Abstract

While a number of scholars have acknowledged the vast changes that reading and writing have undergone in the wake of the wide spread adoption of networked and computational media, less has been said about the concrete technical architectures such works manifest. Discussions concerning the new technical forms made possible by recent developments of web infrastructure (server‑push, web‑rtc, socket‑io, browser‑scripting, etc.) are few and far between. In this paper, we present a novel implementation of an architecture belonging to a class we have called ‘Simulization’ , a hybrid term referencing the conjunction of simulation and visualization. To demonstrate the nature and potential of our approach, we present both the technical framework and several examples of computational literary artworks that utilize it, all of which would have been technically impossible on the web even 5 years ago. We conclude with a discussion of some of the political implications of these new technologies and their potential to address the disempowering dynamics of so‑called ‘big data’ and ‘cloud computing’ paradigms.

• Daniel Howe, School of Creative Media, CityU, Hong Kong, HK