Traversal Hermeneutics: The Emergence of

Narrative in Ergodic Media

Miguel Carvalhais
[email protected]
ID+, Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade do Porto, Portugal

Keywords: Generative Aesthetics, Computational Art and Design, Interaction, Narrative,

Cognition.

Abstract: Digital technologies are capable of simulating traditional media and to give rise
to new media forms that often closely resemble the experience of somatic technologies.
Their interactive capabilities are partially responsible for this, but procedural authorship
and poïesis are supported by process intensity and generative potential.
Designers, the systems and their human operators have very different and maybe
irreconcilable points of view, which profoundly affect their experiences during the dia­
logical construction of the works and of their effusions. From its particular point of

Computation Communication Aesthetics and X. Bergamo, Italy. xcoax.org

view during the traversal, the operator develops a hermeneutic experience during which
models and simulations of the system are built. The operator’s actions within the system
greatly contribute to this development, but it is their capacity to create theories of the
system that is paramount to the success of this effort.
The analysis and critique of these digital artifacts, indeed the procedural pleasures
attainable through these systems, are indissociable from their procedural understanding.
Although traditional aesthetic studies of surface structures or outputs are still possible,
once we regard behaviors and computational processes as an integral part of the system’s
content, it becomes essential to understand how the operator relates to these beyond a
strictly mechanical relation.
This paper discusses how models and simulations allow the operator to anticipate
the behaviors, reactions and configurations of the systems. How they are continuously
revised, confirmed or falsified throughout the traversal, and how this process results in
a dialectical tension that is the basis for the development of narratives and of dramatic
experiences with these, otherwise highly abstract, systems.

51
1. 
Artificial Aesthetic Artifacts

In his book Collective Intelligence, Pierre Lévy proposes a classification of the “technolo-
gies used to control message flow” (1997, 45) in three groups that he terms somatic, molar
and digital. Somatic technologies are defined as those implying “the effective presence,
commitment, energy, and sensibility of the body for the production of signs”, and that
are also characterized by the multimodal nature of the messages produced and by the
uniqueness of each message, that is always produced in and dependent on a dynamic
and complex context that inevitably affects it.
Molar technologies, that we usually simply call media, much as Lévy also does, “­focus
and reproduce messages to ensure they will travel farther, and improve distribution
through space and time.” (1997, 46) They are described as technologies that inevitably af-
fect the production of messages but that “are not, as a first approximation, technologies
for sign creation”, rather for the “fixation, reproduction, and transportation of somatically
produced messages.” (1997, 46) Their capacity to create new signs is very limited, but it may
be felt in media such as film, where the processes of montage introduce some potential
for the generation of new messages for, “although the raw image or sound may be stored
on the recording, the global message  —  the film  —  results from (…) montage.” (1997, 46)
Digital technologies stem from digitalization, the “absolute of montage” that affects
“the tiniest fragments of a message, an indefinite and constantly renewed receptivity to
the combination, fusion, and replenishment of signs” (1997, 48) that preserves the power
to record and distribute information while bringing the technologies closer to some of
the characteristics of somatic technologies. This, however, only happens when digital
technologies are able to retain a certain degree of what Chris Crawford called process
intensity, “the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data” (1987),
and consequently retains some generative potential (Boden and Edmonds 2009). Perhaps
naturally, given the way how we tend to relate to any new medium in the light of the
previously existing media (Bolter and Grusin 1999, McLuhan 1964), digital technologies
tend to follow on the steps of their molar predecessors, thus optimizing for constancy
and effectivity, or for data intensity, instead of investing the technological resources in
developing procedural and participatory traits (Murray 1997, 71). Many digital media are
built with the explicit intent of simulating the traits of molar media rather than trying to
escape from the conventions and limitations of previous technologies. We therefore find
that in such cases, the potential of the technologies is not “effectively exploited” (Lévy
1997, 49), even if they are digital and computational.

