The opening screen of Passage

Co-authored Abstract for DiGRA 2015: William Robinson, Dylan Lederle-Ensign and Michael Mateas

Procedural Deformation and the Close Playing/Reading of Code:
An Analysis of Jason Rohrer’s Code in Passage
Despite Game Studies’ interest in digital games, the field has paid comparatively little attention to the algorithms underlying the medium. The following paper argues for the value of game code analysis and works towards potential methodologies. Platform studies has by necessity done some of this work in its appeals to analyzing game hardware and software along with the affordances and constraints they place on media (see Montfort and Bogost 2009; Salter and Murray 2014). That said, the interest here is not to generalize theories of platforms from snippets of code. Rather, this paper explores the meaning of code in the context of a game whose processes and mechanics are intended to be read metaphorically (Bogost 2009; Treanor and Mateas 2010). While software studies has previously focused on the abstracted operational logics of games (Wardrip-Fruin and Mateas 2009, Wardrip-Fruin 2009; Fox Harrell 2013), we focus on a detailed code-level analysis. Code-level readings of games do exist (Marino 2006, Sample 2011), but these have tended to focus on comments and variable names, rather than analyzing the relationship between the code-level expression of process and player interpretation. Drawing from works in software studies (Fuller 2008; Galloway and Thacker 2007; Bolter et al. 2013) and game studies, we argue that appeals to code may offer insights into the tensions between the practice of game development and the affordances and constraints of computational tools. We use code found in Jason Rohrer’s art-game Passage as a case study. Despite having been theorized by multiple game scholars (e.g. Bogost 2008; Parker 2012; Whalen 2012), Passage’s code has never been examined, nor has anyone considered the importance of its open-source nature. While its code is not representational in the same ways as its output, it does hold hermeneutic meaning that is detectable upon a procedurally literate inspection. What is more, as an artwork with underpinnings left intentionally accessible for public consumption, it is not unreasonable to consider it in this way.
Given the scope of this essay and that Passage has thousands of lines of code, only two portions of Rohrer’s work will be discussed here. The first relates to the hidden contents of in-game chests. The second is responsible for the game’s procedurally generated labyrinths. While both sections were selected because they are illustrative of Rohrer’s style of coding, each also illustrates a proposed methodology for game code studies: Close Reading/Playing Code and Procedural Deformation.

To illustrate our use of close reading/playing of code, we turn to Rohrer’s use of scoring in Passage. In his creator statement, Rohrer discusses the game’s metaphoric chests, suggesting that “not every pursuit leads to a reward—most of them are empty.” Rohrer continues the metaphor in explaining that these chests are marked with a sequence of gems and that “During your lifetime, you can learn to read these sequences and only spend your precious time opening worthwhile treasure chests.” From this we infer that in a single run of Passage (what Rohrer refers to as a lifetime) it should be possible to predict the outcomes of a chest’s contents, and that being able to do so will lead to a higher score. In this instance, Rohrer implies that worthwhile chests are valuable in the fiction of his game, a position echoed by their positive impact on the high score. Current writing on Passage has not addressed this puzzle, which we solved using a combination of code reading and close playing.
The following lines of code can be found in gamma256/gameSource/game.cpp, the core game file:
514 // the gem that marks chests containing points
515 int specialGem = time( NULL ) % 4;
These two lines set up an enormous amount of explanation and investigation to come. Setting aside for the moment an explanation of what the code means, let us continue following the places this number is used. Further down the same file, we find the code that executes when the player touches a closed chest. This is the only other place that specialGem appears in the code:
1183 if( getChestCode( (int)playerX, (int)playerY ) &
1184 0x01 << specialGem ) {
While this is the core of the chest puzzle, code reading alone was not enough to decipher a solution. These two snippets of code begin to give a sense of the futility of isolated code reading as a method for understanding the game elements they implement. These two lines leave us with questions whose answers are all in other parts of the code. Even so, the static definition does not provide a clear answer to the original question about the chest puzzle. While reading this code gave us a hint of the solution, specifically that there were five possible chest solutions randomly assigned to the level, we only fully understood the chest puzzle through a combination of close playing and theorycrafting. Building color coded tables of information about the contents of chests and their gems for each playthrough (as opposed to all playthroughs), we deployed one of the techniques used by powergamers, as described by Chris Paul in his work on theorycrafting (2012). Not only did we uncover the solution to Rohrer’s puzzle, but found our hermeneutic reading of the game had changed.

