Thesis Chapter 1

John Sparrow, Student Number: 100126003
Performances of Technology, Chapter 1:

Taxonomy, Protocol and Layered Readings

The first chapter of this thesis will concentrate on the formal aspects of a digital poetics in relation
to the media it harnesses. In order to further my discussions, I will frame them within the contexts
of other elements of critical theory from multiple areas, including print literature, cinema,
hypertext theory and network theory. By framing these arguments initially in relation to media-‐
specific areas (such as networking protocols) I will show in this chapter that modular approaches
to digital texts are integral to understanding their construction and their interpretation, laying out
more explicitly the intricacies of the ‘hybrid’ nature of digital texts.

In my borrowing from several concepts arising from critical writings based on experimental print
literature and theory related to this, I will establish the formal basis for considering a digital
poetics beyond print, whilst being able to look back at previous innovative non-‐digital works and
reconsider these too in terms of their media. In my dialogue with the theorists in this chapter, I
will show that the contradictory natures of control on the one hand and the erosion of boundaries
on the other are in fact crucial to a digital poetics which seeks to move beyond relatively standard
narrative-‐driven reading practices. Rather than dismiss such works, my aim is to open up the areas
of discussion to works that are more difficult to define in terms of existing reading practices, and
which might form bases for unique engagements with systems of linguistic and synaesthetic
constructions by breaking away from these conventions of reading.

As the introduction to this thesis has established, much has been written about network practices
and interactive relationships between humans and machines prior to the realisation of the
internet as a commercially available system, and prior to digital hardware devices and
accompanying software being widely available. In this, and particularly in the critical writing
following immediately on from the birth of the 'commercial internet', the thrust of the argument
has invariably been in terms of print-‐based writing and reading practices. As Talan Memmott
states in “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading”:

Most discussions of first-‐generation digital textuality – usually called hypertext – focused on
comparisons between page-‐based and screen-‐based compositions. Although helpful in
identifying precedents for digital poetry and demonstrating its literary qualities, these
comparisons tended to minimize the material, performative, and computational actualities of
digital poetry for the sake of developing an evolutionary progression from print to screen. […]
Because of the diversity of technologies available for the development of digital poetry, the
variety of their use as signifying strategies, and radical differences between individual
practitioners, digital poetry is not a single recognizable entity. […] Strategies of signification
that arise out of these writing technologies operate in difference modalities with different
intent than strategies of page-‐based authorship. These differences are not superficial or
interfacial but integral.1

Memmott's argument here is that a taxonomy of one form of media projected onto another which
possesses entirely different dynamics of production is inadequate at delivering a more
comprehensive overview given the fundamental importance of media on the digital text with
1
Talan Memmott “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading,” from New Media Poetics, pp. 293-
4
regard to reading and writing practices. Instead of providing mere historical context for a digital
poetics, however relevant that might be in isolation, we must consider the finer details not only of
the social and phenomenological contexts of such a poetics, but also those of the individual
composite phenomena and their wider contexts.

Indeed, Memmott recognises the usefulness of relative taxonomies to the past; perhaps a major
reason for the frequent associations with print is that hypertext media did, in many respects, still
owe much to the formats of the page-‐based narrative, albeit with a multi-‐linear immediacy not
possible on the printed page. Though much has been written about this elsewhere (and so it is not
useful to go into it in great detail here)2, this is still an important aspect of digital writing, since, as I
will explain later, the chronological progression of time as a controlling framework for reading
remains despite the cross-‐media, potentially multi-‐sensory elements of new digital poetries which
might be said to form the 'whole reading'. As I will discuss in the second chapter, the construct of
time also offers a paradoxical consistency / tension between the experience of the real world and
that of the algorithms in the game which becomes analogous with the digital poem. [[Delete?]]
With this in mind, I will show that kinetic texts, media palimpsests, diverse reading strategies and
applications in feedback loops of production are all traits of digital poetics which, while they
present unique opportunities in terms of digital media, may also reflect back onto experimental
print and hybrid works.

Instrumental to my arguments here will be Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's rhizome, a structure
in which any point can connect to any other (as opposed to a tree-‐like structure that reaffirms
hierarchical development along linear planes) and which seeks alternative routes of transit when
one is broken. I will place these discussions in dialogue with Alexander Galloway's remapping of
the principles of the rhizome onto distribution theories of the network. By examining the nature of
such a remapping, I will demonstrate that there is a congruence between networking practices
and the phenomenology of reading digital poetry –cognitive experiences in which negative and
'multiple' readings form reading strategies, and in which loss, noise and resistance are in fact
positive creative forces enabling the erosion of boundaries and the production of unique signifying
strategies. As part of this, I will show that a separation is necessary which is analogous to
Galloway’s distinction between networks and their layers of protocol, in order to show the
2
Although there are too many works to cite extensively in this essay, early critical works surrounding hypertext include
those of George Landow (such as HYPERTEXT and HYPER/TEXT/THEORY), Espen Aarserth’s discussions of
cybertexts, and Michael Joyce’s writing on hypertext and pedagogy as well as his practice. These, like the works
being produced at around the same period, focus primarily on hypertextual theory in relation to the principles of
print technology and of the reading strategies perpetuated by print. N. Katherine Hayles offers a useful summary of
the historical compartments that have formed in Electronic Literature, stating that
“whereas early works tended to be blocks of text […] later works make much fuller use of the
multimodal capabilities of the Web; while the hypertext link is considered the distinguishing feature of
the earlier works, later works use a wide variety of navigation schemes and interface metaphors[. …]
To avoid the implication that first-generation works are somehow superseded by later aesthetics, it may
be more appropriate to call the early works “classical,” [… and t]he later period might be called
“contemporary” or “postmodern.” (Hayles, Electronic Literature, pp. 6-7)
Like Hayles, my thesis does not seek to undermine the value of such practical and critical works. Instead, the
objective of the thesis is to acknowledge that the evolution and development of technological materials, resources
for the increased capacity and dissemination of information, and the attitudes and strategies employed by those who
receive them, demands a similar redevelopment of critical positioning. The critical theorists mentioned above are
still relevant precisely because their works (despite some being nearly 20 years old) engage with issues fundamental
to digital interaction, even though digital applications have changed drastically during this time.
dynamic between control at the navigation level and multiplicity at the cognitive level in the digital
poetry I will be discussing.

The discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, as with the discussion of networked distribution
methods, has found renewed discussion with the advent of technology-‐based writing, particularly
over the past decade. In particular, hypertext theory has employed theoretical stances based on
the non-‐linear nature of 'multiple choice' narrative strategies synonymous with hypertextual link-‐
node connections between narrative strands. Though satisfactory for the most part in describing
narratives which are unstable insofar as there is no agreed 'finished text' (i.e. there is no finalised,
definitive order of reading which might be considered stable), the problem with such discussions
has been the focus of their attention to the strictly linear progression of narrative across time
without necessarily asking what other potentialities of the nonlinear might exist in such works.
Furthermore, these discussions what how such an enforcement of linearity might be compatible
with a non-‐linear theory.

I will begin by briefly outlining the portions of Deleuze and Gauttari that are of particular relevance
to this chapter. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss how the book is both
objectless and subjectless:

All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of
this kind, and as such is unattributable. […] There is no difference between what a book talks
about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has
only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without
organs. We will never ask what a book means, as a signified or signifier, we will not look for
anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what
other things it does or does not transmit intensities[. …] A book exists only through the
outside and on the outside.3

Instead of working in terms of the purely qualitative to consider the book, it must be considered in
terms of its composite, quantitative differences to others of comparable and therefore differential
value. However, there is a struggle between the multiple roots of the “fascicular” book and their
absorption into wider more abstract structures:

Most modern methods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid
in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of totalization asserts itself
even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic, dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up
in a structure, its growth is offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. Joyce’s words […]
shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the
sentence, text, or knowledge.4

There is a cyclical dimension to representation in the outside world that subsumes even multiple
associations made possible by multiplicity.