Processing data is the very essence of what a computer does. There are many
technologies that can store data: magnetic tape, punched cards, punched tape,
paper and ink, microfilm, microfiche, and optical disk, to name just a few. But
there is only one technology that can process data: the computer. This is its sin-
gle source of superiority over the other technologies. Using the computer in a
data-intensive mode wastes its greatest strength. (Crawford 1987)

The code of these technologies is where the potential for procedural authorship re-
sides (Murray 1997) but, while opening spaces of possibilities, code may also enforce strict

52
limitations within those spaces. The code is the law that governs these technologies and
their products (Lessig 2001, 35), a law that one has no option besides abiding to, save for
actually interfering with the code, something which may in some cases actually remain
a possibility but that is far from being the norm when it comes to the experience of
digital media.1 Therefore, once one develops a digital medium as an analogue of molar 1. Not quite with the experience of
digital technologies. If in many
media, one is building an experience that may have some benefits over the molar equiv-
occasions there is at least the
alent  —  such as speed, economy, etc.  —  but that may actually limit the freedom to ex- theoretical possibility of access-
ing and editing the code of a
plore and to reconfigure the messages being communicated. Aarseth (1997, 46) offers the
digital medium, more often than
example of William Gibson’s 1992 poem Agrippa (a book of the dead) as a digital message not, that experience is not sim-
ple or straightforward, or it may
that was built to force and preserve its linear integrity in ways that wouldn’t in princi-
not fit within the expectations of
ple be achievable with molar media and that are strictly enforced by the nature of code. the users or readers.

We may therefore posit that if digital technologies allow us to develop radically new
media and messages, they may also allow us to develop artifacts that outperform con-
ventional molar media in regard to their specific traits. We are consequently faced with
an ambiguous descriptor that may be equally applied to media with very diverse traits.
For this reason we proposed the alternative designation of some digital media as artifi-
cial aesthetic artifacts (Carvalhais 2010, 2011b), a term that simultaneously points to their
sensorial nature and to their essence as computational systems, as systems where com-
putation is not only found at the logical or code layer (as defined by Lessig) but is also an
integral part of the content layer.
Artificial aesthetic artifacts have the potential to develop what Christopher Alexander
calls a “living structure” (2002): they are process intensive (regardless of whether they use
data structures and of their complexity and extension), they are autopoietic and they are
rich in procedural authorship.2 2. We may identify this procedural
authorship both in the author
To consider a subclass of digital media as artificial aesthetic artifacts allows us to
as well as in the readers, users
better understand the importance of the added dynamics and of the more complex or interactants, and even within
the system itself, which may
user functions that are involved in their creation and experience. It allows us to better
be the bearer of a considerable
parse between digital systems that are closer in their nature and modes of operation to degree of autonomy.

­molar media and those that in some ways become more similar to somatic technologies.
Artificial aesthetic artifacts become utterly dependent of their contexts of operation to
develop messages that, regardless of the initial structures or of the intended final configu-
rations are unique, messages that, in Lévy’s words, become “inseparable from a changing
context” (1997, 46). This was, of course, how Lévy described somatic messages, that are
“never exactly reproduced by somatic technology” (1997, 45), and it is fitting to think of
artificial aesthetic artifacts along the same lines. The contexts are necessarily different,
perhaps at times less linked to physical settings3 and more dependent on interaction, 3. Although this is naturally
possible, as any message that
interpretation and on the procedural contexts at the core of the systems, a layer that, as
originates in a digital medium
we will see is difficult to perceive directly. must eventually be translated
to sensorial stimuli before being
If digital technologies that simulate traits of molar media can, in some ways, be seen
perceived by humans.
as stepping even further from the traits of somatic messages, we find that artificial aes-
thetic artifacts bring us closer to that original essence of the technologies for message
production that are centered in the human body and that are dependent from it. If the
focus of molar technologies can be described as fidelity in reproduction, that of artificial
aesthetic artifacts may very well be variety in every instantiation. To keep recognizable
structures or patterns between instantiations but to creatively infuse them with disorder,
as suggested by Italo Calvino (qtd. in Aarseth 1997, 129).