Our second methodology is also literary in nature. Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann, in their essay Deformance and Interpretation draw from Emily Dickinson’s proposal to read poems backward. They explain, “Reading Backward is a critical move that invades these unvisited precincts of imaginative works. It is our paradigm model of any kind of deformative critical operation. Such a model brings to attention areas of the poetic and artifactual media that usually escapes our scrutiny” (36). Samuels and McGann admit that their approach may be seen as heretical, given the goal of hermeneutic reading is largely meant to avoid “against the grain” readings, but we demonstrate here that this process of deformation is productive in generating new perspectives and questions on poetic works. What is more, we argue that this method has an affinity for code studies, given the emergent nature of the medium.
To discuss our use of procedural deformation, we turn to a second metaphor in Passage: the contradictory goals of advancing forward along the X-axis and the pursuit of treasure chests which appear further along the Y-axis. Metaphorically, these goals potentially relate to any number of everyday trade-offs. Rohrer effectively represents the structural metaphor of these mutually exclusive choices by offering the player a compelling interactive spatial representation. He does this by procedurally generating a map which becomes denser with impassable terrain as one moves down along the Y-axis. This paper describes the map generation algorithm in the context of Passage’s overall design, and explores alternative parameters that significantly alter the play experience and game’s rhetoric. We made several alternate versions of Passage, with changes ranging from small changes to the weights of random numbers to larger changes that expand the field of view and expose the entire map clearly. While Rohrer characterizes the map as a maze, it only functions as such when the player has a limited view. Similarly, modifying the weights with which walls or chests are placed in the world can significantly alter the game’s hermeneutic readings. In an alternate version with denser chests, exploring to the right becomes significantly less appealing. These deformations allow us to interrogate the values and parameters that Rohrer chose, and lead to a deeper understanding of their rhetorical purpose.
These two approaches are of course only loosely sketched, and owe much to the work of digital humanists, such as Alan Liu’s analyses of markup language (2004) or Wendy Chun’s analysis of code as fetish (2008). That said, the practice of digging into complex game code and unpacking its interactions for aesthetic and political analysis is altogether unexplored, which is why we take the research risk here.

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Back to work, into books, toward new writings. As I bring to an end a few projects at the start of this year, and prepare to head into the field and archives for research, I want to re-begin these weekly posts so as to track this work in the midst of composition. Following the MLA convention next week in Vancouver, I will dedicate the following months to researching and writing my dissertation, which explores contemporary poetry and poetics with regard to open access digital collections such as the Electronic Poetry Center, UbuWeb, and PennSound. This research will initially lead me to New York, Mexico City, Buffalo, and Philadelphia, where I will be conducting a number of interviews as well as examining the social and material conditions of the production of these institutional spaces and digital objects. In the midst of this research, I plan to work my way through a pile of (re-)reading on poetics, archives, textual criticism and book history, historical materialist literary criticism, digital publishing and intellectual property, media theory, and sound studies. It’s my hope that I might share aspects of these interviews and observations as well as comment upon these reading here over the coming months.

There are two concerns I find myself occupied with at the start of this project. The first concern has to do with the publishing of the dissertation itself. This is, perhaps, the last thing I should be thinking about at the start of the writing. Yet, as my dissertation will largely concern itself with a concept of literary production in networked digital cultures, I find myself often thinking about how part of this project should entail the creation of a specific digital platform for this research and writing, one that includes documents, video interviews, sound recordings, and images – all of which would be related to specific sections of text, hyperlinked, tagged, or be offered as archival diversions that lead one away from the specific narrative of the writing but deeper into an exploration of the objects themselves. As the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University – where I am writing my doctoral work – seems to encourage such interdisciplinary and research-creation-based projects with regard to doctoral work carried out there, perhaps the development of this unique dissertation platform might be something not only allowed but encouraged.

The second concern has to do with poetics in general. In preparation for this dissertation, I have been reading a number of works that I would consider as being foundational to the discourse of poetics today: Aristotle’s Poetics and its many commentaries, Leibnizian poetics and German morphological poetics, French semantics, Russian formalisms, Language poetics, new media poetics, and so on. Throughout, I have been asking myself and trying to comment upon the question: What are poetics? The slippage into the plural here is intentional because, to specify this question, I want to ask: What are poetics when considered through the lens of pluriform poetic works, which is to insist that poetics comment upon the media specificity and plurality of works – their format(s), simultaneous modes, differential substrates. If “Poetics is the science concerned with poetry as art” (Zhirmunsky, 1928) or “Poetics is the systematic study of literature as literature” (Hrushovski, 1976), the science or systems of poetics have too often focused upon the production of linguistic or narrative codes of a work while ignoring their material existence. One can see such starts to developing of a poetics that acknowledges format and media – for example in the works of Charles Bernstein (from whom I take up the notion of the “pluriform” poetic work), and in several of the essays in Morris & Swiss’s New Media Poetics – yet I am not aware of any work of/on poetics that attempts a comprehensive exploration of the subject of poetics (for example, Todorov’s Poétique) with regard to more contemporary media theory. This exploration is something that I am considering as necessary for an introduction to my dissertation since, as I will argue, that digital collections like the EPC, UbuWeb and PennSound have helped to make explicit the specific format and media differentiality of poetic works.

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The Reading Series

In the past twenty or so years, a large number of poetry sound recordings have been collected and stored in online databases hosted by university institutions. The SpokenWeb digital archive is one such collection. Housed at Concordia University, SpokenWeb features over 89 sound recordings from a poetry reading series that took place at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) between 1966 and 1974. In the early 2000s, the original reel-to-reel tapes were converted to mp3, and by 2010 the SpokenWeb project, using the SGWU Poetry Series as a case study, was well into its exploration for ways to engage with poetry’s sound recordings as an object of literary analysis.

