Spece,+Joseph

HU 302—fields of happening //Newbury College// | School of Arts, Science, & Design //______________________________________________________________________________//

Professor: //Joseph Spece// Office Hours: (—) Class Location: (—)Office Location: //HH 204// Class Day/Time: TTR (—) E-Mail: //joseph.spece@newbury.edu// Credits: //3//Prerequisites: //ENs 105, 206// ______________________________________________________________________________

//Course Description//: With many exciting and challenging questions being posed by the rapidly-expanding discipline of digital humanities, we’ll ask ourselves: ‘What defines an artistic “field of happening?”’ In this interdisciplinary course, students will analyze paintings, poetry, graphic novels, and new media literature in the pursuit of understanding challenges to what Clement Greenberg has called ‘medium specificity.’ How can visual art have meaning without figuration? Are graphic novels and interactive fiction more drawing than literature? Why would anyone shape a poem into a swan? //Internet access will be crucial for this course.// Artists and theorists include: Emily Dickinson, Jackson Pollock, e.e. cummings, Mark Rothko, Shelley Jackson, Robert Coover, Stephanie Strickland, Stanley Kubrick, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller.

//Course Objectives//: Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to: 1. Describe the general characteristics of concrete poetry, Abstract Expressionism, and ‘Golden Age’ digital literature, including surrounding social and intellectual conditions (Knowledge, Communication); 2. Reflect upon how certain historical and intellectual biases may constrain the ‘reading’ of new and/or unestablished art mediums (Critical Thinking/Information Literacy, Social Responsibility, Communication); 4. Discuss how social prejudices—including, but not limited to, those based on race, gender, and class—have impacted the production art in the era discussed (Knowledge, Critical Thinking/Information Literacy, Social Responsibility, Ethical Behavior); 5. Craft and carefully edit both short- and long-form critical essays on the art discussed (Knowledge, Critical Thinking/Information Literacy, Communication); 5. Use sources and appropriate documentation forms (Critical Thinking/Information Literacy, Ethical Behavior); and 6. Experiment creatively in various art mediums (Critical Thinking/Information Literacy). //Texts:// Miller, Frank. //Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.// New York: DC Comics, 2002. Print. Moore, Alan and John Higgins. //Watchmen//. New York: DC Comics, 1987. Print. Morrison, Grant and Frank Quitely. //We3//. New York: DC Comics, 2005. Print.

A course-pack of critical articles will be made available to students. //General Layout//:

//•// Blake’s //The Marriage of Heaven and Hell// (2 classes) //•// Emily Dickinson’s poems; ‘rearranging seriality’; emdash as wound and marker (R: H. Vendler; 2 classes) • Abstract Expressionism and assaults on figural expectation (primary sources: Kandinsky, Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Motherwell, Lee Krasner, &c; R: C. Greenberg, Rothko and Gottlieb’s //NYT// letter; 3 classes) • Concrete poetry and pattern poetry origins (PS: Herbert, Swenson, cummings, Pound, Apollonaire, Mallarmé &c; R: Walker, Apollonaire, Higgins; Sackner Archives; 3 classes) //•// Graphic Novels (PS: //Batman: The Dark Knight Returns//; //The Watchmen//; //We3//; R: from //Critical Approaches to Comics// and //Animals and the Human Imagination//; 8 classes) • Kubrick’s //2001: A Space Odyssey// (2-3 classes) • Digital Humanities (8 classes):

//Introductory Readings:// W. Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (likely read before viewing Kubrick); K. Hayles’ “Electronic Literature: What is it?”; S. Strickland’s “Born Digital”

Each DH class will feature a 15-20 minute presentation by students (groups of two) discussing layout, content, navigation, interesting features.

//Classes 1 & 2—AI and human questions:// R: Hayles, Strickland, and Benjamin, perhaps Weizenbaum’s “Computer Power. . .”; PS: A.L.I.C.E., //Galatea//, and ELIZA, (& HAL) including 25-line printouts and abstracts; presentations

//Classes 3 & 4//—//Virtual text types//: R: Coover’s “Golden Age. . .” Murray’s “Immersion,” Excerpts from Agamben’s //Remnants of Auschwitz//; PS: //‘//My body. . . a wunderkammer,’ ‘Twelve Blue’ ‘The Last Days of Betty Nkomo,’ ‘The Sweet Old Etc,’ ‘Public Secrets’; presentations and short responses [Define ‘textual effectiveness’ for each piece]

//Classes 5 & 6//—//Gaming, interrogated//: R: Murray’s “From Game-Story. . .” Ebert’s “Video games can never be art,” “Nihilanth”; PS: ‘New World Order: Basra,’ ‘Voyage into the Unknown,’ ‘The Kijuju Chronicles,’ ‘Rememori’; presentations and short responses [Locate aspects of works that relate them to gaming; how integral is that aspect to the functionality and meaning of the work?]

