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1. Is Your Computer's Sound on? Fiction on the Flash Platform

   With the arrival of the electronic media, the limits and possibilities for writers of prose fiction changed fundamentally. On the Internet, writers, who had had to depend on the linearity of the signifier in the printed media for the production and consumption of their fiction, explored the new patterns of signification suggested by the computer-based media. And, since the late 1990s, multimedia platforms have appeared, allowing writers to manipulate all kinds of text – video as well as audio, written as well as spoken – in an almost endless variety of ways. My paper takes a look at what happens to prose-fiction when it moves from the world of the printed book to the screen. I'm interested, first and foremost, in the work of contemporary writers who are using the multimedia platform FLASH in their attempts at "adapting" fiction already in print for the computer screen, e.g. Jeanette Winterson, or who have moved beyond hard copy fiction and are producing multimedia events instead, e.g. Alan Bigelow.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 10:43

2. Text and Digital Media: The Visualization of Code, Codex and Context

   The changes provoked by contemporary digital media have altered the traditional concepts of political and social hierarchies as well as blurred the boundaries between disciplines. The concepts of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, as well as those of transnationalism and multiculturalism, offer insight into the new sets of relationships that have developed between diverse disciplines within a global and local context. These relationships are framed within a digital media structure based on processes of mediation, remediation and transmediation that reflect the digital transformations that have blurred the boundaries between classic and new media (Lev Manovich; Henry Jenkins). In this context literary works are no longer part of a standalone discipline but can be visually represented in multiple visual formats, both digital and analogue. The text itself with its context, real and/or virtual, becomes a visual structure that can be manipulated and engaged with beyond its original purpose.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 10:46

3. Philosophical Labyrinths in Cybertexts

   Not only since Postmodernism have spatial dichotomies such as absence and presence, inside and outside played a major role in defining the human condition and the physical positioning of the subject within the world. With the emergence of phenomena like HTML and the World Wide Web authors and artists have found new tools to explore and express new ideas of the human condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Hypertexts or, with Espen J. Aarseth, “cybertexts”, offer new ‘roads’ which need not be taken, hiding places or Dantesque places of beauty. The one is only a step away from the other; in which space the user finds himself depends on the ‘literary machine’ with its narrative strategies. Often compared to labyrinths, these virtual spaces recall an almost archetypal quality of the conditio humana: The choice of exploring life, and of finding enlightenment and defeating the mythical minotaur; yet with one significant difference, as it appears one cannot escape from the labyrinth. Heidegger’s “Dasein” as much as Derrida’s “différance” are key to understanding what this means. At the example of three texts, Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, Mark Z.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 10:53

4. Sámi literature in the age of digitalization and globalization

   This paper is concerned with the adaptation of Sámi narratives to new media. Sámi literature has proved its power of adjustment in the past, and the emergence of new forms of literature and texts in different shapes and genres that we witness today, indicates that this strength has not faded. Sámi literature finds its roots and inspiration in oral tradition. The first Sámi writers were storytellers who established a transition from oral to written literature. Recently, examples of adaptation to audio-visual genres and Internet have multiplied, motivated by the contemporary sociopolitical context for minorities and minority languages in Sweden. From a historical perspective, Sámi literature has undergone an adaptation from an oral to a written medium. Today, the spoken word, sound and visual effects meet again in new media. The transition from a narrative told orally as a performance to an audiovisual medium entails an adaptation not only to a new medium, but also to a new audience, and a new context. In this paper, I investigate how Sámi literature and folklore emerge in new media, more specifically television and Internet.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 11:00

5. Electronic literature or digital art? And where are all the challenging hypertextual novels?

   Lack of new and challenging, interactive hypertextual fictions causes a continuously growing frustration among literary scholars like myself. While we are witnessing a growing and exciting field within digital poetry, and especially digital art as such, hypertextual fictions seem to have become part of and/or floating into interactive digital performance and installation artworks. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s CAVE-work Screen and Camilla Utterback’s Text Rain are among digital artworks based on text and words. According to Roberto Simanowski in “Holopoetry, Biopoetry and Digital Literature” (2007), however, Utterback’s work in particular, must be seen as a work of digital art rather than literature, since its aim is not to be read but to be played with. So how much text, how many literary generic traits must a hypertextual fiction include to be called literature and not digital art?

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 11:10