Didn't notice that slip. Seems like reproducibility, as a term, holds much more possibility; not unlike the digital means of production.

I meant it as in those narratives attempting to achieve realism would intuitively tend toward technology that offers an experience closest to our actual experiences and that 3D has been deemed that solution. Because of the technological advances in CGI, however, I find stylized (i.e. 'artsy') graphical art the only art that can withstand more than a few months without looking outdated. This interview from one of the heads of art on the Guild Wars 2 team (yet unreleased but slated to be a brilliant follow-up to my favorite game) offers a nice explanation and two thumbs into the gut of Ebert's argument.

I agree that 3D is an overblown fad, but I don't agree with your opening premise that narrative tends intuitively toward realism. What about comics? Many of these work fine without being "photo-realistic."

Just a thought on this line of thinking ... Take a look at the Braille on page 423 of House of Leaves. The Editors provide us a translation that includes the phrase "You will never find a mark there." However, if you go to the trouble of actually translating the Braille, it reads "You will never find Mark there."

Obviously, Mark is the author's name, and its use here puns on the authority of inscription. It also plays with this notion of the author that we can't not read into any "authored" work.

I just tried to translate this Braille myself, and it's apparently a pretty interesting code in its own right. It seems Braille doesn't go letter by letter, with one braille character equalling each of the letters in "find Mark".

Instead, it literally reads "f9d Mäk". This isn't some kind of 1337-speak braille, from what I can gather. It's just a convention to keep words as brief as possible, to save paper, so you take these kinds of shortcuts.

Random links FTW.

So what is this email chain? I think I heard some conversation about it in my classes today, but I didn't quite catch what they were talking about.

To start off, many of my picture captions have been sarcastic, with this post being no different. I'm not implying past texts are better, more making a joke on Harold Bloom's anthology.

Professor, you make a point that obsolescence in technology does not mar the quality of work. I somewhat disagree with this. I'm going to use video game computing systems as an example. When Halo first came out on Xbox it was incredibly popular and loved, but as soon as Halo 2 was released and xbox 360 came out, the original Halo went on the backburner. My point is, when technology becomes outdated, it becomes unused. In ten years, will Lexia to Perplexia be viewed except by college students interested in Media Arts? It can probably be argued that this same logic can be used for my literature in the existing western canon, but at least those works are easily accessible at most bookstores

In your comments on plot and theme, I do not consider a linear plot necessary for a text to be canonized, what I meant was that, we have been programmed to look for patterns in text. When reading Joyce, you may not notice a plot, but you certainly are trying to form one. By reading a book in a linear fashion, I also meant reading from page 1 to finish. I don't know much about electronic text but based on Lexia to Perplexia, that is not the form. In this sense, the thought process when reading electronic literature will be different than that of a linear novel.

My thoughts on e-lit becoming more popular is precisely because the internet and technology will advance and play a larger role in peoples lives. E-lit will become more and more accessible to the public, and will undoubtedly find ways of presenting it's content in an appealing medium to the public.

I think canonizing e-lit is possible, but will face obstacles.

I made a comment on this two days ago but I guess it didn't go through. Probably my fault.

What I spoke of was Harold Bloom and his canon. He actually made a physical list and that picture is, I assume, his list in published form. I found it quite an odd concept. His canon is so long no non-literary devotee could ever read through the whole list. Take that in tandem with the fact that modern society has even less time to devote to reading and you essentially have a list of books the average person avoids at all costs. It's so daunting in size it has become unnecessary to think of 'THE' canon of Bloom and easier to think of canonS.

That is why electronic lit would probably do best to stay off Bloom's canon. That way it has a chance of picking up a niche market like Romance or Graphic novels. After all when we include electronic lit into 'THE' canon why can't films be there also? Are they really more different a medium than electronic fiction?

Lastly, even though I don't agree with separatism arguments for literature based on race (such as the argument that African American lit should be judged based on African American standards and have a completely nonadjacent canon), I think it is perfectly reasonable to separate electronic lit into it's own mini-canon. That way canons stay at a reasonable size and are judged by aesthetics that have a chance at providing relevant criteria. Computer culture would be one of these fast developing areas. Hopefully I can support that in my blog post.

I was reading an essay by Stuart Moulthrop in my "big blue" Norton Anthology of theory and criticism (super canony), and he discusses this while talking about Project Xanadu.

There wouldn't be canons like bookshelves, but more like canon, as in the musical meaning, "congeries of connections and relationships that are recognizably orderly yet inexhaustibly various. The shifting networks of consensus and textual demand (or desire)...would be constructed by users and for users. Their very multiplicity and promiscuity...would militate powerfully against any slide from populitism back toward hierarchy." (You Say You Want A Revolution? Hypertext and The Laws of Media, Moulthrop 1991).

Seems like a description of internet memes. Lolcats are in the e-text canon, right?

Hmm having a bit of trouble deciphering exactly what you are asking but, I'll take a stab at it.
It is one of the those fine lines in aesthetics. Does something have to look "beautiful" to be considered good art. In a post-modern world most definitely not so what kind of bad or "ugly" is good art? Is it mere opinion or is their something objective that makes one piece of ugly art good and another piece of ugly are bad (or even art vs non-art for that matter). Further does it mean that we need to know the intentions of the artist or how the piece came about to decide whether it was good or bad. I think knowing artists intentions, while it can be informative, can put you on shaky ground when formulating an aesthetic theory based on the need to know artists intentions.
Interestingly enough I came to like the jodi.org piece more after I discovered the code behind it (before I did not think it had much aesthetic merit). Of course you probably gave the piece more thought and considering you also probably have more experience with this type of art your sensibilities for evaluating such pieces are more refined than mine. So what I saw as just annoying chaos you experienced differently. This goes with an aesthetic idea that only people with refined sensibilities (experience, practice, etc) should be able to judge. I might be rambling here but there are some thoughts. Too many aesthetic theories running through my head hah.

I wanted it to work in two ways: 1. emulation generally requires much less skill than other forms of hacking and 2. the idea is to 'dumb' down the machine so it can run older operating systems or behave as less technologically advanced hardware.

These are some interesting and important operations about the mobility one gains through multilingualism. I think it might be possible to push back on this, though, because of the difference between how one moves from code to code and between how one moves from language to language.

In other words, you'd agree that "apple" doesn't mean exactly the same thing as "manzana" (Spanish for apple), right? A Spanish speaker and an English speaker could both point at the same object and each say, correctly, "manzana" and "apple", respectively, but the sense of each of those utterances connotates differently because of the languages from which they each emerge. Further, one might use a poetic or metaphorical designator to point to the red deliciousness and, while still accomplishing a correct identification, use an entirely different word or words.

However, in code terms, maybe, there's a specific and necessary relationship between the letter A and the decimal, binary, and hexadecimal value of its ASCII representation (65, 01000001, 41). Of course, the relationship between decimal 65 and hexadecimal 41 is a necessary one because that's the rules of those notation systems. The fact that decimal 65 will turn into an A in the right contexts (typing this sentence, for instance) relies on the encoding scheme for this webpage, among many other contexts like the operating system and the webpage's stylesheet.

So I think there's a resemblance certainly, but perhaps there's a different semiotics at work in code. At least, I think that's part of what Hayles is getting at in that Flickering Signifiers essay.