The above problem perhaps explains why many attempts to address non-‐linear aspects of
multimedia works have nonetheless done so in terms of the conventional narrative baseline.
Espen J. Aarseth's essay “Nonlinearity and Literary theory” in Hyper/Text/Theory is still highly
3
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, pp. 514-15
4
Ibid., p. 516
relevant to digital discussions, and proves a decent starting point for considering the truly non-‐
linear potentials of multi-‐layered, multimedia texts. Aarseth implies the problem encountered
when addressing non-‐linearity in hypertexts, by distinguishing between the potentials of the
hypertext materials and the actualities of its execution:

It must immediately be pointed out that [nonlinearity] refers only to the physico-‐logical form
(or arrangement, appearance) of the texts, and not to any fictional meaning or external
reference they might have. Thus, it is not the plot, or the narrative, or any other well-‐known
poetic unit that will be our definitive agency but the shape or structure of the text itself. A
narrative may be perfectly nonlinear (for example describing a sequence of events in a
repetitive or nonsequential way) and yet be represented in a totally linear text.5

Although a hypertext might be unstable in theory, in practice a hypertextual reading is still
structured in linear progression. This problem, if it might even be called that (perhaps it is simply a
limitation) is similarly encountered the frequent use of concepts tied in with Jorge Luis Borges' The
Garden of Forking Paths, another understandably popular work used to illustrate hypertext
principles. This story pre-‐empts perfectly the nature of choice-‐based progression in hypertextual
literature: Begin at a starting point, make a choice and go one of several ways. From here,
continue until the choice format repeats itself, possibly indefinitely depending on how the
narrative is structured and programmed. Though creating a web-‐like structure in theory, this does
not produce a rhizomatic structure in which the heterogeneous potentials of the text are realised
or in which any point might link to any other. It does, pointedly, usually have a beginning and
relentlessly progresses through linear chronological progression. The insistence of an objective
(usually a narrative objective) ensures that the experience of reading such a text, though
multiplicitous in potential, is nonetheless insistently linear. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the
rhizome is quite different to such an experience of navigating through a reading. The rhizome is
neither tree-‐like nor root-‐like, but nebulous and always performing abstractions that allow for
persistent reassessment of semiotic linkages. Deleuze and Guattari:

[A]ny point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. [… Language]
evolves by subterranean stems and flows, long river alleys or train tracks; it spreads like a
path of oil. […] There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the
people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by
decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. […] A multiplicity has […] only
determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the
multiplicity changing in nature[.]6

Mackenzie Wark:

The politics of expression outside the state is always temporary, always becoming something
other. It can never claim to be true to itself. Any stateless expression may yet be captured by
the authorized police of representation, assigned a value, and made subject to scarcity, and
to commodification. This is the fate of any and every hack that comes to be valued as useful.7

I will focus on the social and aesthetic implications of Wark’s writings, and specifically of the hack,
in the next chapter. For now, it will suffice to consider the hack, the moment of abstraction, as a
5
Espen J. Aarseth, ‘Nonlinearity and Literary Theory’ in HYPER/TEXT/THEORY, p. 52
6
Deleuze and Guattari, in Literary Theory, p. 517
7
Mackenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, [224]
moment of radical transformative potential. If society’s semiotics are eventually one step ahead of
the gestures or actions that might threaten to exceed their ability to contain them through
representation, the rhizome’s topology hints at the potential to resist being subsumed by the
“unity of totalization,”8 if only temporarily; indeed it hints at enacting the paradoxes of perpetual
temporariness, constant shifting, repeated variation and rigid adaptability; ways of continually
resisting reduction by breaking off into expansion.

Where the two perspectives of multilinear narratives above join is in the concept of the story as
still being told in some form or other, from one point to another. However, if we place the shift on
the potentials of data available, we can separate such data from fixed semiotic relational
dependencies, approaching the data in a topological sense in which any one piece of data may
interact with any other. Though dependent on material form for execution, information can be
quantified in consistent binary terms and thus remapped onto other data regardless of qualitative
differences which the rendering of such data might produce. This mapping allows us to see that
data can at least be arranged in terms of potentials in a cyclical, nebulous, and crucially fashion.
Most importantly, when related back to the organising structure of time directing the unfolding of
the text, the text can be designed to be always in the middle, never at a starting or finishing point.
Aarseth relates an anecdote of the experience of watching a botched cinematic setup to relate
how such potentialities are integral to textual materials which must be executed rather than being
merely one finalised stable product: [[Typo for Boorman below]]

On Saturday, February the 7th, 1987, I saw John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974) at the Bergen Film
Club. Or did I? As it happened, somehow the reels got mixed up and were projected in the
sequence 1, 2, 4, 3, 5. […] When the fifth reel came on, however, I slowly started to suspect
that this rather crude montage technique was neither Bootman nor his film company’s doing,
but most likely a mistake in “reel time.” By then the damage was done, and I had had the
confusing privilege of being lost in the materiality of the film […] But was it a new film? I am
tempted to answer, no. Not because I feel that a film (or any other artistic “work”) has to be
the intended and consecutive design of a conscious, creative operator, but because both the
original and the heretical sequences are based on the same material potential.9

(Final italics mine)

According to Aarseth, the film sequence he watched still constituted the film Zardoz, by virtue of
the two sequences (intended original and mistakenly reordered) being “based on the same
material potential.” From this perspective, the data potentials latent in the composite materials of
the work might be said to constitute the 'text proper' – the philological sense of the original work,
if such a term can be stretched that far – with any iteration being representative of the potentials
of those textual materials. Importantly, the data, which could include the semantic textual
content, auditory elements, and any number of varying applied media, can take any form and any
structure of potential. It is in sequencing that the order is restored. Perhaps the tension to which
Aarseth is alluding therefore is one in which hypertext materials, be they film canisters or point-‐
and-‐click lexia, negotiate between of multiplicity of material form in potential (the “fascicular
root”10 and linearity of form across time (the realized reading). This tension requires a shift in what
is considered ‘the text’ in the first place, and sets up new points from which to consider a text that
8
9
Ibid., pp. 56-7
10
might break out from such dualisms and into some potentially rhizomatic territory.

Alexander Galloway's Protocol presents an indispensable framework through which to
contextualise the above (in a textual sense) with broader network theory. In “Physical Media”
Galloway outlines 3 forms of network structure, each of which achieve differing outcomes for the
information they process. The first is the centralized network, which Galloway describes as a
clearly definable chain of nodes:

Centralized networks are hierarchical. They operate with a single authoritative hub. Each
radial node, or branch of the hierarchy, is subordinate to the central hub. All activity travels
from center to periphery. No peripheral node is connected to any other node. Centralized
networks may have more than one branch extending out from the center, but at each level of
the hierarchy power is wielded by the top over the bottom.11

The structure of a ‘regular’ poem or story might be described in terms of such a network which is
founded on clear boundaries of progression projected onto the receiver (reader). Though
engaged with the text through the act of reading, processing and interpreting the text, the reader
is passive from the perspective of interaction that might result in the transformation of the text,
its outcomes or its meanings. [[I think there is a useful Hejinian quote here but I need to find it to
know for sure whether it’s useful to insert here]] Modernist and postmodern poetries have made
use of elements of ambiguity in their texts or performances as ways of breaking down prescribed
boundaries of author and reader, and to empower the reader with abilities to create outcomes
from the multiplicities of meaning that such ambiguities afford. [[Expand the following]] The
‘death of the author’ – the attempted removal of authorial ego in the generation of a text – has
added an additional dimension to this balancing of power, for example through chance and
procedural works. [[Quote Barthes here, from Image, Music, Text, p. 147]] However, the
authoritative text is clear about its authorial / readership boundaries, and the experience of
reading such a text is situated within these reinforcements. [[NEEDS WORK]] From a starting point,
several main plots may stem out. In this simplistic network, there is a clear and reinforced sense
of hierarchy – a master narrative, say, which governs several dependent sub-‐narratives.

The next network described by Galloway is the decentralised network, which is

a multiplication of the centralized network […] In a decentralized network, instead of one hub
there are many hubs, each with its own array of dependent nodes. While several hubs exist,
each with its own domain, no single zenith point exercises control over all others.12

Galloway's decentralized network is what one might ascribe to hypertext narratives or poems,
whose unfolding reading strategies form tree like (and therefore still not rhizomatic) structures –
the proliferation of choices from a starting point. Once the reader has made a choice from a hub,
s/he will eventually encounter another hub whose role (way of functioning) is identical to the
previous one, regardless of whether or not the semantic choices are the same or share some or all
nodes to other hubs. The decentralized network is worth discussing in more detail before moving
on to Galloway's discussion of the distributed network, since the decentralized network, though
dealing with linear reading progressions, nonetheless highlights crucial aspects of multi-‐linearity
and the subversion of a goal-‐oriented strategy synonymous with traditional narratives and poetry.
11
Alexander Galloway, ‘Physical Media’ in Protocol, p. 30
12
Ibid., p. 31
Furthermore, such subversions of linearity point to further potential tensions with chronology and
finality. The distributed network has the ability to accentuate these tensions by foregrounding the
tensions between the forward motion of time itself, and the order of inter-‐dependent revelation
revealed through persistent multidirectional associations at specific points in time. This temporal
interplay relies on compounding information whose value is determined by order through time.

A useful example of these principles can be found in Geoff Ryman's hypertext work 253.13 This text
follows the structural metaphor of a London Underground train, a structure relating directly to the
context of the mini-‐narratives the piece reveals. In 253, each character occupying a seat has 3
types of information pertaining to them:

Outward appearance : does this seem to be someone you would like to read about?

Inside information : sadly, people are not always what they seem.

