For the in-class writing exercise today:
1. Go to the following site and browse one or more pages
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/cyborgov.html
2. Think about what you’ve read in the context of class readings and lecture.
3. Think about what you’ve read as it pertains to the cyborg (Yod) in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It.
4. Write a paragraph of 3-5 sentences discussing your conclusions. Begin with a thesis statement that summarizes and suggests your main point or argument.
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism—a human-machine hybrid. Though the cyborg still seems to be mostly a creature of science fiction, Katherine Hayles points out that “about 10% of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints [and limbs], drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin” (qtd. in Landow “Cyborg”).
The cyborg, then, is a person with prosthetic extensions or enhancements, such as those listed above. But there are also what Katherine Hayles calls “metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by fiber optic microscopy during an operation, and the teen gameplayer” (qtd. in Landow “Cyborg”). We might add to this list the theorists (such as Hayles and Donna Haraway) who use the idea of the cyborg to make their theoretical arguments. In our post-modern world, with just about everyone “plugged in” (especially college students), we are almost all of us “metaphoric cyborgs.”
Jay Clayton would say that our cyborg-nature is more than merely metaphoric. He writes: “Most people in the West today are cyborgs. They have internalized technology so completely that their identities have been transformed” because they have been “reshaped by the total integration of technology and the body.” And yet, becoming aware of this situation, most people resist being called cyborgs. This is not just a reaction against technology, but also against the “complicity it establishes between the individual, as a cybernetic system, and the commercial, bureaucratic, and military systems against which the modern liberal subject has often defined itself.”
I think many of us would accept that we are metaphoric cyborgs, but not actually cyborgs. The idea that we are part machine, part robot, is repulsive to many people who believe they are distinct and independent beings—independent of machines, and of “commercial, bureaucratic, and military systems.” But then there are studies that show that the common use of computer technology (and other digital devices) actually “re-hardwires” our brain, reconfiguring our thinking and even our sense of self, making our brain into software for the hardware of the computer. If this is true, it seems that we are more than “metaphoric” cyborgs, whether we like it or not (and many of us don’t).
The implications for the student of digital literature seem quite clear: if we use a machine to access, read, process, and store data in the form of digital literature, we are affecting our brain configuration, and becoming more like a literal cyborg. This is something that Katherine Hayles (once again) addresses in her article on Patchwork Girl and hypertext: “Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity.”
But again, many students, trained to view literature as something uplifting, as bearing time-honored cultural value, as affirming the best and most noble qualities of the human being, resist “cyborg subjectivity.” In fact, many would see literature (and by extension art) as the last bastion of human subjectivity in a increasingly mechanistic and machine-mad world. To say that this is basically a Romantic stance would mean little to most students today, but the relationship of literature to technology, and our relationship to technologized literature, is a vital question for our consideration in this class. I do not pretend to have the answer to that question here; it is beyond the scope of a blog entry—probably beyond the scope of a semester of digital literature.
Leaving aside the question of whether we are “metaphoric” or actual cyborgs, I would argue that our attitudes towards the cyborg have changed over the years, and will no doubt continue to change. In fact, I can imagine writing a paper on the topic, which would look like:
Title: “Canning the Uncanny: The Naturalization of the Cyborg in Ironman.”
Explanation of the title, in introductory paragraph: The uncanny is a psychological term that Ernst Jentsch used to explain the anxiety we feel caused by “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,” and refers “to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata” (quoted in Freud). In the current context, this would include robots and especially cyborgs, which are part human and part machine. “Naturalization” refers to the opposite condition: we accept something as normal and, the anxiety gone, no longer even think about it. My thesis, then, is that after a period of anxious speculation we have by now mostly accepted the idea of the cyborg as a cultural symbol, and are well on the way to accepting that we ourselves are “metaphoric” cyborgs.
In the paper proper, I would consider three phases in the history of the cyborg.
I. Utopian Cyborg. Utopian means “no place”; it is a hypothetical, imaginative place of ultimate possibility. The utopian cyborg is a creature of this hopeful possibility, as imagined by cybernetic theorists like Norbert Weiner, the inventor of cybernetics. As Katherine Hayles makes clear in her book How We Became Posthuman, the early cybernetic thinkers considered mechanically-enhanced humans to be a good thing, a condition that did not threaten the liberal subject—the autonomous, rational self. At this early stage, before the advent of the personal computer, works in popular culture—particularly films, television programs, and science fiction novels—tended to celebrate the possibilities of cybernetic enhancement of the human. Here I would sample some of these works, such as television’s Six Million Dollar Man and Hans Moravec’s novel Mind Children.
