ELMCIP Events 2010-12: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice

SEMINARS

Performing Electronic Literature
2012 May 4-5, hosted by the University College Falmouth

• This seminar will investigate the relationship between e-literature/digital text and performance. Members of the ELMCIP project, international speakers, and practitioners will discuss the function and understanding of performativity and its relationship to digital literature through a series of papers, presentations and practical engagements.

  Although the field of e-literature is rife with references to performance, they have tended to remain relatively untheorised. In the main, analysis or investigation of performance is restricted to the relationship between the text output (on the interface or projected into a performance space) and the live body responding performatively to that text, or else generating text through performance. There has been little attempt to fold digital text performance into the wider context of the ‘turn to performance’ among the humanities in recent decades. It is against this background -- of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, the ethnography of ritual, performance of self and gender, performance writing, etc. -- that the conference will take place.

  While continuing the investigation of live performance, we will be seeking to broaden the scope to include: interactivity, the performative gesture of the hand and fingers (digital text) on the interface, the performativity of language itself on the screen, social performance or how digital texts ‘perform’ us, the performance of codes and scripting, and the performance of the machine itself, i.e., what do engineers mean when they talkabout performance? In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital environment (dispositif) and, in order to give a fuller account of this complex of performative modes, we will also be investigating how they interact and collaborate with each other.

  Conference proceedings, along with artist’s pages, will be published in a dedicated issue of the journal Performance Research (2013)

Digital Poetics
2011 December 9-10, hosted by the University of Amsterdam

• The assumption is that poetics are still used for an initial establishment of a community, but that there are no longer questions of obligation to a shared new poetics. The literary compulsion to break with existing, 'established' poetics seems absent. Instead, communities seem to centre around previous, existing poetic convictions. Where literary history is based on a succession of poetics with every new generation, the question is whether this model still applies to digital literature. Rather than a poetics of the break, digital literature seems to be based on what we could call ‘a poetics of recycling’ The seminar at the University of Amsterdam will address this question, and related issues, in a series of four peer-reviewed sessions:

  1. The issue of analyzing digital poetics — close reading of works to establish the internal poetics.

  2. The methodology of digital poetics: How might literary sociology be fruitfully combined with the study of poetics? 

  3. The question of innovation: How might digitals form be an expression of poetics? 

  4. The issue of ‘conservation’: the relation of new media to the literary and visual tradition. Program available for download here.

Electronic Literature and New Media Art
2011 September 22-24, hosted by the University of Ljubljana

• This seminar aim 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 of th cyber-language at the intersection of various fields and disciplines. It is organized as a series of peer-reviewed theory panels, demonstrations (including artistic performances by practitioners), and individual presentations. One goal 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 by 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.

Electronic Literature Pedagogy
2011 June 15-17, Hosted by Blekinge Institute of Technology

• This workshop aims to examine the educational models of the study and practice of electronic literature that exist in Europe. Currently, there are relatively few European examples of such courses and programs. Such courses exist in a diverse range of disciplinary contexts and thus courses are informed by different theoretical and practical traditions. Therefore, the workshop will serve to both map and consolidate the educational models in practice in Europe today and to build upon shared experiences and knowledge so as to further develop educational models and policies in European higher education.
  We invite active educators and researchers in the field of electronic literature and relevant fields from Europe and beyond to discuss models of practice, pedagogy and critical inquiry. The critical mass of a Pan-European group will allow for reflections on how educational models can inform the formation of creative communities and help to sustain them. The workshop on pedagogy and electronic literature in education will be structured as a single strand event of panel discussions and individual conference presentations.

