Spencer,+Rochelle

This is [|Rochelle's]homepage.

Take a look at //Sor Juana in Prison: A Virtual Pageant Pla//y
 * __Week 4__**

"Camille Utterback's Text Rain is one of my favorite works in the world, in that it acts out the //manipulation of text through physical will.// In doing so, it not only gives us pleasure but also actualizes the pluralistic significance of words as message, meaning, metaphor, symbol and object... I have opted for a paradigm of distinctions consisting of three modes of describing works that, as Utterback says, "explore the interface between physical bodies and various representational systems...." These modes are 1) extending the body, 2) attaching things to it, and 3) ingesting or physically morphing the body."--Adrianne Wortzel
 * I. Camille Utterback **


 * __Week 3--questions__**


 * I. Asareth**

a) know Mike Sell would have issue with this "the relationship between a play and its (varying) performances is a hierarchal and explicit one." Why is Asareth so sure he's right? //**<--DO NOT think of avante-garde drama, think of traditional drama to understand Asareth's point. BUT: the idea that the way in which a character speaks can change the text is not addressed in this argument. Irony is absent!!!**//


 * b) Aarseth's work is informed by structuralism; similar to Levi Strauss **

c) Asareth--ergodic literature creates aporia, moves reader from voyeur to user, reinvents "spacio-dynamic metaphors"

d) Asareth--wants a return to the old meaning of labrynth, so people can discuss unicursal and multicursal texts

e) Asareth's definition of a ergodic text is so broad, anything could fall under this umbrella--hypertexts, algorithms

f) Asareth sees the cybertext as a perspective on textuality; we take into consideration now the mode or medium in which the text was created.

II. Spinelli
 * a) Spinelli makes an interesting argument about radio. It's the only linear, modernist art form. People still discuss the idea of "narrative" when they discuss radio...This really does tie in well with Sell's class & the Beckett radio plays.**
 * Joseph Weizenbaum "programmed most famous chatbox in history" (367); Colby, Weizenbaum's original collaborator on Eliza, wants to use computers to treat mental illness. Weizenbaum claims Polanyi's struggle mirrored his own (371).**


 * b)** **Spinelli's argument goes against the previous ones we've read about digital media--for Spinelli, meaning is paramount, and we have to change the way we critique texts. Instead of our "technofetishism," we have to examine "cognitive or semantic" function. Still, isn't Spinelli forgetting that the method of delivery changes the meaning?**


 * c) Spinelli reminds us of Christell's argument that __radio uses "time not space" because radio is auditory, not visual.__**


 * III. Weizenbaum**


 * A) Weizenbaum is really interested in intersections between science and art (374) **
 * B) Science is in itself an illusion; it can never be certain, just "more or less credible" (375)**

So, in essence, Cayley wants us to develop a better understanding of digital media? He writes, "My argument is that the material manipulation of pixels derives, culturally, from an underlying gasp of the manipulation of letters." If we understand pixels, we understand words and vice-versa. This is Cayley's argument? Cayley wants to expand upon Pat Harrigan's call to create a distinctive digital literature...Cayley sounds jealous of digital literature.
 * IV. Cayley**


 * V. Montfort-**-"you can have interactive fiction without plot; it can still be literary. You can have a literary fiction without a plot," Sherwood says.

Immersion--”metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water” (Murray 98).
 * VI. Murray-- **

We are immersed in the digital space, and we experience a wellspring of emotions. The argument is also that the distance, ironically, allows us to become more fully immersed. Emphasizing the border between “actual world and representational world” (Murray 103).

Murray is interested in the tricky nature of producing the participatory narrative and allowing the user to become immersed in a world. We can create successful immersion by allowing the user to actively create belief--through good characters, i.e., good character sheet (118) and through the ability to regulate arousal (Murray 119); In other words, users need “mechanics that deepen the fantasy without disrupting the immersive trance” (Murray 125).

