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1. The Aesthetics of Materiality in Electronic Literature

   According to the French author and theoretician Jean-Pierre Balpe, “all digital art works are first conceived outside the framework of a pragmatic relation to materiality. Any manifestation of digital art is but a simulated moment of an absent matter.”

   However, I wish to show that there is at least as much materiality in the digital media as in other media. Of course, as a formal description, digital and material can be distinguished. Digital media correspond to formalization, insofar as formalization is understood as the modelling of a given reality through the use of a formal code. But because digital media refers to the effectiveness of digital calculation, it can be considered as “material”, at least on two levels:

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 15:39

2. Aesthetic Autonomy and Sensuous Appearing: Two Questions in the Aesthetics of Digital Poetry

   In this paper I would like to consider the aesthetics of digital poetry with reference to ideas of aesthetic autonomy and sensuous appearing.
   The notion of autonomy, whether of the art-work or of a mode of experience with which it is associated, has been central to the historical development of the idea of the aesthetic itself. Andrew Bowie defines it as ‘the idea that works of art have a status which cannot be attributed to any other natural object or human product’ (Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 2). It is an idea which has been seen as ideologically driven, as when Terry Eagleton suggests that ‘the idea of autonomy – of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining – provides the middle class with just the ideological mode of subjectivity it requires for its material operations’. Yet Eagleton also argues that aesthetic autonomy can provide a ‘vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thinking’, implying that it has potential for avant-garde or critical purposes (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 9).
   

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 16:05

3. Played by Hyperfiction. Modes of Reading Megan Heyward's "Of Day, of Night"

   How do we read digital literature? I want to approach the topic by studying how electronic literature prefigures the reader's response. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the preconditions for reading electronic literature. I argue that electronic literature might be considered as a text game, in Wolfgang Iser's sense, and that different work prefigures different attitudes towards reading. The attitudes regarding reading, or modes of reading, I will focus on the semantic orientation of reading, aesthetic enjoyment, a mode of gaining experience, and absorption of the reader.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:59

4. The Aesthetics and Practice of Computational Literature

   While aesthetic practices in photography, film and music have undergone significant transformation due to the affordances of computational tools, the practice of creative and critical writing has remained largely unaffected. As programmable environments further populate the cultural environment it is increasingly important that we understand the ways in which those designed specifically for literary contexts may serve to challenge traditional notions of the writing endeavor. Our paper will provide a brief historical framework for the emergence of generative literary writing practices, a description of a new authoring environment (RiTa) for use in both the production and teaching of digital writing, and an analysis of specific concepts—including layering, materiality, authorial intent, constraints, and distributed creativity—that the use of this environment meaningfully engages.

   (Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 22:13

5. Programming Literary Flow

   "Flow" is the movement of eyes and bodies through museums or city traffic, through instructional diagrams or branching narratives, through hypertexts or games. What is flow in electronic literature? While comics scholars have theorized linear flow (e.g. closure, trails) and hypertext scholars have theorized multilinear flow (e.g. transclusions, links), this exploration of flow in elit considers flow as a total experience or simultaneous visible landscape, beginning in the visual design tradition of flowchart art. Bill Barker or Martijn Englebregt's beaurocratic infographics, Jason Shiga or Chris Ware's narrative diagrams, and Simon Patterson or Dorian Lynskey's subway map art remixes all posit narrative as an experience occuring within a visible landscape of controlled traversals. In digital arts, this situated experience is best exemplified by performers using flow-control programming. How might the metaphors and software tools of flow-control used by audio livecoders and video jockey mashup artists (e.g. PD, Max/MSP, Quartz Composer) serve electronic textualists (e.g. Yahoo! Pipes)?

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 11:51