The Digital Loop: Feedback and Recurrence
by Rita Raley
while (condition)
{
// execute statement 1
// execute statement 2
// insure that this loop is infinite
condition = true;
}
Production environments such as Flash, Director, and C++ builders
have facilitated the emergence of the continual replay loop as a
formal feature of digital texts. Motion-text genres such as
QuickTime and Flash animations work with the replay loop as a
constraint within the process of composition, and one result has
been that the forms and styles of digital media writing have
altered in relation to the different tools used to produce it.[1]
As these tools have made it possible for digital texts to move
beyond the singular node-link mode of composition, the loop has
also been incorporated as both design element and thematic
content, much like the link, the path, the map, and the stitch
were incorporated by Storyspace and other earlier-generation
hypertexts. Witness, for example, Dan Waber's recent 'Strings'
[
When digital media serve as both production and delivery platform, the question of physical textual boundaries comes to the fore. What, in other words, actually constitutes the text, particularly if each reading is different from the other and in a sense unrepeatable? Indexes, link menus, and site maps alike suggest that a digital text might have discernible borders and potentially be sequentially ordered, but these neither guarantee duplicable readings nor are they common to contemporary production environments. Without a repeatable and shared element, we could only have an absolutely singular work, which means that a digital text needs a degree of repeatability in order for it to function as a text. The loop serves as just such a repeatable element. Moreover, it highlights the extent to which the boundaries of a digital text can best be thought in terms of temporality: the time-based period in which both the reader-user and the system are performing.
While it does not primarily feature literal loops in the sense of
programming statements, M.D. Coverley's early story 'Fibonacci's
Daughter' [
It follows that an epitaph would bring the structure of the loop
and the thematic of recurrence to the fore because it is death
that functions as a metaphor for the endpoint of a textual event
and that brings a stop to the play of signification (or to the
"flickering" of the signifier, as Katherine Hayles would
suggest).[5] So, too, does it gesture toward the obliteration of
a meta-system of reference, that is, to provide a way out before
the meta-pattern or master code needs to be transmitted. As
"hypertext theory" was emerging as a school and within the
school, particularly in the Storyspace era of the mid 1990s, this
theoretical and aesthetic project of engaging and disengaging the
master code would have been attributable to the operative
discourses of postmodernism.[6] The use of death as a metaphor
for closure in the hypertexts of this earlier generation opened
up the possibility of apprehending a practical end to the
seemingly labyrinthine structure of a digital text. Why else
should Geoff Ryman's novel '253' [
What follows from the restart, a kind of loop in itself, is feedback, whereby system and environment are both altered as a result of their interaction.[9] Within a feedback loop, information is not simply circulated; rather, the environment affects the system (input) and, in turn, the system affects the environment (output). Both input and output are bound up in a loop, such that each in turn receives and then sends back information that transforms the other. There is a temporal division between the two, but each wields a material, performative, and generative power. Often generally discussed in terms of distortion, dissonance, and interruption, the feedback loop within the context of digital textuality might also be understood in terms of the interaction between the human operator and the machinic processor.[10] Digital textuality, then, has a feedback economy, wherein input and output are linked within a complex process of performance, "performance" here referring both to the actions of the computer and to the relationship between reader-user and screen. The process of interaction between operator and machine gains greater sophistication and visibility when it is inscribed into the digital text-a moment that loops into itself.
Notes
1 To browse examples of the motion-text genre in digital poetry,
see 'Poems That Go' [
2 Lev Manovich briefly comments on the loop in relation to the still photograph as "the new default method to 'critique' media culture" in a recent series of Nettime postings entitled, "Generation Flash." "Generation Flash 1/3," April 9, 2002.
3 For a review of Coverley's text, see Jane Yellowlees Douglas,
"Playing the Numbers: M.D. Coverley's 'Fibonacci's Daughter',"
SIGWEB Newsletter 9:3 (October 2000). Reposted on 'Word Circuits'
[
4 For a basic description of the structure of fractals, see Hans Lauwerier, "Fractals: Endlessly Repeated Geometrical Figures" (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991); Harold M. Hastings and George Sugihara, "Fractals: A User's Guide for the Natural Sciences" (New York: Oxford UP, 1993); Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut JŸrgens, and Dietmar Saupe, "Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science" (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992).
5 Hayles, "How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6 For example, one can look back to George Landow's institution-building labors at Brown and his influential attempts to fashion a theory of hypertextuality out of a few strands of contemporary continental philosophy.
7 See Michael Joyce, 'afternoon, a story' (Eastgate) and "Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text," which opens in the contemplation of "a mausoleum of books," "awful makeshift morgues," "the union dead," "orphaned victims," and "the library mortuary" (173). Reprinted as " 'The Ends of Print Culture' (a work in progress)," "Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
8 Alan Liu's forthcoming book, "The Laws of Cool" (Stanford UP), concludes with an extended discussion of the aesthetics of destruction and virus art.
9 "Feedback" [
10 I have elsewhere written of performance with respect to
digital textuality; see "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance"
[
(c) Rita Raley 2002
Rita Raley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses in the digital humanities and global literary studies. She is completing work on her book, "Global English and the Academy", and also currently at work on a book about digital textuality. Her most recent article concerns hypertext and performance, and her ancillary research topics include codework, net.art, molecular computing, and the electronic empire.