The collection’s ‘invisibility’ prior to its digitization (for over twenty years the original reel-to-reel tapes remained undiscovered, unreachable, forgotten, or deemed unimportant) is a glaring reminder of printed text’s monopoly in literary analysis and cultural production. Certainly, the written manuscripts of some of North America’s most important twentieth-century poets would not have collected dust for so many years, as did this collection of aural manuscripts — a collection which, as Murray and Wiercinski observe, “[draws] attention to the importance of sounded poetry for increased, complementary or even new critical engagement with poems, and . . . [disrupts] the marginalization of poetry recordings as a subject for serious literary research” (2012). However, before the SpokenWeb recordings became available in an online environment — before they became objects — they were an aggregate of inert documentary data — that is, a collection of archived materials (recordings, posters, newspaper write-ups) that together formed a unit of cultural production (reading series), shaped by bodies (organizers, audiences, poets), spaces (locales), and institutions (scholarly, poetic). Indeed, in order for a reading series to become a coherent object of literary study, its traces, what Camlot and Wershler call “documentary residue” (6), must be properly considered, for they are the constituents of meaning-making through which hermeneutic analyses of recorded audio filter. In other words, the SpokenWeb collection “urge[d] us to consider [the sound archive] as a result of social and technical processes, rather than outside them somehow” (Sterne 826).

As a coherent (if partial) unit of study, SpokenWeb, or the recorded reading series in general, allows us to return (if artificially) to an ephemeral live event, see beyond the archived document, and interpret it as an aggregate, one that is historically, technologically, and culturally specific. But how do we approach this aggregate? What might this particular phonotextual anthology tell us about modes of literary production in Canada in the late 60s and early 70s? How do we begin unpacking this data set? What does it mean to distant listen, or how do we read sound?

We began with an assumption, drawn from a recording of Robert Duncan’s 1965 lecture at the University of British Columbia, in which he speaks for over two hours, lecturing about poetry and poetics and reserving very little time for the reading of poetry in general, which seemed to oppose his claim of being a derivative poet.

Duncan, whose derivative poetic philosophy can be understood as a reincarnation of Romantic concepts of self-disintegration, highlights the inherently paradoxical nature of so many mid-20th century poetry readings — that is, existential consolidation of the poetic self through expository articulations of self-effacement. Which is to say, Duncan renounces the lyric “I” but uses a significant portion of his readings to talk about himself, a trend that proved true in his 1969 Poetry Series reading. This we determined by using the timestamps on Duncan’s recording to create a ratio between poems and extra-poetic speech. By extra-poetic speech we mean the content in the space between poems, where Duncan actually lectures about his poetry, provides anecdotes, or comments on his performance. Excluding George Bowering’s introduction, Duncan reads for two hours, six minutes and fifty-six seconds (another long session, by standard). For one hour and twenty-two minutes, he reads poetry. The remaining fifty-two minutes are filled with extra-poetic speech.

The balancing of poetry and poetics in Duncan’s reading led us to consider how other poets in the reading series might have organized their performance, and what that organization might reveal. For Duncan, it illustrated how aural performance can complicate poetic praxis. How do other poets organize their readings? Are there patterns to suggest that particular schools of poetry favour a certain structure of performance? Do poets begin readings with shorter poems, to ‘warm up’ their audience, and read longer poems in the middle? Do men read differently than women? Is there a relationship between venue and performance? Date? Time? Audience? The SGWU Poetry Series spanned nine years — would there be any recognizable changes in these patterns over that period? It became evident that the aggregation of reading series data could potentially reveal the social, historical, and cultural contexts that shaped the reading series, and also the underlying ideological structures within which the series took place. However, this information is difficult to access because the tools through which we attempt to do so are opaque (temporally, medially) and biased (i.e.who gets recorded, when, where and why). The reading series’ transcripts, it turned out, were a rich tool. But it wasn’t the shiniest.

Findings in the SpokenWeb archive

Fresh from Antonia and Corina’s workshop, we were excited to experiment with Overview, hoping to draw some quantitative results from the reading series transcripts. The possibility to tag, classify, and organize documents, as well as some of its visualisation tools, allowed us to access the documents in a different way, which went back and forth from a distant read to a close one. More than a visualisation program, Overview is an archive-classifying application; it helps to sort out big numbers of documents. In our case, it was not possible to aggregate all the readings made throughout the seven series, which would account for 65 poets. But we used the transcripts for the first three series and tagged the locations we found in them, in order to find if there were any recurrent mentions. Apart from topic classification, other functions of tagging include author/genre identification and reviewing control.

With our collections of extra poetic speech from the first three poetry transcripts of the SGWU Poetry Series, we began our tests with Overview with a specific question in mind: What can the extra-poetic speech, this “documentary residue,” tell us about the poets in this reading series, as well as their literary work? The “distant listening” approach we followed here to analyze the SpokenWeb archive suggests that these new forms of mediation have a strong influence on the way we consume, read, or listen to literary/cultural objects. Distant listening shifts meanings within the analytical process, and forces us to reconsider what is deemed important in a critical endeavor.