What they are doing or thinking : many passengers are doing or thinking interesting things. Many are
not.
14

Each carriage houses its own narrative, formed by the various interactions between characters
based on these 3 types of information, in addition to the actions and responses of certain
characters. In a complex web of constructivist information-‐building, information types feed into
and off each other, assumptions begetting revelations, altercations producing reactive thinking,
actions, facial expressions and reactions being interpreted from multiple physical and perceptual
angles.

If the physical act of reading through such a work is linear, it is only as a control structure for the
non-‐linear structures of both of these nebulous information types, and the ways in which one
reveals them. Or, more specifically, reference is subsumed by the authority of semiotics, across
time, limiting potential to one manifest outcome. Here, crucially, the unfolding of time as a
limiting factor is fundamental to the multiplicity of the textual material potential. [[Work with a
more detailed example here]] The order in which this information is processed by the outside
reader is an integral part of how the information itself is interpreted. As we uncover information,
it may take the form of assumptions by others (“Passenger 4, the grinning werewolf, is plainly a
recipient of Care in the Community”15), narrative statements that clarify the attributes of a
character, or the actions of a particular character in a given situation (“A fight!”16). How we
process the information being uncovered is dictated from within the context of the information
we already possess as well as that which we anticipate discovering in the future. What makes 253
a more rigorous exploration of such narrative devices is that the order in which this information
can be discovered (and indeed whether the same information is uncovered at all) is open to truly
multilinear possibility. The binding in time of this digital narrative is essential to these multiple
realisations, rather than being merely an unfortunate by-‐product. These structural specificities of
253 distinguish it from many other hypertext novels, offering complex decentralised approaches
not only in terms of the reading structure but in terms of the text’s material potential.

13
Geoff Ryman, ‘253’ <http://www.ryman-novel.com/> [accessed 31 May 2010]
14 Geoff Ryman, ‘Why 253?’ in 253, <http://www.ryman-novel.com/info/why.htm> [accessed 31 May 2010]
15
Ryman, ’32: Mr William Dynham’ in 253, <http://www.ryman-novel.com/car1/32.htm> [accessed 31 May 2010]
16
Ibid. See also Ryman, ’15: Mr Harry Wade’ in 253, <http://www.ryman-novel.com/car1/15.htm> [accessed 31 May
2010]
It is, however, in the distributed network that Galloway ties in Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic
structure as exemplar. Like the rhizome, a distributed network opens up cross-‐connections
without the need for hierarchical structure. Points in the network may join in any combination of
paths or link directly to each other; the distributed network, like a rhizome, is always a
miniaturised version of itself, always already in the middle (au milieu) of its production:

In a distributed network, each node may connect to any other node (although there is no
requirement that it does). During a node-‐to-‐node connection, no intermediary hubs are
required–none, not even a centralized switch as is the case in the telephone network. [Two
points may connect] directly via one of several path combinations.
A distributed network is always caught, to use an expression from Deleuze and Guattari, au
milieu, meaning that it is never complete, or integral to itself. […] Any subsegment of a
distributed network is as large and as small as its parent network. Distribution propagates
through rhythm, not rebirth.17

The distributed network, finally achieving rhizomatic heterogeneity, opens up possibilities for the
subversion of one-‐way receptions of expressive works and allows for the conjoining of multiple
stimuli as conducive to the reading experience, even integral to it. A digital poetics becomes a
space in which such relations might arguably occur, since the digital makeup of information may
be tied to any other information as software, as content, as anything that is able to be expressed
digitally. Thus, digital texts are both made up of and house data (they are both text and
application), which, by virtue of its form, can be connected to any other data (though there is no
requirement that it does). Mackenzie Wark:

In topological times, it is not just that the digital now operates on a planetary scale. It is that it
operates across scales, connecting the infinitesimal to the gigantic. The tiniest switch of electric
18
current can launch a cruise missile. Form is detached from scale.

Aarseth's realisation of the tensions between a non-‐linear potentiality and a linear reading
structure nonetheless remain relevant in our discussion of multi-‐(as in truly multiplicitous) media
writing beyond the basic hypertext narrative. For Aarseth, the distinction comes from the
authority of the notion of a 'true' or 'original' text – a notion which becomes questionable when a
text is subject to instabilities created by multiple choice outcomes and experiential shifts, and
from the fact that user intervention is required for the text to become instantiated. When these
instabilities – in the scalable context of the rhizome – become applied to reading methodologies
(i.e. when the methodologies themselves become unstable or variable from work to work or
between the applications which could be said to form the work) they do so at least in part by
setting up their own rules. In basic hypertexts, the rules themselves are relatively simple, even if
the texts they produce are not. The point-‐and-‐click method, by and large, produces the predicted
action, even if the result is unexpected. In more complex digital texts, the reflexive nature of
production and replication in the applications used to produce the text as a whole means that the
interface can produce it's own governing rules, which needn't even be consistent for the duration
of the user's experience with the text. The material potentials of the text are thus made up not
only of multiple directions, but of multiple formats with various elements of feedback potential.

Galloway's focus is on how the multiple works in a distributed network to achieve maximum
17
18
Mackenzie Wark, ‘Analog (on Katamari Damacy)’ in Gamer Theory, [86]
information flow at minimal loss. In information networks, the term 'packet loss' refers to the way
in which information is transferred between sender and receive on a network (in data packets)
and how such an organizational structure is well suited to ensuring all information gets through
reliably, in the same order it was sent. The packet system aids the transport of data in a way which
facilitates speed with the precise replication of the data sent at the end of the receiver.

There is a crucial difference to be noted here: Galloway's arguments are based in discussions of
information flows in which use is directly proportionate to the use value of that information. From
this perspective, complete information has to be the goal; in the case of ‘packet loss,’ partially
transmitted information is resent until the information flow is complete with 100% of the
information transferred successfully. The focus on information rather than necessarily the weight
of the individual choice of how this information gets from a to b is fundamental, since such a
standpoint allows, ironically, for the information being discussed to be abstracted in a way which
welcomes a return to the discussion of rhizomatic principles to phenomenological issues. For
Galloway’s context, interruption to the ‘message’ is a form of destruction; the intended message is
the pinnacle of the electronic ‘master text’ to which the resulting communicated message must be
cross-‐referenced and must match precisely in terms of its information content to be deemed a
success. To all intents and purposes, physical and medial contexts are irrelevant and indeed
actively ignored due to the structure of the protocols driving the information. It is a certain layer
of protocol’s job to deal with the physical ordering of packets of information, not the information’s
job itself. Similarly, it is not protocol’s job to understand the data with which it deals:

[P]rotocol is against interpretation. This is to say that protocol does little to transcode the
meaning of the semantic units of value that pass in and out of its purview. It encodes and
decodes these values, yes, but such transformations are simply trivial mathematics and do
not affect meaning […] Protocols do not perform any interpretation themselves […]
remaining relatively indifferent to the content of the information contained within.19

Galloway here touches on a crucial point concerning the algorithm in a digital text. The text does
not take into account the qualitative information, instead parsing quantitative translation.
Whether information is meaningful is measured by whether the information executes correctly in
order to be passed off into the next protocol. Information only becomes semantically relevant
when subjected to the instinctive semiotic representational strategies of the reader. I will be
addressing further the critical issues surrounding information from a semantic viewpoint in the
next chapter. However, what is important to note at this stage is the tension present in any text
that is “born digital,”: the coding and parsing of the code used to instantiate the text is entirely
objective. It is non-‐ethical, non-‐judgemental; it interprets only at a quantitative level which it
relates to success or failure of the execution of its code. This very arbitrariness of interpretation,
collectively realised in the application of a text, is in turn what allows the digital environment to
produce multiplicities, and truly divergent works.

It becomes clear that the distributed network and the rhizome, whilst being exemplary structures
for facilitating heterogeneity, are nonetheless necessarily governed by structuring protocol(s)
which treat information as arbitrary data in order to do their job efficiently. The complex
structures which form multimedia constructs do not absolutely follow distributed methods, but
rely on protocol-‐based systems in order to achieve multiplicity:

19
Ibid., p. 52
The Web is described as a free, structureless network. Yet the rhizome is clearly not the
absence of structure. It is the privileging of a certain kind of structure, the horizontal
network, over another structure, the tree. So to equate the web with the rhizome, one must
argue against those who describe the Web as a free, structureless network, and argue for a
certain kind of rhizomatic protocol on the Web.20

Galloway identifies several layers of protocol necessary to direct information flows in a controlled
manner – layers that correspond directly to the authoring and reading levels of a digital text –
firstly in the context of information transferral, and then in terms of user experience of navigating
a dispersive information network ensemble like the internet. In my consideration of a digital
poetics, it becomes necessary to appraise the hierarchy of protocological layers in relation to a
text which is inclusive of multiplicities not only of semantic output but of formal structure and
strategy, and which allow for these devices to overlap. This is necessary since the layers existent in
authoring digital texts are conduits to the next layer, and need to be considered as integral to the
multiplicities they each potentially offer the poet or reader. The layers are crucially centred on
ideas of feedback at three levels, (which incorporate recursive reading strategies): The hardware
level, the software level and the cognitive-‐software level. These can be outlined as in my list
below:

• Hardware (physical machinery – computer, screen, mouse)
• Software layer – read-‐only level – 'top level' software
• Applications layer – environments, behaviours, interfaces created by software layer
• Cognitive layer (equivalent to Galloway's application layer) -‐ user understanding,
interpretation of interactions with applications layer. Merges with applications layer and
with hardware layer in feedback dynamic, theoretically indefinitely.

