Ink After Print

The interactive literary installation Ink (Accidentally, the Screen Turns to Ink, created by the authors in a collaboration with Roskilde Library, CAVI and Peter-Clement Woetmann) is a unique experimental public display created in 2012 for the library space and exhibited at more than ten Danish libraries, at conferences, festivals and events. Ink is unique in being a large, public, social and performative digital literary installation designed to give library audiences an experience of digital literature through an affective, ergodic proces. Ink has been presented at several conferences, including the ELO 2013 conference in Paris.

With this paper we aim to develop a post-hoc reflection and prepare for a new version of Ink by exploring a theoretical and conceptual framing of what we term "post-digital literary interaction" in order to propose a collaborative invitation for further experimenting with the infrastructure facilitated by the setup. Concurrently with the actual crafting of the installation, we have deviced a model for conceptualizing the dynamic processes of sensing and sense-making through a cycle of affective, material and ergodic engagement. This model offers a way to conceptualize how the form of interaction precedes and continuously modulates an increasingly active reading process, a form of literary interaction, which is carried out and can be understood performatively - both in relation to the interaction carried out in public space, the act of writing text through the interaction and the act of reading this text.

Based on a thorough analysis of the empirical material from the first version of Ink we aim to propose a re-design of the installation focusing on making the machine's reading and the material data generating processes underlying the infrastructure visible. We consequently aim to develop a critical interface, which demonstrates the perspective of the machine on the text generation - e.g. demonstrating the algorithmic text generation to the audience or how the machine controls the reading. Through this perspective we aim to explore new techniques of text generation, e.g. workshop-based collaborative writing processes, critical explorations of net-based textual dynamics and of post-digital literary culture. In general the aim would be to explore and create an installation, which will allow for a critical reading experience of post-digital literary culture and we hope to address the ELO conference audience in order to invite for collaborations on this with a long-term plan to exhibit the results at the following ELO conference in Bergen 2015.

(Source: Author's introduction)