The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine
“The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine” is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of digital literary studies and for the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitality at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects. The emergence of electronic literature can be seen in a growing body of digitally born artifacts. Most of these works are now published online and they are produced, distributed, and executed by digital machines. The parallel evolution of electronic computers and communication networks during the past twenty years has transformed writing and reading practices, and has deeply altered the electronic landscape itself. Mutations in media technologies have originated not only new sets of relations between print codex and computer display, but they have also redefined the ecology of all other media. These momentous changes are part of a large cluster of social and cultural transformations that characterize contemporary culture, which can be accurately described as a software culture. In their new books, N. Katherine Hayles and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum refine our understanding of electronic literature and digital materiality. In this review essay I look at their critical approaches and try to explain why both books make outstanding contributions to the field of new media studies. Literature as Human-Machine Intermediation Linking subjectivity with computational media is a highly contested project in which the struggle for dominance plays a central role: should the body be subject to the machine, or the machine to the body? The stakes are nothing less than whether the embodied human becomes the center for humanistic inquiry within which digital media can be understood, or whether media provide the context and ground for configuring and disciplining the body. [Hayles 2008a, 87] In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich defined new media as the result of the combination of modern media and computers. He synthesized the features of new media in five principles: numerical representation, modularity (these are the two basic material principles of data processing upon which the other three depend), automation, variability, and cultural transcodification. Manovich’s fifth principle — which describes the social effects of the intertwining of computer and cultural layers — provided a sound theoretical basis for the relatively new field of software studies, i.e., for the cultural analysis of the interactions between computer programs and human practices (cf. [Manovich 2008]). Software mediation is perhaps the main cultural aspect of digital culture because all human-machine interactions are enabled and shaped by features of the software. N. Katherine Hayles’s approach in Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) follows a similar software and cultural analytics rationale. A survey of contemporary electronic literature in English functions, at the same time, as a theoretical investigation into the aesthetic and cultural materiality of digital media. Hayles analyses digital genres and
New Philosophy for New Media
In New Philosophy for New Media Mark Hansen defines the image in digital art in terms that go beyond the merely visual. Arguing that the "digital image" encompasses the entire process by which information is made perceivable, he places the body in a privileged position - as the agent that filters information in order to create images. By doing so, he counters prevailing notions of technological transcendence and argues for the indispensability of the human in the digital era. Hansen examines new media art and theory in light of Henri Bergson's argument that affection and memory render perception impure - that we select only those images precisely relevant to our singular form of embodiment. Hansen updates this argument for the digital age, arguing that we filter the information we receive to create images rather than simply receiving images as pre-existing technical forms. This framing function yields what Hansen calls the "digital image." He argues that this new "embodied" status of the frame corresponds directly to the digital revolution: a digitised image is not a fixed representation of "reality," but is defined by its complete flexibility and accessibility. It is not just that the interactivity of new media turns viewers into users; the image itself has become the body's process of perceiving it. To illustrate his account of how the body filters information in order to create images, Hansen focuses on new media artists who follow a "Bergsonist vocation"; through concrete engagement with the work of artists like Jeffrey Shaw, Douglas Gordon, and Bill Viola, Hansen explores the contemporary aesthetic investment in the affective, bodily basis of vision. The book includes over 70 illustrations (in both black and white and colour) from the works of these and many other new media artists.
Wiki, a New Way to Produce Accessible Documents
Adapting complex documents to make them accessible for print disabled persons is an iterative process which involves various skills and requires the intervention of several people. Collaborative approaches are well suited, especially those based on Wikis which are now widely used to edit contents on the Web. A Wiki offers useful features to overcome some of the difficulties encountered when using word-processors. MediaWiki is a popular Wiki software which can be extended to allow users to import, edit and export contents using XML DTBook, the format designed by the DAISY Consortium for structuring text in an accessible way.