Digital Letterisms

Research Collection
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Letter in Letterism Research Collection is regarded in Lacanian sense as “a material medium each concrete discourse borrows from the language”(Lacan, 1997), thus letterism is viewed on as an attempt to define a minimal unit of a text-based piece of digital or contemporary art. Roland Barthes defined minimal unit of reading, as lexia “a series of brief, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading . . . . The lexia will include sometimes a few words, sometimes several sentences; it will be a matter of convenience: it will suffice that the lexia be the best possible space in which we can observe meanings . . . .” (Barthes, 1974). Following Velimir Khlebnikov, who states in Nasha osnova (1920), that it is possible to find a common meaning of a sound, if one collects all the words containing it “all the remaining sounds will multiply each other, and the common meaning these words have, will be the meaining of Ч”(Хлебников, 1999) Jerald Janecek singles out phonetic zaum as a minimal combinatorial block of a poetic work. According to N. Katherine Hayles, a single digit of computer code would be a formal unit of digital art “the computer, our new compound tool, uses the hierarchical ordering of discrete reproducible units to create new kinds of temporal and spatial experiences”. So one of the ultimate research question is to find a minimal semantic unit of multimodal and multilayered piece of text-based digital art.

The focus of the research is going to be on the letter as a graphic, visual, audial, mechanical, combinatorial unit of an art work. Lettter is also regarded in its sculptural (Jaume Plensa Nomad (2007) and Silent Rain (2003), bodily (Anastasia Mastrakouli Naked Silhouette (2013), Romy Achituv and Camille Utterberg Text Rain and kinetic (Jim Andrew Arteroids, Brian Kim Stefans Dreamlife of Letters, Jorg Piringer Unicode, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz) aspects. A separate attention is given to the letter level constraints (such as anagram), oulipian permutations of letters, “letter sieve” – erasure techniques (Tom Phillips Humament, Ronald Johnson Radi os, Jasper Juul, Amaranth Borsuk, Nick Montfort The Deletionist (2013).

People:

Namesort descending Residency
Alan Bigelow
Buffalo , NY
United States
New York US
Alan Sondheim
United States
US
Barrie Phillip Nichol
Canada
CA
Brian Kim Stefans
Los Angeles
United States
US
Darren Wershler-Henry
Eduardo Kac
Chicago
United States
US
Eugen Gomringer
Switzerland
CH
Giselle Beiguelman
São Paulo , SP
Brazil
São Paulo BR
Jim Andrews
Vancouver , BC
Canada
British Columbia CA
Jörg Piringer
Vienna
Austria
AT
Lori Emerson
Boulder , CO
United States
Colorado US
Marika Dermineur
France
FR
Nick Montfort
New York , NY
United States
New York US
Oni Buchanan
United States
US
Ottar Ormstad
Oslo
Norway
NO
Rita Raley
CA
United States
California US
Sylvanus Shaw
Talan Memmott
United States
US
Whitney Anne Trettien
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Organizations:

Namesort descending Location
Electronic Literature Organization
Electronic Literature Organization, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
B0131 McKeldin Library, University of Maryland
20742 College Park , MD
United States
Maryland US
Electronic Poetry Center (EPC)
14260 Buffalo
United States
US
ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
University of Bergen
Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies, Sydnesplassen 7
5020 Bergen
Norway
NO
Trope Tank
MIT
77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 14N-233
02139 Cambridge , MA
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Teaching Resources:

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Events:

Titlesort descending Event type Date City Country
Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 Launch Performance May 2, 2011 Bergen Norway
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Natalia Fedorova