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Locative Audio Play
The paper describes and reflects upon a research and development project specifically related to a sound installation – Listener (Hoem 2014) – where the purpose has been to examine artistic possibilities when staging an auditive user experience, via micro positioned mobile devices. Listener is augmenting an existing environment, adding a fictional layer, using sound as the only expression. The auditive text is experienced through headphones, connected to a location aware mobile unit, which is positioned by “beacons” (Bluetooth LE transmitters).
Listener tries to relocate an environment, from Bergen railway station to the Bergen University College’s premises, using sound. To this environment we have added six fictional characters, and the user can listen to these characters’ cell phone calls. The text has to be experienced by moving around, as the sounds corresponds to the user’s position and orientation.
Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 15:25
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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
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Watching Textual Screens Then and Now: A Cinema/E-Lit Conversation
Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) suggests a coming art in which “the computer becomes an indispensable component in the production of an art that would be impossible without it” and in which “the machine makes autonomous decisions on alternative possibilities that ultimately govern the outcome of the artwork.” Much of what Youngblood presaged has been fulfilled in the field of electronic literature, which has a significant unexplored areas of overlap with experimental cinema.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 13:54
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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 Public Life of Electronic Literature: Writers’ Festivals Online
The end-point of any form of literary communication is the reader, as acknowledged by the shift towards studying reception in fields such as book history and cultural studies. Electronic literary studies has, to date, remained principally concerned with issues of textuality and medium. Certainly it has, from its inception, extensively explored theoretical issues around the nature of authorship and the extent reader agency. However, this “reader” has tended to remain broadly a theoretical construct rather than a documented empirical reality. Indeed, the first wave of electronic literature has been criticised for imbuing this idealised “reader” with an appetite for digital literary experimentation, common amongst electronic literature scholars and practitioners but scarcely evident amongst the broader reading public.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:25
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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
