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1. Game-Based Digitally Mediated Narrative Construction

   There are various ways of constructing a short story or a novel ranging from detailed planning of characters, back story, and plot before beginning to write to fluid writing. Somewhere in the middle, but near fluid writing, is the approach taken by the late television writer Sydney Sheldon who visualized the flow of the story and narrated what he saw and heard to a secretary. The paper surveys practices in narrative construction both current and speculative, such as a possible future use of advanced functional brain imaging, but emphasizes a particular game-based approach currently being attempted in a pilot project.

 At the Virtual Environments Lab researchers are developing a system that generates a text based on game play. The game has two purposes: entertainment for the player and generation of a work of fiction that describes the experiences of the player. Many of the characters and situations come from Through the Looking Glass. The player character, as Alice, explores an 8x8 grid and interacts with non player characters. The NPCs ask questions, and the PC gives free response answers. The PC can also ask the NPCs questions.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:09

2. The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print: Material Strategies for Innovative Fiction in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s Vas

   In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel Vas: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. Jackson’s book, alluding to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about a monster composed of various bodies while the book itself is also a monstrous text: a nonlinear patchwork of links across networks of words and images.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:12

3. Cave Writing: Reshaping Writing at Brown

   In the spirit of engaging Robert Coover's contributions to the electronic literature field (one of the conference aims) and simultaneously looking at the cutting edge of our field, this panel will discuss the groundbreaking Cave Writing project that Coover has initiated at Brown. It will feature the two primary faculty the project has had over the last eight years (Coover and Cayley), two of the students who have been involved in organizing the project and creating work (Wardrip-Fruin and Gorman), and one of the critics who has looked at this work most seriously (Raley). Topics will include the history of the literary work done in the Brown Cave, the unexpected power of two dimensional typography in three dimensional space, experiences of embodied interaction and spectatorship in combination and tension with literary reading, the role of non-textual images, animation, and sound in the Brown Cave experiments, and others.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:33

4. Process-Intensive Fiction

   Unlike digital poetry, which has pursued process-intensive directions throughout its history, the dominant directions of digital fiction make relatively light use of computational processes. Whether one looks at the traditions of hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, or video games, the primary model is a set of connections (traveled in different manners) between largely static chunks of language. This panel explores a set of alternatives to this model. The suggested potential panelists include the author of the first book on this topic, published in 2009 (Wardrip-Fruin); one of the authors of Facade, the first fully realized interactive drama (Mateas); the creator of Curveship, a new interactive fiction tool that introduces discourse-level variation as a first-class parameter (Montfort); a prominent author, commentator, and tool builder (Short); the author of Blue Lacunae, a vast, highly variable interactive fiction (Reed); the creator of new algorithms for literary variability based on conceptual blending (Harrell); and the author of the mainstream game industry's most ambitious project in this space, Far Cry 2 (Redding).

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:39

5. Machine Subjectivity, Politics and Digital Arts

   Although human interaction with technological artifacts often involves treating them as if they are alive, the dominant discourse in our society portrays technology as the instrument of its human master. In the context of computing, our desire of absolute control over machines manifests itself both as the human computer interaction (HCI) community’s emphasis on “usability” and as popular culture’s apocalyptic imagination of the out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) systems trying to eliminate humanity. It is revealing that, for instance, the word “robot” comes from “slave” in Czech. This paper examines the social and aesthetic limitations of this narrow instrumental view of technology. It proposes an alternative interaction model based on machine subjectivity, that is, constructing and perceiving computer systems as an independent entity in its own right.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:42

6. A Cross-Medial Close Reading of Swedish Digital Poetry

   In the work with my thesis on digital poetry I aim to highlight the following three axes

   1) A theoretical reflection considering language in interaction with the visual and auditory modalities as well as an investigation of the relation between language and technical media, using theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Friedrich A. Kittler.

   2) An analytical, methodical approach, which investigates digital works of poetry and their intermedial relations and effects of meaning.

   3) Putting into perspective the historical concrete poetry and avant-garde movements – primarily from Scandinavia.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:44

7. [Id]entities as a Multilayered Self: The Individual Pervasiveness of Social Networks

   [Id]entities as a Multilayered Self: The Individual Pervasiveness of Social Networks

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 06.06.2013 - 12:02

8. Textopia: Experiments with Locative Literature

   textopia is a design experiment situated in humanist media studies, and based on a simple idea: Making it possible for someone who is walking through the city with a mobile phone to listen to literary texts which talk about whichever place she is walking by. The aim of this exercise has been to explore the relationship between places and literary texts – not just what the relationship is and has been, but what it can be in the new medium. Inspired by the ideas embedded in hermeneutics, open source philosophy and agile software development, I have outlined a methodological approach that I call "agile media design". In the course of the practical process I have ialso dentified three key principles for locative media design, summed up in the "G-P-S" model: Granularity, Particiation and Serendipity. Together they describe the unique characteristics of designs like textopia – a category I call "annotative, locative media".

   Scott Rettberg - 26.06.2013 - 13:19

9. Der Dialog der Kultur und die Kultur des Dialogs: Die chinesische Netzliteratur

   Mit der Entwicklung des Internets erscheinen im chinesischen Literaturraum viele neue literarische Werke in Internet-Megaportalen, auf literarischen Webseiten und auf persönlichen Homepages. Aus Schreiblust oder um persönliche Gefühle auszudrücken stellen Amateurautoren ihre Werke ins Netz. Sie handeln vor allem nicht von den großen Themen, sondern überwiegend von persönlichen Erfahrungen und Gefühlen. Ihre Sprache ist oft witzig, lebendig, alltäglich. Zugleich tauchen auch einige Werke auf, die gar nicht für die Buchform konzipiert worden sind. Sie bestehen aus vielen Hyperlinks, die die Leser anklicken können oder müssen, oder sie benutzen außer Sprache auch Musik, Animationen und andere mediale Ausdrucksformen. Einige Werke beruhen sogar auf der interaktiven Teilnahme des Lesers als unverzichtbare Voraussetzung für ihre Entstehung.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 01.07.2013 - 14:23

10. Ce livre qui n'en est pas un: le texte littéraire électronique

    Un texte littéraire électronique est écrit en code et ne peut exister sous forme imprimée. C’est une forme spécifique qui existe depuis la création dans les années 1970 des jeux d’aventures textuels (Willie Crowther et Don Woods, Adventure). Elle s’est développée de par l’exploitation de liens hypertextuels (Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl), d’éléments hypermédias, et s’oriente à présent vers la sophistication croissante des moyens mis en œuvre pour que le lecteur participe à la création de l’œuvre (Stuart Moulthrop, Pax). Le rapport entre jeux et textes reste très fort, au point que certains arguent que les jeux d’ordinateur actuels sont des œuvres littéraires électroniques. La forme est hantée par la fragilité de ses supports, et son économie semble reposer sur la gratuité.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 15:10

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