MUD Murry, Janet .”Immersion” from _Hamlet on the Holodect_ 


 * VII. Manovich **

Dadaism (free-spirited Dadaist Manifesto instructed poets to cut newspapers and arrange words) and Oulipists (constrained) influenced

Discusses M. Boot's dice model, sentence variation model, and filter model

Discusses Lutz's remix of Kafka's "The Castle"--a stochastic (random generation text) (37-39); combinatoric poems; verse poems;

__**Glossary of terms**__


 * [|Acid-Free Bits]--recommendations for preventing [|digital decay] and keeping electronic literature alive (Hayle 40-41)**


 * [|affectivity-]-the state of causing emotion or feeling**


 * Baldwin effect--Developed by [|James Mark Baldwin], this theory states that natural selection ignores the positive effects on learning and how it can shape one's response to one's environment (Hayles 115)**


 * Brown Ready--**


 * [|codelet]--"A simple way of performing operations on task data using Java" or "small programs that function as independent agents performing specific tasks" (Hayle 49)**


 * "communities of time"--"time differentials are crucial to the bonding effect" (Hayle 96)**


 * control societies--believes "societies of control" will replace disciplinary societies**


 * deep attention--"a willingness to spend long hours with a single artifact" (Hayles 117)**


 * differential texts--"texts that exist in different material forms, with no single version being the definitive one" (Perloff 146); examples include Kenneth Goldsmith's work**


 * dynamic heterarchies--"feedback and feedforward loops," knowledge exchange in which the exchange shapes both receiver and transmitter, who in turn, become one; "complexity emerges through dynamic hetarchies interacting with one another"; people and computers are in a "dynamic hierarchy (Hayle 45-48)**


 * [|"Eliza effect]"--Hofstadter's term for computers that look like they understand when they don't; Hayle claims that "fluid exchanges" between codelets allow computers to make "informed guesses" (50)**


 * embodiment--the body's knowledge**


 * "embodied perceiver"--taking into account the viewer's "cultural, social, and ideological contexts" becomes important for digital art; the user enters the digital work embodied with some knowledge (Hayles 36)**


 * ergodic literature--texts in which 'nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text"; term come from Espen J. Aarset's //Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature// (Hayles 33)**


 * fabula--raw material of the story**


 * [|Flynn Effect]--IQ rising;[| "how the general IQ scores of a population change over time"];**


 * genotext--how we use culture and experience to make meaning out of the phenotext or expressed text**


 * global microsociality--people act globally using tools that provide a local experience? (Hayles 95)**

media type="youtube" key="tBhFYkaift4" height="315" width="420" Fig. 1 Hayles, Katherine


 * haptic--relating to sense of touch**


 * hyper attention--among other things, an "ability to process multiple information streams simultaneously" (Hayles 117)**


 * [|indexicality]--from Peirce's three trichotomies of sign; unlike icon (the bathroom sign which has a vague relationship to the referent) or symbol (when we assign meaning to something out of habit), the icon looks like its object**


 * [|information theory]--mathematical study of how information is stored and processed**


 * interactive fiction--**


 * intermediation--Hayles's term for the effect produced by the "feedback loop," the ongoing exchange of knowledge and how transmitter becomes receiver and receiver becomes transmitter in the endless circle of that loop, which shapes the knowledge of both.**


 * [|ludology]--academic study of video games**


 * MUD--multi-user dungeon (real-time virtual world)**


 * [|natural language processing]--According to Sherwood, " it is the idea that you don't have to know any commands or procedures to make the machine do what you want"**

[|neosentience--]

[|neoteric]**--recent in origins, modern**

[|Oulipo--] **Founded in 1960 by French mathematician Francois de Lionnais and writer Raymond Queneau, Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or Workshop of Potential Literature, investigates the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints**

Making broad claims about "new media" or even "computer games" can be problematic. There are new media forms that are reasonable categories: the massively muliplayer role-playing game, the first-person shooter, the hypertext novel, the chatterbot.


