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Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World
When researchers in computer-mediated communications discuss digital textuality, they rarely venture beyond the now commonplace notion that computer textuality embodies contemporary post-structuralist theories. Written for students and faculty of contemporary literature and composition theories, this book is the first to move from general to specific considerations. Advancing from general considerations of how computers are changing literacy, "Digital Fictions" moves on to a specific consideration of how computers are altering one particular set of literature practices: reading and writing fiction.
Patricia Tomaszek - 24.09.2015 - 11:25
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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
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Latin American Electronic Literature and Its Own Ends
Framed by the theme of the 2015 ELO conference, the paper will examine several interwoven kinds of ends concerning Latin American electronic literature. In this case, the theme is particularly appealing when we consider specific aesthetic/political ends frequently pursued in Latin American contexts and when we situate this thought from “the end of the world”. In fact, being at one of the edges of the world, metaphorically and/or literally, drives one to specific aesthetic/political responses that take position in relation to hegemonic global imaginaries of technological modernisation.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:36
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If the Message Is the Medium, Then There Is No End: Understanding and Defining Materiality in Representational and Communicative Practices Across Media
Media are always and at once substances and channels, both things and bridges. When we use this word medium, it is sometimes though not always clear in which sense we are using it. With broadcast media (television, radio) we tend to emphasize the network aspect. With fine art media (paint, ink, stone, clay), we tend to emphasize the material aspect. Yet as the 17th century painter and architect Frederico Zuccari reminds us in his writings about drawing as an artistic practice and medium, the inscription of a mark on a page is itself a bridge between an idea and its external realization. Thus every act of inscription is at once blending these two senses of the term media, thing and network. However, with digital media, the distinction between the two aspects of the term medium appear to be conflated and to collapse into each other. In this paper, I explore ways in which it may be possible to recuperate both senses of the term medium in a digital age by first acknowledging the importance of materiality to textual representation and communication practices and secondly, by developing a nomenclature for accurately describing the actions involved in such practices.
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:36
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This Is Not the Beginning or the End of Literature
It is too easy to fall into prognostications of electronic literature as the end of literature or as a new beginning. (...) Such views imply too much teleology, and see electronic literature purely as the unfolding of the possibilities of the apparatus. The rhetorical logic at work is literalization, i.e. taking literary works as the sum of their technical features. (Rui Torres & Sandy Baldwyn, eds. 2014. PO.EX: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia. Morgantown, WV: Center for Literary Computing: xv-xvi).
Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 14:53
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MATTERS, Electromagnetic poems
When materials that support texts change, the content have to change. Matters is a physical reflection on how the materiality could affect the text. From ceramic tiles to displays, each new supporting material has opened new possibilities for writing. The support does more than sustain the text, it limits and potentiates it at the same time. The rules of the text are established thanks to these materials, which are implemented as a medium for the text. The physical, the chemical, the sociology, and the politics of these mediums definitively influence the literary use of the ideas. The change in supporting materials allow us to tap into new possibilities that poetry has the pleasure of exploring and amplifying. Similarly, the poetic endeavour is obligated to question the physical, chemical, social, and political limitations of either medium as a support for the text. The expressive reflection allows the revision of rules established by the use of either format and, perhaps, generates new uses of a medium; or in an extreme case, generates a new medium for the diffusion of the text.
Hannah Ackermans - 06.07.2016 - 16:41
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Electronic Literature: A Matter of Bits
From January 19, 2016 through April 21, 2016, The Stedman Gallery will host an electronic literature exhibition entitled “Electronic Literature: A Matter of Bits.” The exhibition is sponsored by the Digital Studies Center and was curated by Director Jim Brown and Associate Director Robert Emmons.
Alvaro Seica - 20.09.2016 - 14:09
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The media materiality as a “dance of agency” – Performing Literary Text with Substances
Shelley Jackson’s Snow does not easily conform to established literary categories or interpretative strategies – words written on snow are evanescent and fragile, vanishing as soon as the surface on which they had been inscribed melts away. The text in progress is offered to the audience only as the documentation of the artist’s own acts of inscription, made available through the accounts on Flickr and Instagram dedicated to the project. Additionally, reading the story in a traditional way on Instagram is possible only in reverse order of the photostream. In my presentation I would like to broaden the notion of a literary text taking into consideration the very materiality of this project’s affordances – especially the specificity of the inscription surface, evoked to the audience with photos regularly uploaded to Instagram (which itself can be seen as a domain of fluidity with its constantly changing visual stream). What I am particularly interested in is the specific mode of meaning distribution – in this case performed between the evaporating substance, photographic documentation and networked media.
(Source: Author's Abstract, ICDMT 2016)
Hannah Ackermans - 08.12.2016 - 15:25
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In the Event of a Variable Text
Walter J Ong argues: ‘The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word’. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of enunciation in which written words refuse repose. This essay argues that although spoken, written and printed words operate within radically different temporal planes, spoken words also have thing-like properties and written and printed words also move through time. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of signification unforeseen by Ong in which written words refuse repose. Jay David Bolter argues that digital writing ‘challenges the logocentric notion that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language ... The writer and reader can create and examine structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech’. N Katherine Hayles argues that, in digital media, the text ‘becomes a process, an event brought into existence when the program runs ... The [text] is ‘‘eventilized,’’ made more an event and less a discrete, self-contained object with clear boundaries in space and time’.
J. R. Carpenter - 31.01.2017 - 12:42
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80 days: Breaking the Boundaries between Video Games and Literature
“Moveable books” predate the printing press. Such experiments, including popular pop-up books of the nineteenth century, pushed against the boundaries of two-dimensional storytelling by crafting ways paper can mechanically foster motion and depth. iPad artists and game designers experiment with device-specific expressive capacities. I call moveable books designed for iPad “playable books” to invoke their ergodic filiation with videogames. In this presentation, I analyze one playable book, 80 Days (2014) by Inkle Studios, which won Time Magazine’s best game of the year and was named by The Telegraph a best novel of the year. Crossing the “border” between literature and videogames, 80 Days invites us to consider how popular modes of human/computer interaction in games shape new forms of reading in device-specific ways. I discuss how 80 Days’ gameful attributes adapt and contest Jules Verne’s 1873 novella Around the World in Eighty Days. The game gives the reader a physical experience of the original story’s chief mechanic, racing to beat the clock.
Hannah Ackermans - 06.02.2017 - 15:59
