University Place  Jim Brown Electronic Literature and Tales of Computational Life  May 22, 2013 UP892  cc >> Jim Brown is an assistant professor who teaches both in the English Department and in the newly launched interdisciplinary Digital Studies Program. His research focuses on rhetorical and ethical questions opened up by new media technologies. He is particularly interested in the expressive, creative, and communicative potential of software from video games to electronic literature. Would you join me in welcoming Jim, please, to give us a talk this afternoon. [applause] >> Thank you. I thought I would explain for a second what you've been watching for the last couple of minutes on screen. It probably looks a bit confusing. This is a poetry generator written by Nick Montford called Taroko Gorge. So, Nick didn't write all of these poems. He wrote the code that generates these poems. 

This is the kind of thing I'm going to be talking about a little bit today. This is my title, "Electronic Literature and the Tales of Computational Life." Today, I'd like to talk about Stuart Moulthrop's 1999 hypertext fiction "Reagan Library," which uses two computer languages, html and JavaScript, in order to generate narratives and to perform various arguments about memory and computational life. What do I mean when I say computational life? Primarily, I mean a life, nearly any life these days, in which software shapes experience. Included in this experience of computational life is, as we will see, literary expression. But for many in the humanities, the term computation might conjure images of mathematics and rigid formulas. It makes us think of binary machines and the opaque systems with which we interact daily from iPhones to Google's increasingly complex search algorithms. Most of us know little about how these computational systems work. We might turn to experts when they crash or go on the fritz. In fact, Lisa has somebody installing something on the machine as we speak. But if we pause for a moment to consider the various computational systems that have shaped this very day, the smart phones in our pockets, the machines used to charge our credit cards for a cup of coffee, or even a machine to calculate how to brew that coffee to certain specifications. 

We can see that the not-so-tech-savvy amongst us are immersed in computational life. As Noah Wardrip-Fruin has argued, ubiquitous computing now means that understanding software and computation is a crucial part of civic life, "In our society we are surrounded by software-- from everyday Google searches to the high stakes of Diebold voting machines. We need to be prepared to engage software critically, accustomed to interpreting descriptions of processes, able to understand common pitfalls, and aware of what observing software's output reveals and conceals about its inner workings." Far from serving as a background as our various reading and writing situations, software is a writing technology. But in terms of my home field of rhetoric, we might say that computation is one of the available means of persuasion. Computational technologies are, in many senses, the air we breathe. Or to foreshadow something we'll talk about at the end of this talk, the water in which we swim. So when I say that Stuart Moulthrop's "Reagan Library" tells us something about computational life, I mean that it comments on how software and hardware shape how we read, write, communicate, and interact. But even more importantly, his piece tells us something about computational life, circa way back in 1999. Like many works of electronic literature, "Reagan Library" asks interactors to piece together narratives. We're going to learn how it does that, but I thought I'd stop for a second to see if anybody would be willing to share, to think back to 1999, to your computational life in 1999, what you were doing with computers, what you were not doing with computers. 

To give you a little bit of context, Wikipedia was two years from being started. We're talking, this is a while ago in technology time. Anybody who had anything that pops into mind in 1999? [inaudible] Right, modem connections, possibly measured, not necessarily in baud anymore. >> I remember that I was using the original chat rooms to find other mothers who had twins, because I lived in an outlying area. >> You were ahead of your time, right? Way ahead of the mommy blogs of today. >> And network connections with other people who knew how to raise two screaming toddlers at one time. >> One more. >> I was learning how to do online courses in WebCT. >> Wow, yes, also ahead of your time. >> I was writing software training manuals. 

>> So you're right at home here. Great, so we can see these are just some of the things happening, you know, almost 15 years ago now. It feels like quite a long time ago. What Moulthrop gives us is a kind of snapshot into that world, by way of literature. I thought for a second I would-- I'll come out of my slides here for a second and I'll go over to the piece, just to give you, before I start talking about it, a sense of what it looks like. I've already clicked the "begin" screen. Actually, let me go back. This is the opening screen. You can see it already dates itself just sort of aesthetically. This is version 1.1. 