 * orthogonal--perpendicular, forming angles at point of intersection**


 * paratext-**-


 * phenotext--Kristeva's term for the exposed or perceived text**


 * phonotext--Stewart's term for the auditory stream associated with the phenotext; the auditory stream which the interruption of script at lexical borders (i.e, I think, periods, commas) never quite renders silent**


 * propioception--awareness of the movements of one's own body**


 * recombinant flux--computers that uses algorithms to create random "texts, words, and images" that function as art; questions about the computer's "agency" arise from this type of art (Hayle 58)**


 * Seaman, Bill--" text can not be easily singled out from other media elements or neighboring evocative environmental qualities -- nor should it be."**

media type="youtube" key="-ulHErzPTII" height="315" width="560" Fig. 2 Seaman, Bill


 * [|syuzhet]--the way a story's events are told (Russian formalist word)**


 * technodeterminism--Hayles aligns this term with Kittler, argues that his theory about war facilitating media development shows that the technology proceeds everything else**


 * temporality--Hayles distinguishes temporality from space, by pointing out that in space, one can move backwards, forwards, sideways, etc., but in time, one can only move forward**


 * theory of embodiment--body knowledge**


 * VR--Virtual reality**


 * X-literature Initiative--based on the premise that XML "will continue to be most robust and widespread form of Web markup language," it seeks to convert old e-lit to xml and make literature easier to locate and read**


 * WEEK 2--Questions.**


 * 1) 6/10 [|Vannevar Bush']s article is so prescient--but is it so just because his article was influential? In other words, did his concept of the memex bring about The Web or would it have developed naturally, on its own?**


 * 2) Why does Melanie Klein, according to Carrie Noland, view the gesture as having "an erotic dimension" (223)? How does Klein (really) how does she see children as investing letters with "libidinal energy"? Is this really different from making motions with the hand or the fingers that are unrelated to writing?**


 * 3) We have a "tentative vocabulary" for this New Media (Morris 4). How much is Morris responsible for giving us this vocabulary? Should we agree with Hansen that we shouldn't appropriate old media language to describe new media?**


 * 4) Terms to review**
 * Language School -->[| L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School]**


 * taxnomadism versus taxonomy**


 * There is no one feature of "New Media" POETRY, but "we can, nonetheless, identify them as members of the same group" (Morris 18).**
 * Literal art-->Poem-games-->Programmable procedural computer-program-->Real-time reiterative programmable poems-->Particpatory networked and programmable poems**


 * 5) Electric Line: The Poetics of Digital Audio Editing--Martin Spinelli**
 * words: flow, continuity, narrative, linear**


 * reception of "sound poetry" has been "considerably unstopped in recent years"--> our discussion in today's class**


 * Try to find a copy of [|Andrew Crisell's Understanding Radio]**


 * WEEK 1--Questions.**

1) I had questions about the Strickland article: why are ebooks not digital literature? Doesn't the format itself change the way we read, the way we think?

2) I question whether digital literature is really postmodern? If postmodernism values plurality and multiple perspectives, then how are we receiving multiple perspectives when we are forced to look through the eyes of the world through the European explorer (the perspective we encounter all-too often in history) or when we consider the gaze and the female body through what appears to be the white, middle-class woman's body--the kind of body that is most often analyzed in the media...I'm excited by this literature, but I also think it's faux-postmodern, if postmodernism even truly exists.

3) As I make my way through the Landow text, I realize that his argument would be much more effective if it provided the kind of interaction we've come to expect from digital texts (but then again, Dr. Sherwood said in today's class that scanned PDFs aren't really digital, so there's that). For instance, he takes 2 pages to summarize what stretch text is, when a simple Google search makes[| stretch text clear.]

4) In Dr. Sell's class, I'm learning that modernism always looks to the classic, and that seems to be a central idea in these digital texts--they are obsessed with the past, but they play with the past in a way that seems "postmodern."

5) Why does everything happen at Brown? What is it about Brown University?

6) Is the word "retrotech" an oxymoron?

7) I feel as though there's already been this apex of digital literature and I somehow missed the entire movement. How can texts and writers I'm just discovering, hearing about for the first time, be considered "classic"? It's enough to drive one crazy!

8) Why does Landow disagree with Ong? Ong's argument about how the computer makes us read text makes sense to me, as does his argument about second orality. Maybe I am too tired to get this point.