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1. From Audio Black to Artful Noises: Looking at Sound in Electronic Literature

   The interplay between sound and image was a vexed issue for practioners and critics of the 20th century art screen art. As the story goes, some argued for a "complex interaction of sound with image" (Kahn 142) others for the political necessity of non-synchronized sound. Early on, "the dream" of "correlating sound and image" through localization (Altman) to deploy sound so as "to reinforce the reality effect" and to "induce[...] spectators to center their gaze." (Polet). There is a sense of disappointment in this trajectory, from the "talkie"to Dolby Surround, by which the sound track comes to maintenance of an illusionistic 3-dimensional visual space. 

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:36

2. Digging For The Roots Of Interactive Storytelling

   This paper is a writer's reflections on the pre-computer origins of interactive narrative. It seeks out forms of human expression dating back to prehistory that can viewed as the precursors of contemporary interactive storytelling and contemplates what can be learned from these forms that can be applied to contemporary works of interactive storytelling. The examined forms include the participatory myth-based dramas of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks; coming of age rituals in traditional societies; games that blend spiritual beliefs and athleticism; and various Judeo-Christian and pagan religious practices.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:46

3. Played by Hyperfiction. Modes of Reading Megan Heyward's "Of Day, of Night"

   How do we read digital literature? I want to approach the topic by studying how electronic literature prefigures the reader's response. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the preconditions for reading electronic literature. I argue that electronic literature might be considered as a text game, in Wolfgang Iser's sense, and that different work prefigures different attitudes towards reading. The attitudes regarding reading, or modes of reading, I will focus on the semantic orientation of reading, aesthetic enjoyment, a mode of gaining experience, and absorption of the reader.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:59

4. An Archival Approach to Curating Born-Digital and Electronic Literary Materials

   This panel session will explore the curation of electronic or born-digital materials in literary manuscript collections. Speakers will discuss how they applied (or tried to apply) traditional archival theories of appraisal, transfer, processing, preservation, and access to electronic records within their collections. The session will interest writers and artists, scholars, and curators and archivists specializing in electronic media and provide a unique chance for intellectual exchange between these groups.

   (Source: 2008 ELO Conference site)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 12:10

5. Sensory Modalities and Digital Media

   My presentation will discuss the use of information and social networking software in electronic writing with the aim of identifying and analyzing several important new directions in literary criticism in the digital era. 

   As I argue, one of the most significant pedagogical outcomes of media convergence within the literary arts centres upon criticism’s necessary de-emphasis of traditional genre-based modes of analysis and assessment. While digital works may resemble, perhaps even aesthetically mimic, the various analogue formats upon which they are based, both the qualitative and quantitative distinctions between texts, audio and image-based forms remain conceptual, not actual. Subsequently, the primary interpretative paradigms for all forms of digital cultural production tend to emerge via spatially accrued tensions and patterns between the work and its literal location within an information network. 

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 15:45

6. Provocation by Program: Imagining a Next-Revolution Eliza

   What program could have the effect on today's popular consciousness that Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza had in the mid-1960s? Eliza ignited numerous productive controversies about language, intelligence, and people's relationships to computers. The system has been hailed as the first and most important work of electronic literature. While other, more complex works have been innovative, challenging, and literary in ways that are perhaps more sophisticated, Eliza was an incisive program of great impact. We consider the provocative program within the contexts of computing from the 1960s to the present. Then, we identify several qualities, some of them not very obvious, that a similarly provocative literary program would need today.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 16:26

7. Avatars Sharing Agency: Metaphor in Interactive Narrative Environments

   This paper considers how the avatar focuses the metaphor of interactivity in video games and interactive narrative environments. It argues that, despite serving as the on-screen representation of user input, the avatar has some independent agency (whether through design or representational practice) that influences its behavior. Thus, rather than merely relying upon it as her transparent stand-in, the player must negotiate with the avatar to achieve her goals. The negotiation serves to dramatize interactivity as an imperfect conduit between the textual and extra-textual worlds. While not so evident in video games, this imperfection sustains the metaphor of interactivity, deepening expressivity in interactive narrative environments.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 16:32

8. Digital Poetry Beyond Avant-Garde Readings: Proposing a Digital Lyric

   Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 17:10

9. The Risk of Reading in Digital Literary Creation

   Modernity is by definition a time of discontinuities and ruptures. And just as writing is now a spatial art, art itself has taken on a certain literary validity in a fertile exercise in artistic permeability. Any ‘modernity' is associated with a certain need to renew the means of expression. The permanent redefinition of the condition and status of the artistic not only redefines the field of art, but also the possibility that artists become experimenters of the possible. Today the creative possibilities offered by the technologies in general and the Internet in particular reinforce and exploit to the limit the communicative intentions of works of literature. In this paper we would like to make a critical analysis of the 2007 edition of the "Ciutat de Vinaròs" Literary Awards winners: Stuart Moulthrop and Isaías Herreros

   (Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 20:29

10. The Aesthetics and Practice of Computational Literature

    While aesthetic practices in photography, film and music have undergone significant transformation due to the affordances of computational tools, the practice of creative and critical writing has remained largely unaffected. As programmable environments further populate the cultural environment it is increasingly important that we understand the ways in which those designed specifically for literary contexts may serve to challenge traditional notions of the writing endeavor. Our paper will provide a brief historical framework for the emergence of generative literary writing practices, a description of a new authoring environment (RiTa) for use in both the production and teaching of digital writing, and an analysis of specific concepts—including layering, materiality, authorial intent, constraints, and distributed creativity—that the use of this environment meaningfully engages.

    (Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

    Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 22:13

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