II. Dystopian Cyborg. A dystopia is a utopia gone bad, a proposed paradise which has been marred by technology run amok, no longer under the control of humans. The dystopian cyborg, then, is an out-of-control monster, generally wreaking havoc and making human life miserable. This is the cyborg most of us are familiar with in the age of the personal computer and computer networks; popular culture is replete with these monstrous, uncanny cyborgs, such as the cyborgs in the Terminator films, the Matrix films, and Blade Runner; the Six Million Dollar Man and the Borg collective (Star Trek franchise) in television; and the rogue operators in cyberpunk fiction (particularly in the novels of William Gibson) in literature.
III. Ubiquitopian Cyborg. If utopian means “no place,” ubiquitopian means “every place.” Not only is the cyborg more accepted and common in a Web 2.0 environment (thus “everywhere”), but the distributed nature of the self over a network, with many machine-mediated versions planted throughout cyberspace, also speaks to the dispersed, everywhere-ness of the cyborg. My case in point would be the film Ironman, which features a man who is quite literally a cyborg, with a pace-maker in his chest, and when in his robot suit, a fully-integrated man-machine hybrid. He is also someone plugged into a network by which he can be monitored by others, and is thus “cognitively distributed” (I would also find some current literature that would provide some equivalent cases). The important point here is that by now, with the ubiquity of personal computing and social networking sites, we are becoming less bothered by the implications of the cyborg, and the idea that we are, at least in part, cyborgs ourselves. In this sense, the concept of the cyborg has become naturalized, safely canned for consumption.
The above “paper” might be a bunch of malarkey, and it might never be written, but I put it out there (in cyberspace, like a good cyborg should) to give an example of how one might think through the idea of the cyborg, in the context of popular art and literature. You might come up with a very different schema, which is fine, but the cyborg is not something we can now dismiss as a pipe-dream. If only as a concept reflected in imaginative works, the cyborg must be reckoned with. At the very least it will prepare you to think seriously before getting that wireless-access node implanted in your brain, something that might be a very real possibility within a decade.
Works Cited:
Clayton, Jay. “Frankenstein’s Monster, Replicants, and Cyborgs.” Charles Dickens in Cyberspace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Laurel Amtower homepage.
<http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html>. 10 November 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Landow, George P. The Cyborg. Cyberart Database.
<http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/cyborgov.html>. 10 November 2008.
He, She, and It is a science fiction novel by Marge Piercy published in 1991. It is considered by critics to be a good example of a specific type of science fiction: cyberpunk. Cyberpunk literature and film is typically set in a dystopian future in which technology runs amok and the world is dominated by corporate interests. What makes Piercy’s novel a particularly interesting example of cyberpunk is that is also suggests the possibility of a utopian future. The world has been destroyed but there are efforts to learn from past mistakes and heal the planet.
The novel might also be classified as a “hard science fiction” novel. Hard science fiction distinguishes itself from regular science fiction in that the author strives to depict a world, and a kind of science, that is plausible and based on established findings in physics, biology, cybernetics, etc. The fact that the novel is a work of hard science fiction is somewhat dispiriting because what it predicts, in terms of destruction of the planet, seems all too plausible. He, She, and It is set in the middle of the 21st century, in which the planet has been nearly destroyed by nuclear war, and poisoned by chemical and biological warfare. Following what Piercy calls the Two Week War—which is started when a terrorist nukes Jerusalem, drawing the Middle-East into a devastating war—radiation pervades the atmosphere, and oil can no longer be drilled, which has ruined the global economy.
Piercy describes other, related, problems. Global temperatures have risen, causing flooding of coastal areas, and turning “bread-basket” food-producing areas into desert. She calls this “the greenhouse effect,” which is an old name for global warming. This has led to devastating famines in which most of the world’s population perishes, and outbreaks of new diseases such as the Kisrami Plague. Also, the ozone layer has been shredded, making life outside of shelter or wraps (permeable covers of entire cities) extremely dangerous because of deadly ultraviolet rays. There is also acid rain. Much of this is a very plausible part of the future of the planet. Some of it, according to scientists, is already happening. I’m talking about global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, and peak oil.
Like any good science fiction writer, Piercy gives us a fully-realized world. The all-too-plausible dystopian elements are part of this. Also part of it are the places, both physical and virtual, that Piercy describes. The novel gives us a United States which is mostly desert, with the rest of the habitable space filled by sprawling metropolises which are lawless zones filled with violence and disease (the Glop). There are also corporate enclaves where the privileged live (multis). There are off-planet satellites (where Shira’s ex-husband takes their child). There are free towns like Tikva where inhabitants are allowed freedom because they produce things that the multis need. In the case of Tikva, they produce computer hardware and software. Avram works in artificial intelligence (and cyborgs). Malkah works in chimeras (deceptive computer programs). These, we learn, are very desirable to the powerful corporations. In this world, as Nili remarks in the novel, “the ability to access information is power” (194). The ability to manipulate information, and to use information to deceive, is also power. This, also, is a fairly accurate description of the world today in regards to the power of information to control people, and its centrality in the global economy.
