Genre rules as the framework for preservation and study of new media literature

At its core, human epistemology is based on two pillars: sense experience (consider the Humean empiricism, or phenomenology) and set-theory based logic. Quine in “Epistemology Naturalized” understands a human as a natural transformer of a meager input from senses into a torrential output of descriptions. For him also Carnap’s rational reconstruction (a logical reconstruction of the world from sense data) can be construed as creative and imaginative mechanical simulations, of the transformations from the world of experiential implications into various languages. Such a detached and rule-governed idea of games as playful alternative worlds, possibly in a reduced state as argued by Huizinga, can provide an important perspective on algorithms of new media literature, as well as its other features. Rules for particular works are summarized in genre-constructs, which will be considered for the domain where new media and literature intersect. The genres can be derived form literary traditions, and from the basic aspects of new media art that encompass the algorithmic building of communication artifacts from (more or less vast) archives of utterances in various media, and of other data. Espen Aarseth’s theory considered cybertext a perspective for the study of literature, and not a particular genre (Cybertext, 5). Finally, there is an important problem that needs to be addressed: today, several generations of work by digital media artists are firmly in the past, while media art remains synonymous with “new” and “emergent,” and the growing vastness of the loss consequently goes unacknowledged. The genre-rules based approach attempts to tackle the preservation issue by identifying the key elements of individual works that need to be recorded and preserved. The descriptions are already interpretations with an intrinsic goal of making the works re-enactable and accessible to the audiences of the future.