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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
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The Poets' Dream Database
In December of 2013, I mailed blank journals to thirty poets and asked them to record their dreams for two months and return the journals to me. I asked that they record the dreams themselves rather than their interpretations, relying on language, voice, and syntactical rhythm to emerge as distinctive markers. From the dream journals I compiled the dreams into a spreadsheet database, setting the linear retelling of the dream along the horizontal axis (rows) in chronological order, color-coded by poet. Ciphering the dreams into single cells was the true editorial work of the matrix. Even as poets were creating their own patterns, I was reorganizing dialogue, bisecting idioms, segmenting narrative apparitions. Phrases and snippets of these dreams were now decontextualized into raw form, phrases and words shaken out of their former constellations to become single pure poetic units. After the dream journals had been reorganized into the matrix, they could be used to generate new poetic material.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:04
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Murmurs, Open Corpus of Online Written Poetry – The End of Isolated Poems
Murmurs seeks to gather and link texts written with a poetic intention and available in the net in order to present them in a consistent form within the outline of a hypertext. These texts will be identified by an algorithm and interconnected through semantic links generated with the use of coincident words.
Thanks to this process, the texts with poetic format, already published online, will become a sole extensive and surfable piece that can be analyzed and can receive feedback from blogs, twits, and by any other indexable means. This way we seek to generate a piece of e-poetry by uniting those expressive texts in the net that cannot individually be classified as e-poetry. In order to achieve this we will use algorithmic processes, databases, crawlers for indexing, Big Data analysis, all presented as self-generated hypertexts.
The study of these texts through systems of computer linguistics will allow finding coincidences in the use of language with expressive intentions in the net. In a second moment, an API (application programming interface) will open and allow the free processing of the information gathered.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:09
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The Practice of Research: A Methodology for Practice-Based Exploration of Digital Writing
In the fields of literature, creative writing, and media studies, creative practice and critical analysis have long been parallel and complementary activities; the poet’s creative experience gives her unique insights into the poetry of others. Direct experimentation for the purposes of critical research, however, has long been relegated to science. Practice-based research, also called action research, is a tried and tested methodology in medicine, design, and engineering. While it has always been present to some extent in the arts and humanities, though generally restricted to practice and research, in recent years artistic practice has developed into a major focus of research activity, both as process and product, and several recent texts as well as discourse in various disciplines have made a strong case for its validity as a method of studying art and the practice of art.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:28
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The Challenge of Visuality for Electronic Literature
Whilst there may be aesthetic tropes within digital media, there is no universally accepted authority within contemporary culture nor is there an easy mutual acceptance of what is “right and proper” or indeed legitimate outside the now virtue of being popular and well followed. Indeed the now bodily distanced and disinhibited digital citizen frequently demonstrates a palpable distain for the elite and pretentious (1). Considering this, any community with Literature in its name may have an identity problem; literariness still pertains to an elevated quality of artistic or intellectual merit and is thus counter to popular cultural production. In addition, mainstream culture has successfully commoditized many counter-cultural communities (2). Electronic Literature has arguably not been through such commodification processes, and the question of interest is why not? To that extent this paper seeks to explore possible answers.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:33
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If the Message Is the Medium, Then There Is No End: Understanding and Defining Materiality in Representational and Communicative Practices Across Media
Media are always and at once substances and channels, both things and bridges. When we use this word medium, it is sometimes though not always clear in which sense we are using it. With broadcast media (television, radio) we tend to emphasize the network aspect. With fine art media (paint, ink, stone, clay), we tend to emphasize the material aspect. Yet as the 17th century painter and architect Frederico Zuccari reminds us in his writings about drawing as an artistic practice and medium, the inscription of a mark on a page is itself a bridge between an idea and its external realization. Thus every act of inscription is at once blending these two senses of the term media, thing and network. However, with digital media, the distinction between the two aspects of the term medium appear to be conflated and to collapse into each other. In this paper, I explore ways in which it may be possible to recuperate both senses of the term medium in a digital age by first acknowledging the importance of materiality to textual representation and communication practices and secondly, by developing a nomenclature for accurately describing the actions involved in such practices.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:36
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It Is the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine
My paper tries to make three simple points, each one of which is connected to a specific end of electronic literature: theoretical, practical, and historical. The point of departure is of course electronic literature as we know it and perhaps like it to be: seriously undertheorized, critically experimental, ignored by media and literary departments, and practiced in relatively small and isolated communities that are firmly situated outside the usual constraints of literary market economy. This is about to change given the multitude of devices and gadgets suitable for consuming electronic literature controlled (i.e. produced, published, distributed and owned) by big media corporations. In short, we’ll soon have something new and unprecedented: popular electronic literature and probably all that usually (or historically) comes with it: both healthy and counterproductive tensions between e-literatures high and low, experimental and generic, innovative and mainstream etc. Therefore, we might need several alternative ends.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:39
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Written. Not Found. Not Generated. Not Random.
This presentation will be a self-critical analysis of the development and reception of the P.o.E.M.M. Cycle (Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media), a series of interactive touch text-works created by the author and his team from 2007–2014. The goal is to situate the project within my own trajectory experimenting with electronic literature, particularly in terms of how it integrates interests in writing, computation, design, visual arts, print-making, book-making, and performance. A further goal is to articulate a position on the question of “to what end electronic literature”, as well as the question of where the project is situated in the forming history of the field.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:42
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This Is Not the Beginning or the End of Literature
It is too easy to fall into prognostications of electronic literature as the end of literature or as a new beginning. (...) Such views imply too much teleology, and see electronic literature purely as the unfolding of the possibilities of the apparatus. The rhetorical logic at work is literalization, i.e. taking literary works as the sum of their technical features. (Rui Torres & Sandy Baldwyn, eds. 2014. PO.EX: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia. Morgantown, WV: Center for Literary Computing: xv-xvi).
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:53
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The Endgame or a Wake?: Tropes of Circularity in Literature Then and Now
This paper argues that attending to the tropes of circularity featuring in print-based literature proves to be a useful foil for an analysis of electronic literature. Based on the idea that digital literary mechanisms do not obliviate previous circularity-inducing structuring motifs in analog literature, such as labyrinths, chess, rivers, and clockwork, this argument arrives at a crucial time for literature, which is currently the object of intensified debates on beginnings and ends, especially in the context of digitality and multisensory perception becoming central to some aspects of its processes. Accordingly, circular motion is here analysed in its depiction and actuation across several kinds of literary / literal machines, in reflection also on how sensory perception both mediate and is mediated. If literature is conditional upon a series of unique, though interconnected, mechanisms, it seems reasonable not to discard a certain circularity of the senses that is brought into play there and, indeed, given both thematic and formal substance in analog and digital works.
Diogo Marques - 26.07.2017 - 13:51
