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At the Brink: Electronic Literature, Technology, and the Peripheral Imagination
Periods of rapid technological change also redraw our sense of cultural and geographical periphery. Routes of transport and travel, communications infrastructures, and networks of cultural production extend, transform, and redirect the perimeters of our personal and collective imagination. In this lecture I will examine how Ireland’s location at the geographical margin of Europe has also rendered it a focal point of technological experimentation and exchange, and has closely entwined it with the story of electronic literature. I propose that the peripheral imagination informing this relationship can also encourage the kind of cultural dissent needed to tackle the consequences of unchecked technological ambition to the fragile environments of the Anthropocene.
Anne Karhio - 08.11.2019 - 10:52
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Rui Torres’ Cantiga in class – digital poetry in Portuguese schools
Although the most recent curricular documents issued by the Portuguese Ministry of Education (ME, 2017; ME, 2018) recommend students to read multimodal texts, there is still a print-based culture among Portuguese schools and among language and literature teachers. As part of the project “Inanimate Alice: Translating Electronic Literature for an Educational Context”, held at the Centre for Portuguese Literature – University of Coimbra, we have already conducted some experiments with digital narrative in Portugal (Machado et alii, 2018), which we hope to be extended by the inclusion of Alice Inanimada (the Portuguese version of Inanimate Alice) in the National Reading Plan in 2018, as Ana Maria Machado, the project coordinator, presented at the ELO Conference 2018. However, we do not have available data concerning teaching digital poetry to children and teenagers in our country, which led me to include Cantiga in the corpus for the empirical research I am conducting for my doctoral thesis in Materialities of Literature.
Vian Rasheed - 11.11.2019 - 22:34
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From Grid to Rhizome: a Rethinking of a Layout Arrangement of the Post-digital Text
In this paper we deal with the necessity of a post-digital text layout rethinking. Such layout differs from a layout of a printed text, because a post-digital medium is based on different principles from a traditional codex book. Arrangement of a layout in case of printed text, also in case of (post)digital text, is often based on the grid model. The alternative arrangement was specified as experimental forms. To go back in history, the grid model comes from cognitive preferences of a western reader and conforms to the principles that we follow in Gestalt psychology. These are the aesthetic references of typographical analysis of Modern movement, which was based on the golden rule principle and its application in the rectangular grid. The idea of grid followed Cartesian measurement of a codex page. According to Design Dictionary (2008) layout is often based on a design grid. Also Ellen Lupton (2010), and other authors described the model of a grid layout as a complex system applicable for every kind of media, so for the (post)digital media as well. In contraposition to the grid model we use arguments based on post-digital text and post-digital media analysis.
Vian Rasheed - 11.11.2019 - 23:55
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eLit User Experience: Audience+Purpose=Design
Responding to the conference theme of “peripheries,” user experience and interface design are frequently on the periphery of electronic literature. Attention to these details, however, can effectively immerse readers in sensory-rich literary aesthetics. User experience and interface design also prompts authors to consider differently-abled readers, viewers, and/or inter-actors, often themselves on the peripheries. This presentation proposes practices for embodying user experience and interface design in works of electronic literature. The desired end result is to enable creators of electronic literature to best utilize the features, affordances, and constraints offered by the digital context of their medium to promote affectively powerful literary experiences.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 00:07
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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
There exists a rift in contemporary culture of computational poetry generation. On the one hand, a vibrant poet-programmer scene has emerged around certain arts-focused conferences (e.g. ELO), online events (e.g. #nanogenmo/#napogenmo), spaces (e.g. NYC's Babycastles), and publication venues (e.g. Nick Montfort's Badquar.to). On the other, computer scientists working on Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and related fields publish scientific research on generating literary texts. The epistemological divide between these two groups can be seen most readily in the latter's focus on using empirical tests to assess work. These tests may be intrinsic (e.g. a quantitative measure of the linguistic features of computer-generated poetry), but they are often extrinsic (e.g. based on human judgments of whether a poem possesses qualities such as humor or coherence). Underwriting much (though not all) of this activity is the notion of the Turing Test and its assumed goal of computer-generated text that can pass as human-authored.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 00:41
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Queer Wordplay: The Queer Subversion of Language in Locked-In and Blackbar
This paper looks at two interactive digital works where female-centred/lesbian desire provides an implicit logic and motivation to the works’ interactivity, which focusses on the control and transgression of language. This wordplay is aimed at resisting dominant regimes of phobic categorization and erasure that pathologize queer desire. In Lucky Special Games’ visual novel Locked-In, the interactor experiences the story through the perspective of Jacqueline Brown, who, as the result of a car crash, has locked-in syndrome, which is characterized by consciousness paired with the complete paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Each of the women who visit Jacqueline's hospital room has a motive for wanting Jacqueline incapacitated or dead, so when Jacqueline discovers that she can slightly move the little finger on one hand, she must decide to which of these women she should reveal that she is conscious. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Locked-In is its casual indication of Jacqueline’s lesbianism (inferred via her relationship with her spouse Delilah).
