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Narrating the Sociality of the Database: A Digital Hermeneutic Reading of The Atlas Group Archive and haikU (presentation)
I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database.
Hannah Ackermans - 03.12.2019 - 10:25
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Let’s Talk About Databases: Acts of Interpretation in Browsing the Leading Structure of the Information Age
Presentation geared at a wide audience about the saturation of databases and other information structures in our society in relation to one mode of this experience and that is browsing. Browsing is very focused on the daily experience people have with the database. I combine offline examples of browsing and with examples of browsing digital database structures. To highlight the cultural value of browsing databases, I analyze the creative database A dictionary of the Revolution to see how it engages our interpretation habits of databases.
Hannah Ackermans - 03.12.2019 - 11:21
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How to Review a Database
In this 5-minute lightning talk, I introduced my work-in-progress chapter on database criticism. A video of the presentation is available on YouTube, see below.
Hannah Ackermans - 03.12.2019 - 12:53
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A Stretch of the Imagination: Transforming Writing Under Constraint into an Inclusive Practice
In electronic literature, the practice of writing under constraint is widely accepted as a creative catalyst; through self-imposed textual restraints, we find new meanings and forms. At the same time, some of us are often reading and writing under constraint due to various disabilities. Yes, we can describe electronic literature as “formally inventive” in its wide use of multimedial writing, but no text or its reception is purely formal because it is always material, situational, and embodied as well.
Bringing up accessibility of these texts generally leads to a knee-jerk reaction: "I don’t want to be limited", "it would stifle my creative freedom", or, god forbid, "why does everything have to be so politically correct?" What if we move past this initial resistance not toward denial, rejection, or a resigned compliance, but with the same creative energy that we allow other forms of writing under constraint?
Hannah Ackermans - 31.07.2020 - 08:30
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A dictionary of the revolution (presentation)
This is a talk about police. The text is read by Alex from A dictionary of the revolution, a multi-media project that attempted to document the evolving language of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
The project's digital publication contains 125 texts, woven from the voices of hundreds of people who were asked to define words used frequently in conversations in public from 2011-2014. Material for the dictionary was collected in Egypt from March to August 2014.
Nearly 200 participants reacted to vocabulary cards containing 160 terms, talking about what the words meant to them, who they heard using them, and how their meanings had changed since the revolution. The text of the dictionary is woven from transcription of this speech.
The project's digital publication is accessible in Arabic and English translation at http://qamosalthawra.com. The website also gives access to an archive of edited sound clips, images, and transcriptions.
Andrés Pardo Rodriguez - 08.10.2020 - 13:26
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Approaching the world of an instapoem
Instapoetry is entangled in the ecology of Instagram and the digital media ecology at large, which despite instapoetry’s very conservative output (images of text or images with textual elements), still has caused questions regarding how to approach it. While a lot of poetry on Instagram is simply images of poetry remediated on the social media, there also exist a type of platform literature, or platform poetry, which in this paper is treated as instapoetry proper.
With instapoetry proper the intent of publishing it on Instagram is something that affects how we should approach it aesthetically. From a media ecological and posthumanist perspective; while we use social media to do things, it also affects how we do things.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 20.02.2021 - 14:17
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The Politics of Web Materiality: Making Electronic Literature in the Capitalocene
We are on the brink of planetary catastrophe. Environmental, political, health and humanitarian crises have infused the zeitgeist of the Anthropocene with a sense of urgency (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Human activity has been placed in opposition (or as an add-on) to Nature, participating in a dialectical discourse that, like the binaries of sexism, racism, or even Eurocentrism, points directly to the violence, inequality and oppression of the modern world (Moore 2016). As these relate to climate and political change, the Anthropocene argument presents the exploitation and accumulation of capital as conterminous to human nature and progress.
Accumulation, however, is not only productive, but necrotic (McBrien 2016), in the sense that it unfolds a slow violence sustained by reduction or, perhaps, extinction: the reduction of cultures, languages and peoples; as well as the extinction of the Earth through depletion of resources. If accumulation is natural to us, then so are reduction and extinction.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 14:40
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Fictionality in Critical Posthumanism: Why some Philosophies Need Genres of Invention
This paper explores the pervasive presence of literature, film, speculation, fabulation, and other genres of invention in the theoretical writings also known as “critical posthumanism.” Identifying a set of different appropriations of fictional discourse in theoretical work by, amongst others, Astrida Niemanis, Stacy Alaimo, Rebekah Sheldon, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett, the paper asks why theorists united by a common interest in “getting real”, to use Karen Barad’s phrase (1998), often turn to a type of discourse that is defined precisely by not committing itself to reality. What, in other words, do genres and rhetorical devices that deliberately and explicitly make stuff up allow thinkers within critical posthumanism to do that traditional academic styles of writing do not?
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:01
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Vegetable thought in Edgar Pêra’s Lisbon Revisited
Perhaps the most mysterious of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic exudations, Bernardo Soares is the author of the Book of Disquiet, an unparalleled artistic endeavour which was first published only many years after Pessoa’s disappearance. In one of the fragments that became part of the intricate composition of this “book,” Soares asks such questions as the following: “What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know that I dream.” It was through the idea of vegetable tangibility that the Portuguese film director and multi-artist Edgar Pêra made a film out of the words of one other of Pessoa’s texts – Lisbon Revisited (2014), which stemmed from the heteronymic incarnation of Álvaro de Campos. In Campos’s poem, the homonymous “Lisbon Revisited” (1923), the poet disowns metaphysics, appealing instead to the affirmation of the “empty and perfect truth” of the sky, of the river, and of the cityscape of Lisbon.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:23
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Writing as collective assemblages in the age of (post)digital capitalism, or de-colonizing e-literature in the minor key.
In my proposition, I would like to explore the notion of the minor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), employed here as a theoretical tool allowing for a critical inquiry into multifarious e-literary post-internet practices, popularly referred to as Third-Generation E-Literature (Flores, 2019), and accompanied by third-wave e-literature scholarship (Ensslin et al., 2020). However, I am going to build on this notion following its recent repurposing by Anne Sauvagnargues (as the minor style) (Sauvagnargues, 2016) and Erin Manning (as the minor gesture) (Manning, 2016). Kathi Inman Berens aptly remarks (Berens, 2020) that de-colonization of e-literature requires multiplicity of perspectives, as it entails not only cultural hegemonies operating along geographical, ethnic and racial axes and following the set of distinctions shaped by modernist aesthetics, but it also needs to address widespread domination of Big Tech companies shaping the popular internet platforms, programming solutions and users' practices.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:57