53
2. 
MDA

Coprocessing (Aarseth 1997, 135), the human-machine regime of collaboration that is

found at the heart of many of these systems, allows the conversational construction of
the works and of their effusions. But as we will see, even non-interactive systems, or those
where reader’s inputs may be minimal, can be construed through iterative exchanges of
information between the systems and their users.
According to Aarseth, cybernetic systems  —  as we may classify many of these arti-
ficial aesthetic artifacts  —  can develop three regimes of collaboration with the human,
“(1) preprocessing, in which the machine is programmed, configured, and loaded by the
human; (2) coprocessing, in which the machine and the human produce (…) in tandem;
and (3) postprocessing, in which the human selects some of the machine’s effusions and
excludes others.” (1997, 135) Alexander Galloway concurrently proposes the identification of
machine actions and of operator actions, the first of these “performed by the software and
hardware” (2006, 5) and the later by the human, clearly distinguishing them in scope but
warning us of the artificiality of the division, as “both the machine and the operator work
together in a cybernetic relationship”, which makes both types of action “ontologically
the same”, existing as “as a unified, single phenomenon, even if they are distinguishable
for the purposes of analysis.” (2006, 5)
Notwithstanding this, if we want to understand the relevance of artificial aesthetic
artifacts as communicational and artistic systems, we should be careful to maintain the
distinction in the analysis because not only in the pre- and post- positions but also in
coprocessing, the roles of the human operators are indeed different from those of the ma-
chines; perhaps more importantly, the points of view of the machines or systems (Bogost
2012) and of the humans at the different positions of collaboration may be quite different.
To better understand this, it may be useful to resort to Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek’s
MDA framework (2004), originally developed as a formal approach to game design and
game research. The domain of computer games is of course one where we can find sev-
eral artificial aesthetic artifacts, and one from where we can extrapolate a large quantity
of knowledge for their study.
MDA, for Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics, is a framework for understanding
games that aims “to bridge the gap between game design and development, game crit-
icism, and technical game research” (Hunicke, et al. 2004) by proposing an approach by
both the perspective of the designer and that of the player, two views through which we
discover a wide range of possibilities and interdependencies in a system. MDA is devel-
oped from the assumption that games are characterized by a “relatively unpredictable”
consumption, meaning that the “string of events that occur during gameplay and the
outcome of those events are unknown at the time the product is finished”, and that the
main content of a game is its behavior, not the media that eventually “streams out of it
towards the p
­ layer.” This is a sense in which we again discover code as the content of
games, described as being “more like artifacts than media”. MDA therefore formalizes the
consumption of games by analyzing them in three distinct components: Rules, System
and “Fun”; and establishing their design counterparts, described as: Mechanics, Dynamics
and Aesthetics.

54
 Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data
representation and algorithms.
Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player
inputs and each others’ outputs over time.
Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when
she interacts with the game system. (Hunicke, et al. 2004)

Each of these three components can be considered as a “lens” to the game that is
separate from, but causally linked to, all the others and that shapes the perspectives one
may develop:

From the designer’s perspective, the mechanics give rise to dynamic system be-
havior, which in turn leads to particular aesthetic experiences. From the player’s
perspective, aesthetics set the tone, which is born out in observable dynamics
and eventually, operable mechanics. (Hunicke, et al. 2004)

We can therefore identify the layers of emergence in the system’s becoming after the
preprocessing stage, and consecutively understand the converse layers through which 4. We often refer to user as a sin-
gular human counterpart in the
the player, reader or interactant may peer through in the dialogue with the system. The
system’s operation. We should
more a system is characterized by process intensity, the more complex will the emer- however note that very often
this user can of course be plural,
gences from one layer to the next be, the more control and agency (Murray 1997) the author
and distributed, both in space
may need to offer to the user, to the system or both.4 Therefore, by focusing and filtering and time, or the user’s role can
be occupied by another artificial
the perspectives, each of these layers inevitably affects the degrees of control that each
aesthetic artifact, or by parts
coprocessor can have within the system. of the same artificial aesthetic
artifact, itself a very singular
form of plurality.
3. 
Reader’s Roles

