Search

The search found 4 results in 0.009 seconds.

Search results

1. Intermediality and Electronic Literature

   The 2015 ELO Conference’s call for papers states that "[e]lectronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice, between literature, computation, visual and performance art. The conference will seek to develop a better understanding of electronic literature’s boundaries and relations with other academic disciplines and artistic practices."

   This roundtable discussion, led by both established and emerging e-lit scholars and artists, will explore the idea of electronic literature as an intermedial practice, looking at the topic from a wide range of forms including literature, performance, sound, computation, visual art, and physical computing. Drawing upon artistic work they have produced or studied, each panelist will provide a five-minute statement that touches on qualities related to intermediality like hybridity, syncretism, and collaboration. Following this series of brief presentations, the panelists, then, encourage engagement in a wider conversation with the audience.

   Hannah Ackermans - 31.10.2015 - 10:36

2. Electronic Literature as a Means to Overcome the Supremacy of the Author Function

   In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses.

   Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:07

3. The Ends of Publishing

   If the media was the message for McLuhan in the 1960s, then audio-visual publishing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have become a message today. In his 1998 article entitled “Database as Symbolic Form,” Lev Manovich fails to foresee the socially hypermediated turn of the new century when he argues that “database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (p. 7). From a purely mathematical, logical viewpoint, they do at first seem at odds, since the database is the superstructure and the narrative media files are the objects oriented within. For example, a database might house narrative-less stock photos or sound effects as easily as it does an audio-visual story. The (early) media database seems indifferent to its contents and does not seem to be able to tell a story. Likewise, the narrative within a digital movie file is indifferent to its matrix-host, because the “story” operates regardless of whether you play the film on a DVD player, digital projector, or a YouTube download.

   Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 13:51

4. 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