Assessing Significance in Digital Genres

Kathi Inman BerensLecture 22, DIKULT 103

The “cultural helix” of new media

TWO TROPES• The storyteller-librarian (Borges)• The soldier-scientist (Bush)

BOTH acknowledge the “increased complexity of human consciousness and the failure of linear media to capture the struggles of our thought.

Murray’s notion of the “cultural helix” of new media

TWO TROPES we’ll further develop• The storyteller-librarian (Borges; McLuhan,

Strickland)

• The soldier-scientist (Bush; OuLiPo, Montfort, Rettberg)

McLuhan: media transform “every sense ratio” in humans

• SIMULTANEITY• SCALE• DEATH OF ROMANTIC

SUBJECTIVITY• PATTERN RECOGNITION

in “the entire media environmental matrix”

OuLiPo: Paris, Feb. 13, 1961

Ouvoir de littérature potentielleouvoir “flattered the modest taste we shared for beautiful work and good deeds.”Potential: “The real fact of any literary being is his potential.”

Death of Romantic Subjectivity

• Notion of “genius”• Notion of “inspiration”• These intangible qualities that mark the artist as

a distinct type of person suggest the conditions for making art cannot be planned, regulated, predicted.

• OuLiPo, as mathematically inclined literary amateurs, wanted to create conditions wherein PATTERNS of inspiration could be discerned.

Cultural Millieu of the 1960s

• Death of the Author (Barthes, Foucault)• “People noticed that they were language from

head to toe. And that when they had a stomach-ache, in fact it was a language-ache” (174).

• Language as mediation.

Origin of OuLiPo: Games

“We directed the games of language, searched, found and encouraged certain of its capacities. We remained attentive to this nature which it seems to have, or which it constitutes for itself and which, in turn, constitutes us.”

Non-human Turn

“Language is a Concrete Object”

“Language doesn’t manipulate notions, as people believe. It handles verbal objects and maybe even, in the case of poetry, sonorous objects.”

absurdism“Unusual designations point to the sign rather

than the signified” Creates conditions for Derrida & Post-

structuralism.

Death of the Author Intentionality

“For most of the experiments that one can conduct on language reveal that the field of meanings extends far beyond the intentions of any author.”

Definition of the literary: “Every literary text is literary because of an indefinite quantity of potential meanings.”

OuLiPo: seeking “a specific intentionality”

• The experimental method: activity to apply systematic and predictable treatments to these materials.” [“These materials” variously defined.]

• “Historically: when Carolingians began to count on their fingers 6, 8, and 12 to make verse, they accomplished an Oulipian task. Potential literature is that which doesn’t yet exist.” (p. 175).

Sonnet: perfect illustration of OuLiPo Claims

Examine Queneau’s 100 Thousand Billion PoemsSea and Spar Between

In small groups . . . .• Taroko Gorge & Adaptations• Frequency

Oulipo: braiding these two orientations

• Humanists– humanists grapple with the “pullulating” problem: how to direct consciousness when structure is rhizomatic not linear? (Legacy of print culture adds burden.)

• Engineers – “put faith in the invention of proper instruments” to solve the problem

Rhizome (Deluze & Guattari)

Games: Ends and Means

• Ends = “game is a contest; only 1 player or team can win.”

• Means = “Process; game cannot be won.”– For our purposes, process-oriented games are

closest to literary experience. What are the differences?

– “Literary” permits ambiguity & reflection (but even this definition might be too broad).

Humanists’ Influence on Engineers

• Storymakers build imaginary landscapes of information that later “become blueprints for actual systems” (e.g., the Holodeck).

• Such experiments “foster the exploratory processes of the mind itself.”

Engineers’ Influence on HumanistsMark Sample: “My co-authors and I have written a number of ports of the original program that run on contemporaries of the C64, like the Atari VCS, the Apple IIe, and the TRS-80 Color Computer. One of the methodological premises of 10 PRINT is that porting—like the act of translation—reveals new facets of the original source. Porting—again, like translation—also makes visible the broader social context of the original.”

