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• 1 2021-05-31T11:20:24-07:00 Traversal of Eric Steinhart’s "Fragments of the Dionysian Body" 53 Video clips of the live stream Traversal of Eric Steinhart’s "Fragment of the Dionysian Body" plain 2021-08-22T15:54:35-07:00
  These videos are of Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart’s Fragments of the Dionysian Body, held on Friday, October 18, 2019 and hosted by the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver. For the event the work was accessed on a Mac G4 Flat-Screen computer (2002-2004) via CD-ROM.
   

  Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Introduction

  This first video clip from the event features the pre-show video in which a variety of voices define "electronic literature" as audience members take their seats. Hardware and works of electronic literature housed at the Electronic Literature Lab in Vancouver, Washington are shown on camera, and what the Electronic Literature Lab means by  "Traversal" is defined: an author or performer reading a text on the original hardware, offering an experience that faithfully presents to an audience the historical and cultural context of a piece as well as the piece itself. 

  
  Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Part 1

  Dene Grigar, Director of the Electronic Literature Lab and organizer of the Traversal, introduces Anna Nacher, associate professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland who will perform the Traversal. Nacher then introduces the physical media of Fragments of the Dionysian Body: a folio with a CD-ROM held inside it and an accompanying information booklet. She lays out the mission of Fragments, which to her is an attempt to use “hypertext as a tool of philosophical inquiry” and “method of teaching philosophy.” We learn that Fragments is based around The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writing, with its heavy use of aphorism, lends itself well to hypertext. Navigating to the opening screen, Nacher identifies two “modes of reading:” either from an introduction or a list of topics, each option accompanied by a large eye so the screen stares back at the reader. Steinhart recommends the list of topics for readers more familiar with Nietzsche’s work, but Nacher clicks on the “Introduction” eye to showcase Fragments as a teaching tool. The next screen, in another nod to Nietzsche’s style, is full of symbols including a volcano, a tree, and a bird. Nacher moves from there to a menu that shows one possible ordering of the keywords of Fragments: a “top-down hierarchical” table-of-contents system. The other ordering is formed by hypertext linking that “cuts through" between the keywords. Nacher decides to progress step-by-step, telling the audience she may “get lost” in the work because that is the nature of both hypertext and Nietzsche: even though Nietzche’s thought is based on logical rigor, his philosophy is not meant to be clear and systematic, but leans more on the reader’s capacity to understand it poetically and “get lost” within it. She clicks on “Epistemology,” which brings her to another top-down list of topics, selects the “Introduction” link, enters that lexia, and from there selects a bolded text link that carries her to “Perspectivism.” 

  Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Part 2

  Nacher’s reading takes her to a lexia describing perspectivism, the idea that “relations are logically prior to things” and the world is ultimately constructed of processes of relation rather than present and material things. At the bottom of the screen is a box of corresponding numbered sections in The Gay Science that also treat that topic, a placement that leads Nacher to conclude that the best way to read Fragments is by shifting between screen and physical text, reading in “a continuum between the book and the hypertext version” an “augmented reality” experience of Nietzsche. Nacher demonstrates this method by reading a section about perspectivism aloud from her print copy of The Gay Science. She also notes an “error” in the translation of Fragments from the original to Hypercard 2.2: link words are rendered on top of the plain text, making it more difficult to read what is on the screen. She is not bothered by this “trouble,” however, because the idea of “the error” is important to Nietzsche and so the translation error is just one more way in which form and content are “fused” in Fragments. This “bridging” of content and form is at the core of Nietzsche’s idea of “the gay science,” and of Fragments: perspectivism, the idea that relations are prior to the things that are related, “is inscribed in hypertext itself.”    

  Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Part 3

  A bolded link in the "perspectivism" lexia leads Nacher to “The Game of Life” by John Conway, which comes in a package with Fragments of the Dionysian Body and opens in another window. “The Game of Life” involves a number of “cells” which are filled in or empty––as the player moves time forward in the game, filled-in cells with filled-in neighbors persist and shift position, while those that have no neighbors perish. The “chain of modifications” imposed on the cells by the user and by chance "mirror biological life itself.” Conway’s game illustrates perspectivism because the forms made by the cells, and by biological life, seem to be things but are actually patterns—the instantiated outcomes of a user’s set of modifications through time rather than stable entities onscreen, testaments to ongoing processes. After playing the game a bit, Nacher returns to the top-down table of contents, and navigates to the introduction lexia to “Ontology,” clicking the in-text link to “will to power,” which brings her to another top-down menu. She explains how Nietzsche’s notion of the “will to power” was “misinterpreted” in tragic ways as a force of domination, and is actually more of a “will to exist” that underpins the world. She clicks a link bringing her to an especially poetic quote from Nietzsche describing the will to power, and then returns to the “will to power” menu, clicking from there to Nietzsche’s description of mechanistic science by “moving a bit upwards in Steinhart’s system.” Understanding the “will to power” not as a machine but as a “music box,” Nietzsche proposes a “gay science” that will involve an aesthetic understanding of the will to power as well as a mechanical one. Nacher concludes her Traversal by stating that “hypertext is actually the gay science itself,” because form (aesthetics) and content (mechanics) come together. Citing Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” Nacher proposes that hypertext reflects the will to power and human thought because it shows things not as things but as evolving, relational, and unified processes.

  Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Q&A, Part 1

  The question and answer session following the reading features Nacher and Grigar sitting onstage and begins with Nacher describing her relationship to Nietzsche and how rich the experience of re-reading The Gay Science through Fragments of the Dionysian Body was for her. The first audience question comes from Nicholas Schiller, who asks about whether parallels can be drawn between hypertext and the typewriter, which Nietzsche was forced to use while writing The Gay Science due to his declining eyesight. Nacher proposes that the aphoristic form of The Gay Science with its songs and poetic language might have been a result of Nietzsche's "struggle with the fundamentally linear writing technology" of the typewriter. Nacher goes on to describe the "poetic sensibility" of Nietzsche's "spatial" and "not systemic" thought before deciding "not to ramble about that for hours" even though she could. Grigar and Nacher then discuss Roland Barthes, whose critical writing also has more of a "poetic sensibility" particularly in works like S/Z and Pleasure of the Text as well as a concern with embodiment that is carried on by feminist materialist thought. Nacher links this notion of "embodiment" with the "ergodic" and performative aspects of hypertext, in which the reader moves through text fragments in a metaphorically embodied way. Grigar connects "embodiment" and "fragmentation" to a notion of "suturing... that was in the air in this period" in works like In Small and Large Pieces  (documented in Rebooting Vol. 2) and Patchwork Girl, as well as to hypertext's inherently "aphoristic" nature. The next question comes from an audience member asking about how to approach works of philosophy. Grigar and Nacher reply that taking your time, focusing on smaller pieces, and physically moving around while reading are helpful.

  Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Q&A, Part 2

  Grigar and Nacher define ontology ("the study of being") and epistemology (the study of "how do we know things?") as the concepts relate to Steinhart's work and the lives of members of the audience. As the discussion turns towards death, Nacher links Conway's "The Game of Life," featured in Fragments of the Dionysian Body to conceptions of death not as a binary but a sort of "process," in which everything in the world takes part. Grigar and Nacher share their love for the humanities and poetry as a way of allowing humans to "survive as a species and society." Another audience member asks Nacher about her views on hypertext's relative decline in comparison to other electronic forms of fragmented writing. Nacher shares that many of her students respond negatively to works of hypertext, preferring a book with a beginning and an end, and proposes the reason for this is cultural conditioning around what a "book" is and what "reading" entails. Quoting Nigel Thrift, Nacher identifies fragmented and hypertext forms of reading encountered by digital natives as "epistemic wallpaper"––structures that are so ubiquitous they go unnoticed. The session concludes with Grigar thanking the ELL team for putting together the event and Nacher acknowledging the trees in the forest, which helped inspire her reading. 
• 1 2021-06-17T15:48:44-07:00 Traversal of Kathy Mac’s "Unnatural Habitats" 17 Video clips of the live stream Traversal of "Unnatural Habitats" plain 2021-08-18T14:47:27-07:00

  Introduction to Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats

  
  Dene Grigar introduces the ELL’s ongoing Traversal project, undertaken to make available an experience of early hypertext works. She thanks the crew involved in creating all of the Traversals included in this book including Greg Philbrook, Holly Slocum, John Barber, David Alonso, Joel Clapp, Kathleen Zoller, and Dan Walker (who is funded by Reed College, which Grigar thanks). She also thanks Astrid Ensslin and Mariusz Pisarski, the two research affiliates of the Lab. 

  Astrid Ensslin introduces Unnatural Habitats as “a poetic hypertext pastiche” in which Kathy Mac “explores American idealism,” and describes the work’s original publication bundled with Kathryn Cramer’s In Small and Large Pieces in The Eastgate Quarterly Review, holding up the original folio to show it to the camera. 

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 1

  
  

  Ensslin hands the Traversal over to Kathy Mac, who explains “I am talking to you from New Brunswick, Canada which is the traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik people, the Peskotomuhkati, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq” and the background of Unnatural Habitats. She was employed at a Canadian publishing house, “moonlighting as a poet,” and working for “a fellow named Bob Atkinson… a serious tech geek” who “got me thinking about hypertext.” Mac says a few of the threads of poems existed on their own, and others were written specifically to be a hypertext. Navigating to a table of contents featuring text arranged in a circle with four levels, Mac explains what each level means: the top six describe physical “unnatural habitats,” the four in the tier below describe mental ones, the two under that weave the physical and mental together, and then the last line is occupied by a “directions” button. 

