Lucy Suchman's directive for talking things: "the creative elaboration of the particular indexical affordances of machine 'speech.'"

Natalie Jeremijenko asserts that machine speech should re-awaken us to "the peculiar structure of participation that we take for granted."

Simon Penny adds object-context to the talking machines of Natalie Jeremijenko's essay.

Stephanie Strickland calibrates n0time.

"Connect the n space to the 0 and understand that the lack of time due to information overflow is an illusion," writes Victoria Vesna.

Phoebe Sengers praises the optimistic, self-aware conversation mapped by Warren Sack and First Person.

Rebecca Ross asks how observing a conversation might change it.

An autobiographical reflection by Warren Sack, prompted by two particular questions.

Text and full-size sidebar images from "What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?"

Sidebar images from "Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics - Media-Element Field Explorations."

Body politics and mouse use scroll through the scene.

Derrida's territory - "discontinuities, contradictions, ambiguities, materiality, silence, space, conflict, margins, and figures" - is Bill Seaman's, as Diane Gromala notes.

Jill Walker questions who (or what) sets the rules for interaction.

Praise for the body art of Camille Utterback, and commentary on controls.

Camille Utterback's physical poetics, re-symbolized.

Matt Gorbet maintains that interactive texts remain overfamiliar to bodies trained on snowflakes and rain.

Johanna Drucker counters hands-off poetics with practice.

Computers abstract from true/false to host letters, pixels, and Nick Montfort's riposte.

Sidebar images from "Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but Letters."

Anthony Enns juxtaposes two models of German media theory in reviewing new works by Oliver Grau and Friedrich Kittler.