The program for the ELMCIP Seminar on Digital Poetics and the Present is now available. The seminar will take place on December 9th and 10th in Amsterdam, Holland at the University of Amsterdam. Readings and performances will be given in the evening at the political and cultural center De Balie (Friday) and the Perdu Theater (Saturday).
Keynotes will be delivered by Jan Baetens, Professor of cultural studies at the University of Leuven, Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Roberto Simanowksi, Professor at the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Basel.
Digital literature covers a broad spectrum of creative work: from Facebook-poetry to interactive fiction and animated poems written in Flash. In recent years, both criticism and practice of digital literature have created a theoretical basis for the approach of the new artform. Ideas have been brought forward on the historical, contextual and institutional embedding of digital literature. Critics have proposed various ways to analyze the hybrid that digital literature is and have emphasised the necessity of a ‘media-specific analysis’. Now the time has come to look closer at techniques and effects of digital literary works, and at the contemporary contexts in which they are created. Digital literature does not operate in isolation: it is in all respects a contemporary artform. The seminar focusses on this question of digital ‘poetics’, understood as the question to the nature and the value of the work, both in criticism as in practice itself.
The complete program can be downloaded as a PDF file.
Coordination: Yra van Dijk Conference website: http://elmcip.net/page/elmcip-events.
The seminar is part of the project: Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) , a collaborative research project funded by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation.
Key-note speakers:
Jan Baetens is Professor of cultural studies at the University of Leuven. He has widely published (most often in French) on word and image studies, particularly in the field of the so-called minor genres (graphic novel, photonovel, novelization) and contemporary French writing and poetry, more specifically in the field of constrained writing.
Rita Raley is Associate Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara and visiting scholar in the Dutch Literary Foundation program. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of digital media and humanist inquiry, with a particular emphasis on cultural critique, artistic practices, and language. She is the author of Tactical Media (2009), a study of new media art in relation to neoliberal globalization, has been published by the University of Minnesota Press in its “Electronic Mediations” series.
Roberto Simanowski is Professor at the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Basel, Swiss, editor of the online jounal Dichtung Digital and the author of Digital art and meaning. Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text machines, Mapping Art, and Intyeractive Installations (University of Minnesota Press 2011, Electronic Mediations” series).
Friday, December 9th:
University of Amsterdam, VOC room, Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam
9.30 Key-note: Jan Baetens: Hypertext revisited. The issue of ‘non-sequentiality’ in print and digital literature.
10.30 Coffee/ Tea break
10.45-13.00: Analyzing digital poetics I
Serge Bouchardon: University of Technology of Compiegne, Gestural manipulations and digital poetic.
Raine Koskimaa: University of Jyvaskyla: Playing with time in digital fiction.
13.00-14.30 lunch break
14.30-16.00: Analysing digital poetics II. Short presentations followed by plenary discussion.
Jerome Fletcher, University of Falmouth : Digital Text: writing with the hand and fingers.
Maria Mencia, Kingston University, London: The Poetics of Sound in e-literature and the Avant-Garde tradition.
16.00-16.15 Coffee/ tea break
16.15-17.15 Key-note: Roberto Simanowski: Warfare and Conventionality: How avant-garde computer-generated text can be,
17.15-19.30: Drinks and Dinner
20.00-22.00: Words in motion. Digital authors from different European countries will present new work. With JR Carpenter and Jerome Fletcher, Serge Bouchardon, Maria Mencia, K. Michel, Henk van der Waal, and Tonnus Oosterhoff.
Location: cultural and political debating center De Balie, Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10. Amsterdam.
Saturday, December 10th
University of Amsterdam, Doelenzaal, Singel 421.
9.30-10.30: Key-note Rita Raley: Living Letterforms: The Ecological Turn in Contemporary Digital Poetics.
10.30 Coffee/ tea break
10.45-12.30: Creativity and Affect
David Prater, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden: Flashpoints: Reading Electronic Literature as a (Neural) Metaphor for Creativity.
Eric Dean Rasmussen, University of Bergen: Significant Affects in Digital Literature.
Jill Walker Rettberg and Eric Dean Rasmussen (University of Bergen, Norway): Student Research Using the ELMCIP Knowledge Base.
12.30-14.00: Lunch
14.00-15.45 Remediation and Relation: digital and print literature.
Kiene Brillenburg-Wurth, University Utrecht: Writing as Erasure: Book Art, Memory, and Forgetting in the Digital Age.
Scott Rettberg, University of Bergen: Revisiting Reflexivity: American Metafiction and Hypertext Narratives.
Yra van Dijk: A performance of reality. Handwriting in digital poetry.
15.45-16.00 Coffee/ Tea break
16.00-17.00: Plenary discussion of artworks demonstrated the previous evening in presence of the authors. What are the effects, promises and possible pitfalls of these works? Panel with Rita Raley, Talan Memmott, Roberto Simanowksi and Jan Baetens.
17.00-20.00 Drinks and dinner
20.00-23.00 Evening show of digital literature: Aesthetic strategies as critical interventions. New work by JR Carpenter, Renee Turner, Andreas Jacobs. Panel hosted by Rita Raley.
Location: Perdu Theater, Kloveniersburgwal 86.
