ELMCIP E-Literature and New Media Art Seminar

This seminar seeks to broaden the conceptual space of media-shaped electronic literature through a ground-up conceptualisation that draws inspiration from various textual practices based on an experimental account with cyber-language at the intersection of various fields and disciplines. The seminar is structured as an event of peer-reviewed theory panels, demonstrations (including artistic performances by practitioners) and individual presentations.

A goal of the Ljubljana seminar will be to discuss the challenges posed by new media and to situate electronic literature within a history of new media. Topics that might be addressed include:

• Discussing and interrogating the key concepts, devices, methods and approaches within the field of electronic literature.
• Questioning the literary nature of often hybrid and mixed-media digital texts within the constraints of electronic literature.
• Defining innovation in the field through considering it as a deviation from print-based literature and applying the concept of de-familiarization.
• Querying the social implications of new media textual practices and how they relate to issues of gender, the digital divide, new media literacy and social networking.
• Defining the reading of digital texts which, in terms of their interruptive and nervous nature, demand the tactile motor activity of “mouse reading”.
• Analyzing electronic literature through relating it to textual practices and performance within the (European) avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.
• Evaluating the audience of electronic literature, asking how such novel textualities produce new audiences sometimes closer in character to DJ and VJ culture.
• Questioning the aesthetics of electronic literature, taking into account the hybrid modalities of new-media affected perception, such as "not-just-reading" and "not-just-seeing", by addressing the roles of proprioception and tactility in reading.
• Exploring electronic literature and the language of the Internet within the expanded field of 'post-print' text, as found in email, SMS texting, chat forums and other popular textual communication media.
• Analyzing and defining the ontological specificity of an E-Literary art articulated as process, software and performance that disrupts the expectations of readership.
• Evaluating digital creative communities as temporary social and artistic structures embedded in present social realities in relation to concepts such as post-Fordism, hactivism, "playbour", the attention economy and P2P initiatives.

(Source: CFPs)