Judy Malloy: The Electronic Manuscript

In this parallel era of changing approaches to reading and writing, situating the written word in a medieval manuscript context -- whether with a visual use of text or with an integrated use of words and visuals -- certain works of electronic literature respond to the aesthetic context of the "framed" computer screen, as well as to the heightened potential of digital text display. Contingently, the phrase "electronic manuscript" is increasingly apt in describing works -- such as Matt Huynh's vertical scrolling The Boat, (adapted from Nam Le's The Boat) in which a harrowing narrative of Vietnamese "boat people" refugees unfolds amidst animated falling rain, storm-rocking graphics, voiced laments, light and dark, moving text, and floating images.

Detail from Rob Kendall's The Soothcircuit, an electronic forecasting manuscript, created anew by each user. When s/he selects from the components of Battery, Lamp, Sky, Antenna, Resistor, Transistor, Speaker, Capacitor, and Ground, in response, The Soothcircuit builds intricate structures of visual text in an interactive generative structure. In Kendall's words:

"As the text moves down the screen, it emerges from darkness and grows more prominent, paralleling the dynamics of its content. The text in the North (top) position represents something hidden, vague, or obscure -- perhaps a distant source or goal. The text in the East (right) position represents something emergent. The text in the South position represents the element that dominates the reading. The text in the West represents something waning or receding." [1]

Medieval manuscript practice is not a source or inspiration for many of the works presented here, nor does this exploratory content | code | process visual essay intend to definitively categorize medieval manuscript practice or contemporary creative practice; instead, for continuing study, it presents a diverse selection of examples, arranged in ways that suggest contingent approaches.

Rather than clearly fitting one established category (generative literature, hypertext literature, or interactive fiction, for instance), electronic manuscripts explore visual text -- as image or with images -- in ways which do not easily fit established genres, and/or they riff on medieval manuscript practice. For instance, a textual labyrinth converts sound to text-image in Maurice Benayoun, Jean-Pierre Balpe, and Jean-Baptiste Barrière's Labylogue, a simulated three-dimensional computer-mediated environment that uses conversation between participants in different locations to create an e-literary French language manuscript of community discourse. Generative marginalia, that change when the reader so desires, occur in the "Prologue" to From Ireland with Letters. Medieval manuscript-like uses of dense, visual text interspersed with images occur in JR Carpenter's "There he was, gone".

And Fox Harrell's Living Liberia Fabric uses the analogy of a traditional West-African textile to create "a war memorial with characteristics of a peace museum".

"...until the new age and science of composition had been in existence some little time we could hardly expect to find that the contemporary writers possessed a vocabulary of agreed technical terms by which they could explain exactly what they were discussing," Dom Anselm Hughes writes in Early Medieval Music up to 1300.[2] Today, we are in a similar era, where vocabularies are developed and expanded in order to describe works of electronic literary art.

Hughes' suggestion (in Early Medieval Music) to look at the works themselves is a useful approach.

For the September 2017 reweaving of the content | code | practice electronic manuscript pages, four new works were inserted into the whole. Like a bestiary of dragons, in generated phrases, the names of American cars move across the screen in Nick Montfort's Autopia; 17th century and earlier "posies" are emitted from a miniature thermal printer, when the viewer touches rings and other objects in Helen Burgess and Margaret Simon's installation, Intimate Fields; In Jeneen Naji's The Rubayaat, created in the Cave at Brown University, a 3-D digitally mediated environment is composed with multiple translations, and visual/poetic text.

In Deanne Achong and Faith Moosang's Lulu Suite, against a backdrop of the Fraser River, on a river-situated walking tour, the life of Gold Rush actress Lulu Sweet is reimagined in a mobile App.

"The factual information on medieval world maps is a blending of historical events and geographical places, a projection of history onto a geographical framework," [3] David Woodward observes in his chapter in Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.

