There's a good discussion over at George's about print, information technology, and materiality (a word that's gotten a lot of play lately).
While I greatly sympathize with a number of recent efforts to recuperate an appreciation of "materiality" in new media studies, and am hardly blameless myself in that regard, my sense is that it now may be time to set the m-word aside, at least for a while, and work toward some new language that both captures and refines what the word contributed, while dispensing with its analog baggage. As Manovich points out, digital media are numeric and programmable, and this really is fundamentally different from prior forms of information technology. Any construction of materiality for digital media must, it seems to me, take their numeric/symbolic pedigree into account.
Spent some time over at the Iowa Review Web this evening, reading a cluster of material by and about Joe Tabbi, who I think of as one of the best critics around these days. I first got to know Joe by writing for his electronic book review, which has since evolved into pretty much the most interesting space on the Web for critical discussion of new media and electronic literature. His new book, on systems theory and postmodern writing, is called Cognitive Fictions. No one I know of is more widely versed in fiction, science, music, and the twentieth century avant garde. If a bright undergraduate told me she wanted to study contemporary literature, I wouldn't hesitate to send her to UIC to work with Joe.
Tabbi says:
Until the institutions, technologies, codes, and constraints can be forgotten, however, as the conventions supporting print were forgotten with the book's naturalization, narrative's emergence is unlikely in new media environments. Designwriting, codework, the hypertextual embedding of texts within texts still require, of readers, cautious collaborations with systems designed to keep 'us' out. It's the achievement of first-generation Web fictions to show us the extent of that exclusion, the paucity of a life lived with files. These are embodied fictions, to be sure, but such an embodiment ravages consciousness by bringing its material supports to the surface.
When the only sign of embodiment is the wrinkled brow, that's when we'll have Web literature worthy of the name.
I don't entirely agree with that--it seems to slip too comfortably back into media transparency--but taken in context (it's the conclusion of the "Overwriting" piece) it's easily of the most eloquent and historically aware things I've read in a while.
Adrian Miles has a pretty insightful post sketching some reasons why television (and not cinema) might be the most apt mirror site for new media. Adrian doesn't mention Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, but the juxtaposition of that book's arguments about cinema with Adrian's points about televisual aesthetics is quite suggestive.
Just returned from the American Film Institute's newly opened Silver Theatre, a 10-minute walk from us here in downtown Silver Spring, where Kari and I saw Holiday (1938) on the big screen, a delightful bit of whimsy starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. The Silver Theatre is splendid, and it's a priceless (if pricey) addition to the neighborhood. One of my best memories of living in downtown Lexington, Kentucky, was going to the Kentucky Theater just minutes from my door; we're both looking forward to the movie-going in our future.
Apropos of my previous post, preservation was much on my mind, not only because we're lucky to have a print for this 1938 classic (we've lost as many as half the American feature films made before 1950), but also because the building itself is an ambitious restoration of the theatre's Art Deco architecture and design (though some features, such as the original pattern for the tilework in the foyer, remain lost). On the walk up Kari reminded me that the history of textual studies teaches us that preservation also always entails loss; all of our archives and repositories are soaked in the waters of Lethe, is how she put it. Loss and forgetting, says Kari, are essential to the art of memory (witness the tragedy of Borges's Funes the Memorius); not for nothing, I would add, did Norbert Wiener celebrate the computer's ability to discard informaton efficiently.
Of course none of this offsets the awfulness of losing the complete holdings of the Museum of Antiquities in Iraq. There's a report now too that the National Library, also in Baghdad, has been looted and burned.
e(X)literature: Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination of Electronic Literature. University of California, Santa Barbara, April 3-5 2003. Sponsored by the University of California Digital Cultures project and the Electronic Literature Organization.
This was in many ways a perfect meeting, from the size (40-50 attendees at the public sessions, around 20 at the planning meeting), to the setting (seaside Santa Barbara), to the mix of people present (writers/artists, critics and theorists, technologists, publishers and editors, legal experts). Kudos to all who helped organize: Bill Warner at UCSB, Jeff Ballowe and Margie Luesebrink for the ELO. It was also in many ways the meeting I've dreamed of attending ever since first getting interested in electronic literature around 1994 or so; a meeting where formalism in its various guises (from Landow's post-structuralism to Aarseth's cybertext) gave way to serious and sustained attention to electronic texts as texts--that is, as artifacts with material and temporal trajectories.
To some extent this was preordained, given the meeting's focus on archiving and preservation, but the hidden histories of these electronic objects manifested themselves over and over in surprising ways, as when Geert Lovink, having just spoken to Olia Lialina (not present), corrected a description of the audio in "My boyfriend came back from the war" that had been a crucial marker in the discussions early on. There was a sense that these minute particulars really mattered, and an urgency about seeing the collective memory in the room (and in the community) harnessed and harvested.
