Cognitions in Creation: Unraveling the Evolutionary Interplay of Cognitive Assemblages

Abstract

Akin to cultural evolution, digital culture is amenable to replications, appropriations and transformations that reverberate the rapid advancements in technology. Literary artists have experimented upon digital platforms leading to an upsurge in electronic literature that portray literary creations in the digital arena blending the characteristics and cognitions of the literary mind and the digital world. In her study of electronic literature, Katherine Hayles (2016) proposes cognitive assemblage characterized by the distribution of cognitions amongst the humans and machines where meanings and codes are assembled and shared multidirectionally. The digital text chosen for study is Evolution (2014), an electronic work in progress that emulates the texts and music of the poet Johannes Heldén and features digital text that regenerates unceasingly. The evolutionary modeled algorithm rhythmically replaces Heldén’s words and textual spaces with similar words/spaces generated algorithmically and will continue to do so until all of Heldén’s original words are replaced in which case it will evolve its own constructions, thereby cognising its own creation. This study explores the possibilities of cognitive assemblage in Evolution that problematize the notions of authorship consciousness and cognitions behind the literary creation and examines the cultural transformations that are inevitable when the humans and the machines co-create the cultural and artistic/literary spaces.