The Classroom As Interface
Call for Papers MLA 2013
Boston, MA
Jan. 3-6
300-word abstract & bio due Wed. 3/15/2012 to kathiberens [at] gmail [dot] com

The classroom has always been an interface, a point of interaction between the physical and the virtual. Mashing up concepts from MLA 2012 sessions about digital pedagogy (“Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom,” “Digital Pedagogy,” “New Media, New Pedagogies”) and interface (“Reading Writing Interfaces: E-Literature’s Past and Present“), this panel considers how ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp“) reveals the unique affordances of “the classroom.”

Now that the physical classroom is no longer the de facto locus of learning, the unique parameters of the synchronous, networked classroom may be tested. Generations of innovative teachers “hacked” the classroom to make it more interactive and student-centered, but their experiments rarely threatened the core mission of the university sufficiently to merit moritoria. Today, calls to ban laptops and smart devices from the classroom bespeak a deep unease about the sorts of learning practices–and student expectations–ubicomp inaugurates.

“The Classroom As Interface” will feature assignments and pedagogical design that manifest an awareness of ubicomp; such presentations may or may not involve “building stuff.” Paul Fyfe asserts in “Digital Humanities Unplugged” that “an unplugged digital humanities pedagogy can be just as productively disorienting as doing humanities digitally.” Elizabeth Losh’s UCSD digital poetry class ran an “E-Lit Writing Exercise: Locative Corpse” that could not have been done online. Jason Farman’s many experiments with mobility, storytelling and pedagogy explore the recursive loop between movement and fixed location, reflecting central tenets featured in his book Mobile Interface Theory. Dene Grigar, Brett Oppegaard and Chief Ranger Greg Shine are pioneering mobile, interactive, site-specific historical interpretation at Fort Vancouver. Many digital humanists use Twitter to expand their classrooms’ discourse communities. Literary scholars are exploring the political, social and privacy implications of the GeoWeb.

The object of this panel is to draw scholars’ attention to the classroom as an interface that can’t simply be remediated online. As Avenues of Access to higher education constrict and budget-conscious administrators enlarge enrollment through asynchronous distance-learning classes, it’s important to make visible the affordances of the synchronous classroom.

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The first-ever show of electronic literature to be exhibited at an MLA comes to Seattle Jan. 5-8, 2012. Featuring more than 160 works of e-lit displayed on 10 desktop computers and 6 mobile devices, this show aims to introduce electronic literature to MLA members: expert readers who may (or may not) be novices with e-lit.

Co-curated with Lori Emerson and Dene Grigar–who dreamed up this show and orchestrated its every element–”Electronic Literature” will feature a live reading at Hugo House on Friday evening, Jan. 5 from 8-10 PM.

Please note that in I’m not linking in my curatorial statement to the works featured in the show: come on by and check them out!

Toward a Mobile and Geolocative E-Lit Aesthetic

Curatorial Statement for
MLA 2012 Exhibit “Electronic Literature”

by Kathi Inman Berens

“Some of the most effective forms of Electronic Writing are INCREDIBLY SIMPLE to create,” declares e-lit critic/poet/curator and UCLA professor Brian Kim Stefans. Creative use of simple platforms is one hallmark of the geolocative e-lit selected for this exhibit. Selected mobile works, by contrast, are authored in complex blends of computational languages. This makes for an interesting contrast. Artists working in social media platforms like Twitter and Google Maps seek to discover whether those platforms that permit interactivity can retain narrative qualities even as the “literary” becomes participatory. Artists working in the iOS–Apple’s mobile operating system–are seeking to discover the narrative potentialities of touch interface: how might it affect game play, interactivity, plotting, the mode of multi-sensory input? Although mobile and geolocative share themes and contexts, the authoring systems lead artists to explore different characteristics of story.

What is “literary” in geolocative and mobile e-lit? Which characteristics, if any, do they they share? Twitterfiction is a good place to begin answering such questions. Twitter and the iOS were hatched within nine months of each other; Twitter’s capacity for immediacy makes it an ideal authoring platform in mobile environments. And yet three recent Twitterfics by established e-lit authors aren’t especially “mobile”: they read just as well on a desktop. Jay Bushman’s #SXStarWars (a real-time Twitter re-enactment of the attack on the Death Star), Rob Wittig’s “netprov” Grace, Wit and Charm and Mark Marino’s The Ballad of Workstudy Seth reveal Twitter’s extravagant hospitality to dramatic irony, but nothing new about mobility.

We curators began last June with a set of texts and questions. What constitutes the “literary” in mobile net art? Does “mobile” e-lit have to run on a mobile device? (Yes.) What if mobile is required for authoring but the piece doesn’t run on mobile? (Depends.) These questions and many others animated a lengthy Google doc. We created a “geolocative” category to gather works that hyperlocate stories and require use of mobile devices to post or gain access to them.