That has been slightly modified in 2009. We'll talk a little bit about the implications of that modification, but the aesthetic is really still very much a sort of '90s aesthetic. We have these QuickTime panoramas at the top that are sort of like virtual reality panoramas. You can move them with your mouse. There are also links in the panoramas. We'll talk more about those. You can click links right here in the text. One thing to point out just for now, a couple of quick features. One, if you're trying to read these pages right now, they might seem like random sort of collections of words that don't make a whole lot of sense in certain places. That's by design. 

Also, we're going to talk a little bit more about these dots down in the lower righthand corner of the screen, which are extremely important. So, as I'm talking about it, I thought it might just help to have this sort of picture in mind. I'll have some screen shots as I go, as well.  So, Reagan Library lays out a number of narrative zones. Each zone tells us a story. But beyond it's various intersecting narratives, the piece offers a commentary on web browsing technology and the language JavaScript. One of the color coded zones, the red zone, and we'll see some shots from this portion of the piece, provides tips to the reader about how to navigate this work of electronic literature. By following these tips, some are red herrings, and by playing with this piece, an interactor learns a number of rules for traversing the narrative, and actually for putting it together. We'll talk about these in more detail, but here's a quick example. The text in each narrative begins as these nonsensical phrases. 

But as an interactor revisits each page, she learns that the text changes. The red zone here, as I talked about before, tells us to count the dots. That's one of the pieces of advice it gives us. We find that each visit to a page adds a dot to the lower righthand corner of the page. So with each dot, the text gains some coherence. Those phrases become sentences, and those sentences become less scattered and become narrative. So, as we explore the piece, we are getting clues about how it works and what the work is demonstrating formally. In fact, one visit to the red zone makes direct reference to the browser's ability to store data that we are giving it. A quote from the red zone is "Your shopping cart is not yet full." This clue, along with the dots in the corner of the screen, tell us that Reagan Library is tracking us. It's remembering things about us. 

The interface indicates to the user that each click is pushing things toward coherence. Here we have four dots. This is a completed page. This is as coherent as Reagan Library gets, if we were to sit and read it. So, Reagan Library sits somewhere between narrative and game, as readers click through and tinker with it, trying to determine how it works, and working to unpack its narratives. In fact, one of the values of this piece is that it reveals much about these inner workings by way of its interface. This is a design. It's designed right into the piece. At first, we may be at a loss trying to make sense of its various narratives. A sustained interaction will slowly reveal clues about how to read and interpret this piece. 

This computational machine, don't be scared, we'll talk about what all this gobbledygook on the screens means. This computational machine, Reagan Library, is not just a collection of narratives. It is a piece of software also. It reveals itself to us as we interact with it. But we can go even further into understanding how this mechanism works. When we dig beyond our surface interaction with Reagan Library, something I'll do today with you, by looking at some of its underlying code. We learn that the piece uses JavaScript to record information about our browsing session, and to transform random collections of sentences into narrative. We learn how this happens if we look at the code. This information affects how or whether various stories emerge. So, Reagan Library's quip about the shopping cart can also be read as a commentary about how code is used to track us. 

While this is a commonplace notion today, Reagan Library was published in 1999, I believe Amazon was four or five years old at the time, so people were shopping online. I don't think I was yet. Some folks were. At this moment, a typical web surfer might not really understand this capability of web browsers. Further, the various narratives presented in the piece comment upon the fraughtness of memory. In fact, the title dose the same, Reagan Library, published well after we find out that the president suffered from Alzheimer's. Thus, Reagan Library links the browser's ability to remember how many times we visited a page to the character's engagements with their own memories. It does so by using computation as an expressive medium. I mentioned this earlier. We might not be used to thinking of that term, computation, next to that word, expressive. 

These things seem opposite to us often. And we're going to talk a little bit about how that's not the case. As Katherine Hayles has demonstrated, computational machines are more than just tools, say, Microsoft Word. Computer programming is more than just a technical practice. That is, more than just the purview of computer scientists. Electronic literature is an ideal form for recognizing how we collaborate with computers in complex, distributive cognitive systems. How do we make meaning emerge in collaboration with computational machines? In her book "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary," Hayles argues that electronic literature refigures computational practice. Works like Reagan Library join technical practice with artistic creation. They show us the value of interdisciplinary approaches to literature. Electronic literature opens up new questions, not only about literary expression, but also about computation's role in contemporary culture. 

