Digitale fortellinger

Computers and Meaning: The Case of OpenAI's Text-Generating Program

This talk will argue that computers do create, disseminate, and understanding meaning, within their contexts and capabilities.  Using criteria developed in biosemiotics for meaning-production by nonhuman animals and plants, the talk will extend these to computational media and specify what kinds of meanings emerge from the computational processing of information and algorithms. The contextual limits to meaning-production imply that humans and computers understand "meaning" in fundamentally different ways.  The talk will take OpenAI's text-generation program as a case in point, comparing it to plans-scripts-goals programs such as Tailspin and to slot algorithms for text generation. Using neural net architecture and a powerful search algorithm, OpenAI's program is arguably the most advanced text generation program in existence. An open question is why so many of its productions turn out to be, if not exactly stories, certainly narratives.  The talk will include a live demonstration of the program with audience participation.

Thursday, November 21st 

9:00-9:30     Welcome & Coffee (Foyer)

9:30-10:45     N. Katherine Hayles Keynote (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

10:45-12:00     Panel 1: Games and Narrative Complexity (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

12:00-1:00        Lunch (Foyer)

1:00-2:00         Panel 2: Artist Talks 1 (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

2:15-3:15     Panel 3: Haunted Spaces of Digital Culture (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

3:30-4:30     Panel 4: Electronic Literature and Political Realities (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

4:45-6:00     Book Launch & Exhibition Reception (Rom 61 and KMD Library)

7:00-10:00     Conference Dinner (for Presenters): Beaujolais Dinner at Bien Danmarksplas, Fjøsangerveien 30, 5054 Bergen

Friday, November 22nd

9:00-9:30     Coffee (Foyer)

9:30-10:30     Panel 5: Design Fictions (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

10:45-11:45     Panel 6: Artist Talks 2 (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

12:00-1:00     Lunch (Foyer)

1:15-2:15     Panel 7: Technology, Politics, and Social Change (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

2:30-3:45     Panel 8: Machine Visions (Knut Knaus Auditorium)

3:30-4:00    Closing discussion: Future of DNN

(In the evening, we recommend Piksel festival https://19.piksel.no/program)

We’re asking attendees to register, so that we can order lunch for the right number of people (if you signed up before 15.11.2019). Please use this form to let us know you're coming. If you’re only coming for the keynote or one or more of the sessions, no need to register, but we can only feed people who signed up.

Keynote Address

N. Katherine Hayles: “Computers and Meaning:  The Case of OpenAI's Text-Generating Program”

This talk will argue that computers do create, disseminate, and understanding meaning, within their contexts and capabilities.  Using criteria developed in biosemiotics for meaning-production by nonhuman animals and plants, the talk will extend these to computational media and specify what kinds of meanings emerge from the computational processing of information and algorithms. The contextual limits to meaning-production imply that humans and computers understand "meaning" in fundamentally different ways.  The talk will take OpenAI's text-generation program as a case in point, comparing it to plans-scripts-goals programs such as Tailspin and to slot algorithms for text generation. Using neural net architecture and a powerful search algorithm, OpenAI's program is arguably the most advanced text generation program in existence. An open question is why so many of its productions turn out to be, if not exactly stories, certainly narratives.  The talk will include a live demonstration of the program with audience participation.

Panel 1: Games and Narrative Complexity

Jan Noel Thon: “Narrative Complexity and Post/Digital Aesthetics in Recent Indie Games”

Building on a general argument that an analysis of video games’ narrative complexity will always need to take into account the interrelation of their audiovisual, ludic, and narrative aesthetics, the proposed paper zooms in on the question how (some) recent indie games employ what could be described as post/digital aesthetics, extending not just to their audiovisual design and gameplay mechanics but also to the narrative strategies they employ.

Marieke Verbiesen: “Bit Crushes & Square Waves”

A presentation of the Sonic Game Space exhibition series I have  been organising in Bergen - with a new upcoming show at USF in 2020. Sonic Game Space is a project that combines Exhibitions, Workshops, Presentations and Live performances, centered around the works by a group of artists that are connected trough their work in early game console art. Their output spans a spectrum of forms including videos, performance & live music, sculpture & installation, often extending beyond the computer screen. Sonic Game Space investigates the concepts of playing with and exploring the obsolete game consoles that have had, and continue to have, a key influence on the development of audiovisual art and technology.

Yngvill Hopen & Linn Sovig: “How do we design a video game about depression that people will want to play?”

