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1. Creative Communities: Nooks, Niches, and Networks

   Creative Communities: Nooks, Niches, and Networks

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.09.2011 - 16:38

2. Can We Help Being Creative?

   People on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea take responsibility for the fertility and reproduction of land and people. Through gardening, hunting, ceremony and initiation, they are continually ‘creating’: both people/places, and the conditions for the emergence of these things as recognisably human. Engaging in the continual creation of the human world is not optional for them but intrinsic to what it means to be a human being. Creativity is necessarily distributed in such circumstances, power over creation or destruction oscillates, but to be a person means participation. As such, the emergence of persons or things, as objects of contemplation, or exchange, or value and beauty, are achieved momentarily as elements of the wider process of which they are part and through which they have meaning.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.09.2011 - 16:41

3. Electronic Authorship, Collaboration, Community, and Practice

   Community has been a central focus of my career in the field of electronic literature, particularly in helping to shape and structure the Electronic Literature Organization, a USA-based nonprofit organization central to the field, and more recently as project leader of ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation and Practice. I consider practical research and artistic community development vital to the creation of a persistent environment that enables network-based creative communities. When creative communities and research communties are not geographically co-located, institutional identities, online publications, directories, and knowledge bases, and in-person conferences, festivals, and events provide for a kind of floating agora that enables creative community to thrive across borders.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.09.2011 - 16:45

4. The Genealogy of a Creative Community: Why is Afternoon the "Grandaddy" of Hypertext Fiction?

   Michael Joyce’s hypertext fiction afternoon, a story was first publicly presented in 1987, and is generally known as the “granddaddy” of electronic literature (Coover, 1992). It has been anthologised by Norton, is substantially analysed and discussed in dozens of academic treatises and is taught or at least mentioned in almost every course taught on electronic literature. But afternoon is not the first work of electronic literature. Why did this particular work become the progenitor of a community of writers, a common reference point for scholars and students for the next 25 years? There were alternative possibilities. (The case has already been made that interactive fiction is equally a form of electronic literature - but IF is a distinct genre with a distinct community.) Why didn’t bp Nichols’ work “First Screening: Computer Poems” (1984) start a movement? Why are there no cricital discussions of Judy Malloy’s database narrative “Uncle Roger”, published on the WELL in 1986/97? This brief paper will question the role of the mythical progenitor in the creation of a creative communtiy. Why do we tend to imagine a father or “granddaddy” of a field?

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.09.2011 - 16:48

5. Because It's Not There: Ekphrasis and the Threat of Graphics in Interactive Fiction

   Existing scholarship on interactive fiction (IF, also known as the text adventure) tends to treat it as a video game genre and/or as a category of electronic literature. In this essay I argue that IF can be understood as participating in traditions of visual prose and ekphrastic textuality, insofar as IF consists of room and object descriptions which direct the player to visualize the things they describe. Unlike traditional ekphrastic literature, however, IF also asks the player to take practical actions in response to the images he or she visualizes. During the commercial era of IF, ekphrasis was the most effective means available of providing players with immersive visual experiences. However, graphical video games have now surpassed IF in this area. Therefore, in order to justify the continued existence of IF, contemporary IF authors have been forced to conceive of the visuality of IF otherwise than in terms of the logic of transparency. One strategy for doing this, exemplified by Nick Montfort's game, Ad Verbum, is to abandon visuality almost entirely and emphasize IF's linguistic and textual qualities.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 12:20

6. At the Time of Writing: Digital Media, Gesture and Handwriting

   This paper examines the way literary practice in digital media illuminates traditional literary processes that otherwise remain unremarked, and conversely, what the literary concept of ‘address’ might contribute to an understanding of the way digital media are reinventing literary agency. It explores handwriting as an embodied praxis linking thought with corporeality through the medium of gesture, and its transformations in text-based new media art. Handwriting (and especially signatures) has long been thought to make personality traits manifest. Its expressive gestural and kinematic aspect can be illuminated by Werner’s theory of physiognomic perception in which two-dimensional diagrams are shown as consistently corresponding to and eliciting a small number of categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) in viewers. Diane Gromala’s ‘Biomorphic Typography’ (2000 onwards) in which the user’s keystrokes generate biofeedback input which combines with the behaviours assigned to typography to animate text in the present time of writing draws on these conventions and complicates them in the process.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 15:32

7. Narrative in Social Media

   Stories broadcast in 140 or less characters over the course of a day may, at first, seem only a 21st century update of serialized micro-fiction, yet considering the strategies authors take to produce literary works involving social media, their creations resist easy definition.  This paper looks the broad notion of narrative as it plays out in the social networking site, Twitter, in works such as Adam Higgs et al’s  “Crushing It:  A Social Media Love Story," Jay Bushman’s “The Good Captain,” and Dene Grigar’s “The 24-Hour Micro-Elit Project.”  Specifically, the paper asks two questions:  First, how do narratives created for social media sites work against what has become the conventional way to describe e-literature?  Second, what do we learn about social media literature if we think about it in terms of non-narrativity? At stake are assumptions about what constitutes electronic literature and conventional views about narrativity in relation to works produced with and for digital media.

   (Source: author's abstract)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 15:34

8. Tagging Practices and the Disturbed Dialectic of Literary Criticism

   This paper will discuss the relationship between speed and literary criticism in the age of new media.  Specifically, this paper will explore the dual metaphor of the “tag” as an official consumer label and an underground art form, and the productive tension that exists when both forms exist within the same urban space.  Using this metaphor to discuss traditional terminologies and folksonomy as forms of “tagging” that can create productive tension within database projects like the Electronic Literature Directory, I will conclude with a call for attentiveness that can push both casual readers and conservative scholars towards criticism that is technologically appropriate, ethically engaged, and culturally vital.

   (Source: author's abstract)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 15:37

9. Making Connections Visible: Building a Knowledge Base for Electronic Literature

   Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a collaborative research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation. Focusing on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP is intended both to study the formation and interactions of that community and also to further electronic literature research and practice in Europe. The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is a publicly accessible online database that focuses on capturing core bibliographic data and archival materials about authors, creative works, critical writing, events, organizations, publishers, and teaching resources and on making visible the connections between creative and scholarly activities in the field.

   This presentation will focus on three aspects of the ELMCIP Knowledge Base in particular:

   1) Cross-referencing to make visible the emergence of creative and scholarly communities of practice

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 15:42

10. Uncreative Writing

    Uncreative Writing

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 16.09.2011 - 15:20

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