The above list attempts to aid a conceptual approach to how reading strategies relate to the rules
of the media integral to their meaning-‐making possibilities. In this structure, the only isolated
protocol is that of the top-‐level software, and even this may not necessarily be static. A high level
programmer may well be able to enter into this layer. However, for the most part, the applications
which would make up this layer (such as, say Flash, or the application which is being used to write
HTML, such as Dreamweaver or Windows Notepad) are inert, as they do not make available their
source code, nor do they make it possible to use any third-‐party software to edit their core code.

The applications layer, by contrast, incorporates user intervention as part of its development
process. The applications layer might itself be made up of two or more layers and is different to
Galloway’s application layer. In the upper layer, the interface itself which is created by the
software. Tied into this are the areas of the application at runtime which allow it to respond to
user feedback and revise output (and often behaviour) as necessary. These aspects of the
applications layer are what give the interface truly 'interactive' qualities in the ergodic sense.

My reforming of a protocol structure aims to correspond to Memmott’s discussions of mixed
media applications in digital text. According to Memmott, the digital poem can be made up of
several applications produced by the programmer, which are designed to be ‘played’ like an
instrument. The poem is itself an engine, a tool, through which (or in spite of which) the reader
(now more a user/reader) can generate rich, complexly layered and multisensory texts that resist
a stasis of direction or form:
20
Ibid., pp. 61-64

To consider a digital poem as an instrument, one must first recognize it as a specific
application or piece of software: a tool for the development of something other than itself. A
clarinet is just a clarinet, a tool that demands a player for the production of music. A digital
poetry object is by default–or almost always–a piece of software that needs a user to
become an instrument of/for signification. To learn to play the instrument–in this case, the
digital poetry object–is to become aware of the strategies of operational signification within
the given application. [..] It is an operational interface for a system of signifying harmonics.21

It stands to reason that the “digital poetry object” Memmott introduces can itself be one of many
objects forming a signifying harmonics of multiple objects. The structure of combinatory digital
poetry objects may follow that of a distributed network, encouraging persistent overlaps of media
and content, and maintaining tensions between semiotic relationships.

Furthermore, the “signifying harmonics” potentially created through user interaction can often
involve the colliding of multiple applications whose fusion (in which discord is arguably as valid as
congruity as a harmonising formation) forms tensions fundamental to the holistic experience of
the work:

As elements on their own, they may be lacking in poetic capacity, but in relationship with
other elements–signs, words, images, computational and performative qualities–a poetics, or
signifying harmonics, may emerge.22

Integral to a digital poetics then, is the combination of digital materials, each of which can be
designed to integrate with each other as a whole. The sum of the parts, rather than the discrete
units, possess the ability to crate rich environments in which multiple stimuli form the text and
whose combination is itself part of the poetics. Katherine Hayles relates this through her
anecdotal narrative of Kaye returning to the “electronic hypertext novel Califia” in Writing
Machines:

Only later, when Kaye returned to Califia after more than a year had passed, did she
understand that her mistake had been precisely to read the work, concentrating mainly on
the words and seeing navigation as a way to access the words, the images as illustrations of
the words. […] Finally it hit her: the work embedded the verbal narrative in a topographic
environment I which word was interwoven with world. […] By focusing on the words alone,
she had missed the point. Now she was able to evaluate Califia in a different way, from an
integrated perspective in which all components become SIGNIFYING PRACTICES.23

(Hayles’s italics)

Digital texts which contain multiple components consisting of multiple media can relate word to
world in more direct ways, but the combinations can also affect syntheses reflective of the unique
grammatical, semantic and multi-‐sensory combinations at play. As Memmott notes:

[b]ecause the grammatological aspects or signifying harmonics of digital poetry are not
universal, it is essential to understand each digital poetry application as an environment or
21
Talan Memmott, ‘Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading’ in New Media Poetics, p. 294
22
Ibid., p. 302
23
N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Entering the Electronic Environment’ in Writing Machines, p. 41
poetic microculture with its own grammar and customs. Applied poetics vary greatly from
one practitioner to the next. Each application is its own Galapagos: a singularity in which
elements are allowed to evolve or be invented for the survivability of poetic intent. Any given
application will of course refer to applications outside itself, but any expectation that
elements in one work should operate in the same fashion in another work disregards the
diversity of practice and ignores the challenges to language […] elemental to digital
practice.24

This crucially equates the idea of rules (protocol) with the potentials for autonomy and anarchic
play with language in the digital poem. This seeming paradox of principles is the crux of a modular
digital work: Protocological structures operate autonomously, anti-‐hierarchically, in order to do
their own job regardless of their content. Though hierarchical in the sense that one protocol may
exist only through the completion of another, such relationships are not defined in terms of
qualitative judgements and do not interfere with the internal workings of the preceding or
subsequent protocol.

[P]rotocol is based on a contradiction between two opposing machinic technologies: One radically
distributes control into autonomous locales […] and the other focuses control into rigidly defined
25
hierarchies.

The conjoining of protocols into a whole structure manifests the existence of multiple
autonomous agents that afford the potential for the whole to work potentially in any way. In
writing about Memmott’s own Lexia to Perplexia work, Katherine Hayles describes the
performances at play in the work a “performance of hybridity.”26 The combinations of creoles and
neologisms together with the hybridised media in the work, bound together in an aesthetic
consistency which at once provides a unifying structure and a uniquely alien interface, produce a
work in which the linguistic compounds represent and enact simultaneously the complex feedback
strategies taking place between the user and the work on screen. These are strategies whose
physicality is represented by those linguistic and formal complexities developing on the screen. As
Hayles notes, the texts

give an overview of the project’s philosophy, especially the process of “cyborganization”–
transforming human subjects into hybrid entities that cannot be thought without the digital
inscription apparatus that produces them.27

The linguistic makeup of Lexia to Perplexia forms through language what it achieves through its
interfacial ‘instrument’ form – the feedback relation of user input which at once requires the
reader to utilise existing knowledge of interfaces and potential methods of navigation, and
similarly be prepared to suspend these in favour of new strategies at once dictated by and
projected onto the project’s screenic surface.

Digital poetry applications, then, are themselves protocol-‐governing entities whose potential
nature is to be at once autonomous and dependent, relational and isolated, derivative and unique.
As Memmott explains, an application can be produced by the same programmer using the same
software, but the resulting applications can be vastly different with different rules of engagement
24
Talan Memmott, in New Media Poetics, pp. 302-03
25
26
N Katherine Hayles, ‘Electronic Literature as Technotext: Lexia to Perplexia’ in Writing Machines, p. 52
27
Ibid., p. 49
and therefore hugely variable methods of forming signifying strategies. In the digital poem,
protocol itself is a two-‐way process of feedback loops, at once governing the overall structure of
consumption, but allowing within that structure the ability to form new, unique, protocols for
producing signifying practices. This is why, although one can easily compartmentalize digital
poetries, such labels are invariably made in relation to the software used to author them (“Flash
Poetry”, “JavaScript Poem”) than the reading conventions they may or may not purport. Digital
poetries have the potential to be such vastly differing platforms of multimedia output that the
very multiplicity of their forms becomes the constant, and, as Hayles notes, this has resulted in the
fact that “some genres have come to be known by the software used to create and perform
them.”28

The protocological layers of the internet serve as ordering structures for the dispersive manner in
which information is channelled online. As Galloway notes, William Gibson’s phrase “consensual
hallucination” is a fitting terms when considering the vast displacements occurring beneath the
surface during network browsing, and the shutting out of such displacements by the user in favour
of the standard sequences of data collected into one place on the screen:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every
nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts ... A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged
29
in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.

It is, indeed, essential to reduce the “unthinkable complexity” the geographically inconsistent
nature of internet networks – the collating of data from vastly disparate locations – into visual
metaphorical representations that allow for manageable processing of information. Such
hallucination is a second nature facilitated by graphical user interface (GUI) based applications
that present the data at the front end in a manner that is harkens back, by and large, to more
familiar forms of print. This is a context for Galloway's application layer, in which the specific rules
of the application (in his example, the web browser) serve the same role to the user as TCP/IP
does to networked information: the former absolves the latter of the responsibilities it has
assumed.