Yngvill Hopen is Creative Director and CEO at local game development studio, Henchman & Goon. They are currently working on a game about coping with depression and angst within an art form that usually encourages positive feeling of play. Their last game Pode, was all about the loveliness of friendship and working together to solve problems. With “Sinking To The Surface” they're working on a game that is communicating that some problems can't be solved in a melancholic world. Producer, Linn Sovig, will do a short introduction of the game and then interview Yngvill Hopen on the challenges of a designing a game with a darker message.

(Moderator: Kristian Bjørkelo) 

Panel 2: Artist Talks

Jeremy Welsh: “The 101”

A digital slide show screening/presentation of part of an ongoing collaboration with British poet/author Paul A. Green. We have collaborated periodically since the 1980s as The Quantum Brothers, with performances, online works (these now defunct), videos and installations. The 101 is a series of fragmentary narratives framed as Keynote slides with animation and sound. Parts of our previous work have appeared in various publications and journals including The J.G. Ballard Book (Terminal Press 2013). The 101 is an unfixed work in progress, each presentation will be a new interpretation.

Linda Kronman: “Surviellance Stories”

Artists have noticed and made visible the increasing number of surveillance cameras in the cityscape. This talk is a brief summary on how artists have reflected upon post 9/11 surveillance focusing on uses of security cameras in storytelling with examples ranging from a manifesto for CCTV filmmakers to unauthorized access to ‘smart cameras’. 

Mikkel Wettre: “The Aura of Electromagnetic Twilight”

In my sculpture-work I have taken eyesight and optical phenomena as a starting point for mechanical installations that engage the senses and serve as metaphorical depictions of the relationship between human and technical cognition. My presentation will track the development of recent projects and the role of imaginative awareness.

(Moderator: Eamon O’Kane)

Panel 3: Haunted Spaces of Digital Culture

Kristian Bjørkelo: “We have been copy-pasting since forever”

Copypasta and creepypasta, while shaped by digital modalities and affordances, exist in the continuation of human storytelling, and constant, iterative retellings of tall tales, legends and myth. They are contemporary folklore. This presentation will tie these contemporary expressions to more traditional genres, and explore how post-Gutenberg modalities affect traditional narratives.

Erika Kvistad: “Home, again: Repetition and closure in haunted-house game narratives”

This presentation explores how two interactive haunted-house narratives, Kitty Horrorshow's Anatomy (2016) and Michael Gendry's Anchorhead (1998), use their game mechanics to deny the reader/player the sense of an ending, leaving the reader/player stranded in the games’ haunted space and damaged time.

Marianne Gunderson: “Your camera has detected motion”

This paper explores how machine vision devices figure in creepypasta narratives, converging around the relationship between agency, truth, and technology. It further argues that these stories can be read as affective articulations of cultural anxieties about our relationship to these technologies.

(Moderator: Jill Walker Rettberg)

Panel 4: Electronic Literature and Political Realities

Scott Rettberg: “Critical Digital Media”

This presentation will contextualize  two projects, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project (2015-17), and Toxi*City: A Climate Change Narrative (2013-17) from the perspective critical digital media. In this context, we describe critical digital media as new media art artifacts derived from interdisciplinary research focused on significant societal challenges. During a period when numerous governments and educational institutions are questioning the value of the arts and humanities to society in comparison to the hard sciences or market-driven professional training, I argue that critical projects driven by scientific research, non-fiction documentary evidence, and digital media aesthetics can have just as significant impacts in helping society to grapple with some of the most significant challenges of our time as can research driven by more traditional disciplinary approaches.

Nohelia Meza: “Visualising Latin American Discourses through a Digital Rhetoric Perspective”

Latin American electronic literature is still a relatively unexplored area of study as far as interdisciplinary research methodologies are concerned. This paper aims to construct a scientific and artistic exchange between Digital Rhetoric, Latin American Cultural Studies, and Digital Humanities to examine the role of digital rhetoric practices in the construction of cultural discourses in Latin American works of electronic literature.  The main objective is to enable an interdisciplinary dialogue between these previous approaches in order to provide new methodological tools to study Latin American electronic literature from different disciplines and perspectives. The incorporation of digital practices in the humanities, such as data visualisation techniques will facilitate the evaluation, comparison, and analysis of the results. Following recent methodological approaches on Digital Rhetoric (Bouchardon, 2014; Brooke, 2009; Eyman, 2015; Saemmer, 2015), and Latin American Cultural Studies (Taylor & Pitman, 2007, 2013), this paper will address three main questions: 1) How are discourses and conceptualisations of Latin American-ness represented within different typologies of digital rhetoric practices in electronic literary works? 2) How do Latin American e-lit works negotiate their identity through the rhetoric of cultural discourse? 3) How can we build bridges between traditional methods of analysis and digital humanities tools (i.e. data visualisation techniques) (Graham, 2017) to help the categorization of Latin American discourses and their association to specific digital rhetoric practices?