The fact that we were not able to analyse the poems read at every series (with few exceptions) guided our research to focus on extra-poetic speech. It is true that not all poets would explain in detail the content, form, or other aspects from their own work, but most of them would find it necessary to say a few words about it — and in some cases, such as Duncan’s, it would take a considerable amount of the reading time.

Although our approach was presumably distanced from the reading series as individual audio files, many initial assumptions were grounded in a close reading/listening approach. However, the fact that we could actually find patterns and correspondences among different readings helped us to identify whether these assumptions could be “quantitatively” confirmed. The use of tags on Overview to identify the mention of geographical data (places, locations, directions) provides significant information about how some poets perform their work in public, as well as it reveals some of the biases implicit in the reading series, which can probably be grasped by quickly skimming through the names of the invited poets, but which are confronted and confirmed through the tagging process.

One of these initial assumptions was that there was an evident slant toward North American/European authors, and therefore toward what Walter Mignolo, following Ella Shohat, would call their “enunciation loci”– the discursive “places” from which they talk about (2005). Nevertheless, can this assumption be proved through the methodological tools offered by Overview? Let’s have a look at the geographical mentions in the Poetry 3 readings, held throughout the 1968-1969 academic year.

Out of the ten poets who read in Poetry 3 (George Oppen, B.P. Nichol, Lionel Kearns, James Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, F.R. Scott, Eli Mandel, D.G. Jones, Robin Blaser, and Robert Duncan), most of them mentioned at least one city, country, or nationality. Although all of the poets were Canadian or American, only five of them mentioned “Canada” or “Canadian” (two Canadians — Mandel and Scott — and three Americans — Wright, Rukeyser, and Duncan). With the exception of Rukeyser, most of them also mentioned Canadian cities, such as Edmonton (Mandel), Montreal (Scott, Wright, and Duncan) or Quebec City (Scott, who was born there). It is significant to note that the three poets who mentioned “America”/“United States” are the same who mentioned “Canada”/“Canadian” (Wright, Rukeyser, and Duncan), so we might say that geographical location is more important for these poets than others in the series. Particularly in the case of Wright, he uses location in order to contextualize his work. Not only is he the one with more geographical references in Poetry 3 (he mentions Canada/Canadian, Connecticut, North and South Dakota, Montreal, New York, Ohio, and America/United States), but also the only one who uses the coordinates East/West to talk about different regions in the US.

What about non-English speaking locations? It is revealing to notice that only one poet (Scott) talks about Quebec, and not to refer to the province but rather to the city. In the light of the social events going on at that time, out of which the Quiet Revolution is the most remarkable, Scott’s solitary mention is actually revealing about the tensions and silences around social and political shifts in the region. Another major political event at that time was the Vietnam War, and only Duncan addresses it when he presents his poem “Soldiers.” In the case of Latin American countries, there is only one mention to Mexico (by Rukeyser, who like Samuel Beckett translated Octavio Paz into English) and one mention to Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Lionel Kearns).

These findings are provisional, as the whole SpokenWeb database has not been processed enough to reach to some general conclusions, but from preliminary analyses as the one above we can assume that most of the works performed in the Poetry 3 series were predominantly focused on North American places and (presumably) topics. Even the mentions to places outside North America, like Cuba or Vietnam, are connected to their relation with the United States.

Methods, Implications, Returns

Although we utilized overview as a tool that could enable ‘distant listening,’ our use of the software inevitably generated a typical close listening of the extra poetic speech that we derived from SpokenWeb. Our data sets from Poetry One, Two, and Three provided useful substance from which we could anticipate certain conclusions on topics such as poetic philosophy, performance tendencies, and topic content. Once we filtered our data through Overview’s algorithm, we began to question how this tool generated a novel set of information that we could not otherwise obtain from using keyword and word number searches in a standard word processor. Initially, it seemed to us that using software such as Overview would enhance our analysis of the material in a manner that would help us depart from a close read. However, we essentially returned to a typical literary approach to our extra poetic speech content through Overview. We had to reconsider our analytic stance towards this dataset, and to identify how exactly our examination would lead towards an effective distant listen of SpokenWeb. Ultimately, extra poetic speech does not qualify as literary text; first and foremost it is the speech sounds that precedes, interjects in, and concludes a given poetry reading. Extra poetic speech is inherently ephemeral – for unrecorded performances – given that it is spoken within the parameters of a reading environment and is not necessarily scripted in a physical document. However, with SpokenWeb, extra poetic speech is very much privileged as substantial and informative data in the form of audio recordings and transcripts. Naturally, a close reading of a transcript felt like the most organic analytic approach; yet, when we considered the forum — date, time, location — in which these poets delivered their readings and the significance of extra poetic speech, we began to reflect upon methods of cultural production and the tools that facilitated the Poetry Series’ preservation.

Phonotextual artifacts (collected in a database) provides invaluable material that enables us to consider things such as:

1) The physical bodies present during the reading
2) The physical space in which the reading occurred
3) Reading order among poets
4) Funding Methods
5) Performance styles

We have this dataset from the Poetry Series since individuals involved with its production recorded the readings on reel-to-reel analog tapes. Decades later, the formation of the SpokenWeb database created the necessary digital environment in which we can analyze and deconstruct MP3 sound recordings and written transcriptions that otherwise would have been lost given the readings’ ephemeral nature as spoken performances. This organized, catalogued, and coherent dataset produces a critical environment in which we can examine how these tools (reel-to-reel/MP3/database/transcripts) produce culture by re-creating the Poetry Series through contemporary technological constraints.

