Program

Here you will find the downloadable conference schedule and full program, available as PDFs.

Conference Programme:

KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS

Programming for Fun, Together
Nick Montfort, MIT
Ever since computers have been programmed, people have programmed them together. From almost the first days of programming, people have also programmed them for fun, to create literary and artistic works as well as games and, quite simply, technical feats intended to suggest new directions for computing.

Respondent: Rita Raley, UC Santa Barbara
Thursday 1st November 13.30 – 15.00pm, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

The Compelling Charm of Numbers
Roberto Simanowski, University of Basel
In postmodern times writing is different. With Facebook the personal diary has returned, reformulated for the 21st century. But this is not the diary as we use to know it. Here time gains a persistence and epistemological import and the person or persons recorded shift from being narrator to the quantified subject. This is not only a philosophical or psychological issue but also an economic and political one.

Respondent: Friedrich Block, Kassel
Friday 2nd November 14.00-15.30pm, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

PLENARY SESSION

Creativity as a Social Relation
James Leach, University of Aberdeen
Creativity can be considered not as individual 'genius' but an emergent and necessary aspect of social relations. To appreciate this we need to formulate conceptual approaches that take us outside recurrent divisions between persons and objects, individuals and society, creative genius and slavish replicators. On the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea we can see how connections between people and land can form the basis for kinship and identity.

Saturday 3rd November 17.15 – 18.15pm, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

PANEL SESSIONS

Panel 1 : Rhizomic Ethnographies
How do communities form in the network and what is the role, value and affect of creativity in this context? What impact do associated dynamics have upon our notions of authorship, ownership and cultural identity? Three examples are presented here, considering the processes of formation involved in contexts as diverse as central London, Italy and cyberspace (somewhere between Munich, London and New Zealand).

Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico | Open Source Cure (via Skype)
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett | DIWO: Do It With Others
Penny Travlou | Rhizomes, Lines and Nomads

Thursday 1st November 15.15 – 16.45pm, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 2 : Writing Different Together
That technology can re-shape what we consider to be writing is a given. The question is what that means for those who read and write the texts and documents involved? What are the implications of massively co-authored texts upon the communities that create and consume them? How does the Wiki articulate and affect the value of knowledge and the relations it arises from? How can the networked folksonomy affect tacit cultural practices? How might text be navigated geographically and historically at the same time?

Smita Kheria | The Digital Manual
Eugenio Tisselli | Sauti ya wakulima
Helen Varley Jamieson | Upstage
Miranda Anderson & Amy Guy | Palimpsest

Friday 2nd November 09.30 – 11.00, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 3 : Emergent Frameworks

How do social media and network culture impact on communities? Is the value of creative work, and the author's perceived standing in a networked creative community, a function of the work or of the network connections it, and its author, have? How do such networks establish the tenets of taste and criteria for inclusion within them and what affect does that have on practice? How do different cultural and social contexts act upon creative practices?

Janez Strehovec | Derivative Writing
Yvonne Spielman | Thinking in Networks
Alexandra Saemmer | Evaluating Digital Literature

Friday 2nd November 11.30 – 13.00, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 4 : Artist's Voices
Close reading plays an important role in the exposition and analysis of creative writing. Such an approach is by definition inter-textual, engaging topics and metaphors in ever expanding waves. With new media writing, with its networked character, this intertextuality is structurally explicit. The library and landscape can be powerful metaphors for this virally expanding and yet immanent connectivity of meaning.

Romy Achituv | Embodied Algorithms
Loss Pequeño Glazier | Stringing Disturbances in Poetic Array Spaces
Roderick Coover | Spatial Remediations

Friday 2nd November 15.45 – 17.15, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 5 : R3M1XW0RX
Collective writing involves multiple voices. How they inter-relate, connect and disconnect defines the nature of what emerges. The R3M1XW0RX blog can be conceived of as an echoing and riffing of one voice upon another, exemplifying a trope of techno-culture, the remix, as a micro-community of creative discourse.

Chris Joseph
Christine Wilks
Randy Adams
Søren Bro Pold | Electronic Literature for Library Spaces

Friday 2nd November 17.15 – 18.45, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 6 Ludic Tactics
Artist's play games and game-play can be art, as Duchamp showed, and digital authors such as also Jim Andrews make this so. Games can also unpack social interaction and in 'The Apartment' (Watternberg and Walczak) the principles of artificial intelligence are employed to explore a new form of open story-telling. Then again, with the pervasive influence of Facebook we are now required to "play", rather than live, our lives, and are scored according to how many "friends" we gain or lose? The whole of life becomes a game, with its winners and losers.

Leonardo Flores | Authorial Scholarship 2.0
Chris Funkhouser and Andrew Klobucar | Players only Love you when they’re Playin’
Daphne Dragona | The New Gamified Social

Saturday 3rd November 09.30 – 11.00, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 7 : Practices in Context
New writing practices emerge from and, in turn, help form communities. Three distinctive examples are explored, ranging from the emerging community of electronic and networked writers in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "digital in/out-grouping" exemplified in the artists' Flash scene of the 1990's and the artistic practices of Japanese media artists in a context of industrially and culturally compressed spaces.

Natalia Fedorova | Where is e-lit in Rulinet?
Cécile Chevalier | Rendezvous
Donna Leishman | Out of Place

Saturday 3rd November 11.30 – 13.00, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 8 : Invisible Participation
Language is the hidden scaffolding of networks, applications, and web sites. It is minified and monetized in ways that are often occluded from the everyday user’s experience. The interaction appears innocuous - language is used for labels and explanations. A few words are typed into an empty field and thousands of related results instantly appear. A simple search, an email to a friend, a unique phrase - all easily logged, monetized, and indexed. This is the world of invisible participation.

Jason Huff
Mimi Cabell
Clement Valla
John Cayley and Daniel Howe

Saturday 3rd November 14.00 – 15.30, Main Lecture Theatre ECA

Panel 9 : Negotiating the Social
What are the rights, obligations and codes that might operate in emergent networked communities? How are these formed, how are they perceived and what is their impact. To what extent does the law and associated public policy keep abreast of these changes, if at all? How might networked and co-creative story-telling inform the structures and practices of pedagogy? How do new forms of writing affect friendship, being mindful of Sandy Baldwin's comment that "friendship is [the] possibility of reading the other's messages"? This panel includes a presentation of the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.

Elena Cooper | Of People not Machines
Angela Thomas | Remediating English Pedagogy
Penny Florence | Re-reading the Digital

Saturday 3rd November 15.45 – 17.15, Main Lecture Theatre ECA