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1. Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest

   It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.

   Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.

   In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:36

2. Creating Story Instruments with Stepworks 2

   In this workshop, attendees will learn to create "story instruments," a genre of performative e-lit with a very simple interaction model. In a story instrument, the author decides *what* happens, and the user, through a one-button interface, determines *when* it happens. This form, with its inherent connections to music, video games, interactive comics, and slide presentations, has been used to collaboratively remix the works of noted California poets, sonify the history of Mars exploration, create multi-vocal lyric videos for Hamilton, and visualize samples of martial arts films in hip-hop tracks — to name just a few applications. The software attendees will use to create their story instruments is Stepworks 2, a new version of the web-based tool I first introduced in 2017. Stepworks (http://step.works) has been described as "an ideal platform for teaching e-literature through feminist critical making pedagogies" (Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, "Back in a Flash: Critical Making Pedagogies to Counter Technological Obsolescence" [The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, December 10, 2020]).

   Milosz Waskiewicz - 26.05.2021 - 15:05

3. Feeling without Touching

   Feeling without Touching is a workshop inspired by John Koenig's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a list of invented words that describe feelings that “give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.” Through a series of guided activities that include movement and writing with the body, participants will explore what it feels like to interact with one another without “physically” being in touch and reimagine new ways of languaging emotion in digital spaces.

   Milosz Waskiewicz - 26.05.2021 - 15:20

4. Subject-making and aesthetics of data practices

   Subject-making is profoundly aesthetic. In the current moment, of data-intensive cultures and identity wars, the subjects that are made stem from machine learning techniques that engage aesthetics differently, nonetheless profoundly. My talk will focus on subjects of data abstractions, poetics of idealisation and aesthetic recognition.
    

   Scott Rettberg - 29.05.2021 - 15:17

5. A Platform Poetics: Computational Art, Material and Formal Specificities, and 101 BASIC Poems

   My digital art is highly computational, or process intensive—it is more about code and symbol manipulation, and less about data, the visualization of data, or multimedia effects. But beyond this, what I do often explores specific computer platforms. In this essay I describe how my project 101 BASIC Poems is part of a platform practice engaging the Commodore 64, the Apple II series of computers, and the BASIC programming language. My project 101 BASIC Poems is an initiative to develop just more than a hundred computational artworks, each one not just a digital text but also a computer program that can and should be run. On the computational end of things, a major inspiration is 101 BASIC Computer Games, a collection of BASIC programs that fired the imaginations and scaffolded the programming ability of many people in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

   Nick Montfort - 15.11.2021 - 00:24

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