In this context, printed text does not hold its monopoly as the primary object in the fields of literary analysis and cultural production. Audio recording – and its component parts in the form of transcript and database – is one possible source from which we can mine digital data and derive meaning, creating new avenues to identify untraditional sources as the subject of literary analysis. However, we could not escape our methodological tendencies by applying a traditional close read. This phonotextual material perhaps necessitates a new methodology from which we can apply an appropriate analysis, or maybe it requires a blend of both close and distant (which we ended up performing). Regardless, the process remains opaque primarily because we were uncertain exactly what it meant to distant listen and read sound. We managed to derive some qualitative conclusions based on a set of quantitative data, but the most striking conclusion resulted from what we could perceive to be the relationship and evolution between forms of cultural production.

The SGWU Reading series recorded on reel-to-reel tapes represents a form of material cultural production. The reels themselves remained limited to a very small audience – perhaps even a non-existent audience prior to its rediscovery and digitization. Its conversion into MP3 entirely expands its material limitations given that it is widely disseminated across a broad audience with features that digitization and database cataloguing privilege. What began as a perfectly useless database (what Camlot described) now enables such endeavors as our specific experiment and the potential for others to perform countless other inquiries. As a form of cultural production, this multifaceted reading series (in its several manifestations) represents how our academic field broadens when expanded beyond print.

Works Cited

Camlot, Jason. “SGW Poetry Reading Series.” SpokenWeb. n.p. n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

—. “Sound Archives.” Beyond the Text: Literary Archives in the 21st Century Conference. Yale University. Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT. April 2013. Panel discussion. MP3.

Duncan, Robert. “Reading at the University of British Columbia, August 5, 1963.” PennSound. n.p. n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Mignolo, Walter. “La razón post-colonial: herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales.” Adversus 2.4 (2005). Web. Nov. 2014.

Murray, Annie, and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17.4 (2012): Web. 20 Oct. 2014.

“Overview Project Blog – Visualize Your Documents.” Overview. n.p. n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Sterne, Joanthan. “MP3 as Cultural Artifact.” New Media & Society 8.5 (2008): 825-42.

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Web writing or moving our works on the internet means never relinquishing while there exists this universe of expressions that appear and disappear, that are created and erased. The web is a riddle to write.

(Melchy 2011, 35).

The subtitle of this chapter from Lisa Gitelman’s book Paper Knowledge attracted my attention since I skimmed through the semester readings–knowing by PDF. When you get most of your semester’s readings on a USB or a Dropbox file, as has mostly been my case since my M.A. years in Tijuana, you eventually get to understand how stupid it is to print 100 pages one week and totally dismiss them next week until the end of semester (at best). Plus, digging into the thousands of photocopies left behind to reread an interesting passage can become like finding a needle in a haystack. So you give up trying to materialize your readings and start reading them as you should’ve done in the first place–on your computer screen. Or e-reader, or tablet. Suit yourself. The thing is, if you really like reading, most of your material will eventually be in PDF format. Increasingly. I know many colleagues and friends still stand for the books’ materiality (such romantic, pseudo-bohemian aspects like “the smell of a good old book” or “the feeling of the pages in my fingers when I turn them”), but sometimes the only way to get access to some texts, in a world of urgency and saturation, is through digital formats, mostly HTML and PDF. We get access to important portions of knowledge through texts that do not have a material coalescence.

It is interesting that Gitelman starts her arguments by invoking the meta-representational dilemma posed by Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, later studied by Michel Foucault, which uncovers the artistic process of mimesis as a representation that wishes to take the object’s place, but leaves an absence instead, a kind of ghostly presence which is probably related to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura”, that non-reproductible, almost divine feature of original paintings that mechanical copies would not attain. Benjamin would not have thought that aura would then move to previously non-aural artistic processes, such as traditional photography when digital photography came to replace it, or from obsolete music players and video game consoles. In the middle of the discussion about PDFs “page images” (as defined by Gitelman 2011, 115) resembling print pages while not entirely being such (becuase of the lack of materiality, its most important feature), the auratic argument is one of the main positions at stake.

Here’s where the task of writers who release (I find this verb mor accurate than “publish”) their works online gets into the stage. There are hubs of writers, like the Alt Lit movement in US (using this contested term to refer to blogs such as Pop Serial and New Wave Vomit) or the “Savage Poet Network” blog in Mexico, who in a way have given up their right to get an economic profit for their writing. Most of them have published their work under alternative licenses, such as Copyleft and Creative Commons. I know this is quite a deal for people in Quebec, for example, where the writer unions and associations have struggled for the aknolwedgment and rights to be paid for their creative work, but it also poses a different approach to the possibilities of network publishing.

