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Read Fast, Die Young? – Interpreting Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Flash Poem Dakota
In this paper I discuss Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ digital poem Dakota. I discuss how the poem controls the reader’s experience and how this control affects its possible interpretations. The control is mostly executed by limiting the reader’s freedom over reading. Reading time, direction and duration are determined by the poem. It is only possible to start the poem, but not rewind, stop or fast-forward it. Furthermore, the manipulation of speed affects reading in many ways. In the fast extreme the effect is illegibility, but more subtly used speed creates varieties of emphasis and de-emphasis. The effect of emphasis of this kind, I argue, creates different layers of readings and invites re-reading. These different readings require different cognitive modes, which mirror our contemporary reading habits. Not being in control of the reading process also leads to a scattered sense of unity, one of postmodernism’s essential traits. While reading the poem I also question why I read as I do, and by doing so I hope to present more general traits of how to approach digital literature.
Arngeir Enåsen - 14.10.2013 - 15:20
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Golden Days, Silver Nights: Locating Utopia through Diminished Reality
This talk introduces Golden Days, Silver Nights, a new steampunk-themed, alternate-history locative adventure game designed to provoke critical thinking about political history and social progress. The game is designed around the life and writings of William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), celebrated orator, infamous crusader against commercial monopolies, and the alleged inspiration for L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. Bryan first ran for U.S. President in 1896 as the candidate for the fused Democratic and Populist parties, inspired in part by the socialist vision of Edward Bellamy's fabulously popular utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888). But if Bryan began his career a progressive, he ended it a militant reactionary and notorious anti-Darwinian. By some accounts, his campaign permanently derailed the American progressive movement, and with it, the hopes and dreams of utopian socialists. Taking its cue from alternate histories by Robert Heinlein and others, Golden Days, Silver Nights begins with the counter-factual premise that Bryan won the 1896 election and went on to reshape America's destiny, though not in the image of Bellamy's technologically utopian socialist future.
Arngeir Enåsen - 14.10.2013 - 15:23
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Spars of Language Lost at Sea
Our poetry generator, Sea and Spar Between, was fashioned based on Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Both in its original edition and in the edition expanded with comments—cut to fit the toolspun course—it exemplifies seven different ways to seek and grasp text: 1) by porting code; 2) by translating text strings and processes; 3) by contrasting the page/canvas experience via a link or URL with the experience of reading code via “View Source”; 4) by harpooning a particular stanza and using the browser’s capability for bookmarking; 5) by creating human-readable glosses of code for readers who may not identify as programmers; 6) by relating its depthless virtual space to the import of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés as interpreted by Quentin Meillassoux; 7) by foregrounding non-translatability as a characterizing sieve for natural languages.
Arngeir Enåsen - 14.10.2013 - 15:35
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Aura in the Age of Computational Production
This roundtable interrogates whether creative computational work can conjure aura, and to what extent the authoring and distribution systems those works rely on foreclose upon or enable "aura." Benjamin’s seminal "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) describes fascistic modes of production and mass deception that forecast -- in very specific ways -- iOS. Co-chairs Berens and Flores will frame the discussion by centering on the authorial contexts afforded by PC and iOS. The other participants are all accomplished writers of electronic literature, actively creating works in a variety of computational environments and distribution models. Each presenter, including the co-chairs, will have 5 minutes to present their own critical and artistic insights on this topic. Once the roundtable discussion begins, they might comment on how Berens' and Flores' theoretical model plays out in their own artistic and commercial works.
Scott Rettberg - 15.10.2013 - 14:40
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Translating afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce, or How to Inhabit a Spectral Body
If we are to follow Paul de Man’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of the Translator” , the translating process, far from being an attempt at totalization, further fragments the already fragmented pieces of a greater vessel, "die reine Sprache", or pure language, which remains inaccessible, and stands for a source of fragmentation itself. The work exists only through the multiple versions it comprises. As claimed by Walter Benjamin in « The Task of the Translator », a work always demands a translation which is both an alteration and a guarantee of its perpetuation : "(…) it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife -- which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living -- the original undergoes a change."