There are also virtual spaces described in the novel. Piercy writes about a world-wide Net, very similar to the internet, which is free and open to anyone. In her world there are also corporate and town Bases, very similar to the kind of massive databases that Google administers, which are closely guarded. Most people access the Net and Bases by way of “projection” in which electric wires connect computers to a port in the head of the person who wishes to jack into the system.
This is one thing that might have seemed likely in 1991, when Piercy wrote her novel, but now of course we live in a world where people communicate, and travel, virtually without wires using mobile devices. It seems likely that Piercy, were she writing her novel today, would envision wireless access to the Net and the Bases, by way of circuitry surgically implanted in people’s heads. Because that’s probably where we’re headed. (I’ll note that another science fiction author, Samuel Delany, in Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand—published in 1984—describes the kind of wireless access I mention above).
But in Piercy’s world, people do more than just cower under cover trying to survive and interface with technology. Piercy’s description of the various forms of entertainment on her ruined planet is also fully realized, and not too far removed from our entertainments today. Many people watch “stimmies,” which are three-dimensional and thus immersive stories. Stimmies are similar to virtual reality spaces already in existence which are accessed by way of virtual reality suits and helmets. An even more immersive form of stimmies are “spikes,” in which the “player” can actually interject him or herself into the action. These games are highly addictive and can lead to a situation in which the player gets lost in the game while his or her body starves to death. There are also 3-D holographic spaces to play in. These come in the form of “holos” or “virons” (you’ll recall that Gadi, in the novel, designs virons). These virons are also incorporated into stimmies and spikes. In Piercy’s world, nearly everyone can afford stimmies, but if they can’t there are also highly addictive hallucinogenic drugs which are affordable and available. There are also “flat films” which are like the films we see today. But there doesn’t not seem to be anything resembling television. Nor are there print newspapers, magazines, or books. All of these can be accessed in digital form on the Net.
The hard-science aspect of the novel also applies to the social sciences. Piercy seems a fairly accomplished amateur anthropologist in her novel. She describes with great detail (or “granularity”) the social and cultural institutions of different parts of her world, including the multis, the Glop, and egalitarian free towns like Tikva. Her explanation of the dystopian economics of the future Earth are particularly convincing. It would be interesting to read an economist’s take on Piercy’s dystopian economics. However, I would hope people at major corporations would steer clear of this novel, because I think they would learn too much how to control places and people in the event of a world disaster such as that described by Piercy.
I should add, on the subject of fictional anthropology, the role of Judaism in the book is quite unique. It’s not something that you would find in other science fiction novels. This futuristic Judaism, and Piercy’s description of the subculture of post-dystopia Jewish communities like Tikva and the one from which Nili comes from in Israel, is very well developed and quite plausible. This is true as well for the history of Judaism in the book. Roughly a third of the novel is set in Prague in the year 1600, featuring the Rabbi Judah Loew and the Golem, a legendary figure in Jewish history. The story of the Golem is legendary, but Piercy’s take on Jewish life in early modern Europe is quite accurate. It was certainly not an easy time or place to be Jewish.
Piercy is also a pretty decent political scientist, based one what we read in her novel. The corporate-based geopolitical power games she writes about are, for the most part, extensions of current political reality. They reveal Piercy’s political investments as well, since she clearly favors the more egalitarian democratic structures such as those in Tikva. Piercy was a progressive political activist before she was a novelist, and most of her novels show that influence. In this regard, the most prominent would be Vida, which is about a Weather Underground type activist living underground, and City of Light, City of Darkness which relates the events of the French Revolution through the perspective of the women who were involved. Woman on the Edge of Time also reflects Piercy’s leftist politics in her depiction of a future world that is quite similar to He, She, and It.
However, it is not as an anthropologist or a political activist that we read He, She, and It in a digital literature class. Rather, it is because she touches upon many of the themes, and the media, we discuss in our class. First of all, it’s important that He, She, and It is a book. I began the semester talking about the book as a form of technology. I hope you have read it with that in mind. When you do so, you see that there are some things about Piercy’s story that would not completely translate to a digital format. You also see that Piercy really knows how to use the technology of the book format to tell her story. And like any good novel in the format of a book, she knows how to use character and plot to immerse the reader in the story.
