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1. Hey Siri, Tell Me a Story: AI, Procedural Generation, and Digital Narratives

   This paper examines a selection of examples of AI storytelling from film, games, and interactive fiction to imagine the future of AI authorship and to question the impetus behind this trend of replacing human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. Increasingly, we’re becoming familiarized with AI agents as they are integrated into our daily lives in the form of personified virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Recently, director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter, who named himself Benjamin. Both Sunspring (2016) and It’s No Game (2017) were created by Goodwin’s long short-term memory (LSTM) AI that was trained on media content that included science fiction scripts and dialogue delivered by actor David Hasselhoff. It’s No Game offers an especially apt metacommentary on AI storytelling as it addresses the possibility of a writers strike and imagines that entertainment corporations opt out of union negotiations and instead replace their writers with AI authors.

   Jane Lausten - 05.09.2018 - 14:57

2. Stalking, Shredding, and Streaming: Reading E-Lit Through Artists’ Alternative Web Browsers

   Alongside the emergent commercial browsers of the late 1990s, several artists made alternative browsers that articulated other ways of conceptualizing a global network of electronic documents, and stood in relief to the particular electronic textuality manifest in browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—a hypertext imaginary that still deeply informs the predominant browsers of today. Post presents research into three such works: The Web Stalker (1997) by the artist collective I/O/D, Shredder (1998) by Mark Napier, and netomat (1999) by Maciej Wisniewski. 

   Post will draw on interviews with the artists and art historical analytical methods to describe the development, functioning, and long-term impact of these works. In particular, Post considers the ways in which these artists’ browsers can inform the study and practice of electronic literature.

   sondre rong davik - 05.09.2018 - 15:05

3. Engineering Language: Electronic Literature, the “Value” of Words, and the Teaching of College Writing

   Since the widespread adoption of the printing press, we have been writing with and for machines. However, the ways in which and the extent to which machines could participate in acts of writing have changed over time. We have now reached a point where machines play an active role not only in the reproduction and distribution of writing, but in its production and, even, at times, in its creation and composition. As we find ourselves more and more writing with and for machines, there is the possibility that compositional functions once assigned uniquely to humans can be outsourced or automated.

   Li Yi - 05.09.2018 - 15:06

4. Narrating the City in Augmented Aur(e)ality

   The idea of walking as the practice of narrating the city constitutes the recurrent theme of Michel de Certau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life:” the pedestrian activity is repeatedly compared to or described as “enunciation,” “enunciatory operations,” “statements” and “stories”. According to the French sociologist, “[t]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (de Certeau 1988: 97). The story of spatial practices “begins on ground level, with footsteps” (de Certeau 1988: 97) and “the art of >>turning<< phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (tourner un parcours)” (de Certeau 1988: 100). It might well be said that walking in the city represents not only the very prototype of ergodic literature (Aarseth 1997) but also predates the notion of augmented reality in its technological sense.

   Susanne Årflot Løtvedt - 05.09.2018 - 15:12

5. Metainterface Character

   These projects ultimately portray a bleak picture of a metainterface industrial control of literacy and of how literature, art and aesthetics is commodified and instrumentalized. However, they also point to how literature potentially becomes sites of critical reflection of the way reading-writing is encased in a big data drama. In this way, they point towards redesigning and rewriting the metainterface character. 

   sondre rong davik - 05.09.2018 - 15:21

6. All VR’s a Stage: The Aesthetics of Immersive Mixed Reality Theater

   Virtual Reality presents great promise as a storytelling medium, but rarely delivers on that promise because it is often approached as an offshoot of cinema. Virtual Reality as a narrative medium has much more in common with theater, using multi-modal narrative in a three dimensional space to tell the story. The possibility of multiple users sharing a virtual space simultaneously creates the opportunity for live performance, with one or more performers moving among and around the audience -- immersive theater within a computer-generated setting. This paper examines the aesthetics of this new space for digital performance. 

   We introduce a new type of performance activity, “Immersive Mixed Reality Theatre” (IMRT), which promises exciting possibilities for participatory immersive digital narratives. To explore the potential aesthetics of IMRT we created Holojam In Wonderland (2017), a short play inspired by the work of Lewis Carroll. It was built on the Holojam platform developed by the NYU Future Reality Lab, which enables both performers and audience to walk around with untethered VR headsets within the same room. 

   June Hovdenakk - 05.09.2018 - 15:29

7. Is there a gap in the classroom? Inanimate Alice in Portuguese schools

   There is still a big gap between electronic literature for children and Portuguese schools. Actually, this situation is in contrast with the increasing interest the educational community and publishers show in print literature for children and young adults in Portugal.
   In this paper we aim to develop the steps that the team from the project Inanimate Alice: Translating Electronic Literature for an Educational Context (Centre of Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra) took in order to give Portuguese students the opportunity to experience e-lit.
   As our ultimate goal is to introduce e-lit in Portuguese schools, the team has translated the first five episodes of Inanimate Alice and is now working on the translation of the Pedagogical Guidance, created by Bill Boyd.
   To accomplish that, we needed to find financial support to publish the Portuguese version of the series. So we contacted the two biggest education-oriented Publishing Companies in Portugal, but they rely a lot on the ministerial documents and they barely dare to innovate, as it is safer to publish what the Ministry of Education (ME) recommends schools, teachers and students to buy.

   Li Yi - 05.09.2018 - 15:48

8. Tapping the Mind: Memories Beneath Your Fingers

   Memories are deeply rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, and material objects. The cognitive processes of forgetting and recalling, the latter involving “action-oriented responses from a living subject to material triggers -- physical stimuli from external environment” (van Dijck 2007: 30), have not only been studied by neuroscientists, psychologists, and cognitive theorists, but have been addressed and examined by e-lit writers as well. 

   Susanne Årflot Løtvedt - 05.09.2018 - 15:58

9. Translating Electronic Literature: A Few Conclusion, Methodologies and Insights

   Over a year and a half ago, a group of scholars, programmers, artists and translators started working on a research project focusing on the translation of various works of electronic literature, ranging from e-poetry (Maria Mencia’s The Poem That Crossed the Atlantic), digital database (Luís Lucas Pereira’s Machines of Disquiet), installation (Søren Pold et al’s The Poetry Machine), digital aurature (digital language art in programmable aurality) (John Cayley’s The Listeners) and hyperfiction (Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story). In order to identify common and divergent issues depending on the genres, formats and languages of the works under study, they were all examined through the prism of the following concepts: Translinguistic translation (translation between languages), Transcoding (translation between machine-readable codes and between machine-readable codes and human-readable text), Transmedial translation (translation between medial modalities), and Transcreation (translation as a shared creative practice).

   Kamilla Idrisova - 05.09.2018 - 15:58

10. Pleasure and E-Lit: Looking at the Difficult and Unfamiliar in the Undergraduate Classroom

    In their 2001 book Art with a Difference: Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art, Leonard Diepeeveen and Timothy Van Laar observe “Artwork is not just an object; it is an object (or event) that does something. The most basic thing an artwork does is give its viewers an implicit set of instructions for its use; it suggests ways in which it ought to be experienced” (95).

    While not written with electronic literature in mind, the book was designed as a supplementary text for beginning arts courses with an awareness of the difficulty that many beginning or non- specialist readers have in understanding contemporary art. The e-lit classroom can be beset by similar difficulties; even the most avid readers in a class can be puzzled by or resistant to the diverse cognitive and ergodic “reading” activities that accrue under the banner of electronic literature.

    Li Yi - 05.09.2018 - 16:01

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