Search
The search found 85 results in 0.01 seconds.
Search results
-
Margins of History
“On the Margin of History” is a witness of the destruction of ancient history and the sharp demographic change in Aleppo (Syria), Mohamad Kebbewar’s home town, a city of six million people that lost ninety percent of its residents over the course of six years. It is the witness of the breakdown of former Yugoslavia, Natasha Boskic’s homeland, culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia where silence was the only response to events. It is a transdisciplinary project that considers the tensions between personal voice and story and the possibilities of the digital visuals, done by Mary McDonald, to suggest and reinforce false narratives and/or to create understandings through metaphor, playing with all levels of our perception. It attempts to reframe our consciousness to find empathy and closeness, humanity in chaos. The ”Margin” tells the true cost of war — the reverberating loss of the destruction of people and place, family, heritage, traditions, and cultures. These brief fragments of poem and film enhance the experience of the surreal and feelings of displacement.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:10
-
The Text That Talks Back
“The Text That Talks Back” is my most ambitious of these experiment thus far. As the title suggests, my performance will consist of a direct dialogue between myself and the text displayed on the screen. The interaction won’t be entirely rehearsed, either, as the text will be coded to vary its responses at random. The text will ask me questions, challenge me, offer me advice, disagree with me, grow angry with me, and then ignore me altogether and address the audience directly. In shifting power away from the author, “The Text That Talks Back” will illuminate and challenge the very terms of the reader-writer-text relationship.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:16
-
Queer Wordplay: The Queer Subversion of Language in Locked-In and Blackbar
This paper looks at two interactive digital works where female-centred/lesbian desire provides an implicit logic and motivation to the works’ interactivity, which focusses on the control and transgression of language. This wordplay is aimed at resisting dominant regimes of phobic categorization and erasure that pathologize queer desire. In Lucky Special Games’ visual novel Locked-In, the interactor experiences the story through the perspective of Jacqueline Brown, who, as the result of a car crash, has locked-in syndrome, which is characterized by consciousness paired with the complete paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Each of the women who visit Jacqueline's hospital room has a motive for wanting Jacqueline incapacitated or dead, so when Jacqueline discovers that she can slightly move the little finger on one hand, she must decide to which of these women she should reveal that she is conscious. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Locked-In is its casual indication of Jacqueline’s lesbianism (inferred via her relationship with her spouse Delilah).
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:22
-
On Nationalizing a Transnational Literature: A Case Study on Examining J. R. Carpenter’s Work Within a Canadian Context
In our contemporary, increasingly transnational world, national literatures may seem increasingly arbitrary—even more so in the context of electronic literature, whose barriers of circulation tend to be marked by transnational, rather than national, groupings based on, for example, language or access to certain technologies. In contrast to the frequently (hyper-)nationalized literatures of mainstream literary study, electronic literature is often framed as an international or transnational literature. There are very good reasons for this: for example, the medium of electronic literature naturally lends itself to transnational dissemination and readership through the global reach of the internet. However, this transnational approach, which frequently exhibits an unacknowledged bias towards works produced in the US, also frequently ignores the ways in which an understanding of national contexts may enrich the understanding of a work.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:36
-
E-locutio: stitching styles and pulling threads in electronic literature
Classical rhetoricians have long known “style” as an integral component of Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric, where it refers to the application of compelling language patterns to achieve specific persuasive purposes: for example, the use of the chiasmus or “cross” (“ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”) as a tool that forces the reader to reflect on relationships between and reversals of concepts. From written style (what rhetoricians call elocutio) to "programming styles,” the application of technique/techne/craft to the expressive media we work in is evident, whether the medium is page, memory core, or cloth. Although we are more accustomed to viewing this process as “poetics,” reframing such activity as the application of style enables us to more fully see the suasive material dimensions of work in different media: asking not “what does this thing say” but “what does this thing do to us.” This paper explores some common stylistic elements that appear among writing, programming, and embroidery.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:44
-
Dairbhre: One Walk
Dairbhre is a lyric poetry project about attempting to know a desired place by walking the roads of that place in that place, in memory, and most accessibly/obsessively, in Google Street View. There are many walks. “One Walk,” a poem in 7 sections, goes from Knightstown to a specific house in Upper Tinnies on Valentia Island. Although the project is intended to be about place and displacement, it manifests currently as being about metaphor, a form of transport I find particularly challenging. And they’re all challenging. The poem is composed primarily in Google Street View, but also on the actual road, and allowing memory. Its intended form is audio-visual recording but at the ELO, I will simply read several sections, without the video
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 02:19
-
Crime fiction in digital ethos: legal and ethical challenges in e-lit
It is well known that any formulaic genre has a predictable story and a conventional meaning, nevertheless what makes each story unique is the ethos, that is to say the relationship between characters and environment. When the environment is digital, new media renegotiate traditional formulaic features, as is the case with detective stories and crime fiction in e-literature. The paper illustrates how digital ontology shapes the relationship between the ethos and the law. Indeed digital technology determines not only the criminal deed and the method of investigation, but it also highlights how the perception of the crime and the resultant moral or legal responsibility are more and more undetermined in social interaction. For Christie’s inter-war fiction or in American hard-boiled literature, the issue of social order was crucial, but contemporary aporia calls into question the happy ending of the investigation. We can anticipate that in electronic crime fiction the final social order and the need for penalty measures are not part of the storytelling.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 02:38
-
The Deer
The Deer is a rhythmic, image-driven literary psychothriller about a physicist who hits — what appears — to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. This piece is an interactive text/recording and/or a performance piece which carries the user through the text line by line. As the narrator becomes more and more emotionally fraught, audio effects bend the narrator’s voice to the point of incoherence, mirroring the breakdown of language in the face of trauma.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 02:42
-
I am not listening
The reading of any text, or the translation from one language (or mode) to another relies on a process of interpretation. Following Derrida, in his theory of translation, Lawrence Venuti writes that ‘Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain (polysemous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages), it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity’ (Venuti 2008: 13). These plural and contingent relations that have the capacity to produce different meanings were played out in Ana Cavic and Sally Morfill’s animation for ELO 2016 (Rules that order the reading of clouds). Lines, as signifiers, developed through gestures of drawing, reformed repeatedly to create different relations, and produce new meanings that shifted between the contexts of image and text. In the process of making Rules (2016), the active space where interpretation occurred and meaning was produced lay between the frames of animated movement. This between space, or gap - prone to perceptual failings - is at the core of a new collaboration between Cavic, Morfill and Tychonas Michailidis.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 02:51
-
“hearing litoral voices / bearing literal traces”: Subliteral Narratives
This collaborative project brings together the narrative practice of Joanna Howard and John Cayley’s digital language art research on the reading of subliteral differences. Particularly in certain fonts, differences of less-than-a-letter distinguish certain pairs of English words – hearing/bearing, litoral/literal. Howard composes brief narratives laced with words from these pairs such that, when the subliteral differences are realized, the narratives are developed, subverted, folded in on themselves: bearing the literal traces of narrative experiences within which tiny formal differences, actualized by digital affordances, generate aesthetic and critical reading.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 02:57
