Review of; Visual Culture Isn’t Just Visual: Multiliteracy, Multimodality & Meaning by Paul Duncum

Paul Duncum’s hypothesis is that even new changes, by art educations, to shift the emphasis of the term visual in visual culture, is not enough to encompass the new diversity of contemporary social culture. He feels that culture cannot be divided into the visual, the auditory, the text-based etc. Within the new digital age, art forms are so integrated that they cannot exist without each other. Duncum used the term “multi-semiotic’, taken from Fairclough; 2000, to suggest that contemporary culture cannot be described by the visual alone. There are many other sign systems that are incorporated into contemporary visual culture. There is a strand in this article that suggests that art educators focused on Visual culture in order to define, legitimise and draw barriers around the ‘visual’ in art, so as to make it the ‘important’ or ‘pertinent’ part of art. Somehow to acknowledge the use of language, music or other in art might reduce the importance of art taught as a visual culture.

Art itself had also added to the move to the visual, as artists explored the abstract and the minimalist. It is in this way that Duncum seeks to define the position of visual culture before the onset of multi-modality. Foe Duncum it seems that the rise of the study of film and media brings forth an interruption of visual culture. Because film and media integrate sound and image but is taught in a similar way to art, the definition of visual culture is being diminished. Duncum emphasises the links between art and text in children’s picture books and thus defining this as an area where multi-literacy is experienced. The child reading needs to be able to read the images as well as the words in order to understand the story. Durcum does not link this further to the use of visual culture on computers or computer games, or the multi-modality of web 2.0.

As a conclusion he says:

The cultural forms of global capital combine images, words, and sound to produce highly seductive experiences that are not in everyone’s best interests. The need for a citizenry equipped to deal with multimodal culture sites remains pressing.

So although he has identified the problem he puts forward no answer and I am not sure that he has any solution. So he has said a new world exists but not how to deal with this.

Review of the NESTA Next Gen. paper

This is a review by Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope about the future of high tech media industries in the UK, such as video games and the visual effects industries. This review is needed, important succinct and pin points the way forward. It also directly relates to my studies as a lecturer and researcher working towards modelling new ideas for teaching in art and media. What I found very interesting was that the review draws a strong link between computer science and art. It talks of the need for education to understand the needs of industry and to train people to enable them to work in the industry. As Livingstone says; The skills needed to produce such varied content are, however, linked by the common denominators of computer science, maths, physics and art. As Alex Hope goes on to explain in more detail; Once you’ve created the tool in the computer to light the water realistically, you still need the flair of the cinematographer or painter to make it look great. At every turn the VFX artist is combining maths, physics, computer science and art to create.

This is the propaganda of need for the industry and also seems to fit my manifesto for the way forward in my work. They keep returning to the theme that without the creative componant which needs computer literate artists, animators, storytellers and designers there is technology without creative content. As Livingstone says, the schools have taught ICT as office skills which does not inspire the continuation of studies. Alex Hope suggests that the push for pupils to choose between science and art is also having a negative effect on creating the skills needed. The government response to this report has however missed this point on several occasions not agreeing with the need for a strong link between STEM subjects and art, somehow they just do not get it. However any move forward is a good move forward and the change from the office based ICT, that even art students have to take, to a more functional and programming based ICT will be a good progression.

January 2012 – review, update and reflect

Well a term can seem so long and so short at the same time. I set myself the task of have a good look at flash animation, taking a course on research and re thinking what my PhD is all about. The Flash course was great. Sometimes I knew what I was doing and sometimes I was totally lost but it was very valuable. it was all about creating drawn animation within the flash program. sometimes I found the process limited by the very fact that it was draw in flash. I therefore did a short course in Photoshop as well. To decide why I am doing this I have to seek the eventual aim and that goes back to my PhD. I want to explore what is digitally interactive narration, sometimes called digital fiction or transliteracy. Like the Dadaists who use film to expand their art I believe that fine art should also be exploring the digital world. To do this there needs to be simple methods and formats that we can explore when teaching in art and design. I also feel that walls between different art forms should be abandoned as we seem to have been sectioned off into zones with media at one end and fine art at the other. What that seems to suggest to me is that I should be modelling teaching ideas and programs and then testing them out. Oh it all seems so simple when you put it like that.

Well this is my first flash animation, a rough and ready but I got there and it only too about a WEEK!!

Link…Review…Research

Digital literature is only that which fulfils Aarseth’s description of Ergodic literature. If you look at the work such as; ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore’ ( a book as an iPad app), because there is only one pathway is this Interactive Fiction but not Ergodic? It is Cybertext because it cannot be accessed in any other way than on a digital device. Dreaming Methods is more random, and the pathway is made by the reader or player. Because of the design nature of the work you follow different pathways every time you ‘read’, and thus you create the work making this ergodic literature. Both these works only exist in or on digital media. However the book, ‘Mr Morris’ is a book and the text is read through a linear process. However the works on Dreaming Methods can often be ‘read’, ‘viewed’, ‘experienced’, from any point in the narrative.
<a href="

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore iPad App Trailer from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

“>

Cybertext by Espen Aarseth………again

All literature in Digital Fiction leads back to Espen Aarseth and his defining of the term Cybertext. Sometimes I wonder if without his defining of terms, others would not have had an area to leap forward from into a new digital world.

Ergodic literature defines the new type of literature that needs more than the turning of pages, there must be the active participation of the ‘reader’, ‘participator’.

