Terry Harpold: Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008)

“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.

In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.

In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816651027, 9780816651023
368 pages

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Nile Southern: The Anarchivists of Eco-Dub: A Wireless Report (1991/2001)

ECO-DUB is a real and evolving cultural repository of image, sound and text–driven by a fictional cast of characters looking for answers in a society that commercial media left behind. Set in the near future, the world’s only hope of holding onto a humanist (and progressive) identity rests with a rag-tag band of drug and sex-addled info-junkies.

Through the Ecodub ‘shaman head hose’ processor, an Anarchival Research/Broadcast Station (see cover), The Anarchivists are able to “divine the exquisite corpse of culture” through the arranged marriage of live, recombinant media interplay and sophistocated indexing techniques. When their signal (beamed daily from erratic Satellite Erica) becomes too popular to control, the Media Blackouts begin, and the Eco-Dubbers’ only hope is to unleash a Divine Intelligence in the making.

“Verbs cannot re-scribe the Eco-Dub experience. It’s like all the world’s become a stage of easily accessible source material that has been broken down into ones and zeroes and the Great Napster God has laid down the social-progressivist gauntlet: peer-to-peer or die!” — Abe Golam, Prog-23

“Long live The Cinema of Information!” — Simulated Nikola Tesla, 2009

Published by Alt-X Press, 2001
ISBN 1931560021, 9781931560023

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