Fashionable Noise: Learning the Algorithm January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Fashionable Noise , add a commentAfter trying to apply this typology to the game Dark Castle, Aarseth concludess that “Andersen’s typology of computer-based signs is both too elastic and too arbitrary to be really useful.” Furthermore, he decides that one cannot determine a computer semiology based entirely on what has been represented on the screen – the heroes, the castles, the trap-doors, etc. – but must take into consideration the “internal, coded level”:
[What] goes on at the external level can only be fully understood only in light of the internal. Both are equally intrinsic, as opposed to the extrinsic status of the performance of a play vis-à-vis the play script. To complicate matters, two different code objects might produce virtually the same expression object, and two different expression objects might result from the same code object under virtually identical circumstances. The possibilities for unique or unintentional sign behavior are endless, which must be bad news for typologists. (p. 40)
It goes without saying that this is also bad news for the reader of a CP who hopes to put a final interpretation on the poem, as much as the hermeneutic enterprise may (and should) beckon (see footnote 3). Since the CP is premised on the reader’s willingness to learn the rules of interaction with the poem, which is to say to explore the reader/writer contract the poem proposes, the variability that the demon creates could put the deduction of these rules mostly out of reach. The ambiguity of language itself, which enterprises such as Chomsky’s “generative grammar” seek to render predictable and put true AI nearly out of reach, makes it even harder to identify the contours of the demon by attempting to read the output alone.
Fashionable Noise: Beyond Scholasticism January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Fashionable Noise , add a commentPierre Bourdieu makes an impassioned critique of scholasticism – which he nonetheless acknowledges as the bearer of “unique fruits” – in his recent book Pascalian Meditations, in which he takes skepticism to its philosophical limit: a critique of the entire industry of “objectivity.” He takes particular aim at the institution that supports the cult of “objectivity” most, the academy, even going so far as to critique its usual location in non-urban, isolated areas. That there is a political component to this analysis is clear:
Enchanted adherence to the scholastic point of view is rooted in the sense, which is specific to academic elites, of natural election through gift: one of the least noticed effects of academic procedures of training and selection, functioning as rites of institution, is that they set up a magic boundary between the elect and the excluded while contriving to repress the differences of condition that are the condition of the difference that they produce and consecrate. This socially guaranteed difference, ratified and authenticated by the academic qualification which functions as a (bureaucratic) title of nobility is, without any doubt – like the difference between freeman and slave in past times – at the root of the difference of ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ (one could, derisively, speak of ‘ontological difference’) that academic aristocratism draws between the thinker and the ‘common man,’ absorbed by the trivial concerns of everyday existence. This aristocratism owes its success to the fact that it offers to the inhabitants of scholastic universes a perfect ‘theodicy of their privilege,’ an absolute justification of that form of forgetting of history, the forgetting of the social conditions of possibility of scholastic reason, which, despite what seems to separate them, the universalist humanism of the Kantian tradition shares with the disenchanted prophets of ‘the forgetting of being.’ (p. 25)
The demon of a well-tempered CP corrupts any of the purities of a hypertrophied scholasticism (not to mention aestheticism), as it honors none of the societal “magic” that the scholastic would choose to propagate, and even parodies the objective viewpoint that would be the scholastic’s “point of honor.” The decayed “aura” of a CP (see footnote 5) pulls it out of the back rooms accessible to the initiated few – the priests, the scholars – and brings it into the world of cultural play, less as art than as autocritical essay. That is, the demon serves to make seemingly eternal truths appear to be accidental and contingent on the social. It creates a pragmatist’s universe out of what was once a “theodicy” and betrays the lie of the seeming ahistorical and omniscient perspective – the cult of objectivity and knowledge – that the scholastic claims to possess.
Fashionable Noise: Reading as Parsing January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Fashionable Noise , add a commentBecause CPs has no creation narrative – programs essentially have written their works even before you compile them (unless they are playing on live texts, such as the internet) – it is up to the digital poet to animate this “attractor” by simulating the sensation of the poem’s having been created through time. That is, the narrative or syllogistic imagination has to be animated artificially in order to put that kinetic sensation of the work’s “becoming” into place. If this doesn’t occur, “readerly” activity would be reduced to mere parsing or, worse, indifferent viewing of a map of data. This can be seen as the obverse of the trajectory of those factions of the avant-garde who seem to want to take a whole called “language” and break it down into its constituent parts in order to liberate suppressed meanings – Dadaists, Language poets, Concrete poets invested in the “post-semiotic.” But “noise” – semantic play that is so free it can’t be recuperated into discourse – is where the digital poet starts, and digital culture has grown to accept noise as an innocuous byproduct to the smooth functioning of technology – as a burp, not a bomb. Since the CP starts from noise, it is in the position of gunning all the way for “convention” with the hope that its algorithmically assembled congeries of data might take on the properties of the “poem.”