Touch–whether from a human fingertip or its GUI approximate in a browser–is the primary mode of navigation in mobile and geolocative e-lit. Touch interface may seem “invisible” because it’s a proprioceptive extension of our bodies. But touch is more than a navigational gesture; it becomes a vernacular–a touch vernacular, I argue–when tactile navigation becomes expressive: not just accessing the story but interactively constituting it.

Erik Loyer’s Strange Rain on the Apple iOS yields an experience that demonstrates the narrative complexity that can arise when touch is treated as a narrative element capable of nuance, mood and layering much the way we think of sound. Both Strange Rain and the previous year’s Ruben and Lullaby are featured in the mobile works exhibit. Synesthetic, narratively rich because multi-sensory and choreographed both to frame text and stand alone, Strange Rain is the best example I’ve found yet of the multimodal sense/text recursive loop that augments narrative possibility beyond the familiar dyad of sight/sound. Unlike Loyer’s gorgeous but less compelling Ruben and Lullaby, which eschews text for drawn, interactive facial expressions to propel the arguing lovers’ narrative, Strange Rain is as much a puzzle as it is a sensory experience. Loyer calls his works “stories you can play,” and indeed, the tension between the narrative and ludic elements pull the reader/gamer in opposite directions. Games urge us to move quickly, to “level up.” Narrative enjoins us to slow down and feel. Strange Rain approximates synesthesia when the reader/gamer oscillates quickly between those two modes of interaction. It’s a splendid disorientation.

Jörg Piringer’s abcedfghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a canny app that features crisp sound recordings of each letter. Activated by touch, these letter-sounds bounce, fly, drop and putter around the screen in any combination a gamer can create through touch. Endlessly imaginative, this game has no narrative element; but the play is so inspired it causes us to hear–for the first time in how long?–the sonic building blocks of language. Piringer’s defamiliarization creates a surprising range of euphony and cacophony. He is a member of Vienna’s legendary Vegetable Orchestra.

Silent and stark in black-and-white silhouettes, Aya Karpinska’s Shadows Never Sleep withholds the sonic and tactile gratifications of works by Piringer and Loyer. Karpinska’s play with children’s nursery rhymes and bedtime stories casts the scary “shadows” as text itself, to which the reader has to “zoom” with her fingers in order to gain access. These beautiful text panes are the creatures under your bed. In P.o.E.M.M., the reader glides her finger atop the mobile screen and lines of poetry spring up and trail behind, sometimes right-side up and sometimes backwards. The app features poems by luminaries David Jhave Johnston, Jim Andrews, J. R. Carpenter, Aya Karpinska, and platform co-creator Jason Lewis on the theme of “what they speak.”

Evan Young’s The Carrier, like the comic books his story remediates, is an app that distributes story serially. Chapter delivery is synchronized to the timestamp within the novel and corresponds to equivalent intervals of time in the reader’s daily world. Ancillary media, such as recipes, pictures, news stories, weather reports and maps, are pushed to the reader via email as further reinforcement of the blend between the fictive and actual worlds.

Where mobile works are instantly summoned at the touch of your finger, geolocative works wander beneath it. A reading experience of geolocated works is desultory, a loopy departure from the precision and focus of a mobile app. Geolocated e-lit floats above the map. The lexia only look anchored by those animated blue pins. What seems on the surface like plentitude is actually synecdochal.

One short video–on display in our exhibit–is almost all that remains of the first locative media experience, Jeremy Hight’s 34 West, 118 North, a walk through a patch Los Angeles where “sonic ghosts of another era” relay the story of the railroad industry in downtown L.A. In Kate Armstrong’s Ping, participants receive directions culled from a telephone tree about where to go next: “the effects of the environment on the perception, behaviour and mood of individuals” is under study here. Four other projects not included in this exhibit continue in the vein of Armstrong’s pioneering work in the psychogeographical: Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, Paul Notzold’s Speak to God and Bluebrain’s two first-ever location-aware albums Listen to the Light (Oct. 2011; set in Central Park) and The National Mall (April 2011). In each case, in situ experience is elemental to the art. In Teri Raub’s Core Sample, featured in this exhibit, a GPS-based interactive sound walk puts the soundscapes of Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art in dialog with the landscape of Spectacle Island and asks “what is recorded versus what is suppressed and denied?”

