Search

The search found 29 results in 0.009 seconds.

Search results

1. UbuWeb, the archive and the gallery

   As a seemingly limitless and comprehensive resource, UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com) has put together a map of the past hundred or so years of ‘experimental’ writing, film, video, and sound art. It resembles the archive in its breadth and depth, in its relentless collecting, in its inherent totalizing tendencies. My argument is that UbuWeb, while not an ‘archive’ per se, does have a cataloging logic, though it is not apparent, and that its specific logic is based on the commodification of the artwork and the effects of that commodification on its exhibition. To understand that logic, I want to situate UbuWeb at the latest point in a series of discontinuous institutions and discourses that have all taken the ‘artwork’ as their object.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:13

2. Electronic Literature Directory 2.0

   The Electronic Literature Directory has served over the years as an ongoing project of the ELO. The recently revamped directory will, by the time of ELO_AI meeting, have been formally launched and will be approximately six months old. The purpose of this proposed panel is to allow sitting editors to provide a face-to-face introduction of the evolving directory to ELO community. Participants will address issues of design, bibliography, editorial process, tagging, and pedagogical relevance of the project. Vincler, a special collections librarian, will address issues of cataloging and archiving. Branda, the site programmer, will address technical aspects of the site's development. Engberg and Heckman will address the potential use of the format in a variety of educational settings. Tabbi will address the general implications of the directory for the future of the field. Special attention will be given to the continued development of the site content, and active discussion will be encouraged.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 13:45

3. The Broken Mirror: Paradigms of Subjectivity in Digital Writing and Informatic Culture

   Advancements in social/participatory media and electronic networking technologies help bring to focus the complex interplay between aesthetics and politics common to all modern community interaction. Historically speaking, few other media formats have transformed social frameworks as acutely as contemporary online networks have. On one level, the diverse communities and social aggregates derived from such technologies seem to follow many of modernity’s more radical ideological critiques of what the philosopher Robert P. Pippen identifies specifically as “bourgeois subjectivity,” re-imagining voice and identity as collective formations to be culled from the cultural and political margins of the state. Distinct, however, from these prior revisionary challenges to cultural and social production, digital “network relations,” with their emphases on convergence over conflict, performance over practice, critically re-situate the traditional modern dialectic between individual and collective modes of agency that has dominated ideologico-political argument for the past century.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 15:05

4. We have never had a mind of our own: A Poetics of the Integrated Circuit

   The black-and-gray background of the splash page for the performance artist Stelarc’s website appears to be an abstraction of memory blocks, logic boards, and input/output pads. Into it is plugged a block of small white introductory text, a blip of red text listing devices necessary to access the site, and a sketch showing a body wired with EEGs to catch the brainwaves, ECGs to trace the heartbeat, EMG’s to monitor the flexor muscles, and an array of contact microphones, position sensors, and kineto-angle transducers to chart everything else. In this integrated circuit, voltage-in probes the body; voltage-out extends it. In case the point is not yet clear, two neon-bright chunks of text in the middle of the page blink on and off to announce it: “THE BODY IS,” the first lines read all in a rush, then slowly, spelling it out, “O-B-S-O-L-E-T-E.” In this paper, I would like to argue that the transformation from an organic, industrial society to the polymorphous information system Stelac enacts allows us to think back to machine-human collaborations overlooked in expressivist approaches to poetry.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 16:02

5. E-lit context as Records Continuum: the “lost” Michael Joyce’s Afternoon Italian edition and the archival perspective

   Devoted to the study and retrieval of those artifacts of the past for which a disruption in the continuity of preservation occurred, archaeological sciences operate with – and against – historical and cultural fractures. Likewise, computer forensics provides assistance whenever a need to recover data in the event of a hardware or software failure occurs. The textual shifting from page to screen experienced in the past twenty years represented both a cultural fracture (a call for paradigmatic changes in preservation which archival sciences themselves were not prepared for) and an opportunity to test computer forensics practices on text-based digital artifacts (software and hardware failures being named, in this case, “obsolescence”). Our paper draws attention to the fact that both digital archaeology and computer forensics, however, no matter how useful in shaping the current preservation practices and methodologies adopted by scholarly communities operating in the digital field, cannot replace or do without the extensive scholarship developed in disciplines that have traditionally dealt with textual preservation in situations of cultural continuity.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 16:07

