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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. Online Reading and the Spectral. Prospectus Online Reading. Qualifying Statements.

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Online Reading and the Spectral

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  1. 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 Online Reading and the Spectral

  2. Prospectus Online Reading Qualifying Statements

  3. 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 The Importance of Representation

  4. 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... The Spectral

  5. Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Passage from Pattern Recognition Passage from House of Leaves Representations

  6. “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

  7. “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.”

  8. “I Robot, You Jane”

  9. “I Robot, You Jane” • “He's gone binary on us.” • Becomes online corrupter • Local, Corporate, Global • Digital Manifestation

  10. “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.”

  11. “I Robot, You Jane” • Exit?

  12. Pattern Recognition • William Gibson, author of Neuromancer • 2003 • Cayce Pollard, professional “cool hunter” • Fetish:Footage:Film

  13. Rather than retype the unbookmarked forum URL, she goes to the browser history. SEE ASIAN SLUTS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE. FETISH:FOOTAGE:FORUM 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 F:F:F reverse their order on the screen. She desperately wants Asian Sluts to be below F:F:F, 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. Pattern Recognition

  14. 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.

  15. 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. House of Leaves

  16. 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... House of Leaves

  17. 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

  18. The End • Closing Clip - BtVS

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