The content | code | process The Electronic Manuscript pages were begun in 2011 and have since been updated every few years. September, 2017 additions can be found directly by clicking on the names of the works above, or by perusing this document as a whole.

A comparison of electronic literature with manuscript creation in a medieval past reveals contingent technical practices. For instance, in the opening sections to Introduction to Manuscript Studies, progressions from papyrus making technologies, to paper making technologies, to the preparation of parchment are documented, as are evolving copying technologies. And changes in instructions for the creation of initials are potent ancient echoes of the progression of HTML standards, the emergence of CSS, and evolving image display affordances. [4]

Additionally, medieval manuscript designs suggest rich approaches to web page design. The chapter on "Correction, Glossing and Annotation" [5] in Manuscript Studies, documents the sophisticated ways in which linking glossing to texts was accomplished. The caption for Figure 3-15 reads:

"In this glossed Liber decretalium of Gregory IX, the commentary is more extensive than the text itself. A complex system of lettered references leads the reader from text to commentary; dots link the portion of the commentary occupying the bottom of the left column with its conclusion at the bottom of the right column. Newberry Library Medieval Manuscript, Fragment 58, fol. 2v."

First presented at the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization Conference at UCLA, Talking Cure is a collaborative work by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, with Camille Utterback, Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin. Central to this interactive installation are intense portraits of the seated-in-a-chair viewer, created with three color-coded layers of text from sources such as Joseph Breuer's case study of Anna O.

As the viewer participates/is immersed in a history of the "talking cure" in psychoanalysis, the hand written texts created during the Middle Ages to be read orally to the laity, [6] are echoed in the interaction of psychiatrist and patient and viewer -- in a contemporary three-dimensional text/image/audio dominated environment.

Detailed on Noah Wardrip-Fruin's website at http://www.hyperfiction.org/talkingcure/index.html, Talking Cure is a starting place for a look at contemporary electronic manuscripts. Information about how it was created is available in Roberto Simanowski's interview with Noah Wardrip-Fruin on artificial.dk at http://www.artificial.dk/articles/wardripfruin.htm

Helen Burgess and Margaret Simon:
Intimate Fields

In the 17th century and earlier, "posies" inscribed on rings or other sentimental gifts, spoke of love or religious devotion, of memories of family and friendship, or in remembrance of the death of a loved one. They were short, sometimes anthologized poems/phrases, such as the texts now embossed on greeting cards. They were intimate, meant to be worn on the body.

Intimate Fields, Helen Burgess and Margaret Simon write in project documentation,

"is an installation work that brings together 'near field' technologies from markedly different eras to argue that secrecy, absence, and distance are constituting features of human intimacy. By inter-animating today's methods of near field communication and early modern wearables, this project explores how text and code technologies and the languages they carry can create, interrupt, or re-shape interpersonal connection."

Installed at the 2017 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Porto, Portugal, Intimate Fields consists of a compartmented wooden box containing six ceramic/steel rings on one side. The box also contains an NFC (near field communication) reader connected to an Arduino Flora (wearable electronics platform) microcontroller and a miniature thermal printer, as well as printed scrolls, and notes containing NFC stickers, and silk ephemera. When the user touches any of the objects, the printer generates "brief affectively charged poems remixed from a range of historical and contemporary texts." Accompanying the exhibition, on a Twitter bot, remixed posies appear at regular intervals.

Intimate Fields could be considered in the category of interactive table-top narratives that Noah Wardrip Fruin discusses in his paper "Beyond the Complex Surface"[6]-- such as Ali Mazalek, Alison Wood, and Hiroshi Ishii's geniebottles (MIT Media Lab Tangible Media Group), from which when each bottle is opened a voice emerges. Or, if looked at as an artists book, Intimate Fields could be considered in the Fluxus box tradition, epitomized by the works in the Getty's Jean Brown papers, 1916-1995; or, of course, as an Arduino work, such as Natalie Freed, Jie Qi, and Adam Setapen's Telescrapbooks, book-housed customizable electronic stickers that empower remote communication.

