From ELOWiki
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| URL of Journal
| http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/
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| Title of Journal
| The Iowa Review Web
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| Editor or Publisher
| Stuart Moulthrop, Jon Winet, Mark NeuCollins
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| Language
| English
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| Description
| The Iowa Review Web’s issue on “Instruments and Playable Text” (published in July 2008) features seven poetic and narrative works by six authors that engage in playability and linguistic operation through computational means. Guest editor Stuart Moulthrop invokes historical precedents as well as contemporary writers in mapping a literary sub-category in digital literature concerned with writing at the interface and code levels. The featured works (by Judy Malloy, John Cayley, Nick Montfort, Shawn Rider, Elizabeth Knipe, and the editor himself) all explore operations of permutation, chance, and remixing prompted by the reader’s actions. These programmed digital works ask of their readers to engage in the (literary) play that the works offer in order to read texts. Readerly actions include clicking on images and texts in Malloy’s Concerto for Narrative Data to allow for different voices and texts to appear in various formations and juxtapositions. In Nick Montfort’s The Purpling color-coding and clickable text chunks cause the poem to permeate. John Cayley’s riverIsland employs navigation via images, clicking on icons or dragging QuickTime images, to access 32 poems reflecting on nature, translation, and language. Both Elizabeth Knipe’s activeReader and Shawn Rider’s two works, So Random and PiTP, offer participation in their works, inviting the reader to put in their own texts into the works. Finally, Moulthrop’s polyphonic Under Language mixes written text with spoken words and sounds as the reader clicks on the interface’s icons and texts. In this work, as in riverIsland, spoken words and sounds also engage the reader as a listener. Different kinds of play, interaction and participation are juxtaposed with the more standard ways of intellectually engaging with a literary work. The Iowa Review Web issue includes a range of explorations of literary play, evoked in the editor’s introduction, the works, and in many of the artists’/authors’ statements.
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| Additional Notes
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| The works included in the issue are: Judy Malloy's Concerto for Narrative Data; John Cayley's riverIsland QT; Nick Montfort's The Purpling; Shawn Rider's So Random and PiTP; Elizabeth Knipe's activeReader; Stuart Moulthrop's Under Language
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