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1. Keleti Blokk Blokki Facebook Game as an Example of Non-fiction Literary Flash

   Keleti blok blokki (Hungarian for ‘the apartment blocks of the Eastern Bloc’) is a Facebook social game in which players try to guess the geographical location of apartment blocks featured on screens from Google Street View and other street view services submitted by one of the participants. The game counters the popular belief that apartment blocks looked all alike from Eastern Germany all the way to Vladivostok. In the wider context, the game challenges the perception of the countries forming the Eastern Bloc as one monolith, described by the Western rulers as “the East”.

   The aim of the game is to guess in which country the sumbmitted block is located. As the name, Keleti blok blokki, suggests the buildings can come from any location within the keleti bloc. The photos are censored by the submitting player for obvious clues that would make guessing the location too easy. The most frequently erased elements include road signs, signs in general, air conditioners, and national symbols. What remains is architecture and details (curtains, elevation colors, sidewalk curbs), and the general visual context.

   Hannah Ackermans - 10.11.2015 - 10:05

2. Protest Bots

   With half a century’s worth of profound social and technological change, the 1960s protest movement is far removed from today’s world. Networks, databases, video games, social media, and the rise of algorithmic culture and the sharing economy have irrevocably altered our landscape. What, in this world, is the 21st century equivalent of that key feature of the sixties protest movement: the protest song? This paper argues that one possible answer is the protest bot, a computer program that algorithmically generates social and political critiques on social media.

   Using Habermas’s imperfect account of the public sphere as my starting point, I suggest that five characteristics define protest bots—or bots of conviction, as I also call them. Bots of conviction are topical, data-based, cumulative, oppositional, and uncanny. After explaining these five characteristics, I explore several well-known and lesser-known bots on Twitter, showing how they are or are not protest bots. Throughout this paper I adopt a critical code studies approach, diving into the procedural DNA of several bots of conviction of my own creation.

   Hannah Ackermans - 10.11.2015 - 10:07

3. "Learn to taste the tea on both sides": AR, Digital Ekphrasis, and a Future for Electronic Literature

   This presentation will link the trope of “digital ekphrasis” (as articulated by Cecilia Lindhé) and the developing of platforms for “augmented reality” to argue that one probable future for electronic literature lies in the interweaving of “born digital” and print texts in ubiquitous layers of mediation. It will examine three instances of “augmented” print – the multimodal performance of ekphrastic poetry, the AR comic book Modern Polaxis, and the AR epistolary romance Between Page and Screen – all of which demonstrate the power of “intermediation” (Hayles) and foster a critical perspective on it. Looking at these amalgamations of print and digital textuality through the lens of digital ekphrasis reveals that electronic literature will most likely always arouse ambivalence, just as the trope of ekphrasis in traditional media has, for better or worse, provoked a sense of the uncanny through its interweaving of visual, auditory, tactile, verbal, or haptic experiences.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:12

4. Conditions of Presence: The Topology of Network Narratives

   The development of the cultural field of electronic literature faces significant challenges today. As everyday network communication practices and habits of media consumption change, they impose expectations on how narratives are expressed, experienced and interacted with by readers and users. These expectations produce an imperative to accommodate additive and emergent participation processes that influence how narratives are structured. It is increasingly important to strike a balance between authorial agency and user generated content, between the core creative vision of a cultural creator and the contributions of casual participants, between narrative coherence and improvisational interactions. Resolving these antinomies is crucial in order for the field of electronic literature to support both the development of popular digital fiction and a continuing tradition of experimental literature.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:18

5. Narrative Theory after Electronic Literature

   Over the last thirty years, we have spoken about electronic literature in terms of its newness. Scholars have emphasized new ways of reading, challenges to closure, and entirely new models for composition. From the earliest books in the 1980s through recent scholarship in this maturing field, critics have sought out the unique features of the electronic medium. Ludologists, in particular, have challenged attempts to reduce electronic literature to a variation on older print forms.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:22

6. Narrative, Affect and Materialist Aesthetics in Post-Digital Technotexts

   After much excitement about hypertext fiction in the 1990s, many digital-literary-arts practitioners moved away from narrative. There seemed to be a recognition that the hyper-reading digital environments promote was not conducive to long-form narratives. Lev Manovich’s influential The Language of New Media (2002) declared that databases dominated over narrative; narrative was now a residual, if not yet obsolete, epistemological form. But born-digital authors have not entirely abandoned narrative; rather, the narrativity inherent to their artifacts has been diffused, redistributed across non-linguistic modalities. New production technologies make it easier to integrate images, animations, music, sounds, and other modalities into cybertextual artifacts often more akin to video games than novels. In multimodal environments, where textual output is more variable, narrative qualities can appear elusive or ephemeral. Nonetheless, narrativity, like other indicators of literariness, persists in new media writing.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:26

7. Literary Spamming in Games: Cold Dust in Lord of the Rings Online and Endgame in Counter-Strike

   Video and computer games as performance spaces continue literary traditions of drama and theater, and particularly Brechtian “defamiliarization” and subsequent practices of street / guerrilla theater. Such performance work is one end of electronic literature: delivery to a vast audience, potentially the largest any work of e-lit could have; at the same time, epic failure in the complete disregard for the performance by the game players – the literary performance as nothing more than spam.

   In fact, exactly this makes such work literary. This presentation discusses two game “interventions” staged over several years by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University: 1) Coal Dust, a series of agitprop theater performances about resource exploitation staged in MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online; and 2) Beckett spams Counter-Strike, carefully staged performances of Endgame in the tactical shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:31

8. Jokes, Prompts and Models: Engaging Player Collaboration in Netprov

   How can we best invite everyday writers to collaborate and play in electronic literature projects? For the past few years I have being doing projects in a format I call netprov. Netprov (networked improv narrative) organizes the creation of collaborative stories in real time using multiple available digital media. Working with Mark C. Marino and others we have developed a set of working guidelines and suggestions about how to best engage players’ imaginations and extend invitations that will encourage their creativity. I will discuss our methods, our “Rules of the Game” for several netprovs, and describe the degrees of player participation, from Featured Players who adopt ongoing characters to Casual Players who may only contribute a line or an image.

   (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:35

9. A Workbench for Analyzing Electronic Literature

   Scholars of electronic literature explore complex multimodal works. However, when they go to report their research, they face the confines of print-style documents that force them to reduce their discussion materials to written descriptions and select still images. ACLS Workbench is a new online tool developed for the analysis of electronic literature and other digital objects. Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the tool was created by Jeremy Douglass, Jessica Pressman, and Mark Marino in collaboration with Lucas Miller, Craig Dietrich, and Erik Loyer, built upon the ANVC Scalar platform.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:39

10. Imagination, Eventhood, and the Literary Absolute

    The three papers in this panel seek to move beyond primarily formalistic discussions of electronic literature as well as approaches primarily concerned with drawing definitional boundaries for it. Instead, they propose to explore various works of electronic literature in terms of the potential dialogue they may open with concepts that are often locatable outside or beyond the current critical boundaries of electronic literature.

    Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:53

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