User:Ssstephen/Reading/Writing Machines

Further reading mentioned in this:

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Milorad Pavic

Always Coming Home, Ursula LeGuin

High Tension, Paul Zimmerman

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Espen Aarseth

Cent Mille Milliards, Raymond Queneau

Afternoon, a story, Michael Joyce (where?)

Hypertext has at a minimum the three characteristics of MULTIPLE READING PATHS, CHUNKED TEXT, and some kind of LINKING MECHANISM

What about a text with only two of these characteristics, or just one? Multiple reading paths and chunked text, but no links? Chunked text and links, but only one reading path? Links without chunked text?

Reflexive Loops

N Kate includes the phrase reflexive loops in her definition of technotexts which is v interesting. A text that creates a feedback loop by connecting the nodes of materiality and inscribed constructions (avoiding the words form and content? which is great if that's what she's doing) necessarily can achieve more than a text that doesn't. Feedback of information at the moment makes me think of emergent complexity, eg video feedback as described by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop, example here and here. Or in the audio world, Karplus Strong synthesis or other techniques that use feedback to an extent that the initial inputs become irrelevant, the emergent sound (or video, or text) having its own properties. Also the recording surface of the body without organs. How can the process of recording and inscribing be creative and what is created or emerges from it? Why does a self-referencing iframe not infinitely loop and crash my machine?

The true difference in nature is not between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but between the real machinic element, which constitutes desiring-production, and the structural whole of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which merely forms a myth and its variants

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus p.102