Anne Karhio: “Reboot?”

Digital Forms and Narrative Poetry”In this presentation I will discuss a selection of print and digital texts, from John Redmond’s MUDe to J. R. Carpenter’s TRANS.MISSION[A.DIALOGUE], to examine the transforming role of narrative poetry and poetics in contemporary media exchanges and environments. In scholarly discussions on literary forms and genres in digital platforms and networks, “poetry” and “narrative” have not infrequently been considered as oppositional approaches to literary practice. To some extent, this is simply a generalizing terminological shortcut: “poetry” in these instances refers to the tradition of the condensed short lyric as verbal craft, whereas “narrative” tends to stand for fiction, storytelling, or even prose. A number of works, however, incorporate both recognizably poetic techniques as well as narrative elements, despite the relative scarcity of scholarly engagement with narrative poetry specifically in the field of electronic literature. Several poets publishing in print have also drawn on digital platforms and genres to explore the potential of the long narrative poem in the digital age. How do authors of print and digital poetry envision the role and function of narrative poetry in the 21st century? And how can narrative poetry as one of the oldest literary forms be revitalized to address the language and practices of the networked society?

(Moderator: Eric Dean Rasmussen)

Panel 5: Design Fictions

Joseph Tabbi: “All Over Writing: Anne Burdick's Design Fiction”

Literature, etymologically “things made from letters,” is Robert Coover’s starting point in a 2018 American Scholar essay that does not forecast so much as inhabit “The End of Literature.” This essay, like Coover’s career and lifework exemplifies a kind of writing that is “all over” – in the double sense of being finished but also dispersing, even as the printed word itself is displaced into and reconfigured within digital media. That particular phrase, “All Over Writing” is one that Anne Burdick, Ewan Branda, and I chose for a panel we’d put together at a HASTAC conference of 2019, celebrating a 4th iteration of our collaborative literary project, ebr (www.electronicbookreview.com). Burdick, in the meantime has contributed essays of her own to the landmark 2012 collection, Digital_Humanities (MIT Press). The underscore in the title conveys, as much as anything written in the book, how any relation between digital arts, literature, and the humanities must needs be a “thing made from letters.” More recently, Burdick interrupted her own career as Chair of Media Design Practices at Cal Arts to obtain a doctoral degree from Carnegie Mellon. Her “dissertation” took the form of a “Design Fiction,” titled Trina, that asks us to look at letters similarly – as objects in themselves as much as they are signifiers. Such an object-orientation opens the prospect of a literature that does not end, so much as it relocates the written text in a multi-medial environment where words (written and spoken) are experienced in much the same way we watch images and hear sounds: not as a “literary” removal from the world, and not as fictions we write or type but as objects we make and think with – along with other sights and sounds in a digital landscape.

Eric Rasmussen: “Digital Narrative, Textual Ecosystems, and the Work as Assemblage Novel: Long-Form Fiction for the Programming Era”

Partaking in efforts to bring the digital- and environmental humanities in dialogue, my talk will draw on the German ecocritic Hubert Zapf’s functional model of literature to outline the cultural-ecological potential of an emergent genre of post-digital narrative fiction first described by Katherine Hayles—the Work as Assemblage (WaA) novel. The focus will be on how William Gillespie’s _Keyhole Factory_ functions as textual ecosystem designed to address concerns about reading practices in online environments.

Hilde Kramer: “Illustration as Sonic Practice”

This project investigates examines what happens when illustration practice is executed outside its traditional realm. Accepting the obligation to operate in the service of an idea and seeking to communicate something particular, the project seeks to identify a specific illustration methodology and constituted knowledge, and investigate these through the medium of sound. Beginning with central topoi in visual storytelling such as ‘character/ actor’, ‘scenography/ environment’ ‘narrative images' ’dramaturgy’/’plot’ and 'style', the project investigates these topics solemnly through sound practice. May the transposition lead to “another thought,” and hence, discover new understanding of the field of illustration? The mediated content of the project is the layered history of a small suburban place of south east Norway, Momarken; an ancient market place and arena for horse racing, that had a near escape from becoming the last Nazi-German concentration camp built on European territory.

