Christian’s Possession

Donna Leishman’s “Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw” is inspired by real historical facts. Christian, daughter of John Shaw (Land of Bargarran, Erskine ), as Leishman explains somewhere, has fallen victim to what is one of the most notorious cases of demonic possession in Scotland. She points out that Christian’s case implicated “local people” as her “tormentors.” Among them seven, three men and four women, were executed to death in Gallow Green in Paisley on charges of witchcraft. Soon after these events took place however people realized that they had “overreacted to nothing more than the psychotic fantasies of a young girl.”

On the whole, the historical facts are fused with suggestiveness. This leaves one wondering on the inherent conceptual structure of the text. In a sense, its linearity is displaced, thus the reader/viewer has to know something about the story before going through the sophisticated unfolding of the text. This may not be the case with “RedRidinghood” (Leishman’s Master thesis) as the audience is well-acquainted with the story.

The elegant and hand-made images seem unwilling to let go of established referents. As one progresses through the text though, s/he is forced to admit that they build together an abstract concept of temporality, capable of very specific applications to historical circumstances. In a way, this shifts the focus from trying to understand what the text is about into testing the audience’s active involvement and meditating on his/her understanding of the real.

hybrid

"Lexia and perplexia" plays with the image as well as the language creating a hybrid literature consisted of both human and electronic elements.
 The text itself is a combination of this two elements, but even more interesting is the image that inserts a picture of an eye into the electronic field as if it suggests that the person when sitting in front of the screen becomes only those eyes / or head sometimes/ while the rest of the body virtualy dissapeares because of its passivity and non-importance.. It becomes an unnecessarily limb that can and is easily cut of / from the picture/. I also noticed the mirror efect that suggests the paralel world we are living in as we enter the field of electronics- internet. . It is kind of scary to think how addicted we are of that identity and how libmless we are if we decide to rebel .. 
So sweet the world is where travelling is in the eyes and minds , so perfect it becomes.. so inhuman.
 

"Faith"

Hello! My name is Flutur and I am following the electronic literature blog remotely. Robert Kendall’s “Faith” is a visual poem, as Ana reminds, but also a kinetic one.

The independent movement of the colored lexical units along the white screen is seminal, because it helps to establish and expand the text. Its expansion, especially, takes place in the form of a rhetorical release - most of the predicates are cut apart, most of the copulas are semantically displaced, and the lines and sentences constantly fragmented, in the end favoring the isolation of the single word.

Grammatical transfers take place thus producing the counter-effect of the traditional ‘single transcendental principle’. It announces an inconsistency between the destabilizing effects of the rhetoric as it is presupposed by the title of the poem, “Faith,” and the metaphorical compromise that the reader has to deal with in going through the poem.

The sentences care for a gravitational field which can be monitored as they marshal one another. At the end, however, they seem to violate the materiality of the language itself and adopt specific poetical postures. As the title of the poem falls down the page, the reader/viewer understands that there is a fundamental change in tone from the assertion of transcendence in the beginning of the poem to the acknowledgment of negation and hence absence and death at the end.

Oulipoems

Oulipoems are interactive poems where interactor can create poems. In „Sundays in the park“he can change meaning of the words by clicking on them. The words collide in new ones or group of words tears itself on smaller parts, but group still sounds the same. During all that time, two unsynchronized voices are reading the default words. I had fun reading „Morningside Vector Space“because it showed the same text through eyes of different types of people. Except that one and „The muse“all other poems are connected with war theme, but they don't have the same features. „ No War“ has no text, except those two words. It is a sound poem. „Headline news“is a two dimensional Rubik's cube where interactor is trying to make sentence in rows and in columns. In „Poggle“interactor is trying to compose a poem from phrases that are offered to him in limited time. „The electronic muse“also offers interactor to create his own poem, but here is offered whole sentences in many different styles, such as Shakespeare’s. I liked „Oulipoems“because everything is based on Oulipo which combines poetry and mathematics. Words are random, but they follow a certain pattern.

text and image

For today's discussion of words and image, it will be useful to refer to Picture Theory by WTJ Mitchell. He distinguishes between three ways in which image and text can interrelate, each signified by a different typographic convention. "Image/text," with a slash, designates "the problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation." In other words, if the image and text seem to point in different or even opposite directions, the slash indicates the tension between them. On the other hand, if the image and text are related and work in the same direction, Mitchell uses the term image~text, with a hypthen between them. Then "imagetext" , written as a single word, indicates "composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text " (89). Here the lack of space between the two terms indicate that they have fused, creating a single inextricably combined effect. I hope these terms will be useful in discussing the different effects of the works we will be exploring today.