Although Aarseth doesn’t use the term consumption, he addresses the unpredictability of
the experience of ergodic texts5  —  and by extension of other ergodic media  —  through the 5. “ During the cybertextual process,
the user will have effectuated
analysis of their traversal function, the mechanisms by which units of the system are
a semiotic sequence, and this
revealed as surface structures that are presented to the human operator. The analytical selective movement is a work of
physical construction that the
model  —  Aarseth’s “textonomy”  —  developed in Cybertext is built as a descriptor of the
various concepts of ‘reading’ do
artifacts according to their modes of traversal, each variable focusing on different as- not account for. This phenome-
non I call ergodic, using a term
pects of the traversal function that uniquely characterize each of the systems: Dynamics,
appropriated from physics that
Determinability, Transiency, Perspective, Access, Linking and User Functions (Aarseth 1997, derives from the Greek words er-
gon and hodos, meaning ‘work’
62-64). In spite of the “relative neglect of the political, social, and cultural contexts in
and ‘path’. In ergodic literature,
which texts are used” and of the “interactions of different modalities within electronic nontrivial effort is required to
allow the reader to traverse the
texts” (Hayles 2005, 36), the model is nevertheless possible to apply to similar traits in
text.” (Aarseth 1997, 1)
systems whose primary function is not “to relay verbal information” (Aarseth 1997, 62)
or with outputs that are not exclusively verbal, although there is room for improvement
and completion by expansion with further variables (Carvalhais 2010, 2012).
Trough the traversal, human operators always develop an interpretative function,
similar to that we can find in more conventional media, where all decisions made by
the reader only concern meaning. In the case of ergodic media and of artificial aesthetic
artifacts, this interpretative function may be accompanied by three additional functions

55
postulated by Aarseth (1997, 64): the explorative function, in which decisions can be made
regarding which paths to take along the traversal; the configurative function, in which the
order of the parts can be rearranged and the navigable structure can be created, shaped or
influenced, more than just explored; and finally, in Aarseth’s model, the textonic function,
in which these parts can be permanently added to the (textual) system. We can ­generalize
Aarseth’s textonic function by shifting its focus from textual structural components to-
wards any component of the system’s outputs (regardless of their nature or modalities)
or even of the system’s code, thus calling it structural (Carvalhais 2011b, 375).
Aarseth’s user functions are very good descriptors of the nature of the human oper-
ator’s cybernetic interactions with the system. The omnipresence of the interpretative
function can perhaps be seen as an extraneous emphasis, especially on media from
which verbal structures are so often absent and where high levels of abstraction further
remove one from any apparent meaning in the systems’ emanations. Markku Eskelinen,
for example, warns us of how in computer games, “we interpret in order to be able to
configure and move from the beginning to the winning or some other situation, whereas
in ergodic literature we may have to configure in order to be able to interpret” (2001), thus
displacing the primacy to the configurative function (Bogost 2006, 108). In spite of this
view, and regardless of its dominance over any of the other functions, interpretation is
nevertheless prevalent.
And interpretation becomes especially important in the experience of artificial aes-
thetic artifacts because, besides semantic interpretative acts  —  that may or may not occur
depending on the nature of the system’s sensorial outputs, of which particular symbols
are produced, etc.  —  there are several aesthetic interpretative acts that need to be per-
formed in order to achieve a poetic understanding of the system. Much as machine and
operator actions fuse, so we may propose that semantic messages “expressible in symbols,
[and] determining translatable, logical decisions” and aesthetic messages, “determining
interior states, [that are ultimately] untranslatable” (Moles 1966, 167) may also become
somewhat indistinguishable in the exchanges with the aesthetic artificial artifacts.
At the layers of mechanics and dynamics, systems most often operate in a space of
possibilities that anticipates the differentiation of modalities (Hansen 2004) that happens
at the layer of aesthetics. When confronted with the modal outputs of the transcoded
processes, the human operator tries to deduce meaning from them, not only a message
that may be communicated but also clues to the procedural nature of the outputs, to their
origin and significance. As so often happens in other contexts, humans try to identify a
design stance that explains the purpose of inanimate objects, and intentional stances that
point to the why of the behaviors of animate objects, to their motivations and emotions
(De Landa 1991). Although crossed and combined, and eventually arbitrary (i.e., not trivial)
in their relation to the previous two layers, these outputs  —  symbols and behaviors  —  are
the only hints, the only points of access the operator has to the “internal, coded level”, that
“can only be fully experienced by way of the external, expressive level.” (Aarseth 1997, 40)