(Moderator: Anne Karhio)

Panel 6: Artist Talks 2

Eamon O’Kane: “And Time Begins Again”

Presentation about And Time Begins Again – an immersive digital video and sound installation relating to a derelict plant nursery in Odense, Denmark, where the artist lives and has a studio. This new work continues the O'Kane’s ongoing interest in architecture and specifically considers relationships to the human, the organic, the machine and the posthuman. The installation consists of an installation of videos and sound of the interior and exterior of the nursery, displayed as projections and on screens and made from recycled light components that were once used in the greenhouses to help plant growth. The films, taken over a period of ten years, depict details of the place in a state of abandonment. We see signs of the changing seasons and the slow take-over of weeds. We also see subtle signs of human interference and then the final demolition of the site and transference to the beginnings of a forest. The installation represents these different and overlapping rhythms of change.

Laurie Lax / Lucila Mayol: “Archaeological Fiction: Sagfjordbotn”

Presentation about an artwork that in its final form will become an Interactive Fiction with 3D audio. Our project is based on the remote fjord of Sagfjordbotn in Nordland. Like other remote places, Sagfjordbotn has been un-built following a process that could be compared to ‘programmed obsolescence’. The narrative will have three parallel levels, corresponding to different moments in time, that the reader will be able to travel between (1910s, 1960s and 2010s). A sound track featuring field recordings of water will consistently accompany the narrative on all three levels.

Samuel Brzeski: "The body of the text"

A semi-performative talk from artist, writer and researcher Samuel Brzeski. The talk will map out recent ideas, research and artworks detailing embodied and experiential forms of text and writing, and will briefly touch upon speed, inertia, hauntology and communal experiences of reading.

(Moderator: Andreas Zingerle)

Panel 7: Technology, Politics, and Social Change

Annelin Eriksen: “Immortality: The Changing Nature of the Human Being”

In this paper I analyse the creation of the humanoid Bina48 by the Terasem movement in Vermont (US) and the cultural significance of new imaginaries of immortality. I question the idea of cultural change, and the notion of disruptive technologies by applying the analytics of cultural value systems.

Andrés Pardo Rodriguez: “National Digital Narratives”

Democratic governments often believe that providing access to technology results in positive social changes. Technological determinism as such needs to be reviewed, as there are hidden cultural layers that are not considered. This research analyzes the introduction of ICTs by central authorities: how they seek to create new national narratives through digital tools, and how users create online communication channels for everyday life. Case studies that are presented and discussed are: Le Kiosque - Minitel (France), E-stonia (Estonia), and Digital Kiosks and Routes of the Conflict (Colombia).

Mathias Klang & Nora Madison: “Barely Allowed: The Narratives of Nude Protest Online”

The body has often been used as a locus for protest messages. One such traditional protest strategy is nudity. This work examines the embodiment of protest narratives as mediated by social media platforms. Social media provides users with communication tools, but their popularity requires users to adopt platform-specific strategies in order to make their message acceptable. This study explores the ways in which platforms limit the ways in which bodies can be used for protest.

(Moderator: Joseph Tabbi)

Panel 8: Machine Visions

Jill Walker Rettberg: “The Machine Vision Database: Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives”

The Machine Vision Database collects information about games, art and narratives that use or represent machine vision technologies. Our aim is to trace connections, similarities and differences in the ways machine vision is invoked culturally and aesthetically. You can follow trails through the material by browsing through the themes each work deals with, or the technologies they use and reference, or the attitudes shown towards machine vision. Or you can trace the ways different kinds of protagonist (human, machine, child, adult and more) engage with machine vision. The Machine Vision database is developed by the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media. It is currently (2019) in development, and is changing daily.

Maud Ceuterick: “Necessities and Challenges of Cultural Mapping”

May locative narratives and their mapping transform urban spaces? The mapping of locative narratives integrates individuals and communities into their environment, which may create a territory that is more inclusive than traditional mapping. Cultural mapping however also comes with challenges, including risks of fixing space, problems of surveillance, and the reproduction of established power relations.

Serge Bouchardon: “StoryFace: log onto a dating website and find love!”

