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1. Slow Games, Slow Poems: The Act of Deliberation in "Slow Year"

   “Video games are actions,” declared Alexander Galloway in a manifesto that stakes out the
   essential differences between videogames and other forms of expressive culture, such as
   literature, photography, and cinema. But what about videogames in which action looks like
   inaction? What about videogames in which action means sitting still? What about a videogame
   that purports to be less a game and more a meditation—a work of literature? In this paper
   I explore a prominent yet remarkably understudied example of a slow game—a game that
   questions what counts as “action” in videogames. This game is A Slow Year (2010), designed
   for the classic Atari 2600 console by Ian Bogost. Comprised of four separate movements
   matching the four seasons, A Slow Year challenges the dominant mode of action in videogames,
   encouraging what I call “acts of deliberation.” These acts of deliberation transform the core
   mechanic of games from “action” (as Galloway would put it) into “experience”—and not just
   any experience, but the kind of experience that Walter Benjamin identifies as Erfahrung, an
   

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 12:55

2. "A Machine Made of Words by a Machine Made of Numbers"- Authorial Presence in Niemi’s Stud Poetry

   Primary Text: Marko Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a demo of which would run during the presentation.

   The paper opens with a brief discussion of the inherently conservative nature of the ELO’s definition of electronic-literature and the critical tendencies which this encourages. It has a strong focus on those critics who identify the forms which electronic literature has taken as an extension of modernist experimentation in the Twentieth Century, while disregarding the new possibilities which programmable media furnishes the poet with.

   These possibilities are manifest in Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a text which has been consistently overlooked since its publication, perhaps because it presents a challenge to the dominant critical trends. Stud Poetry cannot fully be understood in terms of print-based modernist experimentation, Dada or Burroughs, because it would be impossible to achieve without a computer program. Niemi wrote the code which ‘writes’ each poem/game.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 12:24