I believe that poetry read on paper drags a History of literature and a body that is the material itself–the history of that paper. Poetry on screens is not better or worse, it has another form and other ways or entries for us to perceive the poetic, we’re talking about interactions like Internet allowing us to have access through a screen to contents that otherwise would be almost impossible to read due to its historical or geographic distance (Melchy 2011, 34).

Yaxkin is, as his Australian translator Alice Whitmore calls him, “a young self-published Mexican poet and founding member of the Red de los poetas salvajes [Savage Poets Network]” (Whitmore 2013, 42). In fact, Yaxkin is the brain and hand behind the Network. He invited several poets to publish their works online, then created projects such as anthologies and compilations, so that “the Red began as a small-scale blog and eventually transmogrifed into a vast, unoffcial online journal and forum” (Whitmore 2013, 43). He did this as an alternative to Santa Muerte Cartonera, a project he was holding at that time (2008) with the Chilean poet Héctor Hernández Montecinos, one of the first independent publishing houses to use cardboard as primer material for the creation of their covers (known as the Cartonera movement; for more information see Akademia cartonera, a primer of Latin American cartonera publishers published by U Wisconsin-Madison). Given the strong emphasis  of materiality in the cartonera projects, instead of proposing a sort of “digital cartonera”, Yaxkin decided to apply both the digital and the material sides of publishing in the Red, since many books were published both in digital format and as chap books or in paperbound editions. Later on he would keep on mixing digital and printed media in his project 2.0.1.3. editorial.

The ambiguous nature of PDF (one would say its “simulacre”, following Baudrillard, rather than its “nature”) is akin to the amphibious strategy of Melchy’s project. When published in PDF viewing sites, such as Issuu, the experience of reading is even simulated by a page-flipping sound and flashing page corners to suggest movement. The PDF is like the sample in a virtual store, and the ideal paper sample keeps on being the one to have (at least when it’s not “grey literature”), even if the PDF version is stored in our computer and can be readily printed. We can see that the ungraspable, almost ghostly presence that Gitelman grants to PDFs is not fully realized in digital projects like this. Even though Melchy mentions the commonplace of multimediality as a possibility within the digital (“Poetry read on computers can be accompanied with video, audio, interactivity and even immediate feedback”, Melchy 2011, 35), there are no audiovisual contents in the Red’s PDFs, but in the blog itself instead. In this sense seems to be true that ” The portable document format thus represents a specifc “remedial” point of contact between old media and new” (Gitelman 2014, 115). The ground is there for the taking, but the users have only dealed with a limited number of possibilities, still dominated by the printed page format.

Within Yaxkin’s work there is a twist on the audience intended, though. The use of such simple apps as Nick Ciske’s Bynary to “read” binary code fragments included in Poesíavida will reveal us a multi-level reading process, in which not all the content is intended for human eyes. Some of Yaxkin’s work is only “readable” by machines, which doesn’t mean such machines will interpret such readings, just load them and (if asked for) display them. However, how far are we really from digital poetry?

There are things I don’t share with Gitelman’s approcach. For example, she says that in the PDF technology there is an orientation toward the author rather than the reader” (Gitelman 2014, 124). Even free PDF-reading programs, such as Foxit, have already integrated editing, commenting and fill-in tools, let alone the Canadian Government PDFs that generate a barcode when properly written on. So even in the rigid form of PDF, there are many ways to distort the text, as it was the case with printed pages, to add and erase things, to include commentaries. And in the end the file is never the same, even so when the program asks us to save the changes before closing the document. However, it is undeniable that PDF won over other text files because of its “natural” tendency to lock text editing while allowing (within certain limits) text copying. This is why web publishing sites like Issuu are so popular among comercial firms, but also among independent publishers. It gives an impression of materiality, with all those stacks, shelves and bookmarks. A virtual library potentially full either of grey literature or of avant garde experiments on readability in a post-print era. Hmmm.

References

Gitelman, Lisa. “Near print and beyond paper: knowing by *.PDF”. Paper Knowledge: Toward A Media History of Documents. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2014, 111-135.

Melchy, Yaxkin. Poesíavida. Tijuana: Kodama Cartonera, 2011.

Whitmore, Alice. “Four Poems by Yaxkin Melchy”. The AALITRA Review: A Journal of Literary Translation, Melbourne: Monash University, No.6, 2013, 42-55.

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How do deviations from the norm provide an important foundation for radical invention and improvisation in contemporary poetry? Acclaimed poet and scholar Charles Bernstein makes a strong case for the importance of the exception.

Bernstein’s talk explores how the process of swerving away from expected trajectories is necessary for radical improvisation and the invention of new poetic forms. With special reference to Wittgenstein’s use of “queer” in Philosophical Investigations, he makes a strong case for the value of aesthetic positionality as part of the overall program of ’pataphysical disciplines such as Midrashic Antinomianism and Bent Studies.

Introduction by Darren Wershler

Recorded by Michael Nardone
Concordia University, Montreal
25 October 2012

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This past week, in thinking about the soundscape in terms of the poetry reading and the poetry phonotext, I went back to look at some of the initial information I compiled during the High Performance Sound Technology For Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin at the end of May. An NEH-sponsored gathering initiated by Tanya Clement, the HiPSTAS Institute brought together groups focusing on historical recordings, indigenous language preservation, poetry and phonopoetics. I wanted to take part in the institute simply to see what work people were doing across disciplines to critically approach the phonotext. Also, I was interested in simply getting together with the other poets and poet-scholars there to have the time and space to talk about these things face to face.