//Classes 7 & 8//—//Potentialities//: R: Strickland and Lawson, “Vniverse,” White, “The Latest Word,”; PS: ‘Vniverse,’ ‘Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw,’ Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; presentations and short responses [15-minute ‘recuperations’ of virtual experiences; reflect on either Stevens or Keats in context]

Cayley, John. “Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and Programmed Signification.” Rpt. in //New Media Poetics//, Morris and Swiss, eds. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. Print, pp. 307-332.

CAP | Joseph Spece

OVERVIEW

The broadest arc of Cayley’s article is to address the following: ‘What is the relationship of code and text in cultural objects that are classified as literary and that are explicitly programmed’ (307)? Also key for Cayley is the temporality of ‘strongly coded’ pieces (//q.v.//), specifically how Jim Rosenberg’s //Intergrams// embodies the need for a true ability to catalogue structural loops in code, not just moments of coded ‘activity.’

In terms of code’s ‘ontology,’ the points of contention are familiar to us: ‘programmatological manipulation’ is either treated as ‘insignificant for the purposes of interpretation’ (//i.e.,// it functions strictly as a scaffolding that, as Raley has suggested, ‘makes exterior the interior workings of a computer’) or, as Cayley attributes to Katherine Hayles, intimates, by virtue of a ‘flickering signifier,’ an ‘indication of depth’—this ‘indication of depth is what Cayley early posits as the true sense of ‘encoding’ (310; Raley via Cayley, 307). The author almost immediately recognizes this binary to be insufficient (calling attention to the great ‘ambiguity’ of the term ‘code’) and sets forth five categories to frame discussions of codework:

1. //Code as (a special type of) language (viewed and interpreted as such)//; —Think of, for example, reading HTML (if you can’t ‘translate’ HTML). 2. //Code as infecting or modulating natural langauge (the language works, but the code is ‘broken’)//; —To a common reader, confrontation with natural language alongside code immediately identifies the latter as ‘stranded’—it cannot be ‘read,’ so cannot convey any recognizable meaning. Even below the level of seeing, broken code cannot perform its duties to link, play, or otherwise operate inside the system within which it is supposed to be active and legible. If my interpretation is right, it recalls Aquaman without the sea. 3. //Code as text to be read as (if it were) natural language; code which is infected or modulated by natural language (the code works, but the language is ‘broken’)//; —Cayley calls this a ‘special case, and less common’ (313). We might imagine this category of code as contextually significant, or, while largely code-specific, at least comprehensible in its mix of code with natural language. 4. //Code as a system of correspondences, as encoding//; —This is, again, Hayles’ ‘flickering signifier’—it ‘acquires much of its conceptual power from the depths and layers of encoding it allows us to discover and recover.’ As I understand it, this is, at its most basic, the potential energy stored in a hyperlink (though Cayley will eventually deride the ‘depth’ of such a device) 5. //Code as programming, as a program or a set of methods that runs (in time) and produces writing, or that is necessary for the production of writing//. —Cayley’s ‘strongest sense’ of code—code as an ‘ever present aspect of mediation between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategy’—code as ‘operational programming in textuality,’ without which the substance of what we deem readable would cease to be so, //not// by virtue of an 414 or corrupt file, but because it constitutes the backbone of how legibility is made. Perhaps it is like Aquaman (forgetting his Atlantean heritage) first confronted with meaning conveyed through spoken language, when all he had experienced previous was a telepathic conduit with fish.

Cayley’s conception of this fifth type of coding finds fruit, I think, in Jim Rosenberg’s //Intergrams//. In his review of //Intergrams,// Cayley sees rest-state illegibility (the terms are essentially a black mass) and the sensitivity of code to pointer positioning as ‘obliging readers to address the inherent restructuring of time, specifically, the time of reading.’ Further, Cayley states that ‘Rosenberg’s coding of programmable media for literal art //guarantees// this specific aspect of his text’s materiality and also, perhaps even more important, gives both writer and reader access to the manipulation of this dimension of literal textual matter’—code, time, production, writing, and necessary connections, as (5) above (320-1; author’s emphasis).

The strictures placed on a reader by Rosenberg’s //Intergrams// extend even into Cayley’s general praise of Ted Nelson’s ‘permascroll’: ‘the final instantiation of the texual materiality of authorized editions, of the ideal, abstracted, persistent, authorized text.’ Thus the permascroll can capture states of looping (//Intergrams,// say, at a rest state, or at a text-map state) but not the looping activity itself (the stages of the //Intergrams// screen between illegible mass, loosening mass—even the movement of the cursor that causes the syntagms to write/right themselves).

