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The Politics of Web Materiality: Making Electronic Literature in the Capitalocene
We are on the brink of planetary catastrophe. Environmental, political, health and humanitarian crises have infused the zeitgeist of the Anthropocene with a sense of urgency (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Human activity has been placed in opposition (or as an add-on) to Nature, participating in a dialectical discourse that, like the binaries of sexism, racism, or even Eurocentrism, points directly to the violence, inequality and oppression of the modern world (Moore 2016). As these relate to climate and political change, the Anthropocene argument presents the exploitation and accumulation of capital as conterminous to human nature and progress.
Accumulation, however, is not only productive, but necrotic (McBrien 2016), in the sense that it unfolds a slow violence sustained by reduction or, perhaps, extinction: the reduction of cultures, languages and peoples; as well as the extinction of the Earth through depletion of resources. If accumulation is natural to us, then so are reduction and extinction.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 14:40
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Writing as collective assemblages in the age of (post)digital capitalism, or de-colonizing e-literature in the minor key.
In my proposition, I would like to explore the notion of the minor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), employed here as a theoretical tool allowing for a critical inquiry into multifarious e-literary post-internet practices, popularly referred to as Third-Generation E-Literature (Flores, 2019), and accompanied by third-wave e-literature scholarship (Ensslin et al., 2020). However, I am going to build on this notion following its recent repurposing by Anne Sauvagnargues (as the minor style) (Sauvagnargues, 2016) and Erin Manning (as the minor gesture) (Manning, 2016). Kathi Inman Berens aptly remarks (Berens, 2020) that de-colonization of e-literature requires multiplicity of perspectives, as it entails not only cultural hegemonies operating along geographical, ethnic and racial axes and following the set of distinctions shaped by modernist aesthetics, but it also needs to address widespread domination of Big Tech companies shaping the popular internet platforms, programming solutions and users' practices.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:57
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‘Doing e-lit’ in print: Plus-Human Codes and the (re)Turn to the Bookbound
“He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.
Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:11
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The Paradox of Electronic Literature in the Classroom: The Challenges for New Literacy Practices within the Platformized School
Reviewing the history of computing, the educational potential of new ways of knowledge representation and new literary affordances have sparked many influential ideas and reform efforts, spanning from “frantic systems” (Nelson, 1970) to constructionist discovery learning (Papert, 1993) to the reconfiguration of literary education (Landow, 2006, ch. 7). Yet, the current usages of electronic literature in education arguably fall behind those early anticipations. Therefore, this paper explores the wider educational and social entanglements that withhold electronic literature from entering classrooms in the context of current technology transformations. Considering the recent pandemicrelated global upsurge of the digitalization of educational systems, the mere lack of supply of digital devices and equipment will cease to be the main obstacle for the adoption of electronic literature in K12 classrooms. Nonetheless, the question shifts to what imaginaries and discourses shape (and limit) the use of new digital literary affordances. Reviewing current trends, three issues are identified.
Lene Tøftestuen - 24.05.2021 - 17:07
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An Institutional Approach to Building a Platform of Digital Literary Works: The Case(s) of Dutch and Flemish Digital Literature
The recently formed Dutch Digital Literature Consortium – a partnership of researchers from Tilburg University, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Royal Library of the Netherlands and local libraries – aims to develop and launch an online catalogue of digital literature, created in the Netherlands and Flanders, and turn this collection into a publicly accessible digital catalogue. The project draws inspiration from comparable databases, such as the Electronic Literature Collection 1-3, NT2, Hermaneia, and Literatura Electrónica Hispánica. Whereas these databases bring together digital literary projects from a variety of traditions – often with a particular focus –, the project at hand focuses exclusively on works from a specific geographical location (much like collections such as the Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection).
Lene Tøftestuen - 24.05.2021 - 18:49
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Comparing methods of generating 3.5 inch floppy disk forensic images
I propose comparing methods of generating forensic images of 3.5 inch floppy disks in order to evaluate methodologies for use in media archeology labs. Many key works of electronic literature (including the bulk of Eastgate Systems, Inc. early publications) were released on 3.5 inch floppy media. I will use both Kyroflux and Superdrive floppy disk controller units to generate forensic images and also generate images using BitCurator suite of forensic software and using legacy computing hardware and software.
Gathering data on the quality of images created by these disparate methods and also on the workflows involved and the ease and practicality of employing them will produce useful information for other media archeology labs examining how the field of floppy disk forensics has advanced.
The results of these tests should show useful comparison data between the quality of the images created from identical media, the range of image types that can be created using each technique, and the usefulness for online access and emulation each forensic methodology and platform provides.
(Source: Author's own abstract)
Lene Tøftestuen - 24.05.2021 - 19:16
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Executable Landscapes: Speculative Platforms for Ecological E-Literature
The contemporary digital environment is made possible through a matrix of behemoth infrastructures that traverse the orbital, atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial domains. These infrastructures manifest not only in the narrowly technical sense, but encompass the manufacturing chains, regulatory interfaces, and geopolitical contexts that enable (or forestall) the development, deployment, and maintenance of digital systems at a global scale.
Underpinning all these aspects are the flows of energy and materials constituting the liveable Earthly ecology. The latter comprises the ultimate baseline ‘platform’ on which specific digital platforms, as more commonly expressed, are enabled—but which, being so defined, can obscure these far larger structures and processes in which they are embedded.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:09
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Lab-yrinthe: an online laboratory to observe children’s e-lit and support digital literacy
Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:
- a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;
- a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;
- a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:46
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Lyric Recollection and the Preservation of Ephemeral and Social Elit
Though not an ideal solution, lyric reflection can be a significant method of preserving electronic literature. Having lost Flash, one solution is mimetic: a technical project resulting in a faithful copy of the original work, allowing the work to be experienced in all its particularity and interactivity. Failing that, footage, screenshots, and thorough, plainly descriptive writing can make a long-term accessible record so that at least that space in the genre’s history can be seen and understood by future generations. What happens, however, when a work a work features elements of ephemerality? On a computational level, this can happen to a far greater degree than with a traditional print book. Outside of rare tragedies, we can retrieve an old text from the archives, but we cannot retrieve the experience of, for instance, Multi-User Dungeons in the late 1990s. Lyric recollection, however, provides a literary model for securing something very close to the experience of the work.
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:56
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The Fugue * book: when platforms don’t let us escape literature
Anton Ferret, author of the E-Lit work The Fugue* book, will present a reflection on the technological and creative part of it, all that can be done well working with platforms and taking advantage of their own intrusion into the data and all that it means to lose it by the cultural and technological change that has meant the greater awareness for privacy. Oreto Doménech, a researcher in digital literature, will focus on the reception: on how this literary work reconfigures the platforms through which it’s expressed and on how fiction itself uses the platforms to build a metadiscursive reflection on the literature inserted in the historical and social fact.
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 17:09