However, we view them, text producing objects, such as Intimate Fields, suggest a welcome dimension to the electronic manuscript genre.

I n the late middle ages, there are indications that monks carried manuscripts around and read from them in local communities, whose inhabitants could not read. As if they were PowerPoints, manuscripts were held on the laps of prelates or mounted on lecterns. The goal was to convey moral messages, for example bestiaries featured images of animals, whose illustrated lives promoted virtues. [7]

Contingently, the introduction of the written word into a spoken word culture where literature was heard may have influenced an approach to the manuscript as "something revealed visually to the understanding through the written word".[8] Today, the sharing of the output of developing technologies by the carrying of manuscripts from community to community, is echoed in Nick Montfort's carrying his laptop from poetry space to poetry space to poetry space -- projecting code, reading the results aloud, and instructing audiences in coder craft. [9]

Nick Montfort:
Autopia

Nick Montfort's Autopia is a text generator that continuously outputs sentences made from the singular and plural names of automobiles. For example:

AZURE MOUNTAINEERS RALLY
FORESTERS PROBE SMART AVIATORS
PHANTOM EXPLORER FOCUSES
HOMBRES ESCORT SUBURBAN AVIATOR
AZURE PROWLER DODGES ARROW
IMPERIAL WRANGLER ESCORTS PATHFINDERS
RELIANT CHALLENGERS GOLF

In this American car-name manuscript, a mesmerizing visual text display is generated on a track grid, where combinatory phrases move horizontally, sometimes backwards, sometimes forwards. Web-based text-to-speech conversion -- reminiscent of Radio Londres -- plays in the background of this not-Disney, contemporary dragon bestiary.

Montfort provides the JavaScript code (via "view source"). Python code is also available, and -- allowing for comparison of print and screen-based output -- there is an opportunity to purchase a print book of Autopia output (published by TROLL THREAD, in 2016).

Autopia could be viewed in tandem with Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, which features British architecture critic Reyner Banham, who first used the word "autopia" to convey Los Angeles. A classic moment occurs in this video when Banham (eating a pineapple sundae in a drive-in) asks a companion, artists book pioneer Ed Ruscha, to suggest the best buildings in Los Angeles, and, not surprisingly, Ruscha reponds "gas stations" -- [10]

Jeneen Naji:
The Rubayaat

Exploring the visual presence of language and the role of translation in an immersive environment -- where the reader simultaneously experiences different translations -- in 2014, during her Fulbright, working in Brown University's Literary Arts-utilized Cave, Jeneen Naji created a digital work based on translations of Omar Khayyam's The Rubayaat.

The Cave (cave automatic virtual environment) is a projection-based room-sized immersive environment invented in the early 1990's (by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin, Dave Pape, Greg Dawe, and Thomas A. DeFanti) at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

Jeneen Naji, who is a Lecturer in Media Studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, began by studying the Cave. Then -- with Edward Fitzgerald's English translation; with a lesser-known version by Persian scholar Mrs. H.M. Caldwell; with an Arabic translation by Egyptian poet Ahmed Rami, and with an Irish version intended to represent the research-author's multicultural identity -- she created a digitally mediated work of poetic language art that explored translation, multiculturalism, and the impact of technological affordances on literary expression and reception.

In her chapter in Maria Mencia's #WomenTechLit, she explains how the work is experienced:

"The user steps into the cube that is the Cave and using googles and a remote control navigates the immersive VR environment however they please. The piece uses multilingual kinetic text and audio and the user navigates the virtual reality space through movement and a remote control whilst wearing specific 3-D glasses that the computer uses to track the user's position in the virtual space." [11]

Judy Malloy:
As if the memory was a song: From Ireland with Letters

"The early literature of Ireland is so bound up with the early history, and the history so bound up and associated with tribal names, memorial sites, patronymics, and topographical nomenclature, that it presents a kind of heterogeneous whole, that which is recognised history running into and resting upon suspected or often even evident myth, while tribal patronymics and national genealogies abut upon both, and the whole is propped and supported by legions of place-names still there to testify, as it were, to the truth of all" - Douglas Hyde [12]

I ntertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family memories in a work of polyphonic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata, the madrigal, streams and fountains, and Irish song, As if the memory was a song: From Ireland with Letters is an epic electronic manuscript told in the public space of the Internet. It could also be considered playable text or generative hyperfiction.