She also makes reading, particularly novels, a theme within her story. Remember that a big reason that Yod does not run amok like previous versions of the cyborg was that he was socialized by Malkah and Shira. An important component of this is his reading. First of all, he reads Malkah’s story, which is written for him. He reads a lot of other poetry and fiction. He explicitly reads novels in order to learn about the psychology of humans. Critics and historians of the novel would no doubt applaud this touch, since the novel—in English anyway—was a product of a new kind of human subjectivity, and tended to be highly psychological. One of the novels he reads to understand humans, and his human side, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (another reason why we read He, She, and It in this class). Yod reads Frankenstein after Gadi refers to it, and thinks himself monstrous. Shira disabuses him of this notion. She says: “You were not created out of some mad ambition of Avram’s to become a god. You’re not cobbled out of human garbage. You were created to protect a vulnerable and endangered community” (150). Besides this disavowal, it is clear that Piercy wants the reader to make connections between her cyborg and Shelley’s Creature. She also makes the strained relationship between Yod and his creator Avram at the center of her story. As you recall, this was also at the center of Shelley’s story, though it has been de-emphasized or removed from television and film versions.
Piercy’s novel is, as mentioned, is an immersive read, but it also describes with great accuracy the experience of technologically-enhanced immersion—which she calls “projection”—and the problems related to it. You may not remember, but Shira’s main area of expertise is on the psychology of projection, in particular the way that experience can be damaging to people. Much of the action in the novel occurs in the virtual world of projection. This includes a lot of action, some of it violent, and all of it believable to anyone who has played console video games.
What Piercy does really well is investigate the psychological, philosophical, and existential condition of the immersive virtual experience. Part of this is the way people play with identity while projected. For instance, Malkah plays around with gender while projected, taking on the virtual vesture of a man, and encourages Shira to play around with her online identity in similar ways. In the novel, shape-shifting is common online; Yod is particularly ingenious as a shape-shifter (and “chimeras,” which Malkah works on, are also forms of shape-shifting). Though in this class we aren’t really “projected,” we still deal with the existential issues of identity online—in the ways people might abuse the amorphous nature of identity (Mr. Bungle in the LambdaMOO), and the ways they might use it to create characters (such as in many of the fiction blogs and wikis, as well as faux Facebook and Twitter).
Finally, we read He, She, and It to get a better understanding of cyborgs. Piercy’s Yod is one of the better evocations of the cyborg in fiction. As a character, he’s very well-developed, believable, and sympathetic. But more importantly he dramatizes the hopes and fears of the cyborg, and particularly the uneasy balance between machine and embodied person. In the end, he realizes that as an experiment in creating a sentient weapon he is a failure because such an entity is an impossible contradiction. A weapon that can feel the pain he or she inflicts will never be an effective weapon, which is why Yod takes the drastic action of destroying himself, his creator, and all the documentation of how he came to be. No creatures should be subjected to such an existential dilemma.
Yod is not the only cyborg in the novel. Nili is also a cyborg, though more human than machine (Yod is arguably more machine than human). But just about everyone else in the novel is also a cyborg. In a technologically sophisticated world, such as that described in the novel, we are all cyborgs. Shira expresses this on a number of occasions in the novel, most eloquently in this passage when she responds to Yod after he suggests he is “unnatural”:
Yod, we’re all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney…. I couldn’t begin to survive without my personal base: I wouldn’t know who I was. We can’t go unaided into what we haven’t yet destroyed of “nature.” Without a wrap, without sec skins and filters, we’d perish. We’re all cyborgs, Yod. You’re just a purer form of what we’re all tending toward. (150)
Think about your own dependence on technology, such as whatever machine you’re using to read this. In this sense, Piercy’s future is now.
For your mid-term you should be familiar with the following genres, concepts, authors, and works.
digital literature genres:
book (as technology)
hypertext
digital poetry
interactive fiction
MOOs
concepts:
digital literature
interactivity
media (mediation)
remediation (transparent immediacy and hypermediacy)
immersion
authors:
Mary Shelley
Jay Clayton and William St. Clair
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin
N. Katherine Hayles (particularly the two articles I summarized)
Shelley Jackson (both as critic and author of Patchwork Girl)
George Landow
Jason Nelson
Stuart Moulthrop (both as critic as author of Pax)
Nick Montfort
Julian Dibble
Eric Sonstroem
readings:
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson
heliozoa.com (Jason Nelson’s poems)
Pax by Stuart Moulthrop
“A Rape in Cyberspace”
For this week’s team exercise, you will be visiting and playing in a MOO.
Choose one of the MOOs below. Follow the instructions. Have fun. Then answer the questions below.
Hogwarts MOO
http://moo.echoduet.net/address.php?id=29
Cybersphere (RPG MOO)
http://cs.vv.com/
Harper’s Tale MOO
http://www.harpers-tale.com/
Ghostwheel MOO
http://fazigu.org/~quinn/ghost/
Discussion Questions: (Please answer and email to me at byrnejo@umd.edu)
1. Does the MOO make an effort to define time and space for the user? How? Does this make the MOO more immersive?
2. Does the MOO offer interactivity? How? Does this make the MOO more immersive?
3. Does the MOO offer the user interactions with other users or groups? How? Does this make the MOO more immersive?
4. Does the MOO make an effort to make the user forget that he or she is on a computer (does it offer “transparent immediacy” as Bolter and Grusin define that term)? How?