Cybertext is the type of text needed to create ergodic literature, this is text that needs your active participation.

Both terms above were appropriated by Aarseth and have since become the terms used in games studies. Aarseth was seeking to define text that did more than; ‘Read, understand, read, write, think, enjoy’. Within his definition there were texts that were created by the active participation of the ‘text reader’, these texts were the ‘cybertext’. This type of literature was ‘Ergodic literature’. The circle, ‘write, read, create’, could only be completed by the active participation of the reader as player.

Many seek to trace a pathway from Hypertext, to Digital fiction, but I would rather seek to create a pathway back to the text and story novel via the graphic computer game. Aarseth talks about the death of the the text based games and the rise of the graphics visual games in the late nineteen eighties. I come to digital fiction through the visual based medium, which as Aarseth implies, has a much larger public audience than the text based games work.

 

The Wrench

Cyertext et al explained

New work

today i did……..

Semiotics

 

Book review

Literature review – June 2011 – Digital fiction

Cybertext – Espen J. Aarseth

In this book Aarseth seeks to delve down into the difference in the use of text between a classically written text; a book, and an interactive text on the computer. In order to do this he seeks to define every area and at times this makes the book highly technical and dense. However without this minute section-by section definition, the complexity of the creation and participation with participatory digital text would be ignored in the greater analysis of what is literature.

As I started reading I was slightly worried that the introduction was of twenty-three pages. However Aarseth uses this to define his terms, to put down the markers that he will use in his very persuasive argument that a computer game is a piece of literature. As he says;

 

The differences in teleological orientation – the different ways in which the reader is invited to ‘complete’ a text – and the texts’ various self-manipulating devices are what the concept of Cybertext is all about. (p 20)

 

I was interested in the difference between text and Cybertext described in terms of linear and labyrinthine. Text, as in signs in linear form, becomes in Cybertext not only the multi-path journey but also the single twisting journey where there are choices to make. This use of the term labyrinthine is useful because it is such a visual description and helps to describe the difference between the reader of the text and the participator of the Cybertext. Aarseth define what he calls ‘ergonic literature’ and in defining this concept is looking to include the role of the participator or player. The reader reads the text but the reader of ergonic literature must read, play, participate and work the text.

 

I keep finding myself lost in his detailed examination of early games or interactive texts and it is then that I need to return to try and find what he is actually searching for. The text ‘cybertext’ is not the simple read follow and interpret, of the novel. A Cybertext has the read interpret element but the decisions of the reader/player makes decisions on the pathway taken. However I do feel that this slightly misses that you can only get out what has been put in. You can take any of the multiple pathways but you will still have to end at the author’s conclusion.

 

There is a long examination of an early text based game. Aarseth describes this game as ‘autistic’. He uses this term as his definition for the way the game interacts with the player. Like an ‘autistic’ person the game repeats your question back to you. He justifies this with a simplified, old-fashioned definition of autism. I find this whole passage absurd and slightly insulting. Why does the autistic repeat the words back to you? This is generally because you are not being specific and you use words or phrases in an idiomatic manner. Keep you eyes peeled means to look. However, to an autistic person it can mean to peel the eye like an orange. This is a visual interpretation of the text that changes the meaning. The computer, especially the early text based games, could only respond to words in a correct format. The computer cannot ‘interpret’ the meaning. Sometimes Aarseth goes into such detail that he seems to loose any connection with the initial argument. Why are we worrying whether we should call the ‘button category’ a ‘spot’?

 

It is however his pedantic exactitude that eventually persuades you that of course the computer game can be described as a cybertext that is part of a long tradition of literature and can be examined and defined in a similar style.

 

Twisty Little Passages – An approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort

 

As Aarseth defines then Montfort explores, teases and exposes in a historical timeline. Interactive Fiction as described here is a puzzle, a riddle that the participant must engage in to understand the ‘story’. He is looking at early games that were text based. As Montfort says;

 

This book seeks to describe some of the intellectual history of this form and its relationship to other literary and gaming forms, and to computing and other computer programs, while critically examining a representative selection of important works and describing their interrelationships. (p5)

 

I found that I had to read this book without being able to have direct experience of many of the early works of digital fiction. I did find one early example that was partially playable and was surprised at how difficult I found it to play. These games, like Aarseth’s description of the ‘autistic game’, which is in fact Marc Blank’s Deadline, have specific text controls. As someone used to a game controller and graphics these early games are both simple and frustrating. Words and phrases needed to correspond exactly to those within the game program otherwise they would not work.

 

Montfort is however seeking to examine further the early exploration of interactive fiction and the definition of fiction within this context. He references Aarseth who he describes as the theorist who defined the ‘formulation of ergodic literature’, which is refered to as the production of narratives only when they are interacted with, or participated with. However Montfort feels there needs to be a specific definition of interactive fiction.  He gives four different definitions of this type of fiction:

 

• a text-accepting, text generating computer program
• a potential narrative, that is, a system that produces narrative during interaction
• a simulation of an environment or world; and
• a structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game

 

Both these books are trying to define the narrative text experience that was created when the possibilities of the computer were pushed and developed into new creative medium. They needed to create new words and definitions that would describe this new form of creative interaction that was specific to this new computer world. But at the same time they both look forward and backwards in seeking to understand. As Montfort says:

 

The nature of interactive fiction as computer program, simulated world, generator of narrative, and game, means that it has many other ancestors.(p45)