faith 4 nippon & betty

hi there,
sorry for posting so late (or so early).
i liked the poem faith because of all that colour not just colour of the text but all the colour talked about. it feels like tyrany of the visual, and if not tyrany then definitely domination of it. robert kendall talks about red, neon, sunny, black and as well its the coulr of the letters used. almost no interaction apart from `turning` the page over gives the reader littel or no control over the text. so I`ll just jump (or take a leap) to YoungHaeChang`s LastDay to say a few words about it. LastDay offers no interaction besides turning on the work or turning it off. he`s using two-colur style by choice so he offers us (as you said) modernist aesthetics as well as speed and need of progressing forward. Nippon likewise starts with counting down like movies used to start so it can prepare you and give you feeling of performing (something) to a reader of the text/veiwer of the picture.. colures offered like black&white or red&white give us most simple and at the same time most contrasted semple. union of sound and picture, rhythmic change of frames pull us in - in a search of contemplation- audiovisual heaven for some, and for some other maybe even torture. cabaretical, jazzical music in Nippon agrees with colour red and the text which is talking about fun for men outside his house and other from hios wife, red is considered as coulour of forbidden fruit, easy woman and cabaret. does this make any sence? see you all soon.
asp (ana)

Stir Fry Texts

Stir Fry Texts is highly political hypertext about authorship, economy and the capitalist society in general. Through the appropriate tool of word generation, the authors are questioning the need for copyrights. Hypertext in this specific case allows a demonstration of arbitrariness of words and letters. If we do not posses the letters that we are using, why do we insist on making money from them? This hypertext shows how words and ideas can be (easily?) created, not for the economic reason, but for pure fun, the need for artistic expression or something else.

raising heads

"The Last Day of Betty Nkomo" combines the visual effect with the sound but in a way that the raw meaning of the simple words not only surves as an analogy to the raw reality and a simplicity of the world Betty is living and dying in, but also it penetrates in almoust a hypnotic and violent way to the readers counsciousness. The reader can not interfere in the poem, but only sit and absorbe. The most important component of this e-poem is the background story  that reaches out across the whole world into a completely different world , a world of high possibilities and low awarenes, so different from the Bettys one.  
That is why it sings, screams and flashes before it dissapeares in a moment, a glimpse, in a half of a sentence..
To be awaken and to raise our heads as she raises hers for seeing someone she cares about..
 She dies then, but in that moment as the poem ends and we see an unfinished sentence, unfinished cycle
and the black screen along with the silence, we became more than spectatores, observers and in that moment the distance between Betty and the reader dissapeares and the forgotten people of the forgotten world get a glimpse of hope we'll remember..

Lexia to Perplexia

In Lexia to Perplexia the boundary between artificial and real life is fading, human and computer technologies merge (which is specifically visible in a variety of language coinages) and the information seems to flow through a mutation/transformation/the cybernetic circuit of the two.

The Examples of Croatian Electronic Literature

Kata Mijatović: Mreža snova
http://www.g-mk.hr/online/dreams/
Andreja Kulunčić: Razmišljanje kretanjem, kretanje razmišljanjem: http://www.andreja.org/rk-kr/index.html

And the additional work that you have to read for tomorrow:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/memmott__lexia_to_perplexia.html

one woman, one question

How can we know wich electronic literature is good/ or not ( wich are the criterions / or example for bad electronic literature) ?

is universe computational?

Although there is a certain code (neither in complete control nor out of control) which must be followed, it feels as if e-lit gives even more power to the reader, underlining random behaviour and multiagent interactions so that the meaning is given by the process of analysis, analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where: 'What we observe is not nature (text in this sense) itself, but nature/text exposed to our method of questioning.' The fact is that the outcome of an observation/interpretation depends upon the interest and the perspective of the observer, which showed that even in the physical sciences the classical distinction between subject and object was not tenable any longer. Instead of such a distinction—which had been based upon the Cartesian partition of the observable world—there is now the awareness of a high degree of connectedness and even interdependence between subject and object, as prof. Hayles stated 'a complexity', 'recursive feedback loops between humans and intelligent machines dynamically interconnecting', it became clearly evident that the act of observing actually influenced the result of the observation (quantum mechanics). This new view of the natural sciences, the thought that the selective nature of the observation had already interpretative qualities, has simultaneously appeared in the humanities and shaken historical undertakings in particular, for as Hayden White acknowledged 'we storify'... As prof. Hayles mentioned, Daniel Dennett’s work supports this idea of our brains multitasking, performing emergent complexities, overlaping processes that represent human consciousness. Dennett also mentions the hypothesis that there is an Orwellian mechanism in the brain, a revisionist historian of sorts who notices that the unvarnished history in this instance doesn’t make enough sense, so he interprets the brute events by making up a narrative about the intervening passage, and installs this history in the memory library for all future reference. Since this mechanism works fast, within a fraction of a second, the amount of time it takes to frame a verbal report of what one has experienced and the record one relies on, which is stored in the library of memory, is already contaminated. A perfect example of this is Girls' Day Out whith its 'shards' from the papers and 'nothing to see' except for the 'windtorn field' above the layers of hidden past/present/future (reminds me of Derrida's 'cinder'—remains of sth but non-existant) or the 'coiling and uncoiling' in The Jew's Daughter, of the text, words, narrators, actions ('haltless'—walking like 'Qlippoth, the Shells of the Dead' (Pynchon) which eventually halt and then resume again), leaving trails: 'scarf, wallet, or glove'... From Dennett's perspective all this could be a distraction of some kind, even a subterranean memory of some other event/person/detail that contaminates our memory in general. The “historical fact” has transformed thanks to the contamination of memory that came maybe one second after the event in question. The characters end up having false memories of their actual “real” experience. The subject’s point of view is spatially and temporally smeared...

