Passing the Calvino Test? Writing Machines and Literary Ghosts (original) (raw)
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Beginning in the late 1970s, Finland's Erkki Kurenniemi (1941-2017) actively labored to archive every possible aspect of his life. He took photos, made videos, and collected his tram tickets, receipts, body hairs, etc. Kurenniemi believed that within the next forty years, computer technoscience will have advanced sufficiently that it could be programmed to interpret the data of his archive and-on his 107th birthday, 10 July 2018-resurrect his consciousness. For Kurenniemi, this project was an experiment in the realms of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. However, it can also be seen as an experiment in aesthetics, or in what Jacques Rancière calls the "aesthetic regime" of art-an aesthetic-political historical framework imbued with the dynamics of democracy, where "everything speaks." This article reframes Kurenniemi's work within the aesthetic regime of art to draw attention to the "silent speech" and "aesthetic unconscious" (Rancière) of the work and what is the literary nature of Kurenniemi's experiments with (techno)science.
"Books and Computer Technology: 'It Looks Like a Book…'”
With the exponential expansion of information technology, it is superfluous to expound the virtues of computers in reproducing and making written works available to large numbers of readers. It is however crucial to understand that such technology is not simply a neutral vehicle for conveying words and messages, for the fundamental reason that language is not primarily about meaning and communication of ideas. It therefore becomes apparent that the complementary acts of reading and writing necessarily involve the material and the subjective (understood in logical terms as Lacan’s subject of the unconscious) dimensions of human existence. We can then see that Computer technology entails the eradication of the material aspect of writing: kept at an incalculable distance behind a screen, the book becomes ‘virtual’. At least two consequences can be observed. Firstly, one can read only the page which appears on the screen, the rest vanishes. Secondly (the ‘Google effect’), we are lead to believe that nothing is forgotten or lost, that everything is immediately available thanks to a search engine. What is lost is the material and tactile aspect of reading and writing: both concern the material and physical trace on the page, that correspond to the original inscribing of the subject’s body into the humanizing world of language. Thus, reading, for example, requires the dialectic movement back and forth through the pages of a physical book, a movement that involves alternation between forgetting and recall, rediscovery and anticipation. The same physical dimension involved in inscribing is called upon in all forms of creation (dance, painting…). Our research thus aims to explore what is at stake for individual liberty and creativity, taking into account the physical – or even carnal dimension – of existence that is systematically evacuated from post-modern approaches. Keywords: Book, Computer, Writing, Psychoanalysis, Memory, Language Stream: Books, Writing and Reading Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English or French Paper: Books and Computer Technology, Books and Computer Technology
The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2010
Both works make remarkable contributions f or the emerging f ield of digital literary studies and f or the theory of digital media. While Hay les analy ses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitality at the lev el of inscription and establishes a social text rationale f or electronic objects.
Inscription and 'Anscription': Surface and System in Cybernetics, Deconstruction, and Don DeLillo
humanities, 2019
This essay proposes the concept of 'anscription', and employs it to rethink some of the typical valences of inscription in media theory. The word is derived from the German anschreiben, which can simply mean, 'to write up', but also refers to the specific act, and the set of social relations that come into place, when one writes something up on a blackboard. Not quite encompassed by inscription, it offers an essential counterpart to the term for media-oriented thinkers. The essay draws out this corresponding function through readings of three imagined (but not-quite-imaginary) media, across which emerges a dialectic in the cultural imaginary of inscription. The first comes from the mathematician Norbert Wiener's description of a mechanism that would translate written text into tactile impressions; the second, from Jacques Derrida's historical framing of the project of deconstruction in relation to writing systems; and the third, from a thirty-two-page description of an American football game in Don DeLillo's 1972 novel, End Zone. Each will offer a different exemplification of the function termed 'anscription'. Just as significantly, each example presents this function in relation to the technical possibilities of media and articulates it through a theory of the body that is entangled with writing.
Toward the Ludic Cyborg - History and Theory of Authorship in Western Modernity
Joachim Friedmann (ed.), Narratives Crossing Boundaries Storytelling in a Transmedial and Transdisciplinary Context, transcript: Bielefeld 2023, pp. 305-360, 2023
New media create new forms of authorship. The historical investigation starts with an introspective remembrance of the changes in authorial practices during the past half-century. The paper then traces the four major developmental phases of authorship and their cultural reflection in the modern era.—Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, individual authorship originated in the context of letterpress printing. Two radically new concepts formed its philosophical and legal basis: the assertion of intangible and inalienable property. Industrialization, however, introduced new mass media that relied on the collaboration of many artisans. In the 20th century, analog film, radio, and television challenged the established and esteemed concept of individual authorship in favor of collective and hierarchical production. One response to this conflict between the cultural ideal and actual practices was the attempt by the holders of new managerial positions in the auditory and audiovisual media, particularly conductors and directors, to claim the author’s function. The research and theories of new academic disciplines complemented this deconstruction resulting in declarations of the ‘death of the author.’ At the same time, the onset of digitalization and digital networking opened up the possibility of—and created the demand for—different practices. Since the 1990s, distributed and potentially egalitarian authorship of digital knowledge workers has developed in the software medium and its central genre of digital games. Currently, a fourth transformation of authorial practices is underway. Rapid advances in digital technology realize what was hoped for already 60 years ago: a symbiotic relationship between human and machine intelligence. Thus, across all media and genres, the emergence of cyborgian authorship becomes apparent.—A media-specific theory of authorship concludes the investigation, i.e., the insight into the interdependence between the evolving state of media and the formation of authorial practices as well as their cultural acceptance.