So what is electronic literature? Electronic literature emerged in the late 1980s with works such as Michael Joyce's "Afternoon, A Story." In fact, I have two works, these are discs, okay, remember these? I'm going to pass these around. One is Shelly Jackson's "Patchwork Girl," and the other is Michael Joyce's, "Afternoon, A Story." You can look at the booklets inside.  Joyce's canonical work, "Afternoon, A Story," published in the late '80s, I believe 1987, along with much earlier work in electronic literature, was created with stories based software, which looked something like this, which allowed authors to craft chunks of text, called lexia, along with links between those texts. So, it would determine how you got to each of these pieces of narrative, these links, these lines. As a reader, that would happen by clicks. This is hypertext fiction. Much like you read a website, you would be reading a story, a narrative. These early works required readers to click and make choices, leading many to argue that they were more interactive than print literature. Upon closer review, we find that such works were really not all that interactive. They weren't really interactive at all, since authors determined a great deal about how we experienced the text. 

That is, we might be able to click certain links, but really, the possibility space here is determined by an author. In fact, "Afternoon, A Story," reads more like "Ulysses" than it does anything that you would normally read on a screen. Still, these early works of hypertext fiction did make use of computational technologies to craft narratives. They began to explore how computers might change or augment literary expression. After this first wave of electronic literature, came a number of other experiments. I'll talk about what this codes here does here in a second. I won't lay out a complete history of electronic literature here, it's worth noting that authors began to explore a range of media for the creation of electronic literature from html, which we'll talk about more shortly, to Adobe Flash to computer languages such as Perl. This is the kind of work that's happening today. Very quickly, I'll show you that that chuck of code, much like the poem that I showed you at the beginning, Taroko Gorge, actually is a Perl poetry generator. So, all I've done is copied that code directly into this terminal window and I hit enter, and poems appear. 

All based on the rules written by the same poet, Nick Montford. What's interesting about this is it doesn't call upon a library of words. This is not a piece of software that goes to a library of words and selects them an arranges them. It actually makes the words based on rules. It takes the letters and places them in the correct order, then make makes them rhyme actually. It's called ppg256 because it's written in 256 characters. That's the constraints that he put on himself. It's called Perl Golf. How can you write a poem in the fewest characters possible? He chose the number 256 for a number of reasons I won't go into. That snippet of code, which is actually quite short, does this. 

And it does this forever. I could leave this running forever. This is what's happening in some more recent work in electronic literature. Reagan Library is closer. It probably sit in between these two. If we set up an early work and story space, and some of this more contemporary work, it probably sit in between. Although, I think it shares more with story space work than something like this poetry generator. Okay.  There's been a great deal of conversation about how we might define electronic literature, right? What really counts as electronic literature? While most in the field agree that the mere presentation of literature on a digital device, say the Kindle version of "Ulysses," is not considered electronic literature. That's just using the mechanism to deliver the print text in the same way, essentially, as you would on the page. 

There's no real consequences about how we define this category. So to address this problem this organization, I love their logo, the Electronic Literature Organization. Founded in 1999, the same year Reagan Library is published, convened a committee to define the genre. This was tricky, since authors and critics have been discussing electronic literature already for more than a decade. Now they have to sort of work backwards and define the genre. They define it this way, "Work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer." That's it. This definition is, in part, designed to encompass a number of different kinds of work, from Emily Short's Galatea, on the left. It's is a chatterbot, a piece of software that you can actually interact with and have a conversation with. To the work on the right, which is Talan Memmott's Self portrait(s) [as other(s)]. It is a recombinant portrait and biography generator that procedurally generates portraits and bios for well-known painters, different every time, all software running to recombine bits of the portrait and bits of the bio. 