The role of displacement and disrupted tradition in the work of contemporary Irish authors is paralleled in this epic Irish American electronic manuscript, which interweaves the stories of Walter Power -- who came to America as an Irish captive on The Goodfellow in 1654, stolen from his family by Cromwell's soldiers and sold in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he was 14 years old -- and his descendant, 19th century Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers, who grew up on a Vermont farm and moved to Florence, Italy, where his work played a symbolic role in the fight against African American slavery in America.

Weaving through the composition process of From Ireland with Letters is a quixotic search for the mythical lost Irish sonata called up by Grattan Flood, in A History of Irish Music. [13] And in addition to scored polyphonic text, the work is composed with techno-manuscript devices, such as arrays of marginalia that the reader produces at random.

Deanne Achong and Faith Moosang:
Lulu Suite
(Lulu Sweet – A Gold Rush Tale in 8 Acts)

"The factual information on medieval world maps is a blending of historical events and geographical places, a projection of history onto a geographical framework." - David Woodward

Deanne Achang and Faith Moosang, who live and work in the Vancouver, BC area, have been collaborating since 2010. Lulu Suite, the overarching name for Lulu Sweet – A Gold Rush Tale in 8 Acts, is a public art project commissioned by the City of Richmond BC. The Lulu Sweet app was created in a collaboration that utilized their shared interests in history, technology, mediated imagery and archives.

The narrative centers on Lulu Sweet, a gold-rush actress, for whom Lulu Island (in the estuary of the Fraser River, located south of Vancouver, British Columbia) was named. The story is that Lulu was a passenger when Colonel Richard Clement Moody, Royal Engineers, who was surveying the area, sailed past the island in 1861. When she asked the name of the Island, he named it in her honor.

Against a backdrop of the Fraser River, in a river-situated walking tour, Lulu Sweet's life is reimagined with a series of nine GPS activated hot-spots that lead to narratives that took place between 1850 and 1863. With animations, imagery and sound, panoramas, and text from 19th Century newspapers, in their words:

"the artists take viewers on a journey from New York in 1850 through Panama (pre-canal), to the mining towns of California and the outposts of colonial England, ending in the footlights of the Gold Rush stages of San Francisco."

In the Middle Ages, manuscripts such as the Codex Calixtinus, guided travelers on pilgrimages with maps, drawings and narratives. In the 21st century, public history projects seek ways to digitally convey narratives of historic place. Thus, in addition to their value as electronic literature, works such as Lulu Suite explore how local history can be experienced on digital platforms. Other works of locative narrative with historical context that not only create guides but also suggest ways in which electronic public history can be created are Megan Heyward's Notes for Walking, which guided viewers on a narrative journey around an abandoned naval fort overlooking Sydney Harbor, and Danielle Barrios-O'Neill and Alan Hook's alternative reality game [in]Visible Belfast, based on Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory.

Deanne Achong and Faith Moosang's current projects include an interactive website that explores the history of Cantonese opera and theatres in Vancouver’s Chinatown at the turn of the 20th century.

Brian Thomas: The World of an Idea in the Life of Henry David Thoreau
- from If Monks had Macs

The first new media artist to create a comprehensive work based on the idea of a Monastery library is Brian Thomas whose seminal If Monks Had Macs, first created with Philip A. Mohr, in 1988 -- before the advent of the World Wide Web -- has been reissued by rivertext. "Monks was originally written in HyperCard. The current version, which works on the Windows as well as the Macintosh platform was written with Runrev Revolution," Thomas explains. (Note that the "HyperCard descended" Runrev Revolution is now called LiveCode.)

