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Mapping out Spaces for E-Lit Criticism
This paper explores the process of discovering works of elit by focusing on the role of the online literary journal. The heyday of Web 1.0, the late 1990s, gave birth to the first generation of electronic literature. To support this emergent art form, this period also delivered a multitude of online literary journals that showcased hypertexts, kinetic poetry, animations, and interactive fiction as well as scholarly articles, interviews with authors, book reviews, and critical discourse. But as the Web became a more graphic-friendly navigation space and debates about cybertext vs. hypertext took centerstage in critical forums, celebration of electronic literature in web-zines and journals seemed to dry up. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, most of the literary journals that had flourished in the late '90s had ceased operations. What are the spaces for electronic literature and its discovery in the 21st century? How do these spaces or lack of them map and remap the field of electronic literature and its criticism?
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 11:56
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Multimedia Project of Isaac Rosenberg and William Blake
The crux of my work two artist/poets, William Blake (1757-1827) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1919), is in how they expanded the definitions of the man/nature relationship through mythology and spiritual exploration. In addition to audio recordings of readings of the poets' poetry that accompanies their artwork and selected words for emphasis, which I composed in a movie format, I created a podcast discussing my critical and analytical study of the influence of Blake's writing on the increasingly well-studied Modernist, Rosenberg. The exploration of Rosenberg is benefitted by a recent and first scholarly edition of Rosenberg's poems by Vivien Noakes in 2004. While Noakes' edition of his poetry is in itself important, little critical exploration into the influence of Blake on Rosenberg's poetry has occurred, although it is often mentioned in brief. Indeed, not much critical exploration into Rosenberg's poetry has occurred whatsoever. The natural elements of Blake's and Rosenberg's poetry and especially the difference in the ways they presented nature compared to their contemporaries, will stand foremost in this study.
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 13:23
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Code: Redact <Redact>
The "Codework Project" is an NSF (National Science Foundation) funded exploration of codework, language, performance, and embodiment, in relation to philosophies of the analog and digital. The exploration has resulted in exciting work at a leading edge of digital media practice. The project is based at West Virginia University, and continues several years of collaboration between the art/writer Alan Sondheim, WVU's Center for Literary Computing (CLC), and the Virtual Environments Laboratory (computer sciences). The work employs a range of technologies to map and remap the 'obdurate real' of bodies into the dispersions and virtualities of the digital (and back again, into real/physical spaces). We're working with both analysis and experience of coding and codework in order to understand the natures of the real and virtual. How is the real read? How is the virtual? Is reading even appropriate here? These questions play out in a series of artworks (videos, films, performance, installation) and theoretical texts.
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 13:26
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Fugues: An Associative Project on Reading Poetry through the Use of Hypermedia
Fugues, a project of the NT2 Laboratory at the Université du Québec à Montréal, is both an hypermedia adaptation of the poem Piano published 2001 by Quebec author René Lapierre and a literary critical analysis of that same poem. The Fugues Project originally came about when Bertrand Gervais asked NT2 Lab students to think about how to read and to analyze a paper-published poem through hypermedia. Instead of writing a dissertation as one usually does when reading a text in a literature classroom, participants were asked to adapt Piano through hypermedia. The goal was to think about new ways of reading printed text using electronic tools. The participants came up with an associative way of exploring this particular poem. This experimental project was designed not only to build an audience for new media literary works and writing by just presenting existing hypermedia works, but also to ask these literary scholars to think how they would go about writing a paper about a poem in a non-textbook manner. The idea behind this was to put theory into practice.
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 13:45
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Landscape (Re)-Visioned
Landscape is an integral part of our experience of the moving image. The cinematic landscape can become a protagonist in its own right, imposing its own visceral visual force on the story. Television was long denied this possibility, but new technologies such as high-definition standards and large flat-panel display allow video to embrace the cinematic wideshot and the transcendent landscape. Digital post-production capabilities give moving image artists deep control over this landscape. It develops a plasticity that reflects the artist's goals—either to reflect our own landscapes, or those of a different storyworld drawn from the artist's creativity.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:06
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The (Vis)poetics of Jim Andrews: 'A Pen'
"A Pen" is a Letterist exploration of text as a tool for writing, rather than as the result of writing. It is about the interpenetration of code and language in programmable media to imbue letters and words with behaviors and allowing poems to emerge from these. It is about creating tools for readers to become involved in the process of shaping the poems that arise from these processes. It is the latest expression of Jim Andrews' exploration of the visual characteristics of written language, and the capabilities of computers to both render and reinvent statuesque letters as dancing signifiers.
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:15
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Subjective Boundaries: Shelley Jackson's Hypertexts and the Terrain of the Skin
This presentation traces connections between Shelley Jackson's hypertext, "Patchwork Girl" (1995), and her more recent "Skin" Project (2003-present): a 2095 word short story published only once, tattooed word-by-word onto the bodies of applicants who have elected to become words, henceforth understood as embodying these words. Both works are interested in consequential relationships between living/dying bodies and texts: what it means to embody a text, what texts do to the body. Through avoiding traditional print media, both pieces also call into question the ways we read or write and the future of the book in the age of digital media.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:28
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(R)Evolutionary Communication: Defining and Refining Digital Literature, Art and Storytelling
As an educator as well as Director of Digital Media Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, my pedagogical and personal interests lie in how to use media to incorporate inter-disciplinary studies; to use sound, images as well as visual and narrative compositions to communicate multi-dimensional ideas, passions and concepts. In relation to this inter-disciplinary approach, I incorporate the concept of "mixing" to weave together space, design, technology, story-telling and critical discourse. One of the concepts I try to reinforce is that 'space' includes the psychological as well as the physical. In addition, I teach digital media students that "design" is the intentional approach to choreograph the experiential and that digital technology is a tool for exploring these ideas. Accepting this, I challenge the students to consider: how does the user/viewer experience and process the interaction between digital media and the "narrative" of the everyday?
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:35
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The Machinimatic Moment
"The Machinimatic Moment" discusses a type of filmmaking that uses videogame engines (commonly referred to as machinima). I contend machinima exists within a liminal space between a number of diapoles including: production/consumption, play/cognition, and synthesis/critique. While much of machinima can be considered self-referential in that it consistently remarks upon the game itself and, in many ways, its limitations, other productions reveal sophisticated, compelling stories that are neither game nor traditional filmic narrative. I conclude by arguing that its liminality gives machinima distinctive and interesting qualities.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:41
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ELIZA Revisited
This presentation reconsiders one of the most famous works of electronic literature: Joseph Weizenbaum'sEliza/Doctor. Created in the mid-1960s, this conversational character's success led Janet Murray to name Weizenbaum "perhaps the premier" literary artist in the computer medium. Such evaluations, however, don't take into account what happens during the playful engagement that the system's freeform textual interaction encourages: a breakdown that reveals the shape of the underlying processes. An alternative to this is extremely constrained interaction, which can help maintain the illusion. But a more exciting direction is to design processes that reward readers as they are revealed.
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:47