5. Does the MOO demand “a willing suspension of disbelief” in order to get into the experience?
Roni Meunier
Hogwarts MOO
http://moo.echoduet.net/address.php?id=29
Alexander Marques
Cybersphere (RPG MOO)
http://cs.vv.com/
Kevin Mawyer
Harper’s Tale MOO
http://www.harpers-tale.com/
Sam Martin
Ghostwheel MOO
http://fazigu.org/~quinn/ghost
Joe Modeski
Phantasy World MOO
http://pworld.dyndns.org/index.php?page=home
Montfort begins his chapter on interactive fiction (IF) by citing its influence. Not only has IF influenced graphical computer and console games, but it was also a factor in the development of MUDS (multiple user domains or “dungeons”) and MOOS (MUD Object Oriented), both of which are virtual spaces in electronic environments in which multiple “players” can interact and develop their virtual spaces. We’ll be doing some work in a MOO this coming week, and the assigned readings will tell you more. IF has also been influential on computer-based Role Playing Games (RPGs) and internet-based Massive Role Playing Games (MRPGs).
Montfort also cites the role IF plays in actually teaching people how to use a computer, or a language, or many other possible pedogogical applications. IF, according to Montfort, “teaches two essential principles of computing: Try absolutely everything you can think of and save all the time.” Excellent advice, and not just for computer-learning! Outside of the small community of IF developers and players, I would think that the use of IF in educational environments (such as in our class) is the major use of IF.
Montfort also cites the influence of IF on more traditional fiction forms, such as short stories and novels. He cites one example, Jayne Loader’s story “Wild America,” which some critics see as a critique of the lack of interactivity in interactive fiction. Montfort quickly dismisses this critique but I think, based on our experience with IF, that it has some basis and may in fact be part of the relative unpopularity of this form. Graphical computer and console games seem to offer the “player” a lot more freedom than IF does.
Montfort spends some time dealing with the future of IF—or rather, with the bad predictions others have made. Gary McGath, Montfort notes, predicted that IF would become more realistic and would allow for simultaneous “game play,” neither of which has panned out in IF. However, it has panned out in graphical computer/console games, which Montfort doesn’t mention. Could it be that the lack of IF development is due to the development of graphical games? Why work so hard to create this kind of functionality in a text-based system when you can get it in your graphical computer games?
On this issue, and many others we’ve looked at in this class, the competition between the verbal (textual) and the visual (graphical) has been fierce, with the text-based form generally forced to limit itself to those things that text does best, such as develop intricate plots and explore character motivation. This means that we will probably see IF becoming more, rather than less, literary, since it can’t compete with the visual stimulation gained from games that highlight the visual. For Montfort, this is part of the “broader question of whether, in the future, the computer will be seen by the general reading population as a form of potential literature or as one that is capable of providing the sorts of experiences that literary readers value.”
In asking why IF continues to be developed, Montfort answers: “to amuse the initiated.” In doing so, he acknowledges that this amusement might be irrational, even pathological, though he also has hopes that IF might also “be created because of metaphysical or political concerns, to explore the relationship between people and computers or between people and texts, to describe utopian as well as dystopian worlds, and to express or challenge cultural notions.” But the insularity of many IF gamers poses as challenge to this hope. So too the fact that IF is not, and probably never will be, marketable. This isn’t necessarily a problem, according to Montfort. Poetry is another art form that doesn’t pay, but still is viable in our culture. IF might achieve the same status. (Of course, poetry is not as labor-intensive as IF is, which requires not only quite a bit of computer savvy to play, but also programming chops for IF developers).
A larger problem, according to Montfort, may be that there is still (and may always be) a “cultural bias against the computer as a literary medium.” He explains further: “Common preconceptions about what a computer game is and the common way in which such games are dismissed make it harder to accept the idea of computer literature.” I question this assertion. I think people have problems not with computer-based literature, but with computer-based literature that calls itself a game. That is, if we approach IF as a game, we expect to be entertained, to have fun, and when this doesn’t happen, as with other games, we declare that IF is a failure. But if we approach IF as an educational or academic practice; as a form, like poetry, that is not economically viable but still valuable as art; or even as a puzzle (as cognitive exercise), we realize that IF still has a lot to offer.
In his conclusion, Montfort seems to be leaning in this direction. He writes: “Interactive fiction has already offered vital and relevant worlds to fathom, riddles that challenge our assumptions, and machines that accept and produce texts so as to engage us with both their outputs and their workings….not only for fun but as a form that can offer transforming and profound experiences.” To which I only add, forget about the fun. IF can be valuable even if it doesn’t entertain us, and insisting it’s fun only makes it less so.
