Electronic Literature

"An examination of the theory and practice surrounding the genre of electronic literature and exploration of its major works and authors."

Deena Larsen's "Disappearing Rain"

Disappearing Rain.


I poked around in DR for a bit this morning, something I haven't done for a few years. I was shocked that it took me about 10 pages to get a 404 error . I was even more shocked at the sound of surprise and triumph in my voice. The work was complete. It had aged most beautifully. The links were disappearing, just the way I envisioned they would in 1999. For DR is really a time-based piece. All the links worked when I wrote the piece. I even asked permission of every site before I linked to it, which was a major job. You guys probably even smiled at the naivete of these A HREF="http://www.deenalarsen.net/rain/legal.html">early-web correspondances (I hope so, at least). Somewhere, and I dearly hope that it's at MITH now, I have/had a few zip drives that contained the static images of each web site as it was when I linked to it. And now, subtly, silently, with no one watching, the links are disappearing. When a link breaks in the net and no one is there to click it, does it really disappear?

As far as I know (and I've been trying valiantly to keep up with all the wonderful new works in elit), DR is unique in this time-based aspect. The time of reading the piece is essential to the meaning of the piece. The longer it's been since Anna's disappearance (in 1999), the fewer links we have to her. Anna's dorm room has now seen 2 generations graduate. Her computer (a state-of-the-art Mac Quadra with 800 megabytes of ram and a 1 gig hard drive that cost $2,000) was not only thrown out, but is so much of an antique that almost no one owns one any more. Her "case file" at the Berkeley campus police department is closed as a cold file. And Anna and Amy have both long since moved on from the pages that I host at my website. In 2008, some links, some clues, still work. What will happen in 2019? Will we still have the html browsers? Will anyone be able to read the work at all, let alone follow the links and find the clues for Anna?

I have a reading habit I indulge quite frequently, and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it. I read trashy novels from pre world war 1. You can often get them for $10 a pound or for $2 a book at my local used bok store. My latest batch has titles like "Captain Blake Spring," "The Bishop's Carraige," and "The Loves of Miss Anne." The latter's narrator says "This
story, at all events, can be made to proceed doucely enough, in spite of my having to chronicle the harum-scarum doings of a hempie like Miss Anne and one of these silly folk whom she infected with her spirit." This story can be read nearly a century later. The book is a bit frayed around the edges, but the words are there. The writer is assuming that the story will be able to be read for as long as that book is in existence (on acid-free paper, hard bound with machine sewn cloth binders, this book will probably last a millenium). I'm assuming DR will have a life span of no more than 50 years, if that. And I wrote it in that spirit. I was willing (and still am) to trade permanence of my creation for complexity--again, there are things you can do on the screen you can't do on paper. What tradeoffs would you be willing to make? Do you think the added advantages (linked themes, spatial navigation, etc.,) were worth the tradeoff for DR?

Things have moved so fast for my generation. I know, this is like the stories about your grandfather who tromped through the snow on bloody bare feet 5 miles to school every day. And it was uphill all the way each way. But you have to understand the "historical" context here. When I graduated from college in 1991, computers were only in locked rooms and were available only for math or science students. I had to get a written note from the graduate department in English that computers were necessary for my thesis before I could enter the inner sanctum. There was no internet. If you were a bona fide researcher and could prove it, you could get a special code and use GOPHER and VERONICA and ARCHIE and trade papers with colleagues around the world in less than a day. Wow. In 1993, I worked hard to convince my department (the Bureau of Reclamation) to get a website presence. We were denied--no one would go to a computer to look up information! The next year, we got the web site. The year after that, we got people interested in having a site to put their publications on. The year after that, we got one of the first comment pages where the public could go to the net and register their comments about a project. In 1999, when I wrote DR, the web presence had begun to triple every year. The orders of magnitude were impressive. There were suddenly URLs everywhere--on metal newspaper stands, engraved stationary, even magazine advertisements. And Anne Landers started campaigning against the evils of online addiction. People were ruining their lives with this new invention. What is DR in relation to the web as it is now, nearly 10 years later? How have our lives changed from the internet? Is it better or worse? And, given these changes, is DR too dated to have much meaning? And what does it mean to be out of date in your own life time?