After Jasper Johns by Nick Montfort

“Expressive Programming”

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.

Aarseth: Cybertexts (1997)

• Cybertexts are “ the communicational strategies of dynamic texts” (Cybertexts, 5)

• Cybertexts involve “calculation in their production of scriptons.”

• A text is “an object with the primary function to relay verbal information.”

• A text “transmits a string of signs” that may or may not make sense to the observer.

Traversal Function

How scriptons are revealed or generated – that is, the MECHANISM by which readers apprehend meaning.

This mechanism is DYNAMIC and often INTERACTIVE.

KEY ASPECTS of Traversal function-7

USER FUNCTIONS--explorative: user decides which path to take.

--configurative: scriptons are in part chosen or made by the reader/user.

--textonic: if user can permanently add traversals or textons to the text.--interpretative: if all decisions a reader can make about a text concern meaning & there is only 1 user function.

Stuart Moulthrop: “Revolution”?

• “other orders of the visible” – the medium makes the message (pace McLuhan).

• What does “interpretive resistance” mean in the context of hypertext?

• Does h/t enact a “conservative” poetics in which the reader is searching for patterns, following a puzzle determined by the author?

Pattern Recognition

88 Constellation for Wittgenstein (written for the left hand)

-- Hercules/ Doubles (rt circle, rt side)-- Psycho (Anthony Perkins)-- Twin Towers (a loss for words, a refusal

to speak, the limits of language).-- Sept. 11, 2001

Recursion: key aspect of e-lit

Recursion: “self-reference with the possibility of progressive self-modification” . . .

Moulthrop emphasizes the topological, the actual “writing space” (Bolter) as a space where reading & writing co-mingle as activities because of the way we interact with/engage the text. Hence cyberspace (Aarseth).

Literary effect of Pattern Recognition

Humans are meaning machines. We seek pattern & continuity.

Unlike net art (tradition from which it comes) 88 Constellations rewards rereading.

One Work, 3 generic perspectives

Living Willhttp://markcmarino.com/tales/lastwill.htmlSee my guide to reading the code

Literary in UINet art in codeGame in UI – trying to amass fortune, cheat other beneficiaries out of their fortunes.

4 Features common to video games

• Representation: games “model external situations” e.g. baseball

• Interaction: game world is responsive to player’s choices and engagement

• Conflict: obstacles to be overcome• Safety: game consequences do not have same

consequences that such play would have in real world

Games: 2 contemporary definitions (p. 39)

• Jesper Juul– Rule-based– Formal system– Variable & quantifiable outcome– Player exerts effort to influence outcome– Player is attached to outcome– Consequences are optional & negotiable

• Katie Saleen & Eric Zimmerman– Game is a “system in which players engage in artificial

conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantiable outcome.”

MDA

• Mechanics: rules; basic code of the game. This algorithmically creates the reaction pattern of the game.

• Dynamics: a function of mechanics “but may also be surprising” as various choices interact, interoperate.

• Aesthetics: “favorable emotional responses” KIB quibble w this: aesthetics are more scientific than this def. would suppose.

Aesthetic elements• Sensation• Fantasy• Narrative• Challenge• Fellowship• Discovery• Expression• Submission (game as pastime)

Determining Genre• Apply same criteria/criterion universally• Authors ask: “What does it take to succeed in

this game?” (p. 47)

• Challenges to this system:– Single player v multiplayer = dif measures of

success– If a game is not goal-oriented, this method for

determining genre does not work.

Game Genres• Action: battle = “archetypical” vid game; speed

is hallmark• Adventure: solving mysteries or puzzles, akin to

detective novels• Strategy: between action & adventure– Real-time strategy– Turn-based strategy

• Process-oriented: “play with a system”– Sim games: fly an airplane, drive a car

Digital Art & Selfhood

Catherine Siller, Not Not

Ben Grosser, Computers Watching Movies