My initial application for the program was to focus on tactics for phonocritical practice. Over these last years, with the development of several digital sound archives and repositories – PennSound and SpokenWeb being the two with which I’m most familiar – there has been extended discussion on the archival and pedagogical implications of the phonotext, yet a critical vocabulary to approach the phonotextual object has only begun to be articulated. I wanted focus on certain strains of already emerged phonocritical practice that I have begun to write about, while learning as much as I could from those gathered at the institute.

With the introduction to a new software in development called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization) that would be experimented with during the institute, my interests shifted in an unexpected direction. ARLO was developed for classifying bird calls and using visualizations to help scholars classify pollen grains. ARLO has the ability to extract basic prosodic features such as pitch, rhythm and timbre for discovery (clustering) and automated classification (prediction or supervised learning), as well as visualizations. One example of ARLO was particularly interesting: an excerpt of William Carlos Williams reading from a poem was matched as having a tonal/frequency affinity with a short excerpt of Allen Ginsberg reading. A WCW poem and a Ginsberg poem have little in common in terms of their appearance and organization on the page, but sounded affinity makes sense knowing that both WCW and Ginsberg were both from the same area of northern New Jersey and that WCW was a major influence and mentor as a poet for Ginsberg.

This introduction enticed me to focus on one particular facet of phonocriticality: through the search and matching function of the ARLO software, I wondered if I might be to think about community poetics through sound, through a concept of sounded affinity. A few guiding questions to this were: If poets who share a common locale, a common dialect, place of community formation, syntactical style or rhetorical mode, might I be able to trace this out through ARLO? How might I use ARLO find affinities outside of schools or tendencies in poetic practice? Would ARLO be able to track affinities across gender lines? Finally, would I be able to use ARLO to perhaps map specific sounded features of distinct poetic modes or practices?

I have begun to compile test sets. A single analysis through the entire PennSound database can take over a day, and there are a number of kinks presently being worked out on the software in Austin. So, I will hopefully have more than an introduction to present in the coming weeks. Additionally, I would like to address the epistemological problem of utilizing an ocularcentric analysis of sound. For now, I’d like to present just a few shots of ARLO visualizations to present some of the phonotexts and their features I’ve been examining.

Visualization of speech from Spicer’s 1st lecture: “Yeats is probably the first modern to take the idea of dictation seriously.” This is an example of spoken language not in a lyric poem.

Visualization of Fred Moten’s poem “gary fisher“: “rodvan took me for doubles and doubles. / doubles and doubles and double and doubles in alleys.” Noting the visualized sonic slide between words, one that does not exist in the spoken language of Spicer’s lecture. Whereas the discrete unit in Spicer is visualized at the level of the word or phrase, here, the discrete unit is the line, the black unsounded gap being the (line)break.

N.H. Pritchard’s poem “Gyre’s Galax,” like Moten’s has that similar sonic slide across the line.

For the moment, I am noting the visualized sonic motion that is similar in terms of how the line carries forward in the Moten and the Pritchard examples. Might this sonic diffusion from word to word, phrase to phrase – as opposed to the shorter discrete units – across the line be a qualitative affinity between the two? Might I find the shorter discrete units of the Spicer lecture have a resemblance to, say, a David Antin talk?

This research continues.

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This week, I finished a draft book chapter on a (phono)poetics of the human microphone, the people-powered method of sound amplification and multivocalic mode of collective composition, communication and intervention utilized at Occupy protests. The chapter is largely a study of form and praxis combined with a historical sketch: I contextualize the emergence of the human microphone as a form at Occupy protests and locate specific moments of formal variation in its practice during the specific period of September 17 to November 18, 2011. In this sketch, I focus on five distinct modes: 1.) The specific context in which the human microphone as a form and method emerged; 2.) the human microphone’s tuning as a people-powered technology to relay communications; 3.) its use as an interventionist form, one focused not only on the relay of communications within the human microphone, but also on the intervention and interruption of messages outside the human microphone; 4.) the human microphone as a form in which collective bodies can speak to the violence and brutality of state-sponsored forces; and finally, 5.) the human microphone as a device to frame silence with new semantic affect.

In bringing to a forefront concepts of public and collective composition, multivocalic improvisation and political action, I read the human microphone as a mode of tactical composition extensively imagined and theorized in language poetics and performance writing. I focus first on Charles Bernstein’s concept of “poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated.” Then, I pick up on Lyn Hejinian’s concept of a transitive poetry, where a poem functions not as “an isolated autonomous rarefied aesthetic object,” but, instead moves toward a production in which “aesthetic discovery is congruent with social discovery” and “new ways of thinking (new relationships among the components of thought) make new ways of being possible.” With these guiding concepts in mind, I look to Caroline Bergvall, who asks: “What is the process of live performance in its relation to writing. Is it writing’s role, in that context, to function as a guiding background, as the blueprint of a live piece?” And finally, to David Buuck, who questions: “How might the performance writing form of ‘action’ expand beyond the recognizable activist performance model (scripts for street theater, etc.) and/or the much more militant and confrontational modes of direct action which are generally discussed in terms of efficacy (symbolic &/or material) rather than ‘as performance’ (as if the latter threatens to turn the political into the ‘merely’ aesthetic)?”

