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Oral Traditions and Electronic Ambitions: The Trajectory of Flight Paths in a Plugged-In World
Janet Murray writes, “The kaleidoscopic powers the computer offers us…might also lead to compelling narratives that capture our new situation as citizens of a global community. The media explosion of the past one hundred years has brought us face-to-face with particular individuals around the world without telling us how to connect with them” (282). This assertion points to the transforming effects digital media are now having on the ways that we experience representational arts following the advent of digital technology, and points to some of the potential setbacks that Internet-based narrative might embody. This paper will investigate these implications as they relate to narrative trajectory and possibility through analysis of Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s networked novel Flight Paths (2009).
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 12:42
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Missed Collections: Away From the Canon, Toward the Archive
This paper expands on some of the questions raised by my presentation at the 2009 Digital Arts and Culture conference, held last December at UC Irvine. While examining the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI), I asked what it might mean for a new media practitioner to intentionally disregard or shun many of the medium’s inherent capabilities. I was interested in the way in which YHCHI seemed to be protesting some of the assumptions or characteristics of the nascent canon of electronic literature, i.e. that works of new media are inherently multidirectional, adaptive, non-linear, etc.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 12:47
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William Poundstone and the Aesthetics of Digital Literature
This paper will discuss the work of Los Angeles-based writer and digital artist William Poundstone. Poundstone, who makes his living writing books for a popular audience on subjects such as cryptography, philosophical and mathematical conundrums, economics and even a biography of Carl Sagan, has a growing, but still quite small, reputation as one of the most intellectually challenging, playful, and artistically distinctive web artists. His “New Digital Emblems” is probably his most ambitious work, and operates somewhere between a documentary about the history of visual and ludic writing—ranging across centuries and focusing most profoundly on the Renaissance emblem books—and an original artistic creation, as it includes several of his own “digital emblems.” Other works, such as “Project for Tachistoscope,” challenge our ways of reading as this narrative is presented as a mix of basic “Wing Dings”-style iconography and text, presented in synch one image/word combination at a time.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 12:53
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On Condenstaion: how "Computer Aided Poetry" works
"Cloud Computing" is a rather foggy notion, according to which the World Wide Web will be increasingly seen as a platform where not only information, but also different kinds of services and applications will become immediately available, as if coming out of an undifferentiated, nebular space. People will rely less on the software installed on their personal computers, and more on whatever is usable online.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 12:58
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The New-Media Novel: The Intersection of Film, E-Lit & Story
Advances in authoring tools are allowing a new kind of novel to emerge that resides at the intersection of print, film, and e-lit. I’d like to propose a reading from TOC: A New-Media Novel as its example of the new-media book.
Often created by a team of collaborators working in sound, animation, and language, these new-media novels involve many of the same challenges and pleasures of working in film, theater or other collaborative arts. And yet, unlike theater or film, these multimedia novels are books: they are read; they offer the same one-on-one personal experience readers have always had through reading traditional novels. The first part of the presentation will be a tour through TOC: A New-Media Novel by Steve Tomasula, with art and design by Stephen Farrell, animation by Matt Lavoy, programming by Christian Jara, and music, art, and other contributions from 13 other artists.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:03
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Game-Based Digitally Mediated Narrative Construction
There are various ways of constructing a short story or a novel ranging from detailed planning of characters, back story, and plot before beginning to write to fluid writing. Somewhere in the middle, but near fluid writing, is the approach taken by the late television writer Sydney Sheldon who visualized the flow of the story and narrated what he saw and heard to a secretary. The paper surveys practices in narrative construction both current and speculative, such as a possible future use of advanced functional brain imaging, but emphasizes a particular game-based approach currently being attempted in a pilot project. At the Virtual Environments Lab researchers are developing a system that generates a text based on game play. The game has two purposes: entertainment for the player and generation of a work of fiction that describes the experiences of the player. Many of the characters and situations come from Through the Looking Glass. The player character, as Alice, explores an 8x8 grid and interacts with non player characters. The NPCs ask questions, and the PC gives free response answers. The PC can also ask the NPCs questions.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:09
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The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print: Material Strategies for Innovative Fiction in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s Vas
In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel Vas: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. Jackson’s book, alluding to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about a monster composed of various bodies while the book itself is also a monstrous text: a nonlinear patchwork of links across networks of words and images.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:12
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Cave Writing: Reshaping Writing at Brown
In the spirit of engaging Robert Coover's contributions to the electronic literature field (one of the conference aims) and simultaneously looking at the cutting edge of our field, this panel will discuss the groundbreaking Cave Writing project that Coover has initiated at Brown. It will feature the two primary faculty the project has had over the last eight years (Coover and Cayley), two of the students who have been involved in organizing the project and creating work (Wardrip-Fruin and Gorman), and one of the critics who has looked at this work most seriously (Raley). Topics will include the history of the literary work done in the Brown Cave, the unexpected power of two dimensional typography in three dimensional space, experiences of embodied interaction and spectatorship in combination and tension with literary reading, the role of non-textual images, animation, and sound in the Brown Cave experiments, and others.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:33
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Process-Intensive Fiction
Unlike digital poetry, which has pursued process-intensive directions throughout its history, the dominant directions of digital fiction make relatively light use of computational processes. Whether one looks at the traditions of hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, or video games, the primary model is a set of connections (traveled in different manners) between largely static chunks of language. This panel explores a set of alternatives to this model. The suggested potential panelists include the author of the first book on this topic, published in 2009 (Wardrip-Fruin); one of the authors of Facade, the first fully realized interactive drama (Mateas); the creator of Curveship, a new interactive fiction tool that introduces discourse-level variation as a first-class parameter (Montfort); a prominent author, commentator, and tool builder (Short); the author of Blue Lacunae, a vast, highly variable interactive fiction (Reed); the creator of new algorithms for literary variability based on conceptual blending (Harrell); and the author of the mainstream game industry's most ambitious project in this space, Far Cry 2 (Redding).
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:39
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Machine Subjectivity, Politics and Digital Arts
Although human interaction with technological artifacts often involves treating them as if they are alive, the dominant discourse in our society portrays technology as the instrument of its human master. In the context of computing, our desire of absolute control over machines manifests itself both as the human computer interaction (HCI) community’s emphasis on “usability” and as popular culture’s apocalyptic imagination of the out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) systems trying to eliminate humanity. It is revealing that, for instance, the word “robot” comes from “slave” in Czech. This paper examines the social and aesthetic limitations of this narrow instrumental view of technology. It proposes an alternative interaction model based on machine subjectivity, that is, constructing and perceiving computer systems as an independent entity in its own right.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:42