"StoryFace" is an online digital creation based on the capture and recognition of facial emotions. The piece deals with issues of emotional surveillance and the industrialization of emotions. I might also present "fred", an interactive narrative for smartphones, to go further in the reflexion on the links between digital interactive narratives and emotions.

(Moderator: Jeremy Welsh)

REWIRED

Exhibition opening reception: Thursday 21st November 4.45-6pm (as part of the DNN conference)

Opening times: 12-6pm daily (Thursday 21st - Thursday 28th November) please note: please use side entrance after 4pm

Location: Rom61, Faculty of Art, Music and Design, KMD, University of Bergen, Møllendalsveien, 5009 Bergen, Norway

Curated by Scott Rettberg and Eamon O'Kane, including works from network members and guests:

Andreas Zingerle & Linda Kronman 

Mark Marino, Johan Murray & Joellyn Rock

Talan Memmott & Scott Rettberg

Mary Flanagan

Judd Morrissey

Lucila Mayol

Eamon O'Kane

Samuel Brzeski

Laurie Lax

Nick Montfort

Mikkel Wettre

Jason Nelson

Danielle S. Taylor

KMD library is open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 9am-4pm and Thursday 9- 6pm (closed at the weekend).

The KMD library is situated opposite the REWIRED exhibition, where a selection of books from network members and guests are displayed. The Machine Vision and ELMCIP databases are also made accessible there.

Digital Narrative Network Library Exhibition

This library exhibition highlights works by our keynote speaker, N. Katherine Hayles, who has been fundamental to the establishment of digital narrative, electronic literature, digital culture, and posthumanism as fields of inquiry. It also features the launch of Eamon O'Kane's monograph And Time Begins Again, about a remarkable project of artistic research in post-industrial ecology. Finally the exhibition is intended to highlight the longstanding contributions of researchers, writers, and artists based at the University of Bergen to the study of digital narrative, and the ongoing experimentation in the future of digital narrative that takes place in Bergen.

Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious

(University of Chicago Press, 2017)

by N. Katherine Hayles

In Unthought, Hayles bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking—how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems. Together these constitute a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike.

Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary

(University of Notre Dame Press, 2008)

by N. Katherine Hayles

The first systematic survey of the field of Electronic Literature and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study. Hayles's book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts. Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models.

Writing Machines

(The MIT Press, 2002)

by N. Katherine Hayles

Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts. Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them.

How We Became Posthuman

(University of Chicago Press, 1999)

by N. Katherine Hayles

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberalhumanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

And Time Begins Again

(University of Bergen, 2019)

by Eamon O'Kane, UiB Professor of Fine ArtsThe book presents a body of work that I began in 2009. It explores humankind’s fragile relationship with and dependence on the natural world. The title of the work and publication, And Time Begins Again, is taken from Samuel Beckett’s “Text for nothing #8”. The work relates to a derelict plant nursery in Denmark and when displayed in exhibitions has consisted of a series of panoramic photographs of the interior of the greenhouses.

Electronic Literature

(Polity, 2018)

by Scott Rettberg, UiB Professor of Digital Culture

Electronic Literature considers new forms and genres of writing that exploit the capabilities of computers and networks – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context. Electronic Literature places the most significant genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts. These include combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction (and other game-based digital literary work), kinetic and interactive poetry, and networked writing based on our collective experience of the Internet. He argues that electronic literature demands to be read both through the lens of experimental literary practices dating back to the early twentieth century and through the specificities of the technology and software used to produce the work. Electronic Literature is the winner of the 2019N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.

#!

(Counterpath, 2014)

by Nick Montfort, UiB Professor II, Digital Culture#! (pronounced “shebang”) consists of poetic texts that are presented alongside the short computer programs that generated them. The poems, in new and existing forms, are inquiries into the features that make poetry recognizable as such, into code and computation, into ellipsis, and into the alphabet. Computer-generated poems have been composed by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Alison Knowles and James Tenney, Hugh Kenner and Joseph P. O’Rourke, Charles O. Hartman, and others. The works in #! engage with this tradition of more than 50 years and with constrained and conceptual writing. The book’s source code is also offered as free software. All of the text-generating code is presented so that it, too, can be read; it is all also made freely available for use in anyone’s future poetic projects.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature

(Bloomsbury, 2018)

ed. Joseph Tabbi, UiB Professor of English

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Winner of the 2018 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.