In light of the dynamic protocological potentials of the digital poem’s applications (and since, in
my investigations, the data in question seeks multiplicity and seeks to exploit ambiguities
surrounding the master text) it stands to reason that interruptions to standard data flow are not
only inevitable as part of a reading strategy, but are performable as positive creative forces when
the text is executed, since it is through interjections to the information flow in the form of
recursive feedback loops that the user gains information and reiterates elements of the text(s), a
relationship which repeats in a reciprocal loop. While the internet surfer, at a surface level, is
afforded a self-‐reflexive input dynamic with the content of the web material s/he browses, in the
digital poem this extends to the layer of the applications themselves. The phenomenological
tensions which Galloway's protocol layers aim to eliminate in the name of continuity are
potentially brought radically to the fore in the digital text.

It would be useful at this point to illustrate the above ideas in terms of a hybrid work which I feel
enacts these very principles. Janet Cardiff's series of Walk projects are works made out of three
28
Hayles, ‘Electronic Literature: What Is It?’ in Electronic Literature, p. 5
29
William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 51
structures and incorporating the blurrings of performance and documentation30. The first
structure is overarching structure of 'performing the piece' in which the participant enters into a
contract (almost literally, in the loaning of the audio equipment, but perceptually also) with the
rules of the system. This system is the donning of headphones before embarking on a tour of the
designated area. The second structure is of the recording being played through the audio. In this
recording, the participant can hear Cardiff's voice narrating what is itself a kind of hybrid poem,
merging historical, physical, geographical detail with more abstract, 'creative' interjections. In this
recording, then, there is already a recursive effect of boundary-‐crossing and interruption as
forming new creative thrust. The third structure is in the tour itself, the physical act of walking and
being guided by the recording. In this realtime, live environment, the participant is joining a
narrative very much persistently au milieu, stepping into a fraction of repetition and habit but also
one of indeterminacy. Here, what we might call a 'fixed' narrative (the recording) is orchestrating
and penetrating the live environment, but only through the cognitive reception of the participant
whose phenomenological experiences of such synaesthesia relate to the holistic experience.
Fractures are inevitable: Buildings and landscapes change, people and sounds change, one-‐off
events happen which might interrupt the recording entirely. Similarly, uncanny coincidences may
also provide sudden immersion, as events, noises merge into each other for moments in time
during which live and recording become truly indistinguishable.

Throughout the performance of this combinatory media experience, the tension of reciprocal
insertion (of recording onto live and vice-‐versa) produces a synthesis of synaesthetic experience
we might finally call the text. But this text, of course, will never possibly be the same twice. What
is important here is that the tensions created through noise and interruption are responsible for a
heightened textual / sensory experience only possible through multimedia forms. Cardiff’s work,
though not manifested on-‐screen, is arguably a performative digital text in that it crucially exploits
the tensions between the trivial process of the machine (the narrative that drives forward through
the headphones), the autonomous workings of the real world surroundings, and the unavoidably
subjective reader’s interpretations of the combinatory sensory experiences. Cardiff’s piece is
absolutely aware of the combinations of consistency (the recorded audio) and chance (the
surroundings that produce sounds and physical interactions) that are interplaying throughout each
performance. That these two elements combine to produce instances of work that, in spite of
threads of continuity (the route, landmarks, etc.) are genuinely unique (and rely on and amplify
variances within the everyday) marks these works apart from other formally similar setups. Audio
guides in exhibitions, for example, possess consistencies in the recordings which are matched by
the stripped-‐down rules of the gallery space (no noise, limited scope of permitted actions within
the space) and indeed rely on external predictability to impart information usefully. Cardiff’s
work, by contrast, seeks to fuse elements of noise and interruption as informing agents in the text.

What this example shows is that protocol, though by definition rigid and consistent, needn't (in a
digital poetics sense) mean an end to the heterogeneous potentials of the text, even at the
experiential level. Rather, the control systems in place – the various and varied applications
responsible for interacting with the piece – set up the means through which the user can engage
in reciprocal feedback loops with the system. They are 'a way in'.

Fundamental to the workings of such a system is the discussion of reflexivity and feedback loops in
30
Janet Cardiff, documentations of walk projects, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works
(including CD)
relation to the embodiment of information, as described by N Katherine Hayles in How We

Became Posthuman. In “Toward Embodied Virtuality,” Hayles defines the nature of feedback,
arising from tool use, as integral to perceptual dialectical exchange between humans and
machines. Hayles sums up reflexivity in this sense having shown “that an attribute previously
considered to have emerged from a set of preexisting conditions is in fact used to generate the
conditions.”31

Relating cybernetic reflexivity to the recursive development of human artefacts and human
development, Hayles goes on to describe how the reflexive dialectic produces mutational
development:

[C]oncept and artifact engage each other in continuous feedback loops. An artifact materially
expresses the concept it embodies, but the process of its construction is far from passive. A
glitch has to be fixed, a material exhibits unexpected properties, an emergent behavior
surfaces–any of these challenges can give rise to a new concept, which results in another
generation of artifact, which leads to the development of still other concepts.32

Protocols founded on feedback loops are always already in the loop. In such loops, glitches are
constructive interjections, and serendipitous misuses of structures may cause evolutionary
distortions through subsequent improvements and learning curves. The progression of the
protocol itself is founded on the inherent instability of a mutual constructive-‐reactive dynamic, a
dynamic which is directly transposable to the potentials of digital poetry.

The protocols at stake, then, are synonymous – even part of – social ideological structures in terms
of which the posthuman self is already constructed. In opening her discussion of the posthuman
self, Hayles cites C.B. Macpherson’s analysis of possessive individualism:

Because ownership of oneself is thought to predate market relations and owe nothing to them, it
forms a foundation upon which these relations can be built, as when one sells one’s labor for wages.
[…T]his imagined “state of nature” is a retrospective creation of a market society. The liberal self is
produced by market relations and does not in fact predate them. […] The posthuman subject is an
amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-‐informational entity whose
boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.33

The separation necessary to project a sense of freedom from market relations comes in the first
place from a market relations perspective of what this freedom should entail. The posthuman self
is always already made up of the market relations – including the media – which surround and
have surrounded that self:

[T]he distributed cognition of the posthuman complicated individual agency. […T]he posthuman is
‘post’ not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-‐will
that can be clearly distinguished from an other-‐will.34

Hayles’ definitions are useful in providing a parallel with modern modes of expression (including
text and the digital tools which express them) whose reflexive constructions are themselves
comparable. Linguistic systems are bound to the media of the everyday, and are involved in a self-‐
31
N. Katherine Hayles, “Toward Embodied Virtuality”, from How We Became Posthuman, p. 9
32
Ibid., p. 15
33 Ibid., p. 3
34 Ibid., p. 4
reflexive relationship with them. Developments of technology, of new behaviours, introduce in

response articulations of how these developments can and indeed should be experienced. An
example is the popular, graphical user interface (GUI)-‐based operating system format, whose
windows and desktop metaphors provide an immersive structure for human-‐digital existence,
which is transparently symbolic at every turn. Everyday multimedia tools present a many-‐degrees-‐
removed system of interaction through which the most removed level – the ‘front end’ – is
presented as the most immediate. In reality, such an interface presents the everyday person with
the most limited set of choices in the hierarchical schema of coding in the program – the most
removed stage of immediacy with the reality of the program.

Despite this, the limitations are interpreted as expanded possibilities, freedoms rather than
constraints, analogous and analogised to the everyday world. J David Bolter touches on this in his
essay “Seeing and Writing”:

[Readers] can read the alphabetic signs in the conventional way, but they must also parse diagrams,
illustrations, windows and icons. Electronic readers therefore shuttle between two modes of
reading, or rather they learn to read in a way that combines verbal and picture reading. Their
reading includes activating signs by typing and moving the cursor and then making symbolic sense of
the motions that their motions produce.35

Suspension of disbelief and an embracing of the symbolic becomes the normative mode for
multimedia-‐based social existence, and the ability to heighten the sense of the hyperreal through
manipulation, editing and copying furthers this existential allegory. Such interfaces are built upon
already-‐existing relationships with social strata, and the perpetuation of the strata into other
interactive strategies reinforces the boundaries on which they are predicated – a relationship
which is transposable to the formation of social identities. From the perspective of past
movements such as the Situationist International (henceforth referred to as the SI), identity was
constructed by commoditisation, projected through media already grounded in metaphor and
standardised modes of production and interpretation. Choices, represented as freedoms, were (to
the SI) the opposite; they too were essentially standardized modes of information control that
produced a second, irreversibly constructed, nature.

Thus, the SI considered that in such a social milieu, society’s tools – media – implicitly support
their own critique since these tools are catalysts for their own perpetuation:

Everything is compromised by its appearance within the spectacle, and all the terms in which this
can be expressed are themselves the products of spectacular society. […] The critique of the
spectacle can only be an immanent critique: there are no absolute standards, authentic human
beings, or transcendental truths on which it can be based.36

This statement is paradoxical in the respect that despite implying that critique is possible, this
critique runs the likely risk of being compromised by its very production within spectacular society
it opposes, “transcendental truths” being unattainable benchmarks against which reactionary
paradigms can be gauged. Like the possessive individualism of the liberal humanist discussed by
Hayles, social individuals have only the socially–defined model of the fundamental freedom of
thought which predates consumerist exchange.