  Mac chooses to read the “Apollo 13: Interface” poem thread, which is opposite “Apollo 13: Reentry” on the top tier of the table of contents.  Mac shares the story of the Apollo 13 mission, in which an exploded oxygen tank led to the astronauts getting stuck in the atmosphere which led to the astronauts and the “pragmatic” training of astronauts, who attempt not to show emotion and demonstrate “an apparently perfect faith” in the “radio voices” from command giving them directions. Mac describes how the language of the poems, with the patterning of frictive sounds and vowels, is designed to imitate the motions of the men and their spacecraft. The placement of the lines on the page — mounting, descending, narrowing, and contracting --  also mirrors the motions of the craft and their thoughts. Similarly, the arrangement of the lexia in the map mode imitates the spiral path downward of the spacecraft.

  Moving onto the section of lexias about the "Unnatural Habitat" of early aviation and the life of Alberto Santos Dumont, Mac explains how “many of the poems deal with binaries” like “down/up” or “individual identity and groups.” Mac tells about Dumont’s career as an airplane designer around the same time as the Wright brothers, and how the lexias of the poem follow a path going up and then down in a “teeter-totter motion" like an early aircraft. 

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 2

  
  Clicking the link to “submarine patrol 1915,” Mac tells about how the word “fathom” comes from a word for “graves,” linking it to the danger experienced by submariners in that “unnatural habitat.” She describes the history of early submarining, and how during World War I in the Sea of Marmara, where salt and fresh water mixed, military submarines could only go down as far as the level of the denser salt water which began “fifteen graves” below the freshwater. 

  Turning to a section about miners, she reads a line about how “when we go down we turn the world/ into the opposite/ of sculpture” and explains how she used that first line break to tease another meaning before adding on the next clause at the next line. The poem brings up the dangers of mining, and “the egg of grief” that lodges in the throat of those loved ones left behind on the surface.

  Mac continues to “Kuwait: a Testimonial,” an “elemental poem” about fire and two journalists who were burnt in an oil fire in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Combining her own poetry using (in the voice of the dead journalists' he collective “we”), news and press items describing the incident, and quotes from the Bible about fire, Mac examines not only unnatural habitats, but the people who are drawn into them. 

  Moving down to the next layer of “conceptually unnatural habitats” rather than “elementally” unnatural habitats Mac visits a poem about the AIDS Quilt that memorialized victims of that epidemic. Her poem is ekphrastic, describing the experience of seeing a quilt which incorporated Army clothing in a way that showed “this quilt emblematized somebody who had to un-pick and restitch his private life and public life… had to fit a different pattern” in each of the two areas of living. The windows on the screen pop up in different positions, in imitation (Mac explains) of quilt-squares.

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 3

  
  The next poem, within a section called "Signifier, sign, sold" tells the story of a dolphin named Sammy in “a pool somewhere on the prairies” who paints. The entire situation to Mac indicates an unnatural habitat: Sammy wasn’t born to live on the plains, but he also can’t return to the wild because he has never been there. Instead, the dolphin stays and paints, in a palace where “the least of his marks/ means five hundred dollars.” Mac wryly remarks that she made Unnatural Habitats at a time when she was having difficulty making money as an artist.

  When the story of Sammy the painting dolphin ends, Mac moves onto “Living vicariously: a basement oblivion” which describes the unnatural habitat of living indoors and watching a screen, and is "about bread and circuses... how if we are distracted enough we won't notice how unnatural the world is." Mac wrote the work “before the internet was a thing” so the screen indicated is more of a television than a computer screen. Since then, the influence and immersiveness of this particular habitat, where a person watches videos and plays games all day, has only increased.

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 4

  
  Returning to the table of contents screen, Mac reads a section called “Odds and ends” that begins with a lexia about Andy Warhol, exhorting the reader to “Forget/ your promised quarter/ hour of fame” that features couplets or tercets from lexia to lexia, each in a different location onscreen. Mac explains that these sections came from a non-hypertext poem she'd previously written about Warhol. Those poems then “swing into the next poem” through a series of links, returning us to the Apollo 13 re-entry poem that Mac read first.
  
  Dene Grigar brings up the “double-clicking” necessary to navigate the work on old hardware with old software, and Mac comments that “Storyspace is squirrelly... this is off-brand use, I was pushing it to be something it wasn’t.” Because of how the software worked, Mac was unable to end the last two poems the way she wished to, but “that was fine” in the end. 
  