And now, people can't go a day without the net. I no longer call the library or look up materials in encyclopedias--I google what I need. (Anna and Amy, btw, disappeared before google was a verb.) So, have we all disappeared into the electronic void? Are most of us living the second life first? Anna and Amy were early pioneers (not the first, but among the first generation) to immerse themselves in the web. So is DR a cautionary tale or just a harbinger of the bounties that the web will bring? Come on in, the water's fine.

posted by: grigar at 03/30/08 18:38 | link | comments |

Analysis Paper

Formal Analysis Paper
Media Specific Analysis

Choose one of the following elit works, and analyze it from the perspective of N. Katherine Hayles’ “Media Specific Analysis.” The end project of your analysis is a formal paper.

Traveling Magic at Dante’s Bar by Bill Bogart
http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/traveling_magic/index.html

Gallop by Judith Montgomery
http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/gallop/gallop.htm

Grammatron by Mark Amerika
http://www.grammatron.com/

Red Riding Hood by Donna Leishman
http://www.6amhoover.com/redriding/red.htm

Ad verbum by Nick Montfort
http://nickm.com/if/adverbum_web.html



Directions for the paper
ß 750-1000 words + a Works Cited sheet
ß Double spaced
ß MLA Style
ß At least three outside sources: These can be critical works, interviews, or scholarship on the art form; you must turn in Xerox copies of the work along with your paper.
ß Papers will be turned in both in print and electronically
ß Print papers have no cover sheet
ß Electronic submissions must use this protocol: _analysis.doc (i.e. smith_analysis.doc) and sent to grigar@vancouver.wsu.edu. Papers turned in late or that do not follow directions will not be graded.


Deadline
Monday, April 14 at the beginning of class for print papers; by 6 pm that day for electronic. Student Conferences will be offered for all students to discuss the direction your paper is taking, answer questions relating to your paper, or provide guidance.


How to Write this Paper

1. Read Hayles’ Writing Machines closely, taking notes along the way about her notion of media specific analysis and how she applies this method of analysis to the various work of digital media.

2. Identify the elit work you want to talk about.

3. Read the media closely.

4. Make notes about your experience with the work, specifically the sensory modalities that are evoked and the way in which the work utilizes the medium and the technology/ies to get its point across.

5. Conduct a search of the WSUV library catalog for books about elit, these particular works of elit, or by the artist whose work you are analyzing; search the university databases and the internet for these materials after you have looked through the library’s holdings.

6. Read the outside sources. Xerox pages that you utilize and make a note of the works’ bibliographical information for your Works Cited page.

7. Revisit the elit work several times, and apply the principles Hayles suggests each time you read the work and any information gleaned from your outside sources. Make notes of your findings.

8. Develop your notes into a draft

9. Refine draft, and develop MLA style formatting


Keep in mind that you should have an opening paragraph that includes the title of the work and the author’s name of the elit piece you are analyzing. The paragraph should also include your thesis statement (one statement, not two or three . . .). This statement encapsulates your entire argument or point you are making about the work.

The body of your analysis should offer evidence to support your thesis statement. This evidence should be presented in several paragraphs and organized around main ideas. Cite information from the elit work to back up your claims; cite your sources to back up your claims.

Provide a conclusion that offers a final analysis. This final analysis should answer the question: What does it mean for the work to mean what you say it means? In other words, it offers a big picture about how to think globally about the work.

posted by: grigar at 03/23/08 17:11 | link | comments |

Dan Waber's Posting about Strings

A Brief History of Strings

Probably the best way to describe how Strings came about is: totally
unplanned, (but not unprepared). Then, as now, my creative process
tends to hang out at the intersection of play and limitation. I get
many of my ideas from exploring the limitations of the tools at hand.

Which is not to say that I take great delight in pushing all the
buttons or am fascinated by all the bells and whistles and like to do
things because they can be done. I like to futz around with tools, and
watch what they do, and then develop ideas that can leverage the fact
of the tool to the piece's advantage. Instead of having an idea and
then going looking for a way to do it, I go looking at ways to do
things, and that gives me ideas for things that would be fun to do.