Therefore Cayley issues a larger call for the ‘acknowledging and distinguishing. . . the productive, critical oppositions between writing of deferral and writing as program and performance,’ the latter of which ‘allows authors and readers to program aspects of temporality as integral parts of the text, as constitutive of its very materiality’ (327).

COMMENTARY

Though I do question Cayley’s (sometimes) smarmy, jargon-heavy approach, as well as the general diffusion of his trajectory (for me, connecting his coding categories to the work he wanted to do on Rosenberg took quite an effort), I do think that, at journey’s end, some good points have been made. Most pointedly: that our ignorance of how even ‘background’ code is read may lead us to miss moments vital to the interior of texts, even those texts that give themselves to us outwardly; that something critical in the structure of sessility and motility would be lost in attempts to document Rosenberg’s //Intergrams,// even using an index like the permascroll; and that the permascroll is, if nothing else, an interesting ambition for textuality.

FOR DISCUSSION

Mr. Cayley goes to a great deal of trouble to position //Intergrams// as a seminal moment in code-forwardness and critical temporality. Even with this knowledge, however, the text of //Intergrams// hovers between pure obscurantism and associative nuance. Can increased understanding of code-content and other extra-textual concerns truly color our experience of it as art?

Via Cayley, the Nelsonian permascroll is touted to be—at least potentially—the ‘linear and literal representation of //every textual event//.’ This appears to be a preposterous claim, for many reasons. . . what am I missing?

Wilks, Christine. "Tailspin." Prototype available 2008. Rpt. in The Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 2, 2/2011. @http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/wilks_tailspin.html

MEDIA SPECIFIC ANALYSIS Joseph Spece

OVERVIEW

“Tailspin” is a family narrative punctuated by (largely) recursive by-click visual stimuli, sound effects, and aural flashback. Creator Christine Wilks sums up the conflict in “Tailspin” as ‘intergenerational friction between an old man suffering from tinnitus and his daughter, whose children play noisy handheld game consoles’; a disconnect is apparent not only in the generation gap between the Fosters and Grandad, but also in their behavioral expectations, relative imagination, and emotionality. An important question seems to be: how is one deafness separated from another?

TEXTUAL FEATURES

—Mix of juvenile, adult, and ‘senescent’ voices —General narrative confluence —Narrative unfolds gradually and with generosity —‘Exhaustive’ screens; all content must be moused-over to move on —Text can be visited and revisited within a screen

MEDIA FEATURES

—Noises of home feel true-to-life —Lingering and/or random graphics and sounds mimic mnemonic and aural ‘traces’ —Image effects are seamless and attractive —Deft use of sounds that test our capacity for dissonance —Orientation clues (//e.g.// greyed-out swirls for read content, progressive wedge clock) provide a sense of readerly movement

READING EXPERIENCE

Presented, as it is, in variants of grey, white, and black, each chapter-screen creates a clean palette for the activity of rising and sinking text, emergent graphics, and corollary sound; when it appears, color is used to great effect. As with Jackson’s “my body—a Wunderkammer,” the narrative in “Tailspin” is generally coherent, though certain graphics can only be connected to the text by inference—how, for example, does one place the close-up zooming aircraft and explosions (even knowing he ‘witnessed’ a crash) alongside Grandad’s admission that he was “nothing more than an aircraft fitter”? Characterization is round enough, if a bit obvious.

ANALYSIS/INTERPRETATION

In terms of achievement, “Tailspin” is, to my taste, a far greater visual success than it is a literary success. Wilks cannot help but connect already obvious thematic clues (check ‘Ask Grandad, ask Daddy’ against the earlier ‘Ask Daddy, she says, like always . . . ’), engage and re-engage situational (‘Turn a deaf ear’; ‘Her argument shot down in flames’) and generational (‘Kids these days!’) cliché, and generally tug at heartstrings (‘The child cries . . . but when he was a boy no one ever came’)—the result is far too legible, not just for new media work, but for any work that aspires to be substantive literature. Even the most surprising sonic effect—the coarse, roar-like //Shut up//—is reintegrated to excess as “Tailspin” moves from screen to screen. First: why classify this piece as ‘e-lit’ instead of ‘digital art’?—it’s difficult to believe it was ‘anthologized’ by virtue of //literary// merit. Next: where does a discussion of a work’s quality or transcendence fit into its classification, especially in so nascent a medium?

From Louis Menand's "The Marketplace of Ideas": 'To continue to be relevant today, I believe academic inquiry ought to become less specialized, less technical, less exclusionary, and more holistic. I hope that this is the road down which postdisciplinarity is taking us. At the end of this road, though, there is a great danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. . . Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and thinking needs to be done, and how they might better organize themselves to do it; but they need to ignore the world's insistence that they reproduce its self-image.'