6. Intersecting Approaches to Electronic Literature: Close-Reading Code, Content, and Cartographies in “William Poundstone’s “Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]”

   What does it mean to close read electronic literature? Should one closely engage the screenic content, the programming code, or the operating patterns of a work? This panel proposes that critical analysis need not be limited to one approach or one focal point of attention, and seeks to demonstrate what can be gained when scholars collaborate to apply multiple methodologies to engage a single work. All three panelists will read the same work of digital literature, William Poundstone’s “Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]” (EL Collection, vol.1), but using three different critical methods with the collaborative goal of approaches that mutually inform and enrich each other. Jessica Pressman will approach the Flash-based animation from the lens of traditional literary hermeneutics, close reading the onscreen literary aesthetics to explore the relationships between form and content as well as locate the points of aporia and mystery that traditional reading strategies are left struggling to explain.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:12

7. The State of the Archive: Authors, Scholars, and Curators on Archiving Electronic Literature

   Archiving electronic literature and the challenges raised by this task is a subject of discourse and action as well as a formative force in shaping the emergence of electronic literature as field of scholarly study. The ELO Visionary Landscapes Conference in 2007 dedicated a keynote position to a panel on the topic of preserving electronic literature with archivists from leading universities, and the panel was a cornerstone of discussion at the conference and beyond. The current proposal for a panel on the topic seeks to continue the conversation while extending it to voices not usually included in critical conversation about archiving— artists whose work is selected for preservation. What kinds of experiences are involved in collecting and handing over one’s oeuvre to an archivist? Does this experience affect the practice (artistic and otherwise) of future creation? Are there specific aspects of these questions and their answers that are specific to the digital nature of the objects?

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:21

8. Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World's Longest Interactive Fiction

   Blue Lacuna is an ambitious new long form interactive fiction comprising nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code. The longest work yet produced in the Inform 7 language, it is also among the most substantial text-based story games in existence, an interactive novel with an average play time of fifteen to twenty hours. In development between 2006 and 2009, Blue Lacuna features several experiments of interest to creators of long-form interactive stories. This paper describes these experiments and performs an anecdotal post-mortem on what succeeded and failed in the project's realization. I focus on how successful I was at achieving my three principal goals: 1) simplifying the IF interface so those unfamiliar with the medium can easily participate, 2) telling a story which revolves around the player's ability to make choices with real dramatic repercussions, and 3) creating a character able to form a complex relationship with the player across the span of a novel-length story.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:24

9. Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP)

   This talk for the Archive & Innovate conference will present to the ELO community a new major research project and research network focused on electronic literature in Europe. ELMCIP is a 3-year collaborative research project that will run from Spring 2010-2013 and funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) theme: 'Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation.' ELMCIP involves seven European research partners (University of Bergen, Edinburgh College of Art, Blekinge Technical Institute, Univeristy College Falmouth, University of Jyväskylä, University of Amsterdam, and University of Ljubjlana) and one non-academic partner (New Media Scotland) who will investigate how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment.
   The research goals of the project are to:
   • Understand how creative communities form and interact through distributed media
   • Document and evaluate various models and forces of creative communities in the field of electronic literature
   

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:29

10. Closer again!

    A semiotic appoach of animated figures in The Dreamlife of letters by Brian Kim Stefans. In many research works of these last years (for example in my book Matières textuelles sur support numérique, 2007), I tried to circumscribe the stylistic features of digital literature. More specifically, I aimed to identify the processes by which “figures of animation” and “figures of manipulation” in e-literature defamiliarize the conventions of digital discourse. In a recent article (“Digital literature - a question of style”, Reading moving letters, ed. Simanowski/Schäfer/Gendolla, 2009), I have already presented a close reading of The Dreamlife of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans; in order to characterize the textual animations in this work, I had recourse to traditional figures of speech (apocope, metathesis, etc.). The result was a large catalogue of figures - a “taxonomic explosion”.

    Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:46

Pages