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1. We Descend, Volume 2

   We Descend, Volume 2

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 14.06.2012 - 16:06

2. Creativity is something for hairdressers - so what is it for writers? Why the differentiation of 'literature' and 'writing' is obsolete, and what the Internet has to do with it

   I will try to make a blend between the notion of "creative writing", which is typically American (and doesn't exist in most of continental Europe), and the discourse of creative industries, which is typically European, and try to stab the notion of "creative" a bit as a kind of helpless placeholder for something that, for whatever reason, is no longer called literary or artistic. So, referring to Kenny Goldsmith, it's not about a dichotomy creative/uncreative, but what's questionable about the concept in the first place. If we shift the issue from an idealist to a materialist perspective, then the difference between creative/literary writing and common writing has always been arbitrary.

   The critical edition of Kafka, which now includes the documents he wrote for his insurance company, is a good example, as are earlier examples of published letters, diaries etc. Foucault's criticism of the the notion of the oeuvre, whether it would include scraps and laundry bills or not, seems quite backwards to me. The actual difference has been one of published and non-published writing, with publishing being (for technical and economic reasons) controlled by an industry.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 14.06.2012 - 16:38

3. Geolocative Storytelling Off the Map

   This paper explores the effects of sonic implacement in L.A. Flood. Engaging locative literature in situ, a reader can pull audio files that come very close to replicating the experience of hearing such files off-site. But same is not true of the visual interface, which is flat and sensory-impovershed. The deep attention one musters reading locative fiction on desktop is shattered by hypermediation in situ: buildings tower above us, sunlight and air press upon our skin; our devices, other people, weather and other on-site variables distract us from concentrated reading. Distracted reading creates a productive, hyperattