Canned Goods

Remediation: (Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter) “the cycling of different [media] through one another” (5)
Medial Ecology: THe complex relationships involved in remediation.
Textimage: WJT Mitchell in Iconology—”Tis printcentric view fails to account for all the other signifying components of electronic texts . . .” (20).
Simulcrum: originally meaning a material object representing something
Technotexts (Hayles): “Literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate open a window on the larger connections that unite literature as a verbal art to its material forms” (25).
Cybertext (Espen Aarseth): “a wide variety of texts that [use] combinational strategies, including print works . . . electronic fictions . . . [and] computer games . . .” (27).
“Ergodic” texts (aarseth): “those literary systems that require ‘nontrivial effort’ to allow the user to traverse them” (e.g. computer games) (28).
Media-specific analysis (Hayles): “a way . . . to think more broadly about the connections between strands of criticism that have not yet made common cause with one another” (29) by “holding one term constant across media . . . and varying the media to explore how medium-specific possibilities and constraints shape texts. MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those [embodiments] interacts dynamically with linguistic, rheotical, and literary practices to create effects we call literature” (31).
Materiality(Hayles): “The physical attributes constituting any artifact are potentially infinite . . . . From this infinite array a technotext will select a few to foreground and work into its thematic concerns. Materiality thus emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies [and] depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifcat as well as the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops—strategies that include physical manipulations and as well as conceptual frameworks” (33).
Proprioception (75): the reception of stimuli produced within the organism.
Cyborganization(49): “transforming human subjects into hybrid identities that cannot be thought without the digital inscription apparatus that produces them.”

–”In their general form, computers are simulation machines producing environments, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. To construct an environment is, of course, to anticipate and structure the user’s interaction with it and in this sense to construct the user as well as the interface” (48).

–”simulation does not necessarily mean that the processes running in a computer are artificial. The processes can be ‘natural’ as anything in the real world; they are artificial only in the sensethat they run in an artificial medium” (48). “To the extent the user enters the imaginative world of this environment and is structured by her interaction in it, she also becomes a simulation, an informational pattern circulating through the global network that counts as the computational version of human community” (49).

–”If books are seen only as immaterial verbal constructs, the rich potential of this interplay [Mindbody interactions with text] is lost. Literary critics have lon accepted that form is content and content is form. Now Kaye [Hayles] wanted to shout, ‘Materiality is content, and content is materiality!’” (75).