At some level, European art has always been concerned with an investigation into the nature of art itself. To that extent, What I’m doing is a fairly orthodox kind of art activity.
— Cohen, Harold in Holtzman, Steven R. Digital Mantras. The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994.
1) The long laborious calculation made by hand us reduced to nothing; 2) freed from tedious calculations the composer is able to devote himself to the general problems that the new musical form poses and to explore the nooks and crannies of this form while modifying values of the input data.
— Xenakis, Iannis. Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. New expanded edition ed. New York: Pendragon Press, 1992.
The score is instructions for creating a composition. A computer is much more reliable for precisely executing the composition. Traditionally, the score undergoes all sorts of interpretation. With rule systems, I want to find out what the rules really do. I can do it by hand, it just takes more time.
— Koenig, Gottfried Michael in Holtzman, Steven R. Digital Mantras. The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994.
With the work [of Stockhausen] in Cologne, it could be said that composition was occurring for the first time at a microlevel, at a level of granularity smaller than that of a note. The note had been the simplest atomic element that composers had used prior to the availability of electronic devices. But these new devices could control the components of a sound, the simple sine waves that were combined to create complex sounds. Rather than composing from a predetermined palette of instrumental sounds — oboes, clarinets, violins, piano, whatever — the sounds themselves were composed from simple sine waves.
— Holtzman, Steven R. Digital Mantras. The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994.
The computer is essentially a structure manipulator. The workings of a computer program involve defining relationships between different objects — assigned parts of memory, bytes and words, variables or absolute values, operands — and object manipulators or operators — machine instructions that can relate and transform different objects, adding them together, shifting them left or right, comparing them for differences, moving them from one place in memory to another.
— Holtzman, Steven R. Digital Mantras. The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994.
In the first decades of the Gutenberg revolution, printing presses, as McLuhan long ago pointed, poured forth a flood of manuscripts in print form. In similar manner, one can expect that in the first stages of hypertext publishing, printed books will provide both its raw material and much of its stylistics.
— Landow, George P. “What’s a Critic to Do?: Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext.” Hyper / Text Theory. Ed. Landow, George P. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 1-48.
The collage method, which Ulmer pronounces the “single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century,” provides an entirely appropriate paradigm for both hypertext writing and what Ulmer calls “post-criticism”. Collage, or collage-like effects, in fact appear inevitable in hypertext environments, and they also take various forms. Including blocks of nonfictional text or images within a hypertext fiction, as we have seen, provides one way that such collage occurs; it also happens when authors write with and, one might say, along with texts by others.
— Landow, George P. “What’s a Critic to Do?: Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext.” Hyper / Text / Theory. Ed. Landow, George P. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 1-48.
A medieval cathedral was indeed a complex, hypermediated text displayed in a sacred space for the community to read. However, there are obvious differences between the visual culture of the Middle Ages ad our own visual culture. One is the sheer ubiquity of images today. In the Middle Ages, images must have had a sanctity not only because of their religious themes, but also because of their inaccessibility.
— Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space. Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. 2 ed. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.
Artistic prose and poetry did this through metaphor; discursive prose did it by subordinating the concrete to the abstract — techniques that writers inherited from ancient and medieval writers and further developed. In one sense, the history of Western prose might be understood as a series of strategies for controlling the visual and the sensory. As the dominant technology of representation, print has been a voracious remediator since the 15th century; refashioning many of the functions of the manuscript, of oral communication (the homily, the scientific lecture or disputation, the occasional speech), and of visual art (through engraving).
— Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space. Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. 2 ed. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.
The early modernists in literature and the visual arts also created works whose surfaces drew attention to themselves, works that demanded the reader or viewer acknowledge the reality of the genre or medium itself. The reader of Ulysses does not lose himself in the story for long periods, as is (naively) supposed to happen with Victorian novels: Ulysses is not transparent in this sense, but rather hypermediated. Likewise the reader of Michael Joyce’s hypertextual fiction afternoon does not lose herself in the story: what captures her is the experience of moving through the story on a trajectory partly determined by her own choices.
— Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space. Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. 2 ed. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.