This is not a hard and fast rule, I'm kind of an idea factory and
often the sequence of events goes differently, but Strings definitely
came about this way.

I'd just bought a Wacom tablet for someone else, and was playing
around with it to figure it out so that I could provide some basic
tech support on it. I originally thought I might be able to use it to
do some basic, stick-figure animations (stick-figure being the far
reaches of my ability to draw with realism), and went surfing for some
freeware that would help me make some animated .gifs. I found one and
started noodling around with it, just drawing lines in one orientation
to be morphed into lines in another orientation, and I saw that the
software did something interesting. What it was supposed to do was
take a drawn Frame A and drawn Frame Z and then do the math to create
all of the frames necessary to go between. Which it did. But, it had a
small amount of overshoot in its computations, and so every mark got
overshot a bit and then it would oscillate back into place before
stopping/looping. That made me smile. It was like a rubber band
instead of a line. Let the doodling begin!

I created all of the pieces in the original Strings (there's also a
Strings Mark II out there, and a few individual pieces done the same
way) in a single evening. An added bonus that night was I found out
the animated .gif creation software actually exported to Flash format.

After I had the whole suite of them done and tweaked just the way I
wanted them, I contacted Jim Andrews to see if he'd be interested in
hosting one or a few of them at his vispo.com. He liked them all, and
the rest, as they say, is history. In a way, I think the long-term
appeal of Strings has to do with them being in the right place at the
right time doing the right thing and they made a few of the right
people smile. They're simple, so they're appropriate for talking about
some basic tropes. They're a sequence, so they are able to gradually
elaborate those conceptual points. And, I hope, they are the kind of
blend of form and content that amplifies both in a way that makes the
two appear inextricable.

Over the year since Strings came out they've continued to be popular
according to the stats at vispo.com. They appear on New Media and
Hypermedia syllabuses around the world, they're in print in a text
book called The Art of English, and they've been the reason I've been
invited to submit new work to more projects than I can count. They
are, by far, the most widely seen of my work. With each passing year
that becomes a little more bittersweet. On one hand, I want people to
see the new work, on the other, I'm thrilled to have twiddled my way
into something digital that people still find of value. I go back to
them from time to time and re-view them, and they still make me smile;
probably always will.

The web being what it is, I occasionally read the online comments of
someone who had been given Strings as a piece of required
reading. What people read into them is sometimes startling, always
interesting. One person saw a stalker/rape scenario in one of the
"flirt" pieces. Practically no one reads into "haha" what is really
there--though it is often mentioned as being a favorite (In my family
we used to play a game that I just assumed every family in the world
played, called the haha game. The way the game was played was one
person (usually me) said "ha" and the next person (usually my older
sister) said "ha ha". Then the first person said "ha ha ha". Then the
second person said "ha ha ha ha". And so on, until someone (usually
me) couldn't keep saying "ha" and keep track of counting and busted
out laughing, game over. I've also heard of a variation on the game
when you have at least three people and you lie on your backs with
your head on the next person's stomach, in a circle. Apparently this
makes it much harder to keep from laughing.). No one's ever asked me
what "poidog" means, but I'm pretty sure the reference is so obscure
that no one knows it ("words are like a string that I pull out of my
mouth" is a song lyric by a Chicago-based band called Poi Dog
Pondering, from the song Catacombs on their superlative album
Pomegranate (1995), regularly considered my favorite album of all
time).

If I were to give any words of advice to artists considering working
in the digital domain I'd say pretty much the same thing I'd say to
any artist. If you're worried about what other people are thinking,
it's probably not very much fun for you, and the work will suffer as a
result. Find a direction that you are passionate about and you'll
forget that anyone else's opinion even matters. The way to find a
direction you're passionate about is to look at as much existing work
as you can. If you still can't find it, keep looking. The more you
look the better. Absorb influence, don't avoid it. At our best, we are
greater than the sum of our influences. So it behooves us to have as
many influences as possible so that the sum which we may exceed is as
vast as it can be.

--Dan Waber

posted by: grigar at 03/02/08 22:21 | link | comments |