When inactive, the program and data of the internal level can of course be studied
and described as objects in their own right but not as ontological equivalents of
their representations at the external level. (Aarseth 1997, 40)

56
 An alternative way of understanding this relation is put forward by Douglas Hofstadter,
that explains that “although what happens on the lower level is responsible for what
happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level”, which “can
blithely ignore the processes on the lower level.” (2007, 43)
So, although artificial aesthetic artifacts can still be subjected to traditional aesthetic
analysis at the level of their outputs, the operator needs to develop a more comprehensive
procedural interpretation of the system, in order to understand, decode, and ultimately,
to relate to their mechanics and dynamics layers.
Through procedural intuition (Strickland 2007) and the interaction with the system,
the human operator starts to build hypothesis about the mechanics and dynamics layers
of the system. These hypothesis are developed as simulations of the system or of its con-
stituent parts, simulations that are not consciously created but that nevertheless provide
the operator with possible scenarios about the system’s outputs or behaviors, about the
causal procedurality of the phenomena she interacts with (Dehaene 2009). This task is
aided by cognitive processes of patternicity (Shermer 2011, 5) that seek patterns amidst
the manifest sensorial clues in an effort to reduce complexity and to make “many sym-
bols that have been freshly activated in concert to trigger just one familiar pre-existing
symbol (or a very small set of them).” (Hofstadter 2007, 277)
Upon establishing patterns, the operator adds meaning to them, through processes of
agenticity (Shermer 2011), through which she endeavors to operate along the same lines
as the system (Metzinger 2009, 176), by emulating its operations and quite literally, by
simulating it. These mental simulations can be developed concurrently, posing parallel
hypothesis that are evaluated against each other  —  in their capacity to generate valid
predictions or approximations to the actual behaviors of the system  —  and against the
system itself  —  in the frequency with which the hypothesis are validated. The various
simulations can consequently be adjusted and the models evolved in a process where the
system (i.e., the external phenomenon) is used as the fitness function for the selection
of the best models or simulations that are produced by the operator. During the course
of several iterations (and interactions), the operator may therefore be able to develop a
working model of the system, a theory of the processes within it, a theory of the artificial
aesthetic artifact.
This set of simulations allows the operator to try to peer at the system from the point
of view of its designer, from which the system is encoded with prescriptive rules, and
even from the point of view of the system itself, a position better rendered by descriptive
rules (Carvalhais 2012).

