I am currently working on two interrelated projects that focus on the Digital Revolution and the Information Age.

Hacking as Literary and Technological Reciprocity: Backgrounds and Effects of the Human/Machine Symbiosis (ISF 1555/20)

Computer hacking and hackers feature prominently and often frighteningly in mainstream media, with hackers showing up as real or potential criminals who invade systems, steal important data, and ruin our lives. Interestingly enough (or oddly enough), they also show up as real or potential heroes: defenders of democracy and free speech, advocates of transparency, technical wizards, and visionary inventors. This prominent and contradictory cultural figure came to public attention in the 1980s, concurrent with the introduction of the PC, and it has figured prominently in the robust body of scholarship produced in the four subsequent decades, thus far confined to the scientific fields of computer programming, sociology, anthropology, and criminology. It has gone relatively unremarked, however, that the computer, the hacker, and the attendant cultural anxieties also figure in artistic products, in works of the imagination such as fiction and film, and, furthermore, that many of these actually preceded the introduction of the PC into our lives. These many cultural products that reference hackers and hacking indicate the existence of a rich but untapped source of information uniquely suited for the analytical tools of literary studies. The goal of this project is to establish the role that literary and popular culture works have played in forming and fashioning our Digital Age, an age characterized by the very symbiosis between human beings and digital information and devices that the figure of the hacker personifies. Using a large-scale survey to locate the most compelling individual cases as well as to trace broader trends, the project aims to remap the origin and evolution of the human/machine symbiosis at the birth of the information age through the figure of the hacker: the enduring emblem of this age’s desires and fears.

Research Team: Ruben Weiss, Noga Bentora, Deborah Karrer, Ari Ben Ari, Noam Meir

Computer Games as Literary and Technological Reciprocity: Documenting the formative role of literary and cinematic works in the evolution of the computer game medium (ISF 2996/24)

Computer games, literature, and film are intimately interrelated, but this interrelation has been obscured by the evolution of the field. While early work in computer game studies explored the implications of the digital era to textuality, focusing on hypertext, cybertext, and the ergodic, the pioneers of the emerging field of game studies wielded the computer game's interactivity to establish for the medium an institutional and epistemic space distinct from that of literature and film. Subsequent to the "narratology/ludology" debate of the first decade of the 21st century, which revolved around whether computer games should be approached as the evolution of an ancient tradition of cultural expression or as a new and unprecedented medium made possible by the digital computer, computer game scholars developed media-specific analyses to address and define the unique features and material conditions of the emerging medium. Critical engagement with the narratological or cinematic qualities of computer games generally tended to treat such intersections as unidirectional, foreclosing the recursive and reciprocal relation between these media. The origin of the computer game in digital technology and its formative rule in the history of the digital computer served to further distance the medium from its origins in fiction and film. My project aims to remedy this divergence. It focuses on the bidirectional relationship between cultural works and technological advancements, aiming for nuanced exploration of how cultural productions shape technological developments and, conversely, how technological innovations contribute to the evolution of cultural works. By unearthing the works of literature and film that actively participated in the development of the computer game medium and explicating in detail how these works helped define and direct the medium's evolution, the project aims to establish the formative role of literature and film to computer game history and, conversely, demonstrate how technological innovations in computer games and gaming have impacted the literature and film that accompanied the evolution of the medium since its origins in the mid-20th century.

Research Team: Ari Ben Ari, Nuria Levy