jevbratt. In this piece softbots, or agents, continuously scan servers doing a so-called interlaced search of all possible IP addresses, expressed as four octets, from to, and then expressing the results in terms of five different visualization algorithms. The search zooms in repeatedly on different samplings, each of which constitutes not a slice, but a snapshot, of the Web, which increases in resolution as the scans move toward sampling all the octets, after which they recommence. The title 1:1 refers to a scale of 1:1 suggesting that this map has the same size as its referent. In fact, the interface here has become not only the map but the environment, implying all of the problems Lewis Carroll addressed in 1893, when, in the book <span class="booktitle">Sylvie and Bruno Concluded</span>, he has “Mein Herr” speak of his grand project, a map on the scale of a mile to a mile. When asked if he’d used his map much, Mein Herr replies: “It has never been spread out, yet…the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut off the sunlight! So we use the country itself, as its map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”</p> <p>Readers of <span class="booktitle">1:1</span> can select locations via the Hierarchical, Random, Petri, Excursion, or Every interface. The latter is a densely striated coat of many colors, a clickable image map linking to every top level website associated with an IP address. The specific color of each square is generated by using the second, third, and fourth octets to specify RGB numbers. The Petri interface resembles a star-map of live sites, each of which lightens the more times it is clicked, demonstrating the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of collaborative filtering. The Excursion interface permits a recursive choice from a search-progress graphic that opens nested windows; Hierarchical allows consecutive choice of each octet; and Random requests a randomly generated choice.</p> <p>When using these database interfaces, readers experience a very different Web from the one they are accustomed to access through portals. Instead of ads, porn, and pets, they encounter predominantly undeveloped sites and inaccessible information. My own Every selection turned up Scandinavian Seaways, US Army Space and Strategic Defense, and CGS VR Graphics - nuggets among the myriad error messages that announce vacant or forbidden sites. Without a probabilistic sampling scheme, without recursive searches, without a time series interface, this particular view of one of our most important public environments would not be available. Very unlike the plans for the garden at Versailles, this interface/visualization is arguably as much the Web as it is a map of the Web. It yields a kind of knowledge that only transiently yields to a gestalt, that must be reconstituted continuously with computer processing time and human cognizing time, a kind of temporal knowledge that we must all learn to feel with, and that digital artists are exploring in unpredictable ways.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/cognitive">cognitive</a>, <a href="/tags/time">time</a>, <a href="/tags/einstein">einstein</a>, <a href="/tags/digital">digital</a>, <a href="/tags/dali">dali</a>, <a href="/tags/evolution">evolution</a>, <a href="/tags/noah-wardrop-fruin">noah wardrop-fruin</a>, <a href="/tags/eduardo-kac">eduardo kac</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 EBR Administrator 682 at http://electronicbookreview.com