  Mac discusses the map interface for each poem, which is a bunch of boxes connected by arrows showing links. Mac decided to “make patterns out of these.” Looking at the map of the Kuwait poem, Mac and Grigar comment on the star shape formed by the lines between lexias on the mapmode, which evokes both the American flag and the fiery heat of stars. 

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 1

  
  
  Astrid Ensslin comments that in Mac’s work, “everything has its place” and “it all comes together,” to which Mac answers that she was an art college graduate during the 1980s, a “very conceptual time" that influenced her approach to composition. Ensslin also praises Mac as “pushing the boundaries” of Storyspace, like many of the other works published in The Eastgate Quarterly did.

  Ensslin shares a question from Richard Snyder about the influence of concrete poetry on Unnatural Habitats. Mac answers that “I like concrete poetry that’s three dimensional,” and sees herself, because of her work in textiles, “hooking into a very traditional way of looking at it as opposed to a very abstract and contemporary way.” She shares that she has done academic work on textile metaphors in English texts, and that she sees links as analogous to strings. Highlighting this relationship between electronic literature and textile arts, Ensslin and Mac discuss the debate over categorizing the genre, concluding it “must be put in the unboxable box.”
  
  Ensslin then asks how Mac might define the notion of “the natural” at the time of the work’s composition and also now. Mac answers that “natural is a vexed term,” but also “basically what you’re used to,” a thing that is as “constructed” as the “unnatural.”
  
  Andrew Klein from the chat asks whether Mac planned the project before learning about Storyspace, or if Storyspace inspired her to write the poems. Mac explains that she had written some of the poems before she discovered Storyspace and “started playing around in there,” but that the work came together with the software.

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 2

  
  
  Grigar asks about the “linguistic aspects” of Mac’s work as a poet — her rhythms, line breaks, and sound repetitions. Mac revisits the lexia about the miners, detailing how she uses line breaks to help “accrue meaning to the piece” by setting them against the syntax. She also describes her use of alliteration to create meaning in a way that “will have a subliminal effect,” making lines mirror each other and manipulate the breath.  Mac also talks about how “writing for sound” makes a poet more mindful of how “there are no synonyms” and whatever words are chosen carry different cargos of connotation. 

  Andrew from the chat asks if the work could ever exist as a non-hypertext work, to which Mac answers “no” because the visual and dynamic elements of the hypertext are an important part of the whole. Ensslin brings up how often people didn't understand or appreciate new media work at the time of its original publication. Discussing the complexity of new media to unfamiliar readers, Mac says “I want people to trust me as the writer, I don’t want to leave them feeling like they’re stuck on the edge of a cliff hanging onto a bush that’s gonna give at any time. I want them to feel like they’re standing on that cliff looking over the vista.” 

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 3

  Sharing a question from Sarah Xerar Murphy — “does sound reconstruct physicality in a digital world?” — Mac takes a moment to contemplate, saying “words aren’t visual,” and sharing that Sarah is her sometimes-roommate currently recording an audiobook of a novel. Bringing up Saussure, Mac describes how signs have “imposed meanings” and are apprehended visually, aurally, haptically, and culturally. Because of these several meanings, Mac concludes that “sound doesn’t reconstruct physicality, sound helps us interpret physicality.”

  Mac goes on to describe how “reading (a hypertext) out loud” or putting it into “regular text” or “French” are all forms of “translation,” and none of these translations are any better than the “original.”

  Grigar then asks some lore questions about what kind of MacIntosh Mac used to make the work (an SE, she answers) and how she discovered Storyspace (“I honestly don’t remember, I’d love to say something brilliant about that but I really don’t remember.”) 

  Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 4

  Grigar asks about other hypertexts Mac was reading and her influences, to which she answers “Joyce, but honestly hardly anything. I was in Halifax.” Mac then shares how she made the cover image (by photocopying two of her scarves) and used italics to write the title as Unnatural Habitats, allowing the reader to read “natural Habit” in the non-italicized text. 
  
  Ensslin and Mac thank the team that organized the Traversal, and Grigar brings up the Lab’s upcoming event — the launch party for the Lab’s edition of Figurski at Findhorn on Acid.
   
• 1 2021-05-31T10:59:11-07:00 Social Media Content for Carolyn Guyer's "Quibbling" 3 Audience participation via Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube Chat plain 2021-06-15T10:38:55-07:00 The following are postings on Twitter that promoted the live traversal of Quibbling prior to the event and thanked the participants after the event. 
   

  Twitter 

  The Electronic Literature Lab used their Twitter account to post promotional content regarding the traversal of Quibbling.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
• 1 2021-05-31T10:47:08-07:00 Photo of Mark Bernstein and Erin Sweeney's "The Election of 1912" 2 Photos of the packaging of Mark Bernstein and Erin Sweeney's "The Election of 1912" plain 2021-06-16T10:23:56-07:00 This is where all of our images of the work go.