35 J. David Bolter, “Seeing and Writing”, from The New Media Reader, p. 684
36 Sadie Plant, ‘Now, the SI’ in The Most Radical Gesture, p. 30
A critique must therefore be “imminent” in order to resist the standardisation process which
would assimilate the critique back into society. This is also the case for digital media, whose ability
to duplicate, transform and distribute make them an ideal tool for their own critique, yet at the
same time posing the problem of becoming that which they oppose through redefinition as
pastiche or the ‘consumable’ art work.

Looking at Hayles’ discussion of reflexivity is one way of conceptualising this relationship. Hayles
defines reflexivity as

the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed
perspective, to become part of the system it generates. […R]eflexivity has subversive effects
because it confuses and entangles the boundaries we impose on the world in order to make sense of
that world. Reflexivity tends notoriously towards infinite regress. […A]n attribute previously
considered to have emerged from a set of preexisting conditions is in fact used to generate the
conditions.37

“Changed perspective” is a result of input producing mutation within the feedback loop whose
output once more feeds into the production process. By situating oneself in the production-‐
consumption feedback loop, tensions can be created from within which stand in relation to the
immediate causal factors of the situation. Hayles’ reflexive feedback loops are thus an ideal model
in the discussion of the structure of and the reading of digital texts, in that they consider the
intervention of a catalyst (the reader / reader’s actions) that is posited in a positive, creative light,
orchestrating transformations whose instabilities are responsible for subsequent interpretations
and further actions of mutation. Insofar as they are imminent, the situations which create these
tensions are also variable, prone to destruction or failure, unstable in many respects, lying in
contrast to the robust securities of modern life and modern life’s vehicle for communication.
According to Donna Haraway, this relationship between system and human, in a cybernetic sense,
is analogous to wider systems of discourse, since the boundaries they create are formed from the
same systemic workings:

Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as
frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be
viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and
myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies
of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually
constitute each other.38

For Galloway, the transparency of the medium – in a web-‐surfing context, is designed to suppress
what he terms the “radical dislocation” of surfing the web. Literally in terms of geographical
locations of information, but also in terms of quantified and structural disparity, the interface at
the application level produces a stable gateway to the unstable concepts at play:

On the Web, the browser’s movement is experienced as the user’s movement. The mouse
movement is substituted for the user’s movement. The user looks through the screen into an
imaginary world, and it makes sense. The act of “surfing the Web,” which,
phenomenologically, should be an unnerving experience of radical dislocation […] could not
be more pleasurable for the user. […] Continuity, then, is defined as the set of techniques
37 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Toward Embodied Virtuality’ in How We Became Posthuman, pp. 8-9
38
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 164
practiced by webmasters that, taken as a totality, create this pleasurable, fluid experience for
the user. As a whole they constitute a set of abstract protocological rules for the application
layer.39

The traversing of a distributed network system, then – be it in a distributive or phenomenological
sense, or both – is a symbiosis of radical dislocation made possible through ‘sense-‐making’
protocols which enable such dislocations through the familiarised interactions which are
themselves in complex feedback loops with previous navigational / reading strategies and
simultaneously, inherently tied into market relations. In the Janet Cardiff work discussed above,
for example, existing external strategies for cognitive interpretation are employed as a way of
immersing the participant in the piece. The structure of walking in public, and of passively
consuming the contents of an audio tour guide, are subverted by the poet’s interjections and the
interruptive / augmentive tension of the ambient sounds captured by the recording. Nonetheless
these strategies must be used in order to allow for a ‘way in’ to access such subversions – to
create a situation in which unique traits of the medium can be experienced. The digital text, in its
creation of potentially unique signifying harmonic systems, nonetheless utilises protocl to
“[c]apitalize on the user’s preexisting knowledge of iconography to designate a link”40

Continuity, transparency, emerge as integral parts of a dislocative process, where at once pre-‐
existing strategies inform the user and allow the ability to delve into and learn new, autonomous
strategies for navigation and interpretation. A working example of such a relationship – in a truly
multi-‐sensory, immersive sense, is John Cayley’s Torus. Torus is one of the works designed for
Brown University’s CAVE system, a 3-‐dimensional environment in which the walls of the small
room are projections, and in which the system responds to user movements and gestures. Cayley
says of the project:

The structure and surfaces of “Torus” do consciously engage with the problematic
phenomenology of text in space. The shape itself is composed from what I have come
to call vanes of text radiating out from the empty centre of the implied torus. On
these vanes the legible text is suspended in a way that both suggests and subverts
the surfaces of inscription that exist in our habitual space-‐time. I decided, based on
their current phenomenology, that my letter-‐objects in immersive VR should have no
thickness and that they would always turn to face the VR users’ primary point of view
(and so always present themselves as what they are: letters). This was in response to
what I considered to be the defining properties of letter-‐objects. Note, however, that
such behaviour subverts and complicates the inscribed surfaces on which the letters
are suspended because, for example, the letters will pivot on the (invisible) surface of
the plane, both respecting its existence and, literally, turning away from it. Moreover,
if the reader controlling the space’s primary point of view is “behind” one of the
vane’s surfaces, the letters of the text inscribed on it will all be right-‐reading, but the
order of those letters in the words and lines of the text will be reversed. These new
spatio-‐textual phenomena clearly emerge from simple rules built into the
programmatological world of “Torus.”41

39
Alexander Galloway, “Form,” from Protocol, p. 64
40
Alexander Galloway, “Form,” from Protocol, p. 66
41 Raley, Rita, ‘And Interview with John Cayley on Torus’ in The Iowa Review <
http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/TIRW_Archive/september06/cayley/cayley.html> [accessed 30 May 2010]
Cayley’s methodology compounds the simultaneous sense of immersion through “habitual”

navigation and interpretive practices and their subversion in the 3-‐dimensional space. The text’s
progression in space-‐time owes itself to the unique phenomenological potentials of the CAVE’s
environment, made possible through a learnable system which relates itself to pre-‐existing
strategies of interaction. The 3-‐dimensional space opens up a textual tension though a dynamic
between spatial arrangements inside the projection and those of the projection’s placement in the
CAVE space. A work such as Overboard examines linguistic constructions similarly in 2-‐dimensional
space. In order to facilitate these tensions and the ebbs ad flows of harmonising media, aspects of
continuity are essential to thread through phenomenological approaches and allow for certain
aspects of immersion necessary either to in turn subvert this immersion, or to bring out other
congruent or discordant elements of the text.

The idea of continuity is one discussed by Galloway to explain the finer workings of protocol in a
web browsing context. Galloway identifies several definitions of continuity, which provide the
illusion of consistency and aid transparency in the act of participating in a situation of ‘radical
dislocation’. It is with these areas of continuity that a) stability / transparency / immersion can be
achieved; b) opportunities exist to foreground the medium / media in play, and the governing
structures intimately tied to them; c) an enabling system can be achieved which sets up reading
strategies unique to individual media and their combined output, promoting signifying harmonics.

As part of my consideration of the importance of continuity in a digital poetics, I outline those of
Galloway’s definitions below which are pertinent to my discussion, grouping them together where
more than one element cover similar ground in digital poetry. My interpretations of Galloway’s
definitions are to the left. To the right are some potential ways these can be subverted or used in
ways unique to the medium in digital poetry. Digital texts will often be made up of a mixture of
both sides of this table, incorporating necessary elements of continuity but allowing for certain
fractures (some more profoundly foregrounded than others).

Conceal the source Foreground the code

Representation should convey meaning; Change rules of strategy regularly, or the
actions produce predictable results; true consistency of strategy renders persistently
identity unpredictable results

Remove barriers Produce barriers; remove control

Continuity between media types Discord between media types; radical immersion
through combinatory applications

Prohibition against low resolution Noise; degradation; foregrounding of media type
through exposure of limitation (e.g. high
compression, use of loops)

Highest speed possible Lowest speed bearable; variable speeds;
unpredictable temporal progressions; lower
speed than attention span; higher speed than
ability to parse information


Having provided the basis for a framework involving distributed networks and protocol as ways of
understanding a digital poetics at a constructive and cognitive level, I would like to offer some
examples of projects which, in some form or other, exploit the aspects of continuity above and
work with a number of combinations of subversions in order to foreground or enact the concerns
which are intimately tied into their media and reading strategies.

As discussed above, central to Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia is the literary and semiotic
representation of the posthuman. The content exemplifies the fusion of the user and the
interface. The creoles and neologisms present in the work also foreground the coded aspect of
the work, by presenting the user with a variety of linguistic structures uncommon in the everyday
world but synonymous with computer languages and therefore highlighting the structural
influences at play in deeper levels of the project’s build.

To imply or explicitly reveal the workings of a program is to disrupt its transparency and to
foreground the multiple layers of translation at play in order to make such transparency possible,
from the software writing application, through the coded algorithms that themselves produce the
means of production for the user navigating the work.

