Postdigital Ludic Practice: An investigation into the transformative posthuman potentialities catalysed by the tools and methods of digital writing

This thesis situates itself within the field of digital literatures, which is also sometimes referred to as “literary media” (Ensslin et al. 2023). It investigates writing and reading practices within an inherently scary and changeable cultural landscape, where digital technologies continue to invade and rupture all aspects of our everyday life, thus demanding radical shifts in our ontological and epistemological knowledges and traditions.
Existing frameworks of knowledge in the field of digital literatures are limited in that they do not explicitly examine the postdigital slippage (Jordan and Lutostański 2024) evidenced within contemporary literary cultures; where literature although not defined nor identified as “digital” has an ever-increasing connection with digital practices and processes (Adema et al. 2024). The extent to which this has impacted (digital) writing practices is also limited. In addition, the existing research on “digital games” and “ludic mechanics” (Ensslin 2014) does not precisely identify playful behaviours in the "making and doing” of literary media. This research prioritises playful behaviours as evidence of the postdigital where technologies are utilised in creative, hybrid ways as part of the messy lived realities of the prevailing culture and, thus necessitate changes in perceptions of writers, readers, even “humans” (Alexenberg 2011; Braidotti 2019).
Utilising self-directed ethnomethodology in the form of research journalling, I was able to explore the relationship between writers, readers and machines. Through the productive evaluation of my own writing practices I developed an original toolkit, postdigital ludic practice. This practice-led approach was utilised to interrogate the creative-critical hybrid tools and methods of this practice: creative experiments were employed to accurately account for its processes whilst simultaneously refining the processes. Postdigital ludic practice positions itself alongside existing frameworks of knowledge, such as those situated within the New Humanities whilst also operating amongst the ongoing postdisciplinary practices of the critical posthumanities (Braidotti 2019).
My experiments with postdigital ludic practice produced the innovative creative artefact, Viole(n)t Existence: these original digital texts are productive and original outcomes of this practice-led research. These poems were also published as traditional page poetry, Violet Existence by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. Viole(n)t Existence operates as a dynamic web archive of multimodal hypermedia poetry and is comprised of multiple rhizomatic structures. Beyond its thematic foci (contemporary contradictory manifestations of my womanhood) it typifies the potential of postdigital ludic practice to perform as a form of artivist (De-Gonzalo and Perez-Prieto 2008, cited in Aladro-Vico et al. 2018) posthuman knowledge production (Braidotti 2019).
One of Viole(n)t Existence’s iterations is the lyric essay submitted in its page version as chapter four of this thesis. This chapter demonstrates the potential of postdigital ludic practice as a hybrid creative-critical toolkit which can be operationalised for purposeful and meaningful analysis, whilst remaining playful with its form, style and structure. Here postdigital ludic practice functions alongside literary close reading and acknowledged critical approaches within the Literary Humanities yet resists becoming another theoretical framework. It is an original contribution to the postdisciplinary practices of the posthumanities which whilst working alongside established frameworks of knowledge, simultaneously experiments with creative-critical hybridity and “minor sciences” (Braidotti 2019) with the potential to change perceptions and formations. This research perceives these possible transformations as evidence of jouissance: an affecting relational assemblage which creates opportunities for creative freedoms and modes of resistance whilst celebrating new pluralistic posthuman experiences.