10:01

Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie are authors of dynamic "10:01". It can be read in different ways -  one can choose to read characters' storys by clicking on each figure if he is interested in specific character, or he can follow plot clicking on timeline on the bottom of the page. But the timeline isn't linear, it is divided in 10 different colors, who are assoretd lineary, through two rows.  I liked it because of that timeline and I found the characters' stories interesting.  Snoring sound gives everything a realistic tone and two characters who are on a date are interesting to follow. We can see what they are thinking about the same actions and how their date is going to end very soon.

Dreamaphage

Jason Nelson's Dreamaphage impressed me with it's ambiguity. It is a hypertext that, at the same time depends on mechanical (old fashioned) way of scrolling through text, and on the other side, consists of, computer enabled hypertext in digital environment. It is this kind of amalgam that, in my view, clearly represents the position of literature today. Literature cannot (and should not) exclude the Other, whether it is the electronic that excludes the traditional print, or the other way around.
Furthermore, I believe that the angrybovinedisease clearly points to the premise that everything is interconnected, the premise that was explored throughout the science-fiction movement (most notably in cyberpunk), and the other various representations in popular culture. Professor Katarina Peovic Vukovic noted that this is a kind of literature that is not easily read. I must agree. Not only that the pictures and sounds often serve as a distraction, but the flickering signifier is frequently "random", causing the burst of unexpected motion on our display.

The Jew Daughter

Judd Morrissey's text The Jew Daughter appeared to me as the embodiment of the professor Hayles concept of “flickering signifiers” (from the book How We Become Posthuman). The text appears like the flickering image that the reader must control. That also reminded me of the warning of theoretician Espen Aarseth that reading the cybertext is not an easy task. Reader must carefully explore textual spaces (that is why Aarseth compared this exploration to exploration of labyrinth). Hypertextual reading is not like free floating through the text, as it is often though (more like hard work – as we today experienced). As in case of The Jew Daughter – reader must control that flickering text that could easily change without readers will. (As Bojana noticed sometime it is not so easy, the meaning of the text depends on the order of the textual sequences).

Hello everybody! Moram otici doma po rjecnik jer ne mogu bez njega nista napisati!

My first blog post also. Very exciting experience :) Interesting lecture today! More people should be included from cultural studies. My favorite story is 10:01 ad I will probably read it as soon as I can and write something about it.

Hypertextual mind

This hypertextual works makes me worried about the future of linear literature ;)

Infornography

Hello everybody. This is my first blog post, although I use Internet very often. I guess this means that I broke the ice, so feel free to expect daily posts :-)...
I name this post Informa-tron because it is the name of my future newspaper.
That's all for now. You can expect posts in Informa-tron about computer breaktroughs, body, cyborgs and Rock 'n' Roll :-)

Bye.

hello, its ana (asp).
i dont know should we comment the the literary text just now or when the session ends?
i kinda liked the first text best GirlsDayOut because of the game of letters and inversion of the collor; like when the first text appeared in white letters and black backround, and the second (from the article) vice versa, and how everything can go both ways (at least). the name and start of the storey seems so harmless and the ending is so harmfull..
and to the text in the cinema i will pay some more attention because its wery interesting, i like that beckround of the caracters..
thats all 4 now
asp

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog on electronic literature! This blog is meant to be a place where we can all post our thoughts about the electronic literature we are reading, respond to the ideas that we have, and share comments, responses, reactions, and insights. I would like each of us to post at least once each day on one of the texts assigned for that day. You can give your reactions, point out features you liked or did not like, comment on the significance of the interface, give interpretations of one or more features of the text, or whatever you like. To be successful, the blog must be used. Nothing is more forlorn than an empty languishing blog, so let us make ours lively and popoulated! Looking forward to hearing from you all. Kate Hayles