They needed something that would account for all these different kinds of work. As we see, there's text involved in some of these at least, but often times it's not the central way in which things are being expressed. They needed something that would account for something like these story space pieces which are very language driven, and something like this. Now the electronic literature's definition of-- Electronic literature is sometimes called eLit. eLit really wants to focus on work that takes advantage of computation, that does not just use it to deliver text. Of course the definition has a number of problems. Hayles notes that it's tautological. It assumes that we know what if meant by the phrase "an important literary aspect." Additionally, it's quite broad, meaning things like digital games or any number of other sorts of digital art might be incorporated under, now, this category of literature. If fact, another critic has recently taken issue with this definition, saying that we should be defining electronic literature in term of dealing with the constraints of language specifically. That that's what literature has always done, and that that's what electronic literature does. 

While Hayles welcomes all these different types of literature, and work under the category of literature, there's been a great deal of debate here. Regardless of how we define it, which is really not our task here. It's interesting, and this might be something to talk about in the Q & A, we might ask might ask what it means for the field of English studies when the term literature expends and morphs like this. It's not only happening because of the digital. It's happening in a lot of different ways. John was talking about it earlier. What new opportunities are opened up with such expansions and changes? And how do such debates change the way we think about reading and writing? Regardless of how we define it, it seems clear that such work calls for new modes of engagement. Reading and interacting with electronic literature reveals what Hayles calls intermediatory dynamics. She's using this term, intermediation, to describe what she calls dynamic heterarchies. These are opposed to hierarchies, or not hierarchies. 

Dynamic heterarchies amongst humans and machines, recursive feedback loops that show us how humans and machines are intertwined. How is it that when I interact with this piece, meaning emerges? Intermediation provides a way of understanding both reading and writing as complex performances that never originate in any one place. It's difficult to know where the meaning is coming from when I interact with something like Reagan Library. By interacting with computational artifacts we get what Hayles describes as a feel for the algorithm at work. We get a sense for how the computational mechanism in working. Hopefully, if it's designed well. We gain insight into how it works, how it creates meaning and we're reminded of the complexities of any interpretive effort, print, electronic or otherwise. These feedback loops serve as commentaries on our complex relationships with writing tools. This means that humans engineer computers and computers re-engineer humans in systems bound together by recursive feedback and feed-forward loops. We are actually re-wired. 

Research now in neurology is arguing this. In interacting with these devices we begin the think and act differently. Some people who say that they have a hard time focusing for an hour at a time on a talk such as this might be experiencing that. We're being re-wired. This concept of intermediation that Hayles gives us helps us think differently about an interpretive effort as something more dynamic and more fluid. What Hayles gives us is not only a way to read electronic literature, but a way to understand how these technologies re-wire us. This is what I was talking about. "The programmer experiences creation as an active dynamic in which the computer plays a central role." The computer is no longer just a tool, but a collaborator in some sense. In this case, who or what is writing? Who or what is reading? These are just some of the questions we can open up when we start to interact with electronic literature, which asks us to consider what it's like to live in a world increasingly shaped by such computational technology. When analyzing Reagan Library we can read it in the ways that we would normally read it. 

We can read the words on the screen. But if we treat the screen as another pages we miss a great deal here. We need to continue to remind ourselves that what we're seeing is actually not a page, but something that's dynamically generated with each click and with each interaction. What we need the think about is both the words on screen and processes that are generating those words. That's what we're going to talk a little bit about now. Let's talk a little bit about the moving parts in Moulthrop's piece. Like many works of electronic literature, Reagan Library asks interactors to piece together interlocking and overlapping narratives. This work, as I've said earlier, features these color-coded zones of narrative that include dynamically generated text and QuickTime virtual reality panoramas. Each zone contains a different story, though the stories do intersect and overlap at various points. For instance, a blue zone of the story features a stand-up comedian in psychotherapy, and another zone features a deceased film director named Emily St. Cloud. 

At one point the stand-up comic actually makes direct reference to St. Cloud. We find out at one point that Emily St. Cloud is deceased. Here's another screen shot of Reagan Library. This is a page called white cone. The text is very small. One thing to notice here is that there is a single blue dot in the bottom right-hand corner. Just to remind you of what that means is that this is the first times we've interacted with this page on this particular reading. An interactor can navigate the narrative by clicking hyperlinks either in the texts or in the QuickTime panoramas. I'll say more about those in just a second. The narratives, as the title of the work suggests, all deal with recalling and reconstructing memories. 