On the first day, Jamie Boyle kicked things off with a rousing talk entitled "The Opposite of Property." It was my first good introduction to the Creative Commons project, and he made me a believer. (Sidenote: MT supports the Creative Commons licensing structure, but when I attempted to activate a license for this blog it seems to have fizzled. Anyone know what might have gone wrong?) In any case, the "Get Creative" video is a great place to start. Stewart Brand also keynoted on the first day, spoke a bit about his Long Now and Rosetta Project, and then gave a fairly detailed overview of the Library of Congress's federally funded Digital Preservation initiative.
Other speakers on the first day included Margie Luesebrink (who reminded us of what we were doing and why it mattered), Alan Divack and Howard Besser (who made the problems seem soluable), Julia Flanders and Merrilee Proffit (representing emerging standards such as TEI and METS), and Joe Tabbi (representing ebr).
Still on the first day, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort walked the audience through their New Media Reader CD. The editorial issues were often illuminating: for example, the Eliza emulation they included is actually far from authentic, for the original program returned its output via teleprinter; thus a truly faithful documentary representation of Eliza in its original state might have been a facsimile of a spindled sheet of printout.
The first day concluded with a stunning performance featuring new work from Stephanie Strickland, Lisa Jevbratt, Melanie Weins, the Iowa Review Web, and Jason Nelson.
The centerpiece of the second day were the presentations by the technology panel, introduced by remarks from Alan Liu underscoring the lexical convergence between the humanities and high-tech: mutual dependance on keywords such as interpretation, emulation, and representaton. Specifics of PAD's strategy, which will rely on a layered approach consisting of emulators and interpreters, XML and metadata, and other forms of documentation (screenshots, interviews, bibliography and citation standards, source code, etc.) will emerge publicly over the coming months (watch this space) and so I will not go into further detail here.
Also on the second day: my own talk on analytical and descriptive bibliography (see below); a thoughtful meditation by Geoff Bowker on archives and cultural memory; and a copyright roundtable in which Hollywood entertainment lawyer Harvey Harrison reminded us that sharks patrol these waters. His remarks (and Lovink and Rob Swigart's) were followed by a lively audience discussion in which Jeff Ballowe, in particular, spoke well to the inescapable economies of electronic literature.
Some additional thoughts. Nick Montfort, a key participant in this initiative, talked on several occassions about the interactive fiction community, where, without any formal organization, enthusiasts and hobbyists have volunteered untold hours of their time to write emulators and interpreters to keep the work alive and maintain resources such as BAF's Guide. I think it's vital that PAD allow space for such efforts--it may be that somehwere out there is a 17-year old who wants nothing more than to write, say, a HyperCard emulator. It may be that there's a 17-year old out there who's already doing it. But this also raises the question of why the electronic literature community needs an organized and funded initiative, why it can't rely solely on communal spirit and goodwill to ensure that works persist.
One obvious answer is that interactive fiction's audience has more of its fundamentals in the gaming sphere than in the literary, and that electronic literature (in the narrower sense) still occupies a niche whose closest parallel is the small-press publishing of the avant garde. Still, I suspect there are some who believe that preservation happens in just this kind of Darwinian fashion, and that a community of committed enthusiasts is really all that's needed here. But even a brief reflection on the nature of cultural heritage should instruct us otherwise. It strikes me as ironic, for example, that one skeptic voices his opinion that in the realm of electronic literature "preservation is not a big problem," while only a couple of sentences earlier writing approvingly of leafing through the wisdom of the ancients recorded in the volumes on a shelf in an Oxford library bookshop. By contrast, digital media last forever, or five years, whichever comes first, as Jeff Rothenberg is reported to have said. But while it may be true that we can still read handwritten manuscripts that are 1000 years old, that's largely because they're now kept in climate-controlled vaults with access restrictd to all but a handful of specialists. In the end I agree with Stewart Brand, who opined that preservation is finally a social and not a technological problem. Preservation asks us to acknowledge our own mortality, to participate in a proleptic monologue with the future. Nothing could be more human than that, and the notion that preservation in any sphere is somehow futile, or unnecessary, or inappropriate is one that I find soul-killing.
A final image: after the conference, on the way back East, landing into Phoenix on a gorgeous cloudless day, first spotting the hard blue lines of the aqueducts, then the interstates and subdivisions and downtown core rising out of the desert like a circuitboard, remembering that this was the city that won the first post-9/11 World Series (beating the New York Yankees) and also the home of the virtual University of Phoenix. Seeing Phoenix from the air is like seeing the future on a clear day, and it's not an unfitting interstice for a meeting on digital preservation.
See also:
Sony has filed a trademark application on the term "shock and awe," which it may use as the title of a game (which may or may not have something to do with the Iraqi conflict).
I met Flash artist/writer Jason Nelson at the e(X)literature conference last week (trip report coming soon). Previously I knew (and admired) the swirling pomo dustbowl of Panhandle, but the recent stuff really blew me away. Jason has a wonderful palette, and an ear as well as an eye--lovely and weird is his electric Americana. There's a touch of Bradbury there.
The Crystal Cabinet, a phantasmagorical new media interpretation of Blake's poem, beautifully executed by Stephen L. Guynup and Ron Broglio.
It's especially nice to see some new VRML on the Web.
Years ago I remember scrounging around in vain for a history of computer graphics. Now people from SIGGRAPH are doing it.