Most of the geolocative works featured in this show are nonfiction (or, in Hight’s case, a variation on history). The fictional L.A. Flood plays out in a realistically-paced, 6-day flood simulation tweeted by over seventy characters who are coping (or not) with the flood’s incursions. Real-time interactivity via Twitter and at live events in situ drives the narrative’s development. Created in 2007, the L.A. Flood hosts 59 characters dispersed around the city; the story map has been visited over 20,000 times. During installations, QR codes pasted to the exact physical sites around the University of Southern California permit people to pull stories in situ and respond via the #LAflood twitterfic. The cognitive dissonance between the fictive world and the famously cloudless blue skies highlight’s L.A. Flood‘s willing break from the verisimilar. Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action are all here in L.A. Flood; they give readers a toehold in the sprawling narrative. But that toehold erodes as the river of lexia flows from the map and the Twitterfeed. Hypertextual fault lines judder L.A. Flood‘s realistic façade.

“Pursue error & failure, exploit autocorrect, disturb the placid surface of interface that deceives us into believing in unshakable humanness,” exhorts Lori Emerson, guest-tweeting on Mark Amerika‘s @remixthebook. Amerika, an e-lit author since the early days of hypertext, shot the first feature-length film on a mobile phone: Immobilité is on view in our mobile exhibit. From Amerika’s “foreign” film to the next generation of mobile and geolocative elit student authors featured in our gallery: the history of innovation writes and rewrites itself on a palimpsest you can swipe.

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WHEN I consider how my light is spent/E're half my days, in this dark world and wide

It had been a long time since I’d felt surprised by stories. I wondered where had gone the woman who devoted her life to the study and teaching of them? I taught writing. It was a good job.

I thought a lot about Milton’s line from his sonnet “On Blindness”: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” I was waiting.

[And standing in the grocery line. And making babies. And teaching full time.]

But still waiting.

Hypertextual narrative was my way into elit. It felt familiar to click through bits of text. Of course the narrative fragmentation makes it different from paper novels. I scribbled on scraps of paper to trace how the lexias interrelated. I liked the puzzle.

But the transformative moment for me as a reader of elit is actually device specific. I had read Twelve Blue once before on laptop: outside in the dark, warm summer air buffeting my arms. But I found myself distracted.

A year later and in daytime, my body curled around an iPad like the letter Q, I pulled Twelve Blue and started to read. The sun was bright. The high-gloss black screen reflected my face onto the surface of Twelve Blue. I was watching myself read.

It was uncanny. That my face should become another legible surface in Joyce’s rivers, his ocean: it’s thematically appropriate. I kept reading and being jarred by the shocked looks on my face as I reacted to the story. Heimliche and unheimliche: home but not home.

Twelve Blue's storylines run like rivers.

I noticed that touch became more than navigation; it was also a way to engage the characters. When I was empathizing, I found myself soothing the screen or, at different moments, brushing characters away. Video and sound are thought to be more immersive, but hypertext on iPad was permitting a rich sensory experience. The iPad’s screen resolution, its pixel density, renders Joyce’s blues sumptuous.

Reading on the iPad, touch slid my senses into alignment with my intellectual appraisal. The story made sense without mnemonic aids. I was reading as I had when a child: enraptured.

I take that device consciousness with me as I read other elit. Erik Loyer‘s Strange Rain app for iOS is one of my favorite pieces precisely because text, animation, sound and touch vie to compel me. Games urge us to move quickly, to “level up.” Narrative enjoins us to slow down and feel. That tension between the drive to complete and the drive to linger fosters, in Strange Rain, a synesthetic experience. The game itself approximates synesthesia when, after making it through many screens of the protagonist Alphonse’s observations and worries about his ailing sister, the gamer taps the screen quickly with two fingers: this suddenly telescopes the screen, as if catapulting the gamer into it: it feels like 2.5D, but I don’t know that for sure. A jet passes from one edge of the screen to the other. Animated frames explode in jewel tones, and the music rises to a crescendo as your touch–not words–asks Alphonse: will you go inside from the rain? Text responds yes or no as the music strikes an ominous note or chord (depending on which of the three scores you’re running).

In Strange Rain, text, audio, animations and touch vie for the gamer's attention.

Brian Stefans also thinks Loyer’s work is synesthetic, but he finds Loyer’s synesthesia more orderly than I do: “sound, image, and interactivity are choreographed into a unified, harmonized experience.” I can understand why Stefans sees unity and harmony in Strange Rain: that is a designer’s perspective. The work is meticulously choreographed, touch and music synchronised so granularly you have the feeling each note has been planned. That’s an awesome achievement when you also consider the sonic/animation overlay of the rain splattering. (If we are vetting for plausability, eyeglasses are the only explanation for the central conceit of the game: Alphonse tells us he’s getting soaked but we’re also hearing and watching the rain splatter on a surface that sounds like a skylight.) Stefans, himself a designer and poet, appreciates that Loyer can orchestrate many elements in a design.

It’s funny that quasi-neoclassical “unities” result in an experience that shatters me. This game is marketed at the Apple store as “relaxing,” an app that in its Word