Fashionable Noise: The Pornographic Imagination January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Uncategorized, Fashionable Noise , add a commentA last remark by Sontag is suggestive of the aesthetic, even spiritual, power that CPs possess, when she writes that pornography points
to something more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. (p.70)
One immediately thinks of poets like Blake and Rimbaud (who were open to sexual investigation in their work) or to Carlyle and Pound (who weren’t) and their “visionary,” perhaps paranoiac (see footnote 35), obsessions that often resulted in enormous, detailed creations. None of these works could be considered “programmatic,” but they were all premised, in different ways, on rhetorical structures involving feedback and variation – Blake’s characters in Europe, for example, which never settle into stable physical properties – a poetic method that seems peculiar to information-saturated sensibilities on the verge of engulfment. The CP’s demon can thus be seen as the virtual embodiment of the medicine man, the half-cracked partner in aesthetics who makes a visionary of even the most bureaucratically-minded programming artist. Consequently, since coding is the most marginal of literary activities – if it is literature at all – it shares with pornography the distinction of being a textual industry that is nearly entirely unserviceable for personal edification or, indeed, socialization.
Fashionable Noise: The Banality of the Demon January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Fashionable Noise , add a commentBecause the demon instinctually creates works of pure noise (even the most artistic demon can do this with the switch of a few variables), it occupies the extreme pole of the “asocial.” That is, were the aesthetic products of the demon taken as human production, they would most likely be considered the work of a highly obsessed, even autistic, individual who cannot adapt to the codes of daily living. In a sense, it easily occupies the epistemological “horizons” of signification that Language poetry has exhaustively explored. This horizon – which the artist, at risk of mockery and utter marginalization, becomes nearly heroic to explore – is the starting point of digital activity and hence a bit banal, as the demon is not threatened with a loss to its cultural capital nor the psychologiical effects of marginalization. The opposite pole from this “noise” – whether created by demon or poet – is “convention,” containing within it the “historical residues” that Adorno writes of above. This space between these poles – noise and convention – is what I call the “attractor,” the space of dissimulation, where the ambiguities of the cyborg is mistaken as the vagary of an imprecise, but poetic, subjectivity.
Five Holy Grails of Electronic Literature January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Uncategorized , add a comment- To write a piece that can be read several different ways – none predetermined by the “author” – which will provide distinctive reading experiences each time. To emply “algorithm” as the agent of writing, the holiest of holies being with a database that is not generated as a willed piece of literature but is communal (the web, for example).
- To write text for a three-dimensional environment that serves a textual function at nearly all times while maintaining the illusion of the space. That is, to move as far from “the page” as possible, either toward creating environmental pieces (ambient literature) or actual “3D” pieces (such as in Brown’s Cave).
- To create a programmed object that serves equally as a piece of literature – something that can be read – and which all serves as a “game” with all the “fun” implied in such a title. That is, to make something that is “fun” in all of the definitions of the word but also provides one with a non-trivial literary experience.
- To create an animated visual text that, while being quite atomized or impressionistic, can make bold aesthetic statements, and which aspires to the transformational visual qualities that are associated with film.
What is a Game? January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Uncategorized , add a commentFrench sociologist Roger Caillois, in his book Les jeux et les hommes (Games and Men), defined a game as an activity that must have the following characteristics:
- fun: the activity is chosen for its light-hearted character
- separate: it is circumscribed in time and place
- uncertain: the outcome of the activity is unforeseeable
- non-productive
- governed by rules: the activity has rules that are different from everyday life
- fictitious: it is accompanied by the awareness of a different reality
Computer game designer Chris Crawford attempted to define the term game using a series of dichotomies:
- Creative expression is art if made for its own beauty, and entertainment if made for money. (This is the least rigid of his definitions. Crawford acknowledges that he often chooses a creative path over conventional business wisdom, which is why he rarely produces sequels to his games.)
- A piece of entertainment is a plaything if it is interactive. Movies and books are cited as examples of non-interactive entertainment.
- If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.
- If a challenge has no “active agent against whom you compete,” it is a puzzle; if there is one, it is a conflict. (Crawford admits that this is a subjective test. Some games with noticeably algorithmic artificial intelligence can be played as puzzles; these include the patterns used to evade ghosts in Pac-Man.)
- Finally, if the player can only outperform the opponent, but not attack them to interfere with their performance, the conflict is a competition. (Competitions include racing and figure skating.) However, if attacks are allowed, then the conflict qualifies as a game.
Bernard Suits takes up Wittgenstein’s advice and actually looks to see if it is possible to define games. Suit’s definition is as follows:
To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitudes]. [Playing] a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
[Note: the above quotes are cobbled together from Wikipedia and, in the last case, from a web review of Suit’s The Grasshopper. I’m assembling this blog in a rush and so am saving some time typing.]