Machines of Disquiet: Textual Experience in the LdoD Archive

Abstract

The work Machines of Disquiet (http://mofd.dei.uc.pt) has been developed in the context of an ongoing research project whose goal is to create a dynamic digital archive of the Book of Disquiet, an unfinished work written by Fernando Pessoa between 1913 and 1935 (LdoD Archive, 2017, https://ldod.uc.pt/). This paper intends to show the workings of Machines of Disquiet in experiencing Fernando Pessoa’s text as electronic literature. We start by showing the rationale of the LdoD Archive, followed by a discussion of the Machines of Disquiet as both electronic writing and gameplay experiment, before moving on to a demonstration of the various types of machines. We conclude by describing these textual experiments as an opening up of the Book of Disquiet to further acts of writing.

Keywords

• digital archive
• electronic literature
• textual machines
• LdoD Archive
• Fernando Pessoa