[Theory of mind] refers to your ability to attribute intelligent mental beingness

to other people: to understand that your fellow humans behave the way they do
because (you assume) they have thoughts, emotions, ideas, and motivations of
more or less the same kind as you yourself possess. In other words, even though
you cannot actually feel what it is like to be another individual, you use your
theory of mind to automatically project intentions, perceptions, and beliefs into
the minds of others. In so doing you are able to infer their feelings and inten-
tions and to predict and influence their behavior. (Ramachandran 2011, loc. 2632)

57
 As with the development of theories of mind towards humans, animals or other en-
tities, either real or fictional, the development of a theory of an artificial aesthetic arti-
fact may very well stem from “an innate, intuitive mental faculty” (Ramachandran 2011,
loc. 2632), a capacity that is so far unique to humans (Dehaene 2009, loc. 194).
Although, as postulated by the MDA model, while interfacing with the aesthetics
­layer of the system, the operator may be unable to have a clear view of the dynamics
and mechanics layers, through these processes of simulation she effectively tries to re-
verse her view of the system, even if ultimately following models that are incomplete or
6. I ncomplete or erroneous models altogether erroneous.6 It is regarding the validation of these models that the next step in
can nevertheless produce
the exchange is taken.
accurate enough predictions of
the outputs or behaviors of a
system. So a good simulation is
not necessarily just an accurate
4. Dramatic Arcs
simulation, rather it is an effec-
tive model for the anticipation
Traditional narratives are a fertile ground for the development of theories of
of the system. (Carvalhais 2011a).
mind  —  for characters and events, for narrators or even maybe the imagined au-
thors  —  and for hypothesis of procedural causality  —  for mechanical events and natural
phenomena. Provided the narrative is internally consistent, the reader or spectator is able
to infer from the known events and information and to speculate about the narrative
developments, anticipating its evolution and resolution. The reader can conjecture about
narrative arcs, stable situations and unbalancing accidents, about events, goals, obsta-
cles, commitments, protagonists and antagonists, eventually reconciling estimations as
the narrative unfolds. Once the narrative is over, any further reading will most likely be
aided by recollection and memorization than by further speculation and simulation, due
to the stability of the narratives in these technologies.
A similar process is developed during the experience of artificial aesthetic artifacts
and, while memory may also serve a role, due to the unpredictable nature of these sys-
tems  —  the indeterminate and unstable nature of the traversal function, according to
Aarseth (1994, 61–62)  —  the processes of simulation must be developed even in rereadings,
where the same systems may, for a variety of reasons (including, but not limited to, the
operator’s interactions) produce very dissimilar outputs.
The operator is constantly led to the production of models and to the resulting building
of expectations to be confronted with the systems. This effort results in a dialectical pull
between confirmation and violation of expectations that leads to a dramatic tension that
characterizes artificial aesthetic artifacts and is a setting for the development of narra-
tives. This is not only the aporia-epiphany pair that was identified by Aarseth in hypertext
literature, at least not in the terms he proposed it, but he was certainly right in that this
pair, although not being a narrative structure on itself, “constitutes a more fundamental
layer of human experience, from which narratives are spun.” (1997, 92)
Traditional narratives, due in part to their lower (or even absent) process intensity,
relinquish procedural authorship and set the narrative in data to be replayed and perform
it, presenting the reader with a single unified path to traverse. Artificial aesthetic artifacts
make use of procedurality to build unique dramatic arcs from the variations and the space
of possibilities that is opened by their computational nature, from the interactions and
the simulations developed by the operator. These narratives tell the operator’s personal
story, a story that could not be without her (Aarseth 1997, 4), a story that absolutely de-
pends on her to be shaped and formed.

58
 This leads us to regard Aarseth’s perspective variable, that may be so difficult to un-
derstand in the context of abstract and non-verbal artifacts, as something that far from
just describing the operator’s playing of “a strategic role as a character in the world [of the
system]” (1997, 62), actually inscribes her as inseparable from the work, or from the partic-
ular instance of the work as it is experienced, imagined, theorized and experienced by her.

Acknowledgments: This work is funded by FEDER through the Operational Competi­

tiveness Programme  —  COMPETE  —  and by national funds through the Foundation
for Science and Technology  —  FCT  —  in the scope of project PEst-C/EAT/UI4057/2011
(FCOMP-Ol-0124-FEDER-D22700);

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