Highlighting the code of a work has the potential to radically foreground the construction of the
work in question – not solely in terms of the hardware medium, but in terms of the potential
workings of the text itself. In “Code, Cod, Ode: Poetic Language & Programming,” Loss Glazier
explains that an array “is a collection of objects that share a single variable name, differentiated
only by where they are located in the collection, a collection of parts whose sum is greater than
the whole.”42 Object-‐based languages are designed to be economical, with variables and functions
being defined in order to be reused in various instantiations. In a viewable code (i.e. one which is
feasibly available to view at runtime) such as HTML, there is a fundamental shift in the linguistic
values of code and parsed output, as one is able to see a translation process at work, and also
view the construction of the material potentials realised in the output. The code may not (and
usually will not) structurally correspond to the output, nor will it correspond in any regular reading
sense to it. It can only be equated in terms of the translation method required to convert it. Thus,
in Glazier’s essay-‐poem “Code Writing, Reading Code,” the online appendix exemplifies the thrust
of the essay’s interests by including large amounts of content as HTML comments contained
within the code.43 Since comments are parsed but ignored in the output, one must look into the
code to retrieve the extra content. Here, code does not represent the output in standard sense (in
the sense that the comments, though present in the code, are not present in the output) but
represents it in terms of its own rules. Lack here invites engagement with the linguistic
construction of the poem system, which forms the basis of the holistic text’s interests. The
commented on code foregrounds itself through absence – the comments are parsed, but once
parsed they are translated by the browser as not to be included in the output content.
Furthermore, the tension this creates, firstly between the code’s executed potential and its literal
content, and secondly between its executed potential and its executed instantiation, destabilises
any mythical notion of a ‘correct version’ of the text. The holistic text exists ad the simultaneity in
42
Loss Pequeño Glazier, ‘Code, Cod, Ode: Poetic Language & Programming’
http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2005/1/Glazier/index.htm. [accessed 13 April 2009]
43
Loss Pequeño Glazier, ‘Code Writing, Reading Code’ in Digital Poetics. The essay’s appendix containing ‘hidden’
source code, Mousevoer Essay in JavaScript, can be found at
<http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/ebr/mouseover.html> [accessed 13 April 2009]
potential layers, multimedia (including the book format) and potential in the execution of the code
itself.

The works of jimpunk44 foreground their mediation on screen by creating graphically spatial works
of art using deliberately low-‐fi methodologies in a web context. Graphical representations through
ASCII renderings in the source code serve to confuse the stability of the boundaries defining the
serving code and the passively received output. Limited web colours, windows that move faster
than they can be captured, and ‘errant’ graphics and layouts are all devices that deliberately
obstruct immediacy. As J David Bolter says:

Computer programs may ultimately be human products, in the sense that they embody
algorithms devised by human programmers, but once the program is written and loaded, the
machine can operate without human intervention. […] Programmers seek to remove the
traces of their presence in order to give the program the greatest possible autonomy.45

The workings of code as process-‐generating scripts (through which reference-‐providing outputs
are formed) is subverted by the directly referential and metaphorical graphical depictions in the
source code. Instructions, clues, hidden extras, all point toward the unique strategy-‐building
synonymous with the autonomous rule-‐building potentials of code, while at once thwarting them
through direct communication from within the code itself.

The transparency of code needn't (and never is) limited to the level of the executing code. HTML is
a reference code – it tells the browser what to do, and where to do it. Images are not hard-‐coded
into the page, but are housed in a folder to which the HTML document points, finds the correct
image, and places in the correct page. But what of the images themselves? As Galloway notices,
these too are subject to methods of interpretation in order to be rendered as images:

Other examples [of transparency] include image files that must also conceal their source. The
raw code of images is never made visible to the user. Instead the code is interpreted and
rendered as an image.46

(Galloway’s italics)

Giselle Beiguelman’s Code Movie 147, at the Electronic Literature Collection, is a Flash-‐based
animation, a series of images which are animated and manipulated onscreen in sequence. These
are not merely images; they are images of images, since the images files which might have been
shown have been converted to hexadecimal code, which has been put in the place of the images
they represent. In a radical foregrounding of the construction of images and the nature of the
referent onscreen, Code Movie 1 demonstrates the translation processes associated with every
onscreen representation, (whether or not these are from hexadecimal).

As Katherine Hayles notes when discussing signifier relations of letter to instrument on-‐screen:

The computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image – an image drawn in a
44
jimpunk, <http://www.jimpunk.com/> [accessed 13 April 2009]
45
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, ‘Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation’ in Remediation, p. 27
46
Alexander Galloway, ‘Form’ in Protocol, p. 65
47
Giselle Beiguelman, Code Movie 1, <http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/beiguelman__code_movie_1.html>
[accessed 13 April 2009]
medium as fluid and changeable as water. Interacting with electronic images rather than
with a materially resistant text, I absorb through my fingers as well as my mind a model of
signification in which no simple one-‐to-‐one correspondence exists between signifier and
signified.48

Ironically, in this project, process is foregrounded using the very forms utilized to maintain
continuity. The hexadecimal values themselves are represented as ascii text, but rendered by the
Flash application and ironically subjected to highly seductive and absorbing morphing and
animative processes which are themselves the product of distinct and complex programming that
is at odds with the hexadecimal / colour output dynamic in regular code. The code which
represents the image is itself rendered as image, and as such is subject to and foregrounded
object of the relationships between linguistic states which make up the complex layered holistic
readings of a digital text. This complex relationship is achieved through the very loss of
information supposedly required as finalised output, and renders the piece always in transit
between linguistic stabilities.

Like Code Movie 1, the Flash movies of Young-‐hae Chang Heavy Industries49 feature large,
animated texts in which the methodology of translation of code is impenetrable in the Flash
environment, but in which this very inaccessibility is brought to the fore through explicit
representation of translation onscreen. These movies feature stop-‐frame animations to progress
the text to musical soundtracks. Text and music form a synthesis through rhythmic and often
tonal congruence. Discussing The Young-‐hae Chang Heavy Industries work Nippon50, Pressman
notes that

[t]he fact that Nippon is created in Flash exacerbates the inaccessibility of its code, for Flash
renders its source code unavailable to the reader. [...] Nippon does not depict code onscreen.
Whereas codeworks present the interaction between human and computer languages in a
form of hybridized text displayed onscreen, YHCHI’s flashing narrative represents this
relationship as a temporal performance whose onscreen aesthetic indexes the acts of
computational translation happening beneath the screen. It thus presents an opportunity to
extend the insights offered by critics of codework to works of digital literature whose
onscreen textual aesthetics express and signify the acts of translation happening beneath the
screen. […] Nippon shows translation to be at the heart of digital literature and of our critical
engagements with it.51

A major feature of these texts is in the combination of signifying harmonics with lack of control on
the part of the reader. For all the promoting of the freedoms of interaction with digital media, a
major trait of digital texts is also in their ability to close off control in active resistance to the user.
The autonomous potentials of the rule-‐governing applications which make up a digital project
have, as part of this potential, the ability to make texts radically resistant to manipulation. Far
from enforcing a closed reading and reverting to authoritative one-‐dimensional readings, there
emerges a paradoxical position whereby the digital text enforces potentials of loss and the
mergings of information through phenomenological overload, over-‐stimulated texts. Hand-‐in-‐
48
N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers’ in How We Became Posthuman, p. 26
49
<http://www.yhchang.com/>. [accessed 31 May 2010]
50
Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Nippon, <http://www.yhchang.com/NIPPON.html> [accessed 31 May 2010]
51 Jessica Pressman, ‘Reading the Code between the Words: The Role of Translation in Young-hae Chang Heavy
Industries’s Nippon’ <http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2007/Pressman/Pressman.htm> [accessed
31 May 2010]
hand with such 'runaway texts' is the subversion of elements in the 'textual movie' which would
make this movie receivable in a less dynamic way, instead evoking readings in which contextual
approaches to synaesthesia are those of production. The speed and simultaneity of the texts
(particularly in Nippon, in which the English and Japanese texts run simultaneously) resist
continuity in the foregrounding of an inability to separate out and understand discreetly the
workings and translation processes at play in both a linguistic semantic sense and in the
executable processes:

The work reminds its human reader that the computer is a partner in its multilingual
performance; the computer’s circuitry and protocols (particularly since it is accessed online)
are involved in the production and dissemination of Nippon’s textual animation. While the
human reader cannot simultaneously read both texts, the computer performs technical
translations on both languages without understanding the meaning of the words it
processes. It is neither the computer nor the human (author or reader) alone, but rather the
partnership between them, that produce the work. Nippon thus directs discussions away
from a rarefied thing called “code” towards an awareness that translation happens across
protocols, platforms, and readers. The speeding juxtaposition of languages onscreen in
Nippon thwarts efforts at translation by the human reader in order to make visible the fact
that translation is at the heart of digital computing.52

The above is compounded by the effects of speed consistency, which produces a predictability in
the setup of a reading strategy. Many of Young-‐hae Chang Heavy Industries' projects involve texts
which slip in and out of legibility through the greatly varying speeds of their progression. At a slow
point in the music, texts may plod at rates slow enough to foreground themselves to the reader,
but essentially aiding 'communication' by allowing enough time to parse the on-‐screen
information. At other points, the text suddenly shifts at rates difficult to grasp fully, provoking
instead an approach to the text based on sensory combinations, memory lapses, afterimages. The
reading strategy here is paradoxically consistent in its inconsistency. It sets up methods of
immersion in order to make moments of opacity acutely renderable. Mutations onto pattern are
the pattern.

