User:Laurier Rochon/readingnotes/writing machines

Katherine Hayles > Writing Machines

related : signified / signifier, baudrillard (simulacra), flickering signifier, Barthes ; from Work to Text, Authors and Owners : The invention of Copyright (Mark Rose), Bourdieu (Field of Cultural Production)

REMEDIATION : the cycling of different media through one another

MEDIA ECOLOGY suggests that the relationship between different media are as diverse and complex as those between organisms coexisting within the same ecotome, including mimicry, deception, cooperation, competition, paratism and hyperparatism.

The robust interaction between media suggest a different take on the relationship between representation and simulation proposed by Baudrillard. Representation assumes that there is a referent in the real world, however mediated [...], in simulation, the referent has no counterpart in the real world.

- The cycle of representation-simulation remediating media back and forth thus creates a looping (flickering?) implosion resulting from the 'procession of simulacra'.

- Materiality is extremely important, as it 'offers a robust conceptual framework in which to talk about both representation and simulation as well as the constraints and enablings they entail.' Also, 'Media-Specific analysis [allows] critial interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work, and the work constructs the medium'.

Within the humanities and especially in literary studies, there has traditionally been a sharp line between representation and the technologies reproducing them.

- Hayles calls for more attention to the materiality of tools for textual production

To change the material artifact is it transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes the meaning of the words as well.

INSCRIPTION TECHNOLOGIES : a device that initiates material changes that can be read as marks (words, computer, audio, video, telegraph, etc.)

The physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words mean.

TECHNOTEXTS : literary works that connect the technology that produces them with the work's verbal constructions. (also called hypertexts. hypertexts for Aarseth are open-ended, non-linear texts). They must have 3 things at least : multiple reading paths, chunked text and a linking mechanism

Barthes : associated text with multiple authorship, open-ended and rhyzomatic structure VS work which is closed and finished.

Hayles argues for MSA (media-specific analysis), while specifying that these different media should not be separate, but rather 'engage in a recursive dynamic of imitating each other'

Understanding literature as the interplay between form, content, and medium, MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those embodiments interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical and literary practices to create the effects we call literature.

Digital media has given us an opportunity we have not had for several hundred years : the chance to see print with new eyes, and with it, the possiblity of understanding how deeply literary theory and criticism have been imbued with assumptions specific to print.

[it] implied that a shift in the material subtrate of the artifact would affect not just the mode of delivery but everything about the literary work.

- In cybertexts, the mixing of varied media creates components that are all signifying practices. One has not to read images as text, but for what they are, images that have their own meaningl.

When the simulated environment takes literary and narrative form, potent possibilities arise from reflexive loops that present the user with an imaginative fictional world while simultaneously engaging her with a range of sensory inputs that structure bodily interactions to reinforce, resist or otherwise interact with the cognitive creation of the imagined world.

>>The author does not really speak of design as its own language and conveyor of signs. It is somewhat assumed that the images, icons and different visual media used to generate literary texts are all universaly accepted as creators of a singular concept. There is no reference to different asthetic genres, or the typical styles of representation used when it comes to generating graphics on a computer screen (what about bad taste?).

Realtime = simulated time of computer processes is running, at least temporarly, along the same time scale as the real time experienced by humans.

- Good example of what the author refers to : requiemforadream.com

The shift in materiality that Lexia to Perplexia instantiates creates new connections between screen and eye, cursor and hand, computer coding and natural language, space in front of the screen and behind it. Scary and exhilarating, these connections perform human subjects who cannot be thought without the intelligent machines that produce us as we produce them

- Artist books : print hypertexts

Someone starts to make a technical object - a book, say - but in selecting the paper and choosing the cover design, new thoughts come as the materials are handled.

>> on A Humument (Tom Phillips) : the extensive analysis of Phillip's work bothers me slightly. This artist's book is certainly fitting in the context of remediated/hypertext literature, but Hayles dissects the author's renderings in such a precise manner, one could think she had made the book herself. Perhaps her explanations are right, which is not really better : this kind of book presupposes extensive knowledge of literary theory and art history, or an extremely fertile imagination such as Hayles'. During the reading of this chapter I think I began understanding Hayle's obsessive fascination for these books - they provide a large subjective area which can be easily filled with creative analysis by anyone possesing the aforementioned preexisting knowledge or fertile imagination. Is this large subjective grey zone posing a problem for the analysis of these types of text then? Does it matter - and how does this positively or negatively affect the reader-author relationship?

[...] books are more than encoded voices; they are also physical artifacts whose material properties offer potent resources for creating meaning.