ElectroLite

Si bien el discurso predominante de la modernidad es de la linealidad del progreso, Media Specific Analysis y el lema ¨the medium is the message¨ demuestra que el progreso (mediático) es siempre relativo, y que implica violencia simbólica para silenciar nuestra conciencia de tal relatividad. Mientras avanzamos en la comprensión de algo, nos olvidamos de la comprensión de otras cosas que lo permitieron. Cada vez que adoptamos una innovación tecnológica se genera una disrupción de temporalidades, a manera de una huelga del trabajo usual de los sentidos. Con la estandarización de sus infraestructuras la nueva tecnología se vuelve una herramienta de uso, una extensión usual de nuestros cuerpos, y nos olvidamos de la mediación, como un silenciamiento de otros posibles usos del medio. Quizás esto es lo que ha pasado con nuestra lectura de los libros impresos, que se han vuelto herramientas de lectura desde el Renacimiento, y se ha perdido el sentido de los múltiples aspectos del libro como

In her work Writing Machines , Katherine Hayles emphasizes the importance of looking at materiality of a specific work: “Materiality of the artifact can no longer be positioned as a subspecialty within literary studies; it must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies” (pg. 19). This leads us to begin thinking about and exploring the differences (and perhaps, similarities as well) between codex—the traditional book—and code, used for electronic literature. Marshall McCluhan, in his piece “The Medium is the Message,” also discusses the importance of materiality, or medium. He explains that it is not the content inside that provides the message, but rather, the shape and control that the medium provides to human association (pg. 2). Like Delia explains in her post (see Delia’s post in this same website: http://elitsp.blogspot.com/2018/09/codex

This week, we have read the first two chapters from Katherine Hayles’ book  Writing Machines  in which we learn of the life trajectory that led the author to dedicate her studies to electronic literature, mainly rooted in a desire to bridge what have been traditionally perceived as binaries: media and materiality, science and literature, and code vs. “natural language.” Through her work, Hayles fills a void in literary studies by bringing attention to the material artifact and its potential to determine and affect the meaning of a work. In other words, she posits that the medium is a meaning-bearing entity that must be taken into consideration when analyzing, along with content and form. She proposes, therefore, the term “material metaphor” in order to “foreground the traffic between words and physical artifacts” and presents the codex (or book) as a material metaphor since it has the ability to structure the act of reading and transform the “relation of word to world.” This concept

               Aventurarse a comentar, o mejor dicho a especular acerca de la relación entre el Codex y el código es la misión para esta semana en el curso de Literatura Electrónica. Y uso estas palabras porque, en mi extrañez, me encontré merodeando en los blogs publicados por mis compañeros en años anteriores y encontré sentimientos y dudas similares a las mías.              Mi primer impulso al pensar en ambos, Codex y código, es intentar entenderlos en relación a la materialidad y el medio. Un punto de partida deducible ya que en las lecturas de la semana pasada estuvimos indagando este tema y para esta semana las lecturas: Writing Machines de Katherine Hayles y “The Medium is the Message” de Marshall McLuhan, a mi entender continúan dicha temática. Uno de los aspectos en la relación del Codex y el código es quizá su condición de invisibilidad ante los estudios limitados del “contenido.” McLuhan, en su ensayo trae esto a cuenta postulando que el contenido durante mucho tiemp

The topic for this week’s class is Technotexts and Augmented Reality Reading . The readings assigned were “ The medium is the Message” by Marshall McCluhan; “Media and Materiality” and “Material Metaphors, Technotexts, and Media-Specific Analysis” by Katherine Hayles and Élika Ortega’s “Not a case of words: Textual environments and multimateriality in Between Page and Screen.” The prompt for today’s blog entry is on the relationship between codex and code . Katherine Hayles her “technotexts” section states, “the long reign of print made it easy for literary criticism to ignore the specificities of the CODEX book when discussing literary texts. With significant exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a speaking mind” (32).   The author considers that for some critics the form of the CODEX was irrelevant to its content. What really mattered to them was what it had to say. They were not concerned with its shape, but on the actual message that lied

Like the bass excess in Hip Hop, guitar distorsions and feedback in Rock, and barely humanly audible beats because of their speed in glitch electronic music (before they became standarized), glitches in electronic literature defamiliarize our sense organs. They force us to ¨cope¨ (Jones) with that affection and reveal our frustrated expectations. Formal organization of time is de-emphasized in order to bring out the raw quality of the sounds and images that stutter that organization, and may allow us to be self-conscious of our own absorption into given structures of experience. These challenges to our habituated senses driven to failure are not necessarily correlated with political implications on the limited accessibility to computers and the internet mentioned by Ledesma (these implications depend on the type of images that are taking shape with the e-poem) but may teach us a way of navigating mass media that resists uncritical self-absorption into the neoliberal flood of images. I

In her paper Code.surface || Code.depth, Rita Raley uses the example of the opening scene in Le Mépris/Contempt (1963) by Jean-Luc Godard, where a woman seems to be reading a script while other items and equipment of filming production can be seen in the background. This scene appears to represent what the filming production is like for a movie. However, the scene does not show the actual process, “Rather, the opening of the film lays bare the symbolic conditions of production” (pg. 2). And as Raley indicates, this is precisely what contemporary code art attempts to do: give a symbolic representation of what is under the hood of electronic literature. Unlike the traditional literature that may be found printed on a page, electronic literature is the product of a multi-layered structure, where the code underneath instructs the technological devices used how to display or perform the art. This layered-structure as a concept has become an important part of contemporary