Rebecca Lundal - 17.10.2013 - 16:17
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<<Chercher l’exhibition>> Curating Electronic Literature as a Critical Practice
This presentation focuses on curating electronic literature as a critical practice. Exhibits focusing specifically on Electronic Literature have been mounted at galleries, libraries, universities, convention spaces, and parks and other outside venues. The Electronic Literature Organization’s 2012 Media Art Show, for example, hosted exhibits in five different locations in Morgantown, including a community arts center, local gallery, the university library, a department’s conference room, and the city’s amphitheater, while the MLA 2012 and 2013 exhibits were held at the Washington State and Hynes convention centers, respectively. Exhibits of Electronic Literature are planned for U.S. Library of Congress in April 2013 and Illuminations gallery at University of Ireland Maymooth in March 2014, and in various locations in Bergen, Norway in fall 2015. This range of venues suggests a flexibility and appeal of Electronic Literature that is both scalable and broad. With these qualities in mind, the presentation will discuss questions including but not limited to:
Fredrik Sten - 17.10.2013 - 17:13
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The "Research and Creation" Approach in Digital Literature
How can one articulate literary and artistic creation and scientific research? In my case, creative research consists in creating experiences. Indeed I emphasize the notion of experience, or rather experiences: the experiences of the author, of the reader and of the researcher (in the field of digital literature). This approach is based on a variety of first person and third person experiences, subjective experiences and objective descriptions, spontaneous and instrument-based experiences (ie closer to experiments). Conceiving a literary and artistic experience as a scientific experience implies admitting that real life experience can have a scientific dimension. In this approach, I analyse my own productions as well as the productions of other authors. I can think my productions and those of others from a concept-based perspective or from a creative activity perspective, as a literary and artistic experience or as material for a scientific experiment.The challenge is to develop protocols of introspection, data collection and traces which will then reconstruct what happened.
Fredrik Sten - 17.10.2013 - 17:32
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Post-digital Books and Disruptive Literary Machines
The e-book has been launched several times during the last decades and the book’s demise has often been predicted. Furthermore networked and electronic literature has already established a long history. However, currently we witness several interesting artistic and literary experiments exploring the current changes in literary culture – including the media changes brought about by the current popular break-through of the e-book and the changes in book trading such as represented by e.g. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks – changes that have been described with the concept of controlled consumption (Striphas, 2011, Andersen & Pold, 2012). In our paper we want to focus on how artistic, e-literary experiments explore this new literary culture through formal experiments with expanded books and/or artistic experiments with the post-print literary economy. Examples of the first are Konrad Korabiewski and Litten’s multimedia art book Affected as Only a Human Can Be (Danish version, 2010, English version forthcoming) and our own collaborative installation Coincidentally the Screen has turned to Ink (presented at the Remediating the Social conference, Edinburgh 2012).
Fredrik Sten - 17.10.2013 - 17:39
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Une “poésie numérique”? Khlebnikov et Jakobson, Marinetti, Schwitters, Kostelanetz
Quelques protagonistes des avant-gardes historiques montrèrent de l’intérêt pour une poésie exclusivement faite de nombres.
Rebecca Lundal - 17.10.2013 - 17:58
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The Awareness of the Power of the Tool: the Author and his Practices
Notre présentation porte sur le rôle et les enjeux de l’outil-logiciel dans le processus de création des œuvres de littérature numérique. L'outil, sur lequel l’auteur s’appuie de plus en plus, conditionne l'expression de sa créativité. De notre point de vue, l’outil n’est pas neutre dans le processus de création et porte en ses formes, un risque élevé de standardisation. En étant immergé dans la logique de l’outil, l’écriture, au sens traditionnel du terme, est passée au second plan. Nous sommes plongés dans la visualisation des formes et dans l’outil-architexte. Nous sommes dans l’ordre de l’organisation visuelle de la pensée et des échanges. La mise en page met au premier plan certains éléments, en retrait d’autres, articule des formes et propose certaines pratiques. L’auteur, en s’insérant dans la logique de l’outil-logiciel et ses présupposés, peut tomber sous la fascination de celui-ci. Nous pouvons à ce titre nous demander si l’outil ne le domine pas, par la fascination qu’il exerce à son endroit.
Rebecca Lundal - 17.10.2013 - 18:27