William Poundstone's projects frequently employ the removal of control and disparities of pace as
integral to their reading strategies. His trilogy project 3 Proposals for Bottle Imps53 merge
elements of fact and fiction in a pseudo-‐story-‐telling methodology in which multiplicities of form
within each work are integral to the acting out of blurred fact and fiction. Writing about his
BOTTLE IMPS projects, Poundstone states:

One of the things I realized is how much today’s new media literature is similar to Roussel’s
bottle imps. Roussel imagines his bottle imps to be multimedia devices incorporating
motion, sound, and text. They enact narratives that loop endlessly, similar to banner ads on
the Web.54

Poundstone's project too acts as a movie-‐style interface through which subversions to time-‐centric
aspects of continuity are possible, incorporating the limits and the capacities of the human body
to interpret texts at high speeds:
52 Ibid.
53
William Poundstone, 3 Proposals for bottle IMPS, <http://www.williampoundstone.net/Bottle.html> [accessed 31
May 2010]
54
William Poundstone, ‘3 Proposals for Bottle Imps’ in New Media Poetics, p. 245

Using text as part of time-‐based multimedia raises some obvious problems. In print,
everyone reads at his or her own pace. The reader can linger over a passage or turn back to
something he read a few pages earlier. […] I wanted to try something less familiar, the
autonomous “movie of text.” […] People have an amazing capacity to perceive moving or
evanescent text. I make use of that flexibility in this piece. Some of the text stays onscreen
for a long time, while other text zooms by too fast to read. You maybe catch the gist of it, the
way you glimpse someone’s newspaper on a train.55

As a final example I would like to show how a project which applies traits in some ways
oppositional to the above might nonetheless achieve similar breaks to continuity and foreground
constructive processes at work in the digital poem. Jim Andrews' On Lionel Kearns offers a unique
combination of formal approaches to redefine role of biography through persistently changing
reading strategies. Andrews' working note states:

An interactive anthology and a compelling presentation of Kearns's work for today's computer
platforms, this piece testifies that digital poetics has a rich but still undocumented history.

The varied approaches in this project testify to the richness of the history being portrayed. On
Lionel Kearns56 presents a multiply interactive series of works in which unique strategies draw the
user’s attention to the construction of reading practices in a digital context and explicitly illustrate
the potentials for these to be varied and unpredictable. The project merges instability (varying
strategies for reading) with stability enough to engage, by adopting strategies which, though
varied, reference outside habits of constructive learning, such as piecing together a jigsaw.
Familiarity with these reading habits is subverted by the random placement of materials on offer
and the turning to new strategies from phase to phase of the project.

Similarly, Andrews’ Stir Fry Texts57 incorporates the random generation of words with an easy-‐to-‐
grasp navigational strategy of mouseover transformations. However, whereas with On Lional
Kearns the interface is slick and the strategies varied, in Stir Fry Texts the strategy is consistent but
is subject to the interfacial glitches of its own system. Written using dynamic HTML rather than
Flash, the texts which transform on mouseover call attention to their very makeup. The changes
in content cause a change in sentence / phrase length, to which the surrounding text must shift to
accommodate. Consequently, the areas of activation in the text (the trigger areas) are as unstable
as the textual content, shifting and often producing loops of transformation at illegible rates.

Fundamental to the combinations of traits above in a digital text is that there is an inevitable loss
as part of the meaning-‐making strategies at play. At the heart of this are questions regarding the
pattern recognition / restructuring dialectic of multimedia applications. Katherine Hayles states:

Questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage in this situation, for the
avatar both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside the screen.
Instead, the focus shifts to questions about pattern and randomness. What transformations
govern the connections between user and avatar? What parameters control the construction
of the screen world? What patterns can the user discover through interaction with the
55
Ibid., p. 247
56
Jim Andrews, On Lionel Kearns, <http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/andrews__on_lionel_kearns.html>
[accessed 31 May 2010]
57
Andrews, Stir Fry Texts, <http://www.vispo.com/StirFryTexts/index.html> [accessed 31 May 2010]
system? Where do these patterns fade into randomness?58

In this statement, Hayles hints towards a different approach when considering the digital text
onscreen that takes into account moments of instantiation, and subsequently instability and
mutability. Nonetheless, as my discussions in this chapter have established, I depart from the
above evaluation when considering how Hayles’ approach relates directly to a digital text whose
purpose is (often experimental) some form of literary expression through elements of interactive
performance. In such a text, and as we have seen with complex, layered digital poems of
Memmott or the fixed speeds of Young-‐Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the issue of presence and
absence re-‐emerges as experiential loss in realtime, and demands consideration in relation to the
terms developed in Hayles’ discussion.

In addition to the social implications of a feedback-‐oriented system of construction whose
hierarchical stability is potential in question, the above subversions of continuity take into account
the importance of noise, interruption and mutation to the development of such systems. In
“Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” Katherine Hayles relates mutation to the dialectic
between pattern and randomness, and in doing so reveals the creative potentials of mutations in
such patterns. Since these patterns are themselves the organising structures, mutations become a
necessary part of their development, allowing for recursive feedback loops that generate resistive
creative potential:

What happens in the case of mutation? Consider the example of the genetic code. Mutation
normally occurs when some random event (for example, a burst of radiation or a coding
error) disrupts an existing pattern and something else is put in its place instead. Although
mutation disrupts pattern, it also presupposes a morphological standard against which it can
be measured and understood as a mutation. […] Mutation is crucial because it names the
bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system
to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also
recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and
intrinsic to information.59

Relating such a paradox to the dynamics in a digital poetics, then, it becomes clear that one of the
defining features of an innovative digital text (a term to which ‘digital poetics’ applies in the sense
that there is textual experimentation that is integral to an expressive artwork) must be the ability
to evoke some form of mutation, since the relationship of the body and machine is intertwined
with the corporeal / cognitive relationships at stake in this reflexive relationship. As Hayles
explains, this intertwining is no longer separable in the posthuman self, who is defined by the
hybrid nature of the machine / biological that is a recursive, mutually dependent relationship:

[T]he posthuman implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so
intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the
biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed.
Accompanying this change is a corresponding shift in how signification is understood and
corporeally experienced.60
58
N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers’ in How We Became Posthuman, p. 27
59
Ibid., pp. 32-3
60
Ibid., p. 35

When combined with the “microcultures” potentially created in the form of digital applications
(which, as I have discussed above, may be developed with their own rules of signification), a
powerful relationship can be created in which signifying harmonics are created precisely through
their applications’ and the users’ allowance of interruption and mutation, and the allowance for a
mutational dialectic to take place in realtime. The completion usually synonymous with pattern
(closure, resolution) is superseded by those elements usually assumed as being detrimental to
creation. In the complex relationship between the posthuman and the systems he or she uses, the
systems can no longer be experienced as a separated, outside structure, but must be viewed from
within and always already as part of that system.

In this chapter, I have shown that a reappraisal of critical discourse centring on digital poetics must
begin with some departures from traditional modes of literary criticism, taking into account more
rigorously the specificities of digital systems. At the heart of these systems, I have shown that the
principles of protocol alongside those of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and decentralized
networks provide a useful starting point in the consideration of authoring a digital environment
and the text manipulated within this environment, as well as the reading strategies involved with
interpreting and responding to such texts. Although recognizing that an alternative taxonomic
strategy is essential in approaching such texts, this chapter also reasserts that digital concepts can
and should be related to historical works and movements not immediately considered ‘digital,’ in
order to provide useful contexts for the digital systemic principles this chapter outlines. Through
this, I have tied together how the social developments of literary interpretations are intimately
bound to experiential developments and wider social developments, again bound by the modular
combinatory workings of protocol. It is this social aspect that I will now develop in the next
chapter, relating the structural issues discussed above to notions of aesthetics, formal innovation,
appropriation, versioning and resistance in digital texts.

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John Sparrow, Student Number: 100126003

Performances of Technology, Chapter 1:

relation to the embodiment of information, as described by N Katherine Hayles in How We

reflexive relationship with them. Developments of technology, of new behaviours, introduce in

Cayley’s methodology compounds the simultaneous sense of immersion through “habitual”

system? Where do these patterns fade into randomness?58

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