Transgression in Games and Play

(The MIT Press, 2019)

eds. Kristine Jorgensen (UiB Professor of Media Studies) and Faltin Karlsen

Video gameplay can include transgressive play practices in which players act in ways meant to annoy, punish, or harass other players. Videogames themselves can include transgressive or upsetting content, including excessive violence. Such boundary-crossing in videogames belies the general idea that play and games are fun and non-serious, with little consequence outside the world of the game. In this book, contributors from a range of disciplines explore transgression in video games, examining both game content and player actions. The contributors consider the concept of transgression in games and play, drawing on discourses in sociology, philosophy, media studies, and game studies; offer case studies of transgressive play.

Seeing Ourselves Through Technology:How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

by Jill Walker Rettberg, UiB Professor of Digital Culture

Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices help us understand ourselves, building on long histories of written, visual and quantitative modes of self-representations. This book uses examples to explore the balance between using technology to see ourselves and allowing our machines to tell us who we are. This book is open access and available for free download online

Blogging

(Polity, 2008)

by Jill Walker Rettberg, UiB Professor of Digital Culture

Blogging has profoundly influenced not only the nature of the internet today, but also the nature of modern communication, despite being a genre invented less than a decade ago. This book-length study of a now everyday phenomenon provides a close look at blogging while placing it in a historical, theoretical and contemporary context. Scholars, students and bloggers will find a lively survey of blogging that contextualises blogs in terms of critical theory and the history of digital media. Authored by a scholar-blogger, the book is packed with examples that show how blogging and related genres are changing media and communication.

Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing

(Wesleyan University Press, 1994)

by Rob Wittig, UiB Digital Culture alumnus

Invisible Rendezvous is both a history and a manifesto. On behalf of a legion of unseen "authors"," Rob Wittig describes the evolution of IN, S.OMNIA, an electronic bulletin board that first linked Seattle computer users in 1983 and soon spread into a nationwide network of invisible but creative collaborators. This groundbreaking work was one of the first author-driven inquiries into the emerging landscape of digital writing.

setInterval(): Time-Based Readings of Kinetic Poetry

(PhD thesis, University of Bergen, 2018)

by Álvaro Seiça, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Researcher, UiB Digital Culture

setInterval() is a study of digital kinetic poetry by English, French, and Portuguese-speaking poets whose work defies the very act of writing and reading. It places an emphasis on the historical, cultural, and technological contextualization of kinetic poetry written in diverse media. A wider study of kinetic poetry has been missing, because the field has been relatively undocumented until now. Thus, setInterval() contributes to existing literature with new research, and develops innovative methodology for reading and analyzing poems that literally move. The forms of kinetic poetry surveyed include film poetry, videopoetry, holography poetry, and digital poetry, which are all dependent on spatiotemporal elements.

Implementation

(Blurb, 2012)

by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg (UiB Professors of Digital Culture)

Implementation was written collaboratively and sent serially through the mail in the form of eight roughly chronological installments, each consisting of texts on thirty stickers. The stickers were also made available online in different paper sizes, so that people could print them out on standard sheets of business-size shipping labels. Participants attached stickers to public surfaces around the world, so that whoever happened to wander by the stickers could read them. Because of the origin of this novel on sheets of stickers, and because of the way these stickers have been situated on public surfaces, Implementation consists of 240 short texts, any number of which can be read in any order. In this book, all these atomistic texts have been arranged with a cohesive narrative flow in mind. Each page includes placements of the narrative stickers on various public surfaces.

Twisty Little Passages

(The MIT Press, 2005)

by Nick Montfort, UiB Professor II of Digital Culture

Twisty Little Passages looks at interactive fiction beginning with its most important literary ancestor, the riddle. Montfort then discusses Adventure and its precursors (including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragons), and follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. He then considers the introduction of commercial interactive fiction for home computers, particularly that created by Infocom. Commercial works inspired an independent reaction, and Montfort describes the emergence of independent creators and the development of an online interactive fiction community in the 1990s. Finally, he considers the influence of interactive fiction on other literary and gaming forms. With Twisty Little Passages Nick Montfort places interactive fiction in its computational and literary contexts, opening up this still-developing form to new consideration

The Truelist

(Counterpath, 2017)

by Nick Montfort, UiB Professor II of Digital Culture

The Truelist is a book-length poem generated by a one-page,stand-alone computer program. Based around compound words, some more conventional, some quite unusual, the poem invites the reader to imagine moving through a strange landscape that seems to arise from the English language itself. The unusual compounds are open to being understood differently by each reader, given that person’s cultural and individual background. The core text that Nick Montfort wrote is the generating computer program. It defines the sets of words that combine, the way some lines are extended with additional language, the stanza form, and the order of these words and the lines in which they appear. The program is included on the last page.

Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP): A Report from the HERA Joint Research Project

(ELMCIP, 2014)

Scott Rettberg (UiB Professor II, Digital Culture) and Sandy Baldwin, eds.

Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice maps electronic literature in Europe and is an essential read for scholars and students in the field. ELMCIP was a three-year (2013) collaborative research project funded by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). Focusing on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP studies the formation and interactions of that community and furthers electronic literature research and practice in Europe

Transgression in Games and Play

(The MIT Press, 2019)

eds. Kristine Jorgensen (UiB Professor of Media Studies) and Faltin Karlsen

Video gameplay can include transgressive play practices in which players act in ways meant to annoy, punish, or harass other players. Videogames themselves can include transgressive or upsetting content, including excessive violence. Such boundary-crossing in videogames belies the general idea that play and games are fun and non-serious, with little consequence outside the world of the game. In this book, contributors from a range of disciplines explore transgression in video games, examining both game content and player actions. The contributors consider the concept of transgression in games and play, drawing on discourses in sociology, philosophy, media studies, and game studies; offer case studies of transgressive play.

Remediating the Social

(ELMCIP, 2013)

ed. Simon Biggs

Remediating the Social documents the final conference and art exhibition, held in Edinburgh in November 2012, of the Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) research project. The publication documents the exhibition and the full conference program, consisting of expert presentations, across a range of disciplines and modes of inquiry, addressing examples of emergent creative communities that have formed around various practices, media and discourses in the network. Case studies, papers and panels, discussing examples arising from the ELMCIP project and other contexts are presented. Remediating the Social was hosted by Edinburgh College of Art in collaboration with New Media Scotland and University College Falmouth within the framework of the ELMCIP research project. The exhibition was held at Inspace, a purpose-built research and exhibition facility at the University of Edinburgh.

The End(s) of Electronic Literature

(ELMCIP and Irish Research Council, 2015)

eds. Anne Karhio; Rettberg, S.; Ramada Prieto, L.

The Electronic Literature Organization Conference Program and Festival Catalog. The 2015 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Bergen included the largest exhibition program organized at any ELO conference to date, with events and exhibtions at seven venues throughout Bergen.

Electronic Literature Communities

(West Virginia UP, 2015)

eds. Scott Rettberg, Tomaszek, P., and Baldwin, S.

This book is a diverse collection on the role and function of community in the contemporary practice of electronic literature, with ten essays by thirteen leading authors, providing wide-ranging perspectives and approaches. The collection offers historical narratives of institutions in the field, examples of how particular platforms or genres can inspire community, and stories of how ad hoc communities can form around specific creative projects. These case studies are histories of creative affiliations in electronic literature—snapshots of consensus-based communities in their process of formation—and offer a starting point for broader theoretical analyses of network-based creative community.

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

by Espen AarsethThe original version of Cybertext was Aarseth's UiB Ph.D thesis in Humanistic InformaticsIn Cybertext, Espen Aarseth explores the aesthetics and textual dynamics of digital literature and its diverse genres, including hypertext fiction, computer games, computer-generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. Instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of electronic writing and interactive fiction, however, Aarseth situates these literary forms within the tradition of "ergodic" literature―a term borrowed from physics to describe open, dynamic texts such as the I Ching or Apollinaire's calligrams, with which the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence. Constructing a theoretical model that describes how new electronic forms build on this tradition, Aarseth bridges the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts.

Interactive Digital Narrative

(Routledge, 2015)

eds. Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen, Tonguç İbrahim Sezen

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in thimulti-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity.

I laugh while crying. And I barely cry. What's wrong with me?

(TEXSTpress, 2019)

by Samuel Brzeski, UiB Fine Arts

A short poetic texts made with questions sourced from www.quora.com, in which visitors to the site post questions that are answered by the online community. The publication, which is a companion piece for a three screen video installation, was made from daily updated received in my inbox from Quora between march and May 2019. These were then composed into short 'poems'.

Why Audio Guide?

(University of Bergen, 2018)

by Laurie Lax, Fine Arts alumnus

An artistic enquiry into the the cultural object of the audio guide written as my MA text.