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1. Literacy between book, page and screen – on Between Page and Screen by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse

   The aim of the speech will be to show that e-literature realizations not only could be a renovation of avant-garde or even earlier tradition, but also in many cases provoke the same kind of questions which were made by theoreticians of (e.g.) formalism or structuralism in relation to avant-garde or modern text. Looking at electronic texts we re-ask about a literacy of those works and have to renovate our conception of literary communication, re-thinking not only the category of the text (as Aarseth did), but also the character of signs and code used in this kind of communication.
   

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 10:26

2. Hostages of the Ephemeral: A Preservationist View of Electronic Literature

   Throughout history, stewards of cultural heritage collections have advocated for technologies of external memory based on their proven ability to endure into the future. Despite studies that demonstrate how zeros and ones inscribed on digital media often stand up well to the ravages of time, the long-term preservation of the content they encode—particularly in the field of electronic literature—has proven to be a challenge. This is because the accessibility of electronic literature depends as much on the preservation of bit-streams as on the long-term viability of specialized computing environments and their constituent hardware and software components, thereby placing works of electronic literature at considerably greater risk of disappearance than their analog predecessors. Although authors of electronic literature have cultivated a growing awareness of best practices in digital preservation, they still lack tools designed with the posterity of their creations in mind. This paper explores these issues, as well as the question of ephemerality for electronic literature, by assessing contemporary digital formats within the broader history of preservation technologies.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 10:33

3. Spirals of Meaning: Exploring Nonlinearity through Prezi’s Infinite Canvas

   Our linear expectations of digital presentations (and the scorn associated with “Death by PowerPoint) have been transformed by the availability of tools such as Prezi, an editor that allows for the juxtaposition of images, text, and other media on a telescoping canvas that relies on linear paths for exploring nonlinear content. Prezi acts an infinite canvas, recalling Scott McCloud’s model for a future of sequential art on the web defined not by pages but by the screen as portal to an expanding and linked storyspace, allowing for continual layering of meaning and data using the methods of what Henry Jenkins describes as environmental storytelling. Alexandra Saemmer's use of Prezi as a space for experimenting with electronic literature breaks our expectations of a tool originally designed for presentations. The adaptation of tools of this kind towards the development of literary experiences reveals the fundamental transformations of procedural expectations and linked structures in online spaces: the co-location and linking of ideas to create meaning is now a matter of course.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 12:16

4. "A Machine Made of Words by a Machine Made of Numbers"- Authorial Presence in Niemi’s Stud Poetry

   Primary Text: Marko Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a demo of which would run during the presentation.

   The paper opens with a brief discussion of the inherently conservative nature of the ELO’s definition of electronic-literature and the critical tendencies which this encourages. It has a strong focus on those critics who identify the forms which electronic literature has taken as an extension of modernist experimentation in the Twentieth Century, while disregarding the new possibilities which programmable media furnishes the poet with.

   These possibilities are manifest in Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a text which has been consistently overlooked since its publication, perhaps because it presents a challenge to the dominant critical trends. Stud Poetry cannot fully be understood in terms of print-based modernist experimentation, Dada or Burroughs, because it would be impossible to achieve without a computer program. Niemi wrote the code which ‘writes’ each poem/game.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 12:24

5. La double démesure de l'oeuvre textuelle métastable

   La présente contribution, dans le cadre de la thématique proposée par l’E.L.O., souhaiterait « chercher le texte » en interrogeant des œuvres présentant ce que nous appelons une double ouverture, ou encore une double démesure — double, eu égard à deux aspects que peuvent revêtir cette ouverture ou cette démesure : le premier aspect est de nature profondément technique et médiatique, le second pourrait se dire plus volontiers ontologique et téléologique.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 12:51

6. Distant Readings of a Field: Using Macroanalytic Digital Research Methods to Data Mine the ELMCIP Knowledge Base

   The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase) is a human-edited, open-access, contributory Drupal database consisting of cross-referenced entries describing creative works of and critical writing about electronic literature as well as entries on authors, events, exhibitions, publishers, teaching resources and archives. The project has been developed by the Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen as an outcome of the ELMCIP project. All nodes are cross-referenced so users can see at a glance which works were presented at an event, and follow links to see which articles have been written about any given work or which other events they were presented at. Most records provide simple bibliographic metadata about a work or event, but increasingly we are also gathering source code of works, PDFs of papers and dissertations, videos of talks and performances, and other forms of archival documentation.

   Scott Rettberg - 06.09.2013 - 15:55

7. Cross-Reading: un outil de visualisation de close readings

   ELO 2013 brought out the question of how the theoretical discussions about specific works can be extended in space and time beyond teams. A few months before, different teams began a project of the labex Arts-H2H focusing on the design of “Cross-reading”, a tool to make a pooling of theoretical perspectives used in different parts of the world to treat works of Electronic Literature. This experience, the first large-scale in this area, has as its primary mission to cross different methodologies (or points of view) on the same object to produce a high value-added analysis, which is not only a juxtaposition of disparate contributions but a construction reflecting teamwork.The still ongoing implementation implied first the design of an ontology to harmonize the different analyses produced autonomously by each team. Analyses come from diverse backgrounds such as literature, semiotics, media and cultural studies, ergonomic experimentation and aesthetics. The ontology considers the work as a Spinozist individual in the context of the procedural model of Ph. Bootz, allowing the contemplation of both the visible "surface" and the computer program of the work.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 11:54

8. Literature in a State of Emergency

   Giorgio Agamben has identified the “State of Exception” as the emergent principle of governance for the 21st Century. To summarize Agamben’s argument, alongside the emergence of modern theories of governance (democratic societies with defined human rights), a state of permanent emergency has been declared in response to the various threats (terrorism, ecological disasters, migration, etc.) that have enabled an exception to the rule to persist as the emerging norm. Parallel to this crisis in politics, there is the increasing currency of the term emergence in literary criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to describe the general state of change. Increasingly, this term is used to describe change as a benign and specifically digital determinism. This paper will consider electronic literature as both a laboratory for formal innovation and a site of critique.

   Scott Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 12:36

9. The Materiality of the Intangible: Literary Metaphor in Multimodal Texts

   The materiality of fiction narratives is, ironically, a rather intangible concept, particularly as the notion of materiality traditionally relates to specifically tangible tools of creation — such as the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s clay. The materiality of digital artifacts lies only superficially in the haptic hardware of screens, keyboards, and mice; the materiality of modes, navigation, and interaction must also be explored for their effects on metaphor and meaning. Bouchardon & Heckman identify three levels of materiality in digital literary works: the figure of a semiotic form, the grasp required to physically interact with the work, and the memory of the work — its whole compiled from the parts of code, hardware, and user/reader experience that form meaning (2012, n.p.). In presenting her theory of the technotext, however, Katherine Hayles argues that it is the conjunction of the physical embodiment of technotexts (whether semi-tangible in digital form, or as fully physical as a book) with their embedded verbal signifiers that constructs both plurimodal meaning and an implicit construct of the user/reader (2002, 130-1).

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 12:41

10. Approaching the Real: Materiality in Digital Literature

    Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
    The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
    In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 13:07

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