For instance, this stand-up comedian I referenced earlier has survived a plane crash and is severely burned, and is using virtual reality in these therapy sessions he's having. He's creating a space to work through memories and to work through trauma. Emily St. Cloud's character discusses previous films in a time capsule she's buried, recalling various moments in her life. Like I said, we find out later that she's dead. It's unclear where this voice is coming from. As an interactor clicks through the piece, either through the hypertext links in the text or in the panoramas, we move amongst these narratives and we move towards something more coherent. The text becomes less fragmentary. Interactors find that visiting a page four times completes it's transformation. You can play Reagan Library as a game, try to get it to maximum coherence. This brief introduction shows us what it's like to read or play Reagan Library at it's most basic level. 

There's a lot more to the narrative than I'm not going into here. But it gives you a general sense of what's happening. As we'll see, a closer look at this piece reveals that it is not only a series of narratives about the fraughtness of memory, it is also a set of computational processes crafted by Moulthrop. What do we call him? Is he a creative writer? He's written some poetry, he's written all different kinds of electronic literature. I would call him a writer, but he's doing something more than what we would normally call writing. And he's doing that all toward the same end. The text and these computational processes work together to express an idea. He's using this idea of what Noah Wardrip-Fruin calls expressive processing. Computational processes used as an expressive medium. Crafting rules that generate text. 

The rules themselves express ideas, not just the text. That's what we're going to talk little bit about today. The other meaning of expressive processes that is evoked for Wardrip-Fruin is that these processes actually tell us something about design histories and about the milieus that the piece grows out of. In this case, what we learn is something about JavaScript and about web browsers. By examining the code and the processes of Moulthrop's piece, which I'm going to do here in a minute, we gain insight into the history of a language. We gain insight into the sorts of arguments that Moulthrop is trying to make. And the value of Reagan library is that it reveals much of this in our interactions with it. We don't have to dig down to the code if we don't know how to. The argument I'm making today is certainly not that we should all become experts in computer programming. Instead, what I hope I'll offer here is a way to think about a multi-layered interpretation of this kind of artifact and what it might expose that only an interface reading would not. 

I can get that code based on a disk, much like the one I passed around, from the Electronic Literature volume. This piece was republished as part of the Electronic Literature collection. I can grab the code from that CD Rom and take a look at it. I didn't know JavaScript before I started looking at this code. In fact, Reagan Library became my way of learning this language, by looking at the code. So here is a really interesting function that I want to explain. I want to explain what's happening here and tell you why I think it's important. This is a function called Keep Track. We probably can determine what we think this thing is doing. It's keeping track of us and of what we're doing. 

It's got an if/then statement built into it. If this value called fourState is less that three. FourState meaning we're trying to get four different visits to a page. We start at zero for every page. Each reading is unique. That means when you start over with Reagan Library everything goes back to zero and you work through again. If fourState is less than three, increment fourState one. Meaning, if I come in at zero, increment it to one. If I come in at one, increment it to two. That's what that if statement does. 

The second statement is really interesting. I won't go into the syntax of this line, but what that line is doing is holding all that information about how many times we have visited each page. It's holding it right behind the screen that you are reading. It's actually sitting right underneath the text that you're reading. Let me show you how we can find that out very quickly. This would not have been possible when Moulthrop published this, but modern browsers such as Chrome, which is the one I'm using, you can also do this in Firefox and I think you can probably do this in Safari now, have something called developer tools. If I click on developer tools, and anyone can do this, anyone can bring this screen up. Knowing what's on this screen is the trick, right? I open up the developer tools and I can note over here, there's this value right here that is setting up a column. It's set at 100%. It's actually setting up two columns. 

