WRITING AND THE MACHINE:
PERSPECTIVES FROM CYBERTEXTS
制動文本視角下的數位書寫
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Tong King Lee
University of Hong Kong
AIMS
• To explore a specific medium-genre that
exemplifies the digital humanities at work – the
literary cybertext
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• To articulate the relationship between
technology and writing
• “Texts”:
(1) John Cayley’s “morphing series”;
(2) Poetry Vending Machine 詩的自動販賣機
JOHN CAYLEY
• John Cayley: sinologist, poet, translator
• Poetry writing (translation) within the
environment of Networked and Programmable
Media (NPM): electronic literary artifacts
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• Many of his works set out to “practise and
theorize a greater integration of the concepts of
programming and writing” (Cayley 2003: 280)
LITERAL MORPHING
• Literal morphing: visual transitions of
letters/characters
• A mode of inscriptional technology governed by
algorithmic programming
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• Effects a dynamic shift in the material surface of
the text
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RIVERISLAND
• A “transcultural pastoral/lyric poetic exercise”
• A multimedia text-artifact features a “spatialized
aural poetic environment” (Cayley 2007)
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• A “complex poetic event” (Engberg 2006)
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Source: http://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php?p=works/riverisland/riverislandQT.html
RIVERISLAND
• The horizontal loop displays Cayley’s English
adaptations of 16 classical Chinese quatrains by
Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei (699-759), entitled
“Wang River Sequence”
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• The vertical loop contains 16 translations of the
fifth title in the same sequence (English,
Spanish, French, Pinyin-Chinese).
• A series of interlingual and intersemiotic
remediations of Wang Wei’s poems
ROLE OF THE READER
• The reader assumes an active role in his/her
engagement with the technological platform
displaying the texts and images.
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• S/he controls the movement of the textual loops
by clicking a set of navigational arrows or by
maneuvering the QuickTime movies
• Cayley provides detailed instructions to his
readers on how to operate his multimodal
artifact.
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Source: http://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php?p=works/riverisland/riverislandQT.html
ROLE OF THE READER
• The reader is the driver behind the text-machine:
each chooses to experience the poetic event
according to his/her preference by effecting the
above actions at different rates and in different
combinations.
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• The reader’s navigation of the interface also
determines the textual formation that appears in
the middle of the screen: the reader’s action has
an impact on the material outcome of the work
MORPHING
• riverIsland is not a static text
• Through morphing, letters are continuously
displaced into other letters as they are displayed
on the screen.
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• This creates the visual effect of textual flux,
rendering the poems in perpetual/perceptual
instability.
• Combined with interlingual translation,
morphing articulates an overall sense of
ambivalence in respect to text, form, and
semantics.
OVERBOARD
• “a dynamic linguistic ‘wall-hanging,’ an evermoving ‘language painting’” (Cayley 2004a)
• Text: William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation
1620-1647, in the original English and translated
German versions
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• three morphing procedures:
• sinking (a letter drowns into the void of the
screen)
• floating (an original letter is displaced by
another); and
• surfacing (a letter manifests itself on the screen)
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Source: www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2-Cayley.htm
IMPERCEPTIBILITY
• Imperceptibility is central to the logic of the
entire piece, which is to impede rather than
facilitate communication.
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• It requires absolute and deliberate attention
(effort) on the part of the reader, who so wishes
to make sense of the apparently illegible text.
• “the text is always legible to a reader who is
prepared to take time and recover its principles.
A willing reader is able to preserve or ‘save’ the
text’s legibility” (Cayley 2004a).
TRANSLATION
• To “interrogate certain relationships between the
granular or atomic structures of alphabetically
transcribed language and the critically or
interpretatively discoverable rhetorical and
aesthetic effects of literature” (Cayley 2004a).
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• Walter Benjamin’s essay “On language as such
and on the language of Man” and Proust’s In
Search of Lost Time; these texts appear in the
original language (German in the first case and
French in the second) and in translation in the
other two languages.
TRANSLATION
• Each run of the text affords the reader a different
interface and therefore a different interpretive
and sensorial experience. Each trial of the text
derives a contingent and transient outcome.
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• The reader has some control over the interface:
TRANSLATION
• Two “trials” of the text
• The third stanza: Die Ü bersetzung ist die
Ü berführung der einen Sprache in die andere durch
ein Kontinuum von Verwandlungen “translation is
removal from one language into another through
a continuum of transformations”
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TRIAL ONE
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translation, Trial 1(1)
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translation, Trial 1(2)
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translation, Trial 1(3)
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translation, Trial 1(1)
translation, Trial 1(4)
TRIAL TWO
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translation, Trial 2(1)
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translation, Trial 2(2)
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translation, Trial 2(3)
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translation, Trial 2(4)
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translation, Trial 2(5)
UNPREDICTABILITY
• A high degree of unpredictability with respect to
the textual interface encountered by the reader,
which affords the reading process a degree of
uncertainty
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• Although the original text is a fixed form and its
identity is made known to readers, its
remediation through algorithmic programming
ensures that each performance of the text
presents a new experience.
THE READER’S EFFORT
• A meticulous reader who wishes to trace the
visual and linguistic evolution of a particular text
segment can do so by observing the morphing
procedures closely.
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• In doing so the reader is making a sensory
commitment exceeding what is normally
required in conventional reading.
• The reader can control the linguistic interface
IMPLICATIONS
• A text-in-flux, where the visual technique of
letter morphing becomes a metaphor for an
infinite suspension of form.
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• It backgrounds the agency of Cayley the author
while foregrounding the active contribution of
the reader, who engages the text in an embodied
manner and partakes in its performativity.
POETRY VENDING MACHINE
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POETRY VENDING MACHINE
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POETRY VENDING MACHINE
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POETRY VENDING MACHINE
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POETRY VENDING MACHINE
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POETRY VENDING MACHINE
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POETRY VENDING MACHINE
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POETRY VENDING
MACHINE
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DISCUSSION
• Cayley’s “morphing series” and Poetry Vending
Machine represent different modes of digital
writing and, more generally, of the technologyhumanities nexus.
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• The first hinges on the reader’s deciphering of
morphing letters and interventions of the readertext interface; the second exploits the reader’s
writerly desire.
DISCUSSION
• A text is more than a mere text; it is a cybertext,
that is to say, a textual artifact (and I have indeed
used this term on several occasions), in the
specific sense that it needs to be engaged with.
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• Cybertext – Espen Aarseth (1997) Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
• Non-trivial action: action that goes beyond
simple page-turning and linear reading (Aarseth
1997: 2)
DISCUSSION
• Cybertexts invite the reader to “effectuate a
semiotic sequence” (Aarseth 1997: 1), which
may take the form of a textual input or a choice
with regards how a text should proceed or be
presented.
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• The examples are cybertexts, not primarily
because they run on algorithmic programming,
but because they motivate the reader to execute
non-trivial actions (navigating text and image
movement, inputting texts) with concrete
repercussions on the material text itself.
DISCUSSION
• The reader becomes a more than a mere reader;
s/he becomes a USER or PLAYER.
• Digital technology provides the platform on
which these complex interactions between
reader and text occur.
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• The digital cybertext excels in its capacity to
remediate preexisting texts into multimodal
performances
• It also provides an efficient interface that invites
the reader’s response, which usually leads to
some form of material change in the text.
THANK YOU
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ALGORITHMS
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ALGORITHMS
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