The new If Monks had Macs CD-ROM includes an ebook with interactive notebook features that use literary analysis tools to look at the work of Henry David Thoreau. Like much of Thomas' work, this edition of Thoreau is interesting, complex, detailed, and it provides a gateway to new ways of exploring literary texts. To find out more, visit "The World of an Idea in the Life of Henry David Thoreau"
or visit rivertext's Literary Machines page

To find out more about the ebooks in If Monks Had Macs, visit http://www.rivertext.com/monks3.html

For information on the new version of If Monks Had Macs,
visit http://www.rivertext.com/monks.html

Nanette Wylde - The Qi Project

User input screen from The Qi Project

W ith quiet elegance, The Qi Project brings the question of humanity and what means to be human into the realm of electronic manuscripts. And -- eliciting answers from its readers, displaying the responses -- this interactive installation/webwork is a cogent reminder of who we are in an increasingly complex and computer-mediated world.

On content | code | process, Nanette Wylde describes The Qi Project, created with Flash, Final Cut, Perl, and CGI, as "an inquiry into the nature of humanity and what it means to be human at this moment in time."

"Qi is a Chinese word which literally means 'air' or 'breath,'" the artist explains. "It is considered to be the circulating life force."

More information is available on content | code | process, at
http://www.narrabase.net/elit_software.html#nanette

Samantha Gorman:
The Book of Kells

Samantha Gorman's Deconstruction of The Book of Kells (detail above) is, in the words of her introduction, "a weaving of historical study, literary theory, travel narrative, meditative prose, mystical contemplation, and academic inquiry." Informed by onsite study of the circa 800 AD manuscript (housed at Trinity College, Dublin) and by her work with hypertext theory and practice, her deconstruction immerses the reader in an exploration of recurring patterns, hypertextual paths, linking, and intuitive linking.

Each page of the website includes images from The Book of Kells; lexias in which various narrators address the content, the design and the creation of the manuscript; and a node-carrying Celtic knot icon, based on the Celtic knots which occur and reoccur in The Book of Kells. Linking strategies emphasize relationships between design elements, creative process, and content -- guiding the reader in a nonsequential exploration of the creative practice that informs The Book of Kells.

Regina Pinto, producer: AlphaAlpha

T o produce the collaborative AlphaAlpha, Brazilian artist Regina Pinto used a variety of graphic art, animation, video, website design, and sound software applications, including Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0, Dreamweaver 8.0, Flash 8.0, Photoshop 7.0 and Sound Forge 9.0. AlphaAlpha includes 365 illuminations of the letter "A" -- plus one more for the leap year -- from artists & poets from all around the world, including Brazil, USA, Canada, Chile, France, UK, Argentina, Finland, Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Uruguay, Spain, and Mexico.

Quoting Frederic W. Goudy's The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering, Pinto explains that "The concept of this netbook is the proper "history of writing, which is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention." [14]

For more information, visit her statement about AlphaAlpha on content | code | process.

INDEX

R ob Kendall
The Sooothcircuit

N oah Wardrip Fruin, with Camille Utterback,
Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin
Talking Cure

H elen Burgess and Margaret Simon
Intimate Fields

E mily Short
First Draft of the Revolution

N ick Montfort
Autopia

C hris Funkhouser;
Eugenio Tiselli's MIDIPoet

J eneen Naji
The Rubayaat

M aurice Benayoun
Labylogue

C ynthia-Beth Rubin and Bob Gluck
The Wandering Bible of Marseilles

M ark Marino
Marginalia in the Library of Babel

J udy Malloy
From Ireland with Letters

J. R. Carpenter
The Broadside of a Yarn

D eanne Achong and Faith Moosang
Lulu Suite

B rian Thomas
The World of an Idea