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482 Temporality of Digital Works John David Zuern The computational processing and manipulation of text, images, sound, and audience feedback inevitably introduce distinctive temporal features into digital artworks . While many of these features can be viewed as extensions of earlier strategies for representing time in film (Miles 1999), in particular the use of montage (Manovich fi 2001, 148–155), other temporal elements of the newer media, especially those related to interactivity, cannot be easily subsumed within cinematic models (see interactivity). In some cases, artists and writers conspicuously exploit these temporal aspects of the media to conduct creative experiments with time. Stephanie Strickland has observed that a striking number of works in digital media “explicitly address questions of time, history, and memory, often using dynamic means, Web-streaming or telepresence, in order to do it” (2001). Likewise, N. Katherine Hayles includes among the key cultural implications of the new media “the deconstruction of temporality and its reconstruction as an emergent phenomena arising from multiagent interactions” (2008, 84). Regardless of their themes, all creative endeavors in these media are shaped in some way by the specific temporal properties associated with computational systems. As Hayles suggests, fi the distribution of different time sequences across various agents and processes distin- ff ff guishes the temporality of digital works from the temporal characteristics of works in other media. Raine Koskimaa provides a useful four-part schema for mapping the different tem- ff ff poral strata of computer-based artworks (2010, 136). Koskimaa’s user time represents the time individual users spend engaging with the work. Discourse time is the time the work itself takes to deliver its content to the user, for example, the length of a text or the running time of a film. fi Story time designates the temporality represented in the work itself, for example, the fictional time frame of a story like Michael Joyce’s fi afternoon: a story (1990) or temporal markers within a poem like William Gibson’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992). System time, according to Koskimaa, is “the time of the cybertext system states” (2010, 136). Markku Eskelinen also uses “system time” to designate “the varying degrees of the text’s permanence, in short the appearances, disappearances, and possible reappearances of its parts and phases” (2007, 181). This category can be understood to include the time it takes a computational device to process the work’s code, which can vary substantially from computer to computer, and, in the case of Internet-based works, the time it takes the data composing the artwork to travel from a server to the user’s disT 483 Temporality of Digital Works play device. To different degrees and in diff ff ff erent confi ff ff gurations, these four temporal fi domains come into play in all works that incorporate computation in meaningful ways. The interplay of user, discourse, and story time in computer-based works can be compared to temporal relationships in other media, while the complexities of system time are unique to digital artifacts. Classical narrative theory distinguishes between discourse time, or “the time of the act of narrating,” and story time, or “the time of the things narrated” (Ricoeur 1985, 5). If discourse time, understood as the audience’s experience of the work’s duration, is more or less fixed by the work’s length or running time, user time has always been relatively fi elastic in the case of works in print, as individual readers parse texts at markedly differ- ff ff ent speed. Referring to Roland Barthes’s notion of tmesis, Espen Aarseth points out that readers of print texts rarely read word for word along the precise linear path laid down on the page (1997, 47), and the amount of material readers “skip over” directly influences fl the duration of user time. In the case of conventional films and dramatic performances, fi discourse time and user time are generally much more closely aligned. Texts in digital media tend to accentuate discrepancies between user and discourse time. A variety of structural features in digital works greatly extend the reader’s capacity to affect the duration of the reading experience. Works that invite readers to participate ff ff in their unfolding, whether by making choices (as in hypertext fiction and poetry), con- fi tributing content or solving puzzles (as in interactive fiction and works employing chat- fi terbots; see chatterbots, interactive fiction), or assuming the role of a character /interlocutor (as in interactive narrative and interactive drama; see interactive drama, interactive narrative), surrender control over the duration of reading, along with...
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