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1. Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks

   The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing insofar as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me.

   J. R. Carpenter - 22.11.2014 - 21:44

2. Border Connections in Electronic Literature

   In 1962, MIT scientist Steve Russell presented one of the first videogames in history: Spacewar! in which two starships maneuvered around a star and tried to destroy each other. A year earlier, Raymond Queneau had published Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a potential literature book consisting of ten sonnets printed onto cards, with each line written on a separate strip, offering readers 100 trillions of possible combinations.

   At first glance, the connection between these two milestones from worlds as different as literature and computer science would seem to be remote, but they are actually the start of a convergence of experiences and interests that have radically changed the way we read and write stories.

   The sixties marked the start of a series of experiments in both literature and computing that mutally influenced each other and challenged the narrative, physical and conceptual boundaries of literature. This text looks at some of these connections.

   (Source: Author's Introduction)

   Carles Sora - 09.03.2015 - 21:21

3. Shuffling the Sjuzhet in Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1

   Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 is an unbound novel that can be read in any order. This essay explores how the novel's indeterminate nature affects the sjuzhet and fabula. It finds that the fabula works in an essentially normal way, but priority is shifted from the reader-determined sjuzhet to the (perceived) author-determined fabula, which shows that readers privilege the author's intention over their own activity and order.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 16.08.2015 - 10:37

4. The Numberlys: An Interplay Between History, Urban Life and Technology in a Children’s Story App

   The presentation will explore narrative, intertextual and ideological aspects of The Numberlys iPad/iPhone app (http://www.numberlys.com/). The app, produced by Moonbot Studios and released in 2012, received an American Annie award for excellence in the field of animation in 2013.
   The Numberlys is a fanciful tale about the origin of the alphabet. In a world where ways of organization and communication are based on numbers and nobody has a name, only a number, five friends decide to build the alphabet by transforming numbers into letters. By inventing the alphabet the five protagonists let the inhabitants acquire a personal name. Thus the app raises existential questions concerning the construction of identity and our needs for recognition.
   The story is set in a futuristic cityscape inspired by the German-Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 silent film Metropolis. Other intertextual references include ABC books, German expressionism, popular early fantasy epics like King Kong, Flash Gordon and Superman, the Macintosh tv-commercial 1984 and more. Thus The Numberlys seems to address both children and adults.
   

   Hannah Ackermans - 03.11.2015 - 11:28

5. Conditions of Presence: The Topology of Network Narratives

   The development of the cultural field of electronic literature faces significant challenges today. As everyday network communication practices and habits of media consumption change, they impose expectations on how narratives are expressed, experienced and interacted with by readers and users. These expectations produce an imperative to accommodate additive and emergent participation processes that influence how narratives are structured. It is increasingly important to strike a balance between authorial agency and user generated content, between the core creative vision of a cultural creator and the contributions of casual participants, between narrative coherence and improvisational interactions. Resolving these antinomies is crucial in order for the field of electronic literature to support both the development of popular digital fiction and a continuing tradition of experimental literature.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:18

6. Narrative, Affect and Materialist Aesthetics in Post-Digital Technotexts

   After much excitement about hypertext fiction in the 1990s, many digital-literary-arts practitioners moved away from narrative. There seemed to be a recognition that the hyper-reading digital environments promote was not conducive to long-form narratives. Lev Manovich’s influential The Language of New Media (2002) declared that databases dominated over narrative; narrative was now a residual, if not yet obsolete, epistemological form. But born-digital authors have not entirely abandoned narrative; rather, the narrativity inherent to their artifacts has been diffused, redistributed across non-linguistic modalities. New production technologies make it easier to integrate images, animations, music, sounds, and other modalities into cybertextual artifacts often more akin to video games than novels. In multimodal environments, where textual output is more variable, narrative qualities can appear elusive or ephemeral. Nonetheless, narrativity, like other indicators of literariness, persists in new media writing.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:26

7. The Interactive Character as a Black Box

   How can a convincing interactive character, with apparent psychological depth, be modelled in a playable narrative that adapts to a reader’s choice? This is the central question of my practice-based research that I address through the authoring (in both natural language and computer code) of an interactive text-based psychological thriller Stitched Up.

   Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:10

8. Digital Games: The New Frontier of Postmodern Detective Fiction

   The tropes of the detective genre have been challenged, subverted, re-appropriated by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, or Paul Auster, establishing what could be considered a new strain of postmodern detective fiction. In these stories, solving the case is not central to the story, and what the detective searches transforms or is derailed by becoming a discovery of something completely different. In some cases, the detective, along with the reader, explores an encyclopedic space in such a way that these stories have already been connected to hypertextual literature (Rosello 1994).

   Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 15:09

9. Fill in the Blanks: Narrative, Digital Work and Intermediality

   Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1986 is a digital work produced by the Labyrinth Project Research Center of the University of Southern California. Part paper, part DVD-ROM, part real, part fiction, it is based on an unsolved mystery, and unfolds the story of Molly, an Irish immigrant who moved to Los Angeles in 1920. She was at the heart of an investigation in the late 50’s early 60’s as she was the main suspect in the death of her second husband Walt. The project gathers hundreds of different data types like maps, pictures, texts, newspaper articles, books and movies, through which the user navigates in order to ultimately, resolve the crime. But how does the user build an interpretable narrative through this hypermedial database?

   Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 13:58