Digital poetry is known by various names such as computer poetry, cyberpoetry, electronic poetry, and e-poetry.
This is a good working definition of digital poetry:
“creative, experimental, playful and critical language art involving programming, multimedia, animation, interactivity, and net communication” (Block, Heibach, Wenz, 2004)
There are many types of digital poetry, but the following are the most common:
Unlike digital prose, digital poetry is much more likely to utilize multimedia elements such as sound and images.
Digital poetry has a different tradition than digital prose. In general, digital poetry has advanced most in Europe where there were non-digital artistic traditions in place to inspire digital poets.
On the other hand, digital prose (such as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl) has generally been the form of choice for those who speak and write in English.
Two European art movements have been important in the development of digital poetry. They are:
Dada is “an early twentieth century art movement which ridiculed contemporary culture and traditional art forms. The movement was formed to prove the bankruptcy of existing style of artistic expression rather than to promote a particular style itself. It was born as a consequence of the collapse during World War I of social and moral values which had developed to that time. Dada artists produced works which were nihilistic or reflected a cynical attitude toward social values, and, at the same time, irrational—absurd and playful, emotive and intuitive, and often cryptic. Less a style than a zeitgeist, Dadaists typically produced art objects in unconventional forms produced by unconventional methods. Several artists employed the chance results of accident as a means of production, for instance. Literally, the word dada means several things in several languages: it’s French for “hobbyhorse” and Slavic for “yes yes.” Some authorities say that the name Dada is a nonsensical word chosen at random from a dictionary.” http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/d/dada.html
Some Dada poets:
Oulipo is the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature.
It consists of a group of European writers and mathematicians who collaborate on artistic projects. The most famous members are Raymond Queneau (poetry) and Georges Perec (prose).
Oulipo works are examples of constrained writing in which rules or conditions are imposed on the writer.
Another example:
http://www.nous.org.uk/oulipo.html (S+7 method)
Computer Poetry
“Is generated by computer algorithm, arranged as a sequence of words, or signs and symbols according to a programming code.” (Christopher Funkhouser)
“The creative spirit and impetus to combine randomness with order through intricate, technical art alters the human relationship with language. Cyborgian poetry, works co-created by humans and digital machinery, emerged from these experiments.” (Christopher Funkhouser)
Algorithms
Sets of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.
Computers could not work without algorithm. When you tell your computer to do something, at least one algorithm is at work—usually many more than one.
For a more prosaic and less technical example of an algorithm is a cooking recipe.
Computer Poetry: Examples
Raymond Queneu: One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets (Cent mille milliards de poèmes) (digitized version)
http://www.growndodo.com/wordplay/oulipo/10%5E14sonnets.html
Neil Hennesy: “The Jabberwocky Engine”
http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/winter2004/jabber/
Graphic Poetry
This kind of poetry emphasizes the visual aspects of language at least as much as the verbal. It is based on “a poetry of sight, overtly conscious of its look, sited on and incited by computers. . . . Digital poets began to work with prosody that was literally in motion.” (Christopher Funkhouser)
“Digitally rendered poems portray at least three different traits: words are arranged into literal shapes; words show patterns that represent dispersal or displacement of language; or words are combined with images (as in a collage).” (Christopher Funkhouser)
Graphic Poetry: Examples
Thomas Swiss: “Genius”
http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/summer2001/genius/genius.html
Jason E. Lewis: “Nine”
http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/fall2003/nine/nine.htm
Hypertext Poetry
Christopher Funkhouser notes that theorist Michael Joyce classifies hypertext into two distinct categories: “constructive” and “exploratory“
Hypertext Poetry
According to Funkhouser, essentially four types of hypertext poems have been designed:
Hypertext Poetry: Examples
Peter Howard: “Midwinter Fair”
http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/midwin/midwintr.htm
Mary Hedges: “Harddrive Human”
http://www.mauvezone.screaming.net/pages/hypertext%20poetry.htm
According to Bolter and Grusin, immersion is a key aspect of remediation. They write:
Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. Both of these moves are strategies of remediation. (Bolter and Grusin 53).
Bolter and Grusin call these two aspects of remediation “transparent immediacy” and “hypermediacy.” That is, a sense of mental or imaginative immersion is created by cloaking media and multiplying media.
While transparent immediacy is more properly immersive, hypermediacy can also bring you into the imaginative world of the digital literary work. (Unfortunately, Bolter and Grusin do no make this clear.)
An example of transparent immediacy: Playing an interactive fiction game and forgetting that you are in fact reading and writing on a computer.
An example of hypermediacy: Reading a digital poem by Jason Nelson and getting drawn into the work by the multimedia aspects of the work.
Digital immersion requires what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “a willing suspension of disbelief.” If we are willing to suspend our critical judgment, to give our imagination free rein, we can enter and remain in virtual space.