  Day 1 Morning: Presentation of individual educational practices and pedagogical programs. Afternoon: Panel discussions on European institutional models for teaching electronic literature. Day 2 Morning: Presentation of individual educational practices and pedagogical programs. Afternoon: Panel discussions on pedagogical models

Electronic Literature Publishing
2011 March 28-29, Hosted by the University of Jyväskylä

• The University of Jyväskylä will conduct a survey and form a report on venues for European electronic literature publication and distribution, to be concluded by December 2010. Day 1 The first day of the seminar focuses on the survey report. Following a presentation of the report, the seminar offers a series of commentaries commissioned from selected electronic literature publishers and authors. Commentaries from print literature publishers will also be invited, engaging representatives from small publishers, such as Eastgate, Ntamo On-Demand or Enostone, and larger companies, like Penguin UK, Gallimard or Suhrkamp. Academic publishers, such as MIT Press, who do have a considerable record in publishing on new media, will also be invited. Day 2 The second day of the seminar includes presentations of selected publications and their policies. The seminar will be closed with a panel discussion charting promising directions for future collaboration, aiming to establish a tighter network of European electronic literature publishing able to expand the audience and increase the recognition within cultural institutions and organizations of digital literary practice and works. At the time of the seminar a one-day workshop on editing, publishing and presenting electronic literature will be organized.

Electronic Literature Communities
2010 Sept 20-11, Hosted by the University of Bergen

• This seminar seeks to establish a framework for understanding how electronic literature communities have evolved in recent decades and how that development process can more generally provide insight in the formation of contemporary network-mediated creative communities. The seminar program includes presentations by members of the ELMCIP project partners and by invited experts, and a public panel discussion for local and national stakeholders. Additionally, an evening of public performances and demonstrations of electronic literature will take place at Landmark Café at Bergen Kunsthall in conjunction with the seminar, in order to provide some material examples of the type of interdisciplinary works of electronic literature produced within the creative communities we are studying.

CONFERENCE

2012 Nov 1-3, Hosted by Edinburgh College of Art

• The ELMCIP project is summed up in a final project conference. The conference programme will consist of expert presentations, across a range of disciplines, allowing for diverse modalities of inquiry to be articulated in an inclusive interdisciplinary context, addressing examples of creative communities that have formed around various practices, media and discourses. Case studies, papers and panels discussing examples arising from the research project will be presented. Plenary sessions will be designed to enhance cross-disciplinary debate. The conference will be organised so as to facilitate the broadest range of presentation formats and media. Appropriate elements of the conference will be e-cast, allowing for remote attendees to freely monitor events and put questions to conference. The objective is to facilitate open access to the conference and to highlight the mediating technologies in the formation of networked communities. Liaison with project associates will be developed so as to ensure facilitators at appropriate locations will be able to exploit this opportunity within academic programmes that employ network media as pedagogical tools. The three-day conference is structured as a single strand event of peer reviewed panels and individual conference presentations. Day 1 Afternoon: keynote featuring a significant international speaker. Early evening: Public opening of the exhibition. Mid-evening: conference dinner. Day 2 All day: conference panels, presentations and plenary. Evening: public presentation of conference performances. Day 3 All day: conference panels, presentations and conference plenary, featuring a significant international speaker. The conference is complemented by an exhibition of electronic literature performance work.

EXHIBITION AND PERFORMANCE PROGRAM

2012 Winter

• Exhibition 
   Hosted by Edinburgh College of Art in collaboration with New Media Scotland

  The exhibition will be held at Inspace, a new purpose built facility at the University of Edinburgh, well equipped with instrumented presentation and exhibition facilities designed to engage the public with developments in new technologies, scientific research and creative practices. The exhibition will continue after the conference lasting two weeks. An objective of the exhibition is to maximise public engagement and to invite a wider critical engagement with the art, literary, social science and more general media. The networked character of relevant artworks will be exploited to facilitate international visibility of the event. 
   

• Performance program 
  Hosted by University College Falmouth in collaboration with New Media Scotland 

  A public performance of electronic literary works will present international work in the field. Similar to the exhibition, the selection of works for the programme will be made by an international jury. It is expected that, as with the exhibited works, there will be performances that employ live networked technologies. We will seek to exploit these characteristics to ensure the widest public engagement.