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:22
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On Nationalizing a Transnational Literature: A Case Study on Examining J. R. Carpenter’s Work Within a Canadian Context
In our contemporary, increasingly transnational world, national literatures may seem increasingly arbitrary—even more so in the context of electronic literature, whose barriers of circulation tend to be marked by transnational, rather than national, groupings based on, for example, language or access to certain technologies. In contrast to the frequently (hyper-)nationalized literatures of mainstream literary study, electronic literature is often framed as an international or transnational literature. There are very good reasons for this: for example, the medium of electronic literature naturally lends itself to transnational dissemination and readership through the global reach of the internet. However, this transnational approach, which frequently exhibits an unacknowledged bias towards works produced in the US, also frequently ignores the ways in which an understanding of national contexts may enrich the understanding of a work.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:36
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E-locutio: stitching styles and pulling threads in electronic literature
Classical rhetoricians have long known “style” as an integral component of Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric, where it refers to the application of compelling language patterns to achieve specific persuasive purposes: for example, the use of the chiasmus or “cross” (“ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”) as a tool that forces the reader to reflect on relationships between and reversals of concepts. From written style (what rhetoricians call elocutio) to "programming styles,” the application of technique/techne/craft to the expressive media we work in is evident, whether the medium is page, memory core, or cloth. Although we are more accustomed to viewing this process as “poetics,” reframing such activity as the application of style enables us to more fully see the suasive material dimensions of work in different media: asking not “what does this thing say” but “what does this thing do to us.” This paper explores some common stylistic elements that appear among writing, programming, and embroidery.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:44
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Crime fiction in digital ethos: legal and ethical challenges in e-lit
It is well known that any formulaic genre has a predictable story and a conventional meaning, nevertheless what makes each story unique is the ethos, that is to say the relationship between characters and environment. When the environment is digital, new media renegotiate traditional formulaic features, as is the case with detective stories and crime fiction in e-literature. The paper illustrates how digital ontology shapes the relationship between the ethos and the law. Indeed digital technology determines not only the criminal deed and the method of investigation, but it also highlights how the perception of the crime and the resultant moral or legal responsibility are more and more undetermined in social interaction. For Christie’s inter-war fiction or in American hard-boiled literature, the issue of social order was crucial, but contemporary aporia calls into question the happy ending of the investigation. We can anticipate that in electronic crime fiction the final social order and the need for penalty measures are not part of the storytelling.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 02:38
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Sound and queer affirmative space in augmented reality
Despite the burgeoning interest in the creation of imaginative spaces in AR and VR, very little focus has been given to sound. This paper borrows aspects of cinema studies and cultural geography to argue that sound can create a discursive environment and a queer space in Augmented Reality (AR). Referring to Michel Chion’s Audio-vision (1990), and Steven Shaviro’s Post-cinematic affect (2010), I explore how the assemblage of aural, visual and haptic in AR pieces, such as Caitlin Fisher’s ‘Chez moi’ (2014), create what Lev Manovich (2001) calls ‘hybrid spaces’, spaces visually disjointed but semantically connected. In ‘Chez moi’, Fisher invites the viewer to put on their headphones and watch the video on their smartphone while walking down Hayden street in Toronto, where the lesbian bar Chez moi was located when Fisher was a teenager. The audiovisual piece augment the physical reality of the viewer through a montage of various media forms, such as Fisher’s voice over, images of news reports, and fictitious audio and images.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 03:21