One of those columns is set at 100%, meaning it's taking up the whole screen. If I change this to 50%, we now have what sitting behind there the whole time that we couldn't see otherwise. What this table on the right is, is each time we visit a page this increments. So what I can now do actually is cheat. I can go through and just plug a three into each of those fields and the work is complete. I don't actually have to traverse and click all of the links to do it. It takes a really long time actually. This is what's sitting behind the scenes, right underneath our noses. It's all in the interest of remembering what we're doing, tracking us.  Given what we know about what's happening in that table behind the scenes, when one of the clues in the red zone says, you can end this. 

It's not actually teasing us. There are multiple lines in that red zone that are teasing us. There are multiple times in the red zone where we're being essentially taunted by Moulthrop, being sort of provoked and made fun of for not being able to figure out what's going on. You can actually complete the work. I was trying to think of one of the ones, one of these sort of teasing remarks. At points he'll say things like, you're 55% through the work, but that number 55 is randomly generated. It means nothing. All of this you can see once you look at the code. But again, you don't have to look at the code to know that. You can be clicking for a half an hour and it says 55%. 

Then you click for another ten minutes and it says 23%. It's randomly generated. Now you know there's something fishy going on here. The variable that generates that, I could be getting this wrong. The function that generates that is called, I believe, Sententious, is the name of the function. So it's all the way down, it's sort of snark all the way down. [laughter] The various narratives presented in this piece comment upon the fraughtness of memory. The title of the piece of the piece, as I've said, suggests the same. But the software mirrors this idea using expressive processes to make a procedural argument. In a book called Persuasive Games Ian Bogost describes what he calls procedural rhetoric, the crafting of rules, computational or otherwise, that make arguments. 

 Designers of procedural systems use rules to shape an interactive experience. This is what Moulthrop is doing. This is what Reagan Library is doing with JavaScript. By using computational procedures to make arguments about the state of browser technology in the 1990s, Moulthrop's Reagan Library is, in Bogost's words, "an expressive agent that uses processes for expression rather than utility." You can see the difference between something like Reagan Library and something like Microsoft Word, which is not necessarily an expressive agent. Although, it is expressing things, as John noted. It's expressing things about what a page should look like or does look like. Works like this remind us that computational procedures can be more about tool making. They can be deployed as an expressive and rhetorical medium. Taking advantage of this expressive power, Reagan Library links the browser's ability to remember to the character's engagements with their memories. While the Keep Track function effects how or whether various narratives emerge, Moulthrop's quip about the shopping cart show that this is about more than just the dynamic generation of narrative fragments. 

This Keep Track function is procedurally arguing something to us. I took a screen shot of this, I believe, yesterday. It's probably hard to see, but you can see that Google is telling me that I have last visited the ELC version two on 6/23. And it tells me how many times I've visited it if I'm logged in, as I always am, because I'm always on gmail, obsessively checking it, right? This is now commonplace. We barely notice it. In 1999 this was likely a pretty big deal. One other thing to note about those QuickTime panoramas, in addition to making these arguments about memory and about our attempts to capture memories, and machine's attempts to remember things, it's worth noting that those QuickTime panoramas in the 1999 version don't work anymore because of software upgrades. This is why Moulthrop had to fix it and make a 2009 version, which is the one that we were looking at. So in it's actual deterioration as an artifact, it's actually still performing it's argument, despite itself probably. This happens quite a lot with electronic literature. 

Archiving electronic literature is a very tricky thing. We have to save all the software that runs this stuff. Much of it we don't use anymore. We're asked to link computational function to literary meaning. We're asked to consider how the various objects of computational life have been constructed or composed. How has that composition made use of computational technologies? And how do our own interactions with the piece help to make meaning possible? When examining Reagan Library as both literature and software it is not enough to consider, for instance, that the story's stand-up comedian is a burn victim working is psychotherapy and describing a virtual world that he's created in therapy. There's no question that such details are important as we try to parse the narrative, that narrative and these other intersecting ones. However, that information can also be linked to these computational procedures I've been demonstrating today. Showing that a multi-layered reading is actually somewhat required if we were to gain any sort of full appreciation of how electronic literature tells us the tales of computational life. Hayles argues that electronic literature, as I mentioned earlier, revalues computational practice. 