Digital immersion, then, is a sense of being mentally planted in a virtual space. We project ourselves into an immersive world, and in so doing creating an out-of-body experience that allows us to re-create ourselves in a form that works within that world—or in a way we’ve always wanted to be perceived.
It is important to note that this sense of immersion is not new in literature. Using an engaging narrative, and characters that the reader can easily identify with, writers have always created virtual spaces in which the reader might be immersed. Novels have from the beginning been associated with this effect, even when they were just words on the page.
All you need is a well-developed imagination, to go with narrative and characters, to create a sense of immersion in a story-world.
In terms of digital immersion, two additional things are needed:
1. multimedia (textual, graphical, aural)
2. interactivity (choices for the reader)
Multimedia
For some people, using multiple forms of media (multimedia) can actually be a distraction: that is, they only need, and want, words to create a sense of immersion. This is somewhat akin to the person who needs to read the book before seeing the film adaptation, because otherwise all they will imagine when they read the book is scenes from the film.
But for the most part, for most people today familiar with the digital world, multimedia enhances the sense of immersion, by engaging more of our senses than just the visual, or engaging our visual sense in different ways (e.g. reading, and looking at images).
We’ve encountered any number of works in this class in which multimedia was incorporated into the reading experience, enhancing immersion. To cite just one example, there is Stuart Moulthrop’s Pax. All of this combined created a sense of immersion in the work, and a larger sense of engagement.
Interactivity
Interactivity also enhances our sense of immersion; if we are active in a virtual space, rather than just reading words, the experience tends to be more “real” for us, and thus more immersive. In this way, we can see that though multimedia and interactivity are different and discrete criteria for digital literature, they often work in conjunction to create or supplement a certain effect—in this case, a sense of immersion.
Interactive fiction “games” (IF) are immersive in some of the ways described above. In games like “Dreamhold” we read descriptions, which engages our imagination, thus drawing us into the world of the game. Interaction takes us to the next level, bringing us into the world through our action, making us co-authors of the work and the world virtually created. Given agency, given power, within an imaginative world, we tend to become more involved.
Most of the IF we encountered in class was purely textual, so multimedia was not as much a factor; but imagination and interaction made up for this lack—that and the fact that IF works resemble games, something most of us wish to invest in, willingly suspending our disbelief in order to be part of a virtual space in which we have some say, and can play.
Group Engagement
The MOO, a networked virtual space, offers an even more immersive experience, even though, for technical reasons, the multimedia aspect is mostly missing. Eric Sonstroem, “co-author” of the FrankenMOO, says that networked virtual spaces like the MOO
offer a strange new method of textual practice that fluently blurs the lines between global and individual communication, and the lines between transient and permanent textual objects; they can be radically and efficiently interactive in ways that printed text cannot; they can provide instantaneous two-way, multi-way, or truly dialogical communication. (“Revolution” 149).
The MOO offers a level of interaction—and immersion—that IF does not: namely, interaction with other “players.” Interacting with others is something we do in the “real world,” it is something we associate with reality, so importing it into the virtual space makes it more real, and more inviting.
Sometimes this immersion is too much in the MOO; it threatens our sense of self, and leaves us open to the predations of other “players,” acting under the cover of an anonymous avatar.
This danger was described in Julian Dibble’s “A Rape in Cyberspace,” which describes a cruel and vicious attack perpetrated in a MOO very much like the one our class spent time in. The victims of this attack took it very personally; psychologically, they were violated because psychologically they were immersed in the MOO, which they thought was a safe, egalitarian virtual space. It turns out this was not so, much to their grief.
To summarize, immersion has always been part of the literary experience; indeed, pre-literature story tellers (like Homer) used various techniques to involve the listeners in the virtual story-world they were describing.
Authors of digital works draw upon similar techniques, but have a lot more tools and effects at their disposal. They can use multimedia (images and sounds), interactivity, and group engagement with the digital work to create a sense of immersion in a virtual world.
This sense of immersion is generally a much-desired aspect of digital literature, though it can be abused, and lead to a sense of loss of self—even to the point where the distinction between the technology and us is lost, making us into what some call cyborgs. More on that subject in the weeks to come.
Works Cited:
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Sonstroem, Eric. “Do You Really Want a Revolution? CyberTheory Meets Real-Life Pedagogical Practice in FrankenMOO and the Conventional Literature Classroom.” College Literature 33.3 (Summer 2006).
N. Katherine Hayle’s article, “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Important of Media-Specific Analysis,” is, as you now know, a LONG article for a mostly academic audience. That is, it’s pretty hard going for college undergrads. Nonetheless, she makes a lot of points that are pertinent to what we’ve been doing in ENGL278W, and has some helpful insights into Patchwork Girl. I will try to summarize her article in this post.
