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Digital Letterisms
According to Vilem Flusser, writing in the sense of placing letters or other marks one after another has little or no future (Flusser, 3). On the contrary, American conceptualists state that textual universe of the web is a victory of the verbal, liberating it, as earlier photography did for painting, from the task of representation and thus allowing it to obtain the artistic function (Goldsmith, 14). Indeed, in the world of digital communication, writing potentially acquires visual, audial, plastic, kinetic and computational features blurring the border between traditional writing and art practices. The work of many artists illustrates a trasition from concrete poetry to digital animation: John Maeda, Ottar Omstad, Jorg Piringer, Caroline Bergvall, Alexander Gornon, and many others. However, the reverse is also possible: transition from digital to postdigital – painted ASCII art (Ivan Khimin). So the letters are not only not dead, but the opportunities they acquire in the digital realm tie back to the central aspects of art history.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 11:13
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Performance Art, Experimental Poetry and Electronic Literature in Portugal: An Intermedial Archive to an Intermedial Practice of Language
Considering electronic literature from a temporal perspective calls for a redefinition of our classical notions of time. It is impossible to anticipate its end because electronic literature appears as dynamic, and cyclic. Therefore, in order to think this ever-present artistic manifestation in its radical meanings and in a futuristic perspective, it is useful to know its past.
In Portugal, electronic literature, experimental poetry, and performance art share and explore the same performative concept of language, re-examining fundamental literary notions such as author, space, time, audience, medium, mediation and materiality. In this paper, we will present an intermedial archive to illustrate an intermedial field of practice.
This paper is thus based on current research on the history of Portuguese performance art. After framing and pointing out the close relationship between experimental poetry, performance art, and electronic literature in Portugal, we will present a timeline of Portuguese performance art (1915-1990), which will soon be available in the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (www.po-ex.net).
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 11:20
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Fandom Vs. E-Lit: How Communities Organize
“E-literature”, as defined by the ELO, is a fairly sweeping term. Any sort of “born digital” text can potentially be claimed as “e-lit”: video games, works of interactive fiction, fan fiction, et cetera. As a scholar, it is tempting to dragoon a favorite text, to bring it into an e-lit context. But to do this is to ignore the differences in the communities that supported these texts’ creation. Similarly, it is tempting to declare the “end of e-lit,” since so much e-lit can also be framed as fan fiction, video art, games, etc., but to do this is to ignore the impact of the e-lit community and its structure.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 11:23
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The Road to Assland: The Demoscene and Electronic Literature
The demoscene is a European subculture that gathers computer programmers, who generate computer art in real time, the origins of which date back to the 80s. The most important genre created by the scene are demos – programs of which the sole aim is to impress the audience and demonstrate the abilities of the computer and the programmer. The demos are created in real time during demoparties, their effects are generated by a processor processing input data according to the created algorithm. The demoscene and its works are examples of pioneer creative computing in the field of digital media, at the intersection of computer science, media art and underground subculture. The aim of this paper is to attempt a description of the literary esthetic of the demoscene in scene genres such as demos, real-time texts, interactive fiction or zines. Special attention will devoted to the analysis of these genres in from the perspective of camp, pastiche, trash, bad taste. The point of departure will be the activity of the group Hooy-Program, and one of its members, the demoscener Yerzmyey, the author of various works, including the work of interactive fiction The Road to Assland.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 11:27
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Rhematics and the Literariness of Electronic Literature
In Gerard Genette’s (1993; 1997) narratology, “rheme” is contrasted with “theme.” While themes are symbolic indications of what texts mean, rhemes are super-formal indications of texts themselves. The title of this article is highly thematic because it indicates much of that what is being discussed; a title like “Only an Article” would be highly rhematic due to its lack of indication of the subject matter at the expense of non-reflective form.
Veli-Matti Karhulahti has recently argued that the aesthetics of the videogame phenomenon are better understood through “rhematics” than the rhetoric of “meaning” that has so far dominated the analysis of cultural products, especially within literary studies:
Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 14:48
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Ephemeral Words, Ephemeral People: Suicide and Choice in Twine Games
On April 10th, 2014, game designer Porpentine released a game called Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone with the intention of deleting it at the end of the day: “This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever. You can download it here until then. What you do with it, whether you distribute, share, or cover it, is up to you.” The game has lived on through what Porpentine predicted as “social means,” but it was designed as an ephemeral text, and one which the author deliberately destroyed as part of the act of creation. This idea of a vanishing text is interwoven with the experience of electronic literature, as Marjorie C. Luesebrink notes, as part of a practice of “text erasure” as embracing “self-undermining, undecidability, disdain for commercialization, ambivalence about technology, struggle against the presence of text itself, and response to overwhelming data” but also “the fragility of memory” (2014).
Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 14:52
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Toward Understanding Real-World Social Impacts of Avatars
Many digital narratives feature avatars onto which we project our agency, aspirations, and biases – consciously and unconsciously. This paper presents two projects towards understanding why we construct the avatars that we do and how these avatars impact us. The upshot is that electronic literature authors should take constructing avatars in digital systems seriously since they can potentially reinforce real-world stereotypes.
The first project consists of a system called AIRvatar (named for the Advanced Identity Representation), which is an avatar constructor for collecting analytical data such as mouse-click events and the amount of time spent in the different parts of the menu.
Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 15:05
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Digital Games: The New Frontier of Postmodern Detective Fiction
The tropes of the detective genre have been challenged, subverted, re-appropriated by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, or Paul Auster, establishing what could be considered a new strain of postmodern detective fiction. In these stories, solving the case is not central to the story, and what the detective searches transforms or is derailed by becoming a discovery of something completely different. In some cases, the detective, along with the reader, explores an encyclopedic space in such a way that these stories have already been connected to hypertextual literature (Rosello 1994).
Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 15:09
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Live Performance, Voicescapes, and Remixing the Under Language: Sounds and Voices at the End(s) of Electronic Literature
This panel responds to the conference theme: “The end(s) of electronic literature” with three approaches, in theory and practice, for the use of sound as the basis for new forms of electronic literature.
These approaches are sound composition for intermedia, digital manipulation of the voice in new media writing, and remixing the under language of pioneering works of electronic literature. Each panel participant will present and discuss one of these different approaches.
Historically, sound has been overlooked, or worse, ignored, as a component of electronic literature. The “end(s)” of e-lit explored in this panel may provide new and interesting opportunities, however, to investigate and ameliorate this oversight.
In brief, this panel argues that live coding and live algorithms for generative text and sound, along with digital manipulation of voice, offer new approaches to new media writing. These can also be mixed or remixed with previous content and/or techniques to provide new forms of e-literature.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 15:14
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On Landscape as an Interface: Textuality, Walking Practices and Augmented Location in Notes for Walking
Since the early 2000s, media artists have explored the potentials of location-based technologies, developing locative media projects “in which geographical space becomes a canvas” (Hemment 2006). Artists both within and without the locative field, such as Teri Rueb (USA), Blast Theory (UK), Jeremy Hight (USA), Janet Cardiff (Canada), Chris Caines (Australia) and Paul Carter (Australia) have developed creative works involving narrative, textuality and place-based storytelling within a site-specific context. In many of these works, real world spaces are annotated and augmented with a range of artistic contents – primarily audio and/ or textual – and mediated by mobile devices.
Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 15:18
