Never Let It Collapse: Three Passes at an Unsupervised Cat's Cradle
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
In 2000, I defended a doctoral dissertation that was also a work of electronic literature: Building Feminist Theory: Hypertextual Heuristics, a native hypermedia work composed of over 1,400 lexias and more than 17,000 links. My argument was that the linking structure was the epistemological intervention - not the nodes, but the constellation. The weaving, not the cloth.
I defended it, as it turned out, without my supervisor, who had died suddenly weeks before. In the institutional drama of a doctoral defence - the moment when the university reproduces itself, validates knowledge, confers legitimacy- I stood at the threshold without the person who had made that threshold crossable. The person who had looked at something genuinely strange and said: this is worth making. The cat's cradle, somehow, did not collapse.
This talk reflects on twenty-five years of living with that moment, having been built by that work, organized around three meanings of unsupervised. The first: the regulatory vacuum of the late 1990s, when digital and multi-modal dissertations existed without institutional frameworks, a genuinely wild space of invention… and of loneliness, as I discovered readers who could read nodes but not links, and an institution that could evaluate arguments but not constellations. The second: the literal unsupervisedness of my defence, and what it revealed about how institutions reproduce knowledge, and what happens when that mechanism and what happens when that mechanism must reckon with a work it doesn't have the tools to see.
The third is now. Large language models traverse archives at scales I couldn't have imagined, producing fluent outputs whose linking structures are opaque, whose constellations are invisible, whose situated intelligence is unlocatable. My readers in 2000 read nodes and not links. I experienced that as a failure of interface, a problem awaiting better literacies. What I want to ask from the vantage point of twenty-five years is whether something more fundamental is being lost: not a failure of interface, but the disappearance of accountability for the connections being made and the disappearance of the eros and ways of knowing associated with making the links, our hands at the keyboard, our thinking and ourselves change.
Building Feminist Theory was never archived. This talk may be its primary transmission. The cat's cradle passes from hand to hand. Yours now.
Never Let It Collapse: Three Passes at an Unsupervised Cat's Cradle
Narratives & Worlds
In 2000, I defended a doctoral dissertation that was also a work of electronic literature: Building Feminist Theory: Hypertextual Heuristics, a native hypermedia work composed of over 1,400 lexias and more than 17,000 links. My argument was that the linking structure was the epistemological intervention - not the nodes, but the constellation. The weaving, not the cloth.
I defended it, as it turned out, without my supervisor, who had died suddenly weeks before. In the institutional drama of a doctoral defence - the moment when the university reproduces itself, validates knowledge, confers legitimacy- I stood at the threshold without the person who had made that threshold crossable. The person who had looked at something genuinely strange and said: this is worth making. The cat's cradle, somehow, did not collapse.
This talk reflects on twenty-five years of living with that moment, having been built by that work, organized around three meanings of unsupervised. The first: the regulatory vacuum of the late 1990s, when digital and multi-modal dissertations existed without institutional frameworks, a genuinely wild space of invention… and of loneliness, as I discovered readers who could read nodes but not links, and an institution that could evaluate arguments but not constellations. The second: the literal unsupervisedness of my defence, and what it revealed about how institutions reproduce knowledge, and what happens when that mechanism and what happens when that mechanism must reckon with a work it doesn't have the tools to see.
The third is now. Large language models traverse archives at scales I couldn't have imagined, producing fluent outputs whose linking structures are opaque, whose constellations are invisible, whose situated intelligence is unlocatable. My readers in 2000 read nodes and not links. I experienced that as a failure of interface, a problem awaiting better literacies. What I want to ask from the vantage point of twenty-five years is whether something more fundamental is being lost: not a failure of interface, but the disappearance of accountability for the connections being made and the disappearance of the eros and ways of knowing associated with making the links, our hands at the keyboard, our thinking and ourselves change.
Building Feminist Theory was never archived. This talk may be its primary transmission. The cat's cradle passes from hand to hand. Yours now.
Bio
Caitlin directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she is also Professor and Chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. She is also an affiliated professor with the Centre for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. An award-winning elit author and former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair, Caitlin’s current projects include bringing the power of storytelling and elit to the global health crisis of antimicrobial resistance through a new XR Museum project, serving as co-investigator on an indigenous-led Pluriversal Worlding Project, creating a series of XR works under the umbrella of the Grand Hotels Project – an homage to both Joseph Cornell and Robert Coover – and writing with the Decameron Collective. Caitlin serves on the International Executive Board of HASTAC and is immediate past President of the Electronic Literature Organization.