First of all, Hayles makes a point that some of our other authors have made: we are so used to books that we forget how books work as media, or as a form of reading technology—and how this technology impacts the study of literature. Digitization of books has actually helped us see how books work as technology, and how technology, in turn, affects the writing and reading of digital objects. This is what she calls “media-specific analysis,” which is something we’ve been doing since day one: that is, looking at how digital objects work as reading technology.
Using media-specific analysis, Hayles attempts to look at how hypertext works as a literary medium. I will here summarize her most pertinent points, compressing her eight points into three.
1. Electronic hypertexts are mutable and transformable, generated through fragmentation and recombination. Unlike print, which is fixed on the page, electronic hypertexts change, they can be changed, they are unstable, they are adaptable. In digitizing the work, we take it apart; in reading the work, we put it back together. The computer helps us do this.
2. Digital hypertexts have depth and operate in three dimensions, and offer to the reader spaces to navigate. They are immersive textual environments which makes them “intrinsically more involved with issues of mapping and navigation than are most print texts” (Par. 11). Sometimes the sense of immersion is thwarted by too many mapping and navigational possibilities.
3. Digital hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, which leads to the development of what Hayles calls “cyborg reading practices.” The gist of this point is that we need computers to read digital hypertexts; they are essential to, and affect, the reading of these texts; and we adapt ourselves to them. This makes us, in a sense, cyborgs—part human, part machine.
After making these points, Hayles goes into the history of copyright/intellectual property. Using the scholarship of Mark Rose, she makes the point that in the eighteenth century, the way we looked at literature changed. In order to secure copyright, the literary work had to be abstracted, made into an “immaterial intellectual property,” a work of originality (something the AUTHOR could be paid for), which meant that the economic forces and the technologies that created the work had to be hidden, made less prominent. Hayles writes: “The erasure of the economic networks that produced the books went along with the erasure of the technologies of production,” and the literary work as a form of reading technology (Par. 21).
The reason all this is important, in the context of Patchwork Girl, is that Shelley Jackson works against all that, highlighting the fact that with digital literature it has to all be re-negotiated. Patchwork Girl is, in effect, a collaborative work in which we really don’t know who the author is, because the reader takes on so much of the work of the author. The author, like most of her characters and her narrative, is a patchwork of different things.
In addition to analyzing Patchwork Girl using the ideas above, Hayles actually does a pretty good job describing the different sections of Jackson’s work. I’ll excerpt her analysis here:
Like the female monster’s body, the body of this hypertext is also seamed and ruptured, comprised of disparate parts with extensive links between them. The main components of the hypertextual corpus are “body of text,” containing the female monster’s narration and theoretical speculations on hypertextual and human bodies; “graveyard,” where the stories of the creatures whose parts were used to make the female monster are told; “story,” in which are inscribed excerpts from the relevant passages in Frankenstein along with the monster’s later adventures; “journal,” the putative journal of Mary Shelley, where she records her interactions with the female monster; and “crazy quilt,” a section containing excerpts from Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, as well as reinscriptions from other parts of the text. (Par. 23)
Later in the article Hayles describes the “phrenology” section, which is accessible through the “her” section. Hayles writes:
Showing a massive head in profile, “phenology” displays the brain partitioned by lines into a crazy quilt of women’s names and enigmatic phrases. When we click on the names, we are taken to lexias telling the women’s stories form whose parts the monster was assembled; clicking on the phrases takes us to lexias that meditate on the nature of “her” multiple subjectivities. Thus we enter these textual blocks through a bodily image, implying that the text lies within the represented body. (Par. 27).
So that’s what Shelley Jackson was up to!
The rest of Hayles’s reading of Patchwork Girl is well worth consulting in trying to understand what Jackson is trying to accomplish. I’ll try to summarize her main points.
First of all, the Monster is not the only patchwork creature (collage, assemblage) in Jackson’s text. The hypertext, of course, is a patchwork; the narrative or plot is a patchwork; ALL the characters are patchworks; the author is a patchwork (including machine, and readers). The reader is a patchwork as well; like the author, the reader is also part machine, and author. The body is a patchwork, consciousness is a patchwork, memory is a patchwork. All of this reflects the postmodern idea that we are all of us networks of disparate thoughts, and also disparate people (those who conceived and brought us into the world, but also all those who have influenced us in some way).
This returns us to Hayles’s point about our being cyborgs, combinations of bodies and machines, the product of many different kinds of networks. I intimated in class that this is another reason that readers have trouble with Patchwork Girl: the idea that we are, in Hayle’s words, “vapor-ware,” something disparate and dissipated, with no real central core of identity. This is pretty scary, an ego-less state of being in which our very existence, particularly of subjectivity or individuality, seems to be constantly flickering like objects of a computer screen. The upside is that, when we can get our minds wrapped around that, we’re pretty darn close to becoming enlightened (in a buddhist sense)!