It's showing us that computer programs are more than tools. They're compositions, and sometimes even arguments. It shows us that new media technologies have opened up new modes of expression, and that it forces us to link surface meaning with technological mechanism. In short, electronic literature addresses questions of composition and literary meaning that reach beyond the concerns of any one academic discipline. It's linking the concerns of say, computer science and engineering with those of English studies. Understanding computation. Here's a function called Supernoise which actually just introduces noise into the piece and randomizes things. It makes things, sort of, more complicated before they get clearer. Understanding computation as literary and rhetorical medium allows us to see how those who study literature might collaborate across the university to track how literature helps us understand computational life in new ways. In short, we can and should be sitting side by side with computer scientists trying to parse code like this. 

Even without delving into the intricacies of JavaScript or browsers states, Reagan Library never allows us to imagine the scene of reading as a stable one. Of course, we know that scene has never been stable. The texts open themselves to infinite readings. However, a work like Reagan Library introduces another set of dynamics. The generation of narrative meaning is the result of a computational machine that is constantly manipulating and reconfiguring text and image. Any given performance of this work relies upon an interaction between the reader and Moulthrop's computational machine. Each reading is unique due to the dynamic way the text is generated. All randomness is pseudo-randomness. Right? There's no actual pure randomness when it comes to computation. Though performing every reading of Reagan Library would likely take you more time than you are on this planet. 

This work invites the kind of intermediatory dynamics that Hayles talks about. We require new interpretive strategies for understanding how all of this works. By way of coda, at the end here I thought I would talk here for a second about how computational life might be different 14 years after the publication of Reagan Library today. One way to answer this is just to look around, to notice how the web has transformed from a read-only space to a read/write space. It's the transformation of the web to web 2.0, which is social networking technologies. We could do that. We could think about how algorithms are millions of stock trades right now, as we speak. But another way of answering this question would be to look once again to electronic literature. In closing, I thought we might look together at another work by Moulthrop, published in 2008. Now, given how quickly things move, it is perhaps a stretch to link 2008 to today, right? But at the very least, we can see some of the differences in the nine years between these two compositions. 

Not just in the compositions themselves, but in terms of the moment that they grow out of. This more recent piece is called Deep Surface. It asks the following question, what would happen if the pages of a book, or rather, the so-called web pages, what we call web pages which are not pages at all, were made of a flexible fluid such as water. Readers could dive gradually from the home page to the next, and on and on. Here is how Moulthrop describes Deep Surface, "Deep Surface is a monstrous progeny of a strange romance between reading machine and a free-diving simulator. Literature at crush depth. Hypertext gets wet. Generically, it is yet another instrument, one of those things you can play (or play with), without playing a game. There are rules here and procedures, and (as in Real Life) a more of less invisible scoring system, so astute players may be able to invent clever and even elegant strategies. But if you're not feeling astute you can plunge in and have a dip, immersing yourself in what signs and symptoms may present themselves as you pass by, dreaming perhaps of meaning, 'til robot voices wake and you drown." I mentioned earlier that computational devices are in many ways the water in which we swim. 

Deep Surface actually demonstrates this in a particularly striking way. As we interact with Deep Surface we confront the depths of reading and the various layers through which we might move or get lost as we surf, click or read. This is the interface. I'm going to actually go to the piece here in a second, but this is a screen shot of what it looks like. The dive bubble on the righthand side of the screen tells us how deep we are, how much air we have left. The text is layered and contently on the move. I've captured it here, but it never actually sits still for you long enough to really read it unless you learn how to play it the right way. Okay, so we can immediately see similarities to Reagan Library. This piece is played and performed rather than just read. One can treat it as a reading experience of a game, tinkering with it's various possibilities. 

But the question I thought we might close with, and that I thought might trigger our discussion today is this, what does Deep Surface tell us about contemporary computational life? What arguments does it make about our contemporary world, about reading and writing today? How does it use not just text, but also computational processes, to express those ideas? Also, what would you want to know if you could dig into the code? What kinds of questions would you ask? These are the questions we might ask as we examine electronic literature at it's various levels of meaning, from code to text, from interface to internal mechanism. By examining works that are born digital we can meditate on how computation is changing how we read, write, think and live, and how literary meaning travels through these various media. Thank you. I'll stop there. [applause]