Online Reading and the Spectral
By: Kim Knight
University of California, Santa Barbara
Created for New Media and the Reading Experience: New
Approaches to Textual Forms, Interfaces, and Social Interactions
November 28, 2006
Qualifying Statements
Prospectus
Online Reading

The Importance of Representation
As our proliferating technologies have created
a whole series of environments, men have
become aware of the arts as “antienvironments” or “counter-environments” that
provide us with the means of perceiving the
environment itself.
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media
The Spectral
Traditionally, the spectral has been invoked to describe characteristics of
the Gothic: otherworldly apparitions or the mere feeling or suggestion of
haunting. However, spectral may also mean related to a spectrum, in
this case the electromagnetic spectrum. For the purposes of my project,
the spectral is a multivalent term: referring to the ability of electric
technologies to leave traces, to evoke the strange or odd, to awe or
unsettle the subject. The technologies may be present as “realist”
depictions or they may occupy the space of metaphor...
Representations
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Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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Passage from Pattern Recognition
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Passage from House of Leaves
“I Robot, You Jane”
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Season 1, 1997
Gang of high school misfits and the school librarian
hunt vampires, fight demons, etc.
The Players
● Buffy – the nearly invincible Slayer
● Willow – hacker sidekick
● Xander – hapless sidekick
● Giles – British librarian
● Ms. Calendar – computer science teacher
● Fritz & David – enthusiastic students
● Moloch the Corrupter – demon
“I Robot, You Jane”
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Italy, 1418
Moloch the Corrupter
“More and more people
have fallen under his
mesmerizing power.”
“Pray this accursed
book shall never again
be read.”
“I Robot, You Jane”
“I Robot, You Jane”
●
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“He's gone binary on
us.”
Becomes online
corrupter

●
Local, Corporate,
Global
Digital Manifestation
“I Robot, You Jane”
●
“You think the realm
of the mystical is
limited to ancient
texts and relics?
That bad old science
made the magic go
away? The divine
exists in cyberspace,
same as out here.”
“I Robot, You Jane”
●
Exit?
Pattern Recognition
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William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
2003
Cayce Pollard, professional “cool hunter”
Fetish:Footage:Film
Pattern Recognition
Rather than retype the unbookmarked forum URL, she goes to
the browser history.
SEE ASIAN SLUTS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE.
FETISH:FOOTAGE:FORUM
She freezes, hand on mouse, looking at this last logged site.
Then she starts to feel it, that literal folkloric prickle in the scalp.
And she can't, through sheer mental effort, make Asian Sluts
and F:F:F reverse their order on the screen. She desperately
wants Asian Sluts to be below F:F:F, but it stays where it is.
She sits there, unmoving, peering at the browser history the
way she once peered at a brown recluse spider in a rose
garden in Portland, a drab little thing her host reliably informed
her contained enough neurotoxin to kill them both, and horribly.
Damien's flat is suddenly not a friendly place, not familiar at all.
House of Leaves
●
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Mark Danielewski
2000
Jose Zampanò, a lonely old blind man, dies,
leaving a haphazard manuscript in his
apartment. Johnny Truant finds the
manuscript and after becoming obsessed with
its contents, he decides to finish Zampanò's
work. The manuscript is a scholarly study of
The Navidson Record, a film that Truant is
fairly certain doesn't even exist.
House of Leaves
As I discovered, there were reams and reams of it. Endless
snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes
into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always
branching off into other pieces I'd come across later – on old
napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even the
back of a postage stamp; everything and anything but
empty[...]
One thing's for sure, even without touching it, both of us
slowly began to feel its heaviness, sensed something
horrifying in its proportions, its silence, its stillness, even if it
did seem to have been shoved almost carelessly to the side
of the room[...]I know a moment came when I felt certain its
resolute blackness was capable of anything, maybe even of
slashing out, tearing up the floor, murdering Zampanò,
murdering us, maybe even murdering you.
House of Leaves
There's only one choice now: finish what
Zampanò himself failed to finish. Re-inter this
thing in a binding tomb. Make it only a book...
The Spectral
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“I Robot, You Jane”

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Pattern Recognition
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Demon / Internet parallels
The moment Malcom reveals too much
The machine overriding the user
The uncanny moment when the computer reveals
a violation of privacy
House of Leaves

The monstrosity of print
The End
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Closing Clip - BtVS