Critical Analysis of Writing For Machines

Never in the entirety of literature history has there been a character less genial, charming or engaging as that of the autobiographical creature known as Kaye. Her lung capacity must be incredible judging by her unparalleled ability to toot her own horn. I had barely sat down to read chapter 3 before the self flattery an smugness saturated the reading. This turned what should have an interesting and identifiable account of a journey in to a new world of artistic possibilities in to a torturous sludge. Is Kaye purposely trying to alienate her readers? Is it a devious ploy to release a print book whish is such a nauseating experience that it’ll have people running into the arms of the new media, never looking back?

I don’t understand why I find this character of Kaye so repulsive, we have a lot of the same sensibilities, I also am excited by the emerging web media. However she is so caught up in the hype of what is coming next she can not see that a lot of what she discusses is in fact entirely possible through the older medium. She has been blinded by the hype. A piece of work called Patchwork Girl which Kaye calls an “important innovation” (pg.38), but this in actuality does little more than an Artist Book.

Her inability to understand the cross over between the medium of Artist Books and that of Digital literature is startling. This is especially so as she considers W.J.T. Mitchells’ contention that the only important signifying components of literary text are words and images to be incorrect. She claims that that was not true for both electronic texts and artists books, (pg43-44) in away showing some appreciate between the two.

I to a degree, agree with Mitchells’ point of view. Literature is to me a simple abstract used to explain something larger than it’s self. It is a personal and collaborative experience between the reader and the work. Consider a piece of coding to be similar to a piece of text, the letters in both cases are abstract the computer processor assigns them meaning in the case of the coding, the readers brain in the case of the text. This is then visualised on the screen or our minds eye respectively.

However the important difference, the quirk that makes it personal, being that you and I could read the exact same piece of text and still derive vastly different images in our minds eye however the computer will always produce the same image on the screen based on coding. This uniqueness is the charm of literature. This is why I feel Kaye should show more restraint when pushing the realm of electronic writing. Other media which she is so excited about attaching to electronic literature, such as animated film and music are fundamentally different.She'll create an electronic litriture monster.

These mediums more passive delivery style takes away the uniqueness of the reading experience in a way similar to traditional illustrated stories do but in a much larger more forceful way and Literature has the . In trying to push literatures’ boundaries she is in danger of diluting and losing the effect of the words.

Chapter four is an incredibly difficult read and feels like you need six stout men to man the thesaurus as you go. It’s full of complicated words such as “MINDBODY”, (her capitals not mine), which is never truly explained. This is both annoying and disheartening.

It imagines a world where Human kind has fused entirely with the digital and human kind can not be truly separated from the information technology all around which has evolved beyond forming our means of communicating to also playing an integral part of forming our very selves. This leap in to a plane of pure science fiction comes from left field and leaves the reader stranded in a sea of word play and puns which are neither as ingenious nor as entertaining as the author believes them to be.

Works Cited.
Hayles, N. Kathrine. Writing Machines.
(Cambridge, MA; Mediawork/MIT Press, 2002)