{"id":135,"date":"2013-03-15T01:59:16","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T08:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/?p=135"},"modified":"2013-03-15T11:44:26","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T18:44:26","slug":"the-missing-link","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/2013\/03\/15\/the-missing-link\/","title":{"rendered":"The Missing Link"},"content":{"rendered":"

Electronic Ruins: Virtual Landscapes out of History<\/a> by Dave Youssef begins by outlining the design plan for Paris under Hausmann and brings up the notion of ‘ruin value’ coined by Nazi chief architect, Albert Speer.\u00a0 What do these two have in common?\u00a0 In envisioning the design of their cities and empires, Hausmann and Speer both took into account the eventual demise of humanity and the end of the civilizations they were originally planning for.\u00a0 Similar to how monuments are blocked off from people to climb on, live in, or otherwise, Hausmann wanted the design of his Paris to have the streets free of the poor and homeless as they would be a blight in the face of the greater city.\u00a0 Speer envisioned the Reich to instill the same sense of power and grandeur of the Roman Empire.\u00a0 They considered how their creations would be viewed in the eyes of the future.\u00a0 A future with or without people.<\/p>\n

This applies to the world of electronic literature because in the nebulous of the web, material is constantly shifting and changing.\u00a0 The web ten years into the future will be a radically different place that it is now.\u00a0 Webpages, like this one, that aren’t tended to will fall into oblivion and will fade into memory.<\/p>\n

As Katherine Hayles states in her essay \u201cElectronic Literature: What is it?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the centuries, print literature has developed mechanisms for its preservation and archiving, including libraries and librarians, conservators, and preservationists. Unfortunately, no such mechanisms exist for electronic literature. The situation is exacerbated by the fluid nature of digital media; whereas books printed on good quality paper can endure for centuries, electronic literature routinely becomes unplayable (and hence unreadable) after a decade or even less<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Youssef then takes a look at\u00a0Stuart Moulthrop\u2019s ‘Reagan’s Library’ and its design as an example of the ever shifting face of the net. Moulthrop’s idea was to create a work of electronic literature composed of hypertext links, where the user will be guided through a virtual narrative in a virtual geography.\u00a0 The user is constantly linked to new frames of reference adding to Moulthrop’s procedural rhetoric.\u00a0 These frames provide an omni-directional vantage point; a panoramic of the other ‘world states’ in the library. Often times, the user will visit a site up to four times before the site becomes stable. The point of all this is to provide a historicist framework where the user recalls coherence throughout their virtual journey in the narrative.<\/p>\n

\"mediacontrol29_14\"<\/a>

The Matrix. Google Images<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

As the sites congeal, their previous forms fade away.\u00a0 The site shifts again, but in a historicist framework. \u00a0 Moulthrop wants to bring to attention that the idea of projecting a monument in the future is futile because it will not be maintained with the same vision, intent, or purpose and people will essentially become disconnected.\u00a0 The monument will become meaningless to the dismay of people like Speer and Hausmann.<\/p>\n

The content of the net is so expansive that the landscape that is created won’t be able to recall its own history.\u00a0 The inverse relationship of web content and its longevity is akin to a dying sun; growing larger, but fading at the same time. The digital medium is more easily prone to tampering, destruction, and eventual outpacing by new innovations in the medium itself as opposed to printed material (Youssef).<\/p>\n

He closes by pointing out that the library being bounded by hypertext link is like the what binds us to the present when we view monuments of old: time.\u00a0 The instantaneous nature of the links\u00a0 in the library effectively filter out crucial pieces of information which as a whole disintegrates the collective meaning as the user forges their own.\u00a0 So as much as we may think we know what we know, we may never know. We can only point and guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Electronic Ruins: Virtual Landscapes out of History by Dave Youssef begins by outlining the design plan for Paris under Hausmann and brings up the notion of ‘ruin value’ coined by Nazi chief architect, Albert Speer.\u00a0 What do these two have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":401,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","kk_blocks_editor_width":"","_kiokenblocks_attr":"","_kiokenblocks_dimensions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"gutentor_comment":0,"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"anouaux","author_link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/author\/anouaux\/"},"qubely_comment":0,"qubely_category":"Engl 16 - Blog Posts<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Electronic Ruins: Virtual Landscapes out of History by Dave Youssef begins by outlining the design plan for Paris under Hausmann and brings up the notion of ‘ruin value’ coined by Nazi chief architect, Albert Speer.\u00a0 What do these two have … Continue reading →","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/401"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anouaux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}