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Module 10

Part I: Reading Response 500 words

OliaLialina, “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War”
https://anthology.rhizome.org/my-boyfriend-came-back-from-the-war
(scroll down and click “view work”)

Shelley Jackson, “my body”
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/jackson__my_body_a_wunderkammer.html

Daniel Kolitz, “The Data Drive”
http://thedatadrive.com/

Guideline:

What are they doing? Consider what kinds of meaning is conveyed by their interfaces and how they look and work. Think about empty space and what’s missing and obscured or kept deliberately unclear, which we’ll get further into next week and beyond. Or perhaps consider how possibilities for making literary work on the web have changed during the 20 years between the first two pieces and the third. Note, though, that the internet did have color back in the 90s, and everything wasn’t in black and white.

Part II: Response 2 peers (250word each X2= 500words)

A:

Net Art Anthology

I enjoyed looking through this anthology of the internet and found many of the articles/ HTML presentations very interesting. It was divided into chapters that represent 5 year periods of time on the internet. “My Boyfriend Came Back from War” by OliaLialna was interesting and cinematic because of the HTML style that allowed the reader to choose the fate of the interaction. At one point, I was given an option to don’t kill or forgive which confused me greatly. There is no true order to click on the links so I felt that I was reading the story in fragments or that I was using early version AOL messenger and just advancing through the conversation.

The Body

This was my favorite reading from this week because the ability to interact as well as the explanations written for each body part. The author goes through her life and explains what happened to her body part and how see feels about it. The author also refers to her childhood when describing her large and strong arms that allowed her to have the most pull-ups for the class and had the other girls envying her. But, then explains the trauma caused by the arrive of her breast. The author seems to be of an athletic type and had to adjust because they often limited her movement. I also like how she referred to her butt as her tail showing a childish side of herself. The author has an artistic persona as she also tells the reader when was the first time she drew those body parts and how they affected her throughout her growth.

The Data Drive

When I first opened this page, I immediately recognized the Facebook layout but, with a twist. The page seems to have “cut out” post from Facebook and created a digital scrapbook of Facebook post that people have sent in. I read the ad on the side where they explained they would need one hundred petabytes of personal data to continue operations. The site even gives you prize incentives for the type of personal data you provide. There was a lot of different posts I enjoyed reading like tips and a message from CEO Buck Calhoun and the post containing NSA cellular data statistics.

B:

Yeah, I couldn’t think of a funny title. OliaLialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” was about a conversation between the speaker’s boyfriend and the speaker. It’s presented in multiple, progressively smaller boxes of links and, to me anyways, is very unclear as to who is speaking or what they’re saying. I feel like there is some double talk in these sentences. The means of interaction is another interesting aspect of this piece. As a piece of cybertext, the reader is allowed to explore everything at their own time and choice. That being said, the way a reader interacts with the text provides a questionable way of reading things. For example, at one point there are four boxes with links to progress the text. One way the reader can read this is by thinking that each box is its own self-contained sentence or interaction and you advance (or turn the page) by clicking. Alternatively, one can view the four boxes as an interaction, like a comic book, and in order to “turn the page” one must click on each link. As for the story itself, this is a prime way of exploring the complicated feelings of interacting with someone who came back from a conflict. The format of internet/interactive storytelling is relatively new and thus unknown. The different splits and divisions lend themselves to be like windows (ha) to small snippets of how these people’s lives have been changed and how it might represent the boyfriend’s own experience with the war, like with PTSD.

Shelley Jackson’s “my body” explores her (I assume this is autobiographical) feelings toward her body pre and post puberty. They are complicated to say the least. The text uses similar cybertextual ideas discussed before as the reader can visit different body parts and read her opinions on them. My initial impression is that she was not a huge fan of her body post puberty, which is understandable and, if I may be personal, relatable. The feeling I get from the use of cybertext as a kind of stream of consciousness scrutiny of one’s physical body. Therefore, there is no true beginning point. Each body part links to other parts when mentioned, similar to a Wikipedia page. This means that the reader cannot separate one view of a part with the rest as they are interconnected.

Daniel Kolitz’s “The Data Drive” was a satirical project on Facebook culture and Zuckerberg’s scummy attitude that got annoying really quick. I don’t use Facebook anymore, so I can only assume that this experience is similar to using it. I don’t want to hate on something that clearly had a lot of work put into it, but as a satire it wasn’t particularly funny (similar to my views on Grand Theft Auto) and more cynical in a non-fun way. I know that not all satire needs to be funny like Swift’s A Modest Proposal (which I think has dark humor so it is funny), but I prefer my hard hitting cultural criticism to make me laugh while I digest it.