Online Reading and the Spectral

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Online Reading and the Spectral

• By Kim Knight
• University of California, Santa Barbara
• Created for New Media and the Reading
  Experience New Approaches to Textual Forms,
  Interfaces, and Social Interactions
• November 28, 2006

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Qualifying Statements

• Prospectus
• Online Reading

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The Importance of Representation

• As our proliferating technologies have created a
  whole series of environments, men have become
  aware of the arts as anti-environments or
  counter-environments that provide us with the
  means of perceiving the environment itself.
• - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

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The Spectral

• Traditionally, the spectral has been invoked to
  describe characteristics of the Gothic
  otherworldly apparitions or the mere feeling or
  suggestion of haunting. However, spectral may
  also mean related to a spectrum, in this case the
  electromagnetic spectrum. For the purposes of my
  project, the spectral is a multivalent term
  referring to the ability of electric technologies
  to leave traces, to evoke the strange or odd, to
  awe or unsettle the subject. The technologies
  may be present as realist depictions or they
  may occupy the space of metaphor...

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Representations

• Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Passage from Pattern Recognition
• Passage from House of Leaves

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I Robot, You Jane

• Season 1, 1997
• Gang of high school misfits and the school
  librarian hunt vampires, fight demons, etc.
• The Players
• Buffy the nearly invincible Slayer
• Willow hacker sidekick
• Xander hapless sidekick
• Giles British librarian
• Ms. Calendar computer science teacher
• Fritz David enthusiastic students
• Moloch the Corrupter demon

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I Robot, You Jane

• Italy, 1418
• Moloch the Corrupter
• More and more people have fallen under his
  mesmerizing power.
• Pray this accursed book shall never again be
  read.

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I Robot, You Jane
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I Robot, You Jane

• He's gone binary on us.
• Becomes online corrupter
• Local, Corporate, Global
• Digital Manifestation

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I Robot, You Jane

• You think the realm of the mystical is limited
  to ancient texts and relics? That bad old
  science made the magic go away? The divine
  exists in cyberspace, same as out here.

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I Robot, You Jane

• Exit?

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Pattern Recognition

• William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
• 2003
• Cayce Pollard, professional cool hunter
• FetishFootageFilm

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Pattern Recognition

• Rather than retype the unbookmarked forum URL,
  she goes to the browser history.
• SEE ASIAN SLUTS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE.
• FETISHFOOTAGEFORUM
• She freezes, hand on mouse, looking at this last
  logged site.
• Then she starts to feel it, that literal
  folkloric prickle in the scalp.
• And she can't, through sheer mental effort, make
  Asian Sluts and FFF reverse their order on the
  screen. She desperately wants Asian Sluts to be
  below FFF, but it stays where it is. She sits
  there, unmoving, peering at the browser history
  the way she once peered at a brown recluse spider
  in a rose garden in Portland, a drab little thing
  her host reliably informed her contained enough
  neurotoxin to kill them both, and horribly.
• Damien's flat is suddenly not a friendly place,
  not familiar at all.

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House of Leaves

• Mark Danielewski
• 2000
• Jose Zampanò, a lonely old blind man, dies,
  leaving a haphazard manuscript in his apartment.
  Johnny Truant finds the manuscript and after
  becoming obsessed with its contents, he decides
  to finish Zampanò's work. The manuscript is a
  scholarly study of The Navidson Record, a film
  that Truant is fairly certain doesn't even exist.

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House of Leaves

• As I discovered, there were reams and reams of
  it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting
  into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all,
  frequently breaking apart, always branching off
  into other pieces I'd come across later on old
  napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once
  even the back of a postage stamp everything and
  anything but empty...
• One thing's for sure, even without touching it,
  both of us slowly began to feel its heaviness,
  sensed something horrifying in its proportions,
  its silence, its stillness, even if it did seem
  to have been shoved almost carelessly to the side
  of the room...I know a moment came when I felt
  certain its resolute blackness was capable of
  anything, maybe even of slashing out, tearing up
  the floor, murdering Zampanò, murdering us, maybe
  even murdering you.

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House of Leaves

• There's only one choice now finish what Zampanò
  himself failed to finish. Re-inter this thing in
  a binding tomb. Make it only a book...

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The Spectral

• I Robot, You Jane
• Demon / Internet parallels
• The moment Malcom reveals too much
• The machine overriding the user
• Pattern Recognition
• The uncanny moment when the computer reveals a
  violation of privacy
• House of Leaves
• The monstrosity of print

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The End

• Closing Clip - BtVS