I, Apparatus, You

Abstract

In 2001, Florian Cramer wondered whether ‘the theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted... from perceiving computer data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in such notions as ‘hypertext’, ‘hyperfiction’, ‘hyper-/multimedia’) towards paying attention to the very codedness–that is, textuality–of digital systems themselves' (Cramer, 2001). I want to extend this focus on the codedness of computer-based textuality into a technosocial ‘phenomenology’ of the text-as-apparatus. These texts cannot be understood separately from the apparatus that displays and performs them. ‘Trilogical’ relationships exist between humans and apparatuses that are revealed during the performance of the text-as-apparatus. The trilogue acknowledges the apparatus as an entity that, while lacking consciousness, possesses a pseudo-agency with ramifications for the interpretations of such texts. The result is new types of creative relationships, in which different concepts of language compete, and hopefully combine, to create new types of meaning.

The Adaptive Process of Multimodal Composition: How Developing Tacit Knowledge of Digital Tools Affects Creative Writing

“…Flower and Hayes' Cognitive Process Model (1981), as well as my own practice-based methodology (Skains, in review;2013a) has provided a solid framework from which to analyze the effects of this shift in my composition process. The technology of digital media, or the "text-as-apparatus" (Weight, 2006), altered the rhetorical situation in creating these fictional texts; in addition to the familiar rhetorical problem of creating a compelling characterdriven narrative, digital media added additional considerations, such as multiple modes, reader interaction, and non-traditional story structures. The difficulties I discovered in transitioning to a digital composition practice parallel those of students attempting to draw upon their print-based composition knowledge in multimodal composition tasks (DePalma & Alexander, 2015).…”

The Fragmented Digital Gaze

“…Contemporary narratives, including modern and postmodern literature, film, and digital fiction, trend toward seeing existence as "fragmented -as multiple, discontinuous, discordant, and confusing" (Beja, 1979, p. 76), toward creating, fragmenting, and reconstructing narrative voices (Richardson, 2006, p. ix). Jenny Weight (2006) notes that technology affects the human experience, that the computer is a "performative device of unique capacity, sensitivity and complexity, which encourages a wide range of human creativity, interpretation and, indeed, collaboration" between the writer, the apparatus, and the reader (p. Similarly, the layering of architectonic spaces, and the requisite transgression called for in creating digital fictions that are built from layers of often simultaneously displayed and edited code, image, sound and text-as-displayed led to both ontological metalepsis and analogous challenges to power through narration. These challenges to the stability of the narrative levels and the authority of the narrator blend to offer a clear theme communicated through the very structure of the discourse: every person must seek to control their own story, rather than letting it fall to the arbitrary whims of an interlocutor.…”

“…Contemporary narratives, including modern and postmodern literature, film, and digital fiction, trend toward seeing existence as "fragmented-as multiple, discontinuous, discordant, and confusing" (Beja, 1979, p. 76), toward creating, fragmenting, and reconstructing narrative voices (Richardson, 2006). Jenny Weight (2006) notes that technology affects the human experience, that the computer is a "performative device of unique capacity, sensitivity and complexity, which encourages a wide range of human creativity, interpretation and, indeed, collaboration" between the writer, the apparatus, and the reader (p. 416). The conventions of various digital genres engage fundamentally in unnatural narration, including the conventional use of second-person perspective and necessary metalepsis in interactive fictions and other ludic platforms.…”