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Electronic Literature, or Whatever It’s Called Now: the Archive and the Field
The umbrella term ‘electronic literature’ arches broadly over a multitude of digital art forms, so long as they satisfy the criteria ‘electronic’, and ‘literature’. However, it is this paper’s primary contention that the extent of the term’s coverage is delimited by whatever has already been archived. Understandings of what constitute ‘literature’ and the ‘literary’ are manifold and include concepts of the letterary (also as in ‘belles lettres’), the poetic, the lyrical – but also, the canonical, and the institutional. This paper will argue that that which can now be pointed to by literary and digital humanities scholars, and called ‘electronic literature’, is in large part only recognisable because archivisation has been used in its regard as an instrument for institutionalisation and canon-creation. This body of work is also only findable because archivisation has preserved it, faced as it is with the constant threats of platform erosion, and obsolescence sooner rather than later. Archivisation is therefore both a problem of media, and a problem of selection.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 03:35
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Digital Sound Poetry: Peripheral Platform for Posthuman Performativity
According to Steve McCaffery (1998), sound poetry’s primal goal concerns “the liberation and promotion of phonetic and sub-phonetic features to language to the state of a materia prima for creative, subversive endeavors.” (163). Accordingly, it thrives on an embodied conflict between expectation and interpretation as it allows communicative ‘uptake’ while problematizing the communicative ‘relation.’ Or, as Brandon LaBelle (2010) argued, “sound poetry yearns for language by rupturing the very coherence of it.” The ‘techniques’ thereby employed vary widely: mounting idiosyncratic language and notational systems, performing spontaneous and improvised poetical oralities, fooling with the performer’s body to rupture the ordered movements of vocality, or indeed by appropriating new technologies and digital devices in order to disassemble, reconfigure, and ‘cobble together’ personal or imported sounds and utterances.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 03:47
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Walking Simulator Video Games–A New Digital Storytelling Artefact–Transportation, not flow
In the past decade a new genre of video games has emerged; with little action or traditional gameplay this new form has been described as audiovisual novels, ‘freeform unstructured narrative’ (Heron & Belford, 2015), ‘narrative avant-garde’ (Koenitz, 2017), ‘walkers’ (Muscat et al., 2016), ‘literary games’ (Ensslin, 2014), or ‘Walking Simulators’ which was added to the Urban Dictionary in April 2014 as a pejorative description of games where the main purpose appears to be walking around. This new genre has its antecedents in text adventure games, Point and Click adventure games, digital fiction, and art games, yet defining the Walking Simulator as ‘simply’ a game is an unproductive argument in itself (Fest, 2016). Aims and research questions: How do we categorise Walking Simulators? How should we analyse them? What can we find out from that analysis? Methodology and analytical framework Taking a broadly representative sample of Walking Simulators published in the past ten years (most have received critical acclaim and also won BAFTA and similar awards) some common features were identified.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 21:20
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The Crisis of Representation: Glitch Art and the Rise of Technological Abstraction
Since the emergence of photography in the 19th-century, ‘technical images’—which media philosopher Vilém Flusser defines as images constructed through the use of an ‘apparatus’— have replaced traditional images (sketching, drawing, painting, etc…) as the principal mode of objective documentation for mapping and representing reality. In fact it is this perceived objective character of the medium that has historically problematised its classification as an accepted artform. As a reaction, artists have long explored methods for circumventing the overriding social status of photography, by developing practices that operate to undermine its primary existence as strict documentation. Historical examples of this include, the photomontage of the early 20th-century by Dada artists (eg. Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield), who spliced together images from mass media in order to construct new aesthetic scenes, and The Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s (eg.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 22:08
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Analyzing Pry as a literature work, Is it possible?
The objective of this communication is the application of ideas and tools encountered in the field of study of narratology and its consideration as a narrative genre so that the chosen work, Pry, may be analysed and differences seen that may arise when approached from a different frame of the print. It is hoped to show with this approach, how in order to be studied, digital narrative works require new concepts and how more investigation is needed into how the reader receives the work. For example, after analyzing the work of Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro it was seen to be necessary to deepen the skills required by the reader in order to enter into the work, to establish functional guidelines for the reader, so as to remain within the orientation of the text, etc. It is not just a question concerning only in how the work is received, but also how space and the other approaches to the work need concepts and approaches which are more adequate for the reality presented by the digital narrative. As has been shown in the analysis of Pry, it has not been possible to capture all that is contained in the text using the type of analysis used up to now.
Vian Rasheed - 14.11.2019 - 01:14
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Revisting Califia: “Here the Path triverages”
This paper is not a reappraisal of Califia, as it needs no reappraisal in terms of its value to electronic literature, but a re-reading of what could be termed its hidden critical apparatus. While not wrongly referred to as “hypertext narrative,” this general category obscures a number of crucial structural and theoretical distinctions that suggest Califia rests on, and can offer, a different and powerful critical idiom of its own that has only recently found more theoretical expression as technology has advanced. Roughly contemporary (Luesebrink began Califia in 1995, when Patchwork Girl was published, and published it in 2000) and both on Eastgate, Califia remains in a relatively peripheral position in comparison, and not because Patchwork Girl appeared first. As many articles written about Patchwork will attest, PWG is and was more immediately accessible to the academic community via its attachment to several theoretical narratives around intertextuality, strategies of resistance, and a straightforward use of hypertext as structure and theme (“patching” and linking, e.g.
Vian Rasheed - 14.11.2019 - 01:21
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Mining Linguistic Content from Vast Audio and Video Archives for Multimodal Poetry
This 20-minute presentation highlights research conducted as a Fellow in the MIT Open Documentary Lab developing a methodology and software for parsing linguistic and semantic information from vast quantities of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across networked computers. The presentation will focus on the expressive potential of this methodology to create new forms of multi-modal digital poems. The goal of this research is to extend recent advances in computational text analysis of written materials to the realm of audio and video media for use in a variety of different language centered media production contexts. This methodology and software provides the ability to parse vast quantities of audio and video files for topics, parts of speech, phonetic content, sentiment, passive/active voice and language patterns and then playback the video or audio content of the search for consideration in an aesthetic context. Queries that are intriguing can be saved and sequenced for playback as a poetic remix of linguistic patterns on one or multiple monitors.
Vian Rasheed - 14.11.2019 - 01:25
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Preserving, Curating and Visualizing Latin American Digital Literature and Art
Digital literature and art are currently being produced right across the globe. However, some digital works are more visible than others, depending on where in the world they are being produced, who is producing them, and how they are being circulated. The works that this panel will address are from Latin America, a region that has usually occupied a peripheral place in terms of global geopolitics, and whose digital cultural production, and its theorization, has typically been less visible than that produced and analyzed in the Global North. Furthermore, some of the works featured in the panel are produced by marginalised communities even within a Latin American setting (eg. indigenous communities).
Jorge Sáez Jiménez-Casquet - 14.11.2019 - 14:20
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Amore di plastica: A survey on digital publishing in Italy
During the last ten years the digital publishing industry has gone through an important development in terms of the creation and adoption of new software. E-books that are widely known and used in PDF format can now be entirely designed with new software and enriched with multimedia and multimodal features, which can also embed Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies.
Since the design of the layout and the software of enhanced e-books are both created with the same technology used in the web, these enhanced e-books can be analyzed and described with theories and concepts used in the field of web technology. The innovative features that these e-books present include practices termed as Multimedia Literacy, i.e. multilinearity, multimedia, multimodality. For these reasons the analysis of the works of fiction and poetry published in this format can be carried out through these theories and research methods, already elaborated in the field of electronic literature.
Jorge Sáez Jiménez-Casquet - 14.11.2019 - 14:40
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Eccentric Peninsular: The Cornish Coast as a site for Deconstruction in Intermedia Poetry
This paper analyses the use of ‘the coast’, particularly the coast of England’s South-West Peninsular, as a site for deconstruction in the works of a number of intermedia poet-artists. It is based primarily on selected readings of digital literature works which specifically engage with the South-West coast, covering works by Mark Goodwin, Andrew Fentham, Penny Florence and JR Carpenter (including the latest work by JR Carpenter ‘This is a Picture of Wind’, shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018). The reading considers the texts’ representations of ‘coasts’ and ‘peninsulars’ and their relationship to the de-stabilisation and frustration of positions of authority and authoritative structures (especially positions and structures of nationalism and sexism). The South-West peninsular can itself be considered de-centred and eccentric, remote from England’s administrative and financial centres and with a rich history of translocal interactions and migrations (c.f. Natalie Pollard) between other peripheral artistic and cultural regions and nations (especially those with Celtic heritage).
Vian Rasheed - 18.11.2019 - 01:19