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I began the week listening closely to the Lisa Gitelman and Craig Dworkin lectures and dialogue that I recorded last year while both were at Concordia.

Between Blankness & Illegibility:

The dialogue brings together Gitelman, a scholar noted for her work on media history, and Dworkin, a critic, editor and writer of late 20th century innovative poetry and poetics. Before this meeting, both Dworkin and Gitelman have focused on the materiality of their subjects: Gitelman on media technologies, the machines that inscribe all kinds of cultural perspectives into their production of communications; Dworkin on the materiality of language itself (as written, as typed, as printed), the materials upon which this language is printed, and the cultures through which that material is disseminated.

For this convergence, both focus on The Blank: blank space, fillable space, the empty sheet upon which and/or with which one communicates. Gitelman’s talk opens up the field of literary studies to the wider culture of print. “Books are for lots of things,” Gitelman states at the start of her lecture. The blank that one fills with writing is a kind or genre of book that exists in so many variations: lesson and exercise books for schoolchildren, personal diaries, calendars, ledgers, daybooks, order and invoice books, scrapbooks, and blank books of all kinds to facilitate the work done in various occupations from tailors to geographers, plumbers to trappers. Gitelman makes an important differentiation between the blank books and other printed works, ones, say, that are the usual object of study in an English department: “They [the blank books] are designed, printed and used, not authored, published or read.” In this talk, Gitelman provokes us to look at the publics active in the culture of print (one outside the limited frame of specifically literary production), and also to consider how we might analyze the layers and intentions of cultural inscription involved in the production and circulation of blank/fillable books.

Dworkin’s talk is full of pataphysical trickery and Derridean wordplay. To develop his concepts on the blank page, he begins with a discussion of a blank book. Yet this blank book does not exist outside of being a prop for a film: it is the fictional blank book written by the fictional poet Jacques Cégeste in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée. Here is the clip from Orphée that Dworkin discusses:

There are many directions to go in with the Dworkin talk: it’s a great piece, and I hope this recording will be of use for the growing number of people working critically at the juncture of conceptual poetics and media theory. In this space, I’d like to focus on his statement: “Blank books typically are not blank.” This is a distinction held in common by both him and Gitelman. There is ink on the cover or pages. In Gitelman’s example, this ink is used to frame or coerce specific operations, designated acts of labor, certain kinds of writing. In Dworkin’s example, this ink is used to trigger what he calls “mechanisms of social and moral reflex in the best avant-garde tradition of trying to piss off the bourgeois.” Cégeste’s book, Nudisme, might lure the “prudish bourgeois reader” by announcing some possibly bawdy subject within its pages, only to make a fool of that same reader by offering him nothing: no text, no salacious story, not even a picture. This same trick on the bourgeois reader is also a trick on the poet reader: expecting, perhaps, a book of unadorned, plain-spoken language still functioning in a lyric mode, Cégeste again refuses to satisfy the reader’s expectations in a proto-conceptualist gesture of assembling a book that offers itself to a thinkership – as opposed to a readership – to surmise why this book is stripped of any signifying language and what the absence itself might signify.

In other projects, I sent a few of my recordings – of Lisa Robertson, Charles Bernstein, and Juliana Spahr – to be included in the PennSound archive. As I begin my doctoral research – which will be a social history of the EPC, UbuWeb, and PennSound, focusing specifically on the contemporary exploration of phonopoetics and what Danny Snelson has aptly termed “the little database” – I hope to produce and curate more and more recordings and transcripts. In these last years, as both a critical and creative practice, I have come to regard the audio recording and the transcript as my favourite mode of composition. In the following weeks, here in these notes, I hope to get into this more, examining specifically the social aspects of this kind of composition, the multivocality it presumes, the spatial aspects that are important to scrutinize, and the close listening practice of how to address both what is and isn’t audible in that space.

Following from this, as part of my final directed study with Kay Dickinson and in preparation for my comprehensive field examinations, I have been reading and thinking about the soundscape: this week reading, again, in Attali’s Noise; several pieces in Aural Cultures, edited by Jim Dobnick; a number of pieces in Music, Sound, and Technology in America; and beginning to read in Veit Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance. As I go through my notes here, perhaps I will post some excerpts of interest on this page. At this moment, one thing that has resonated with me out of this past week’s reading is the reminder to always consider the tactile aspects of sounds. Andra McCartney, in her contribution to Aural Cultures, brings up a story of going to a school for deaf children and witnessing a dance in which the children take of their shoes so that they can feel the vibrations of the amplified music through their feet, and respond to it in dance through this sensation. The vibrational, tactile aspect of sound will be important for the three writings I am working out during this summer: one on the human microphone, one on Jackson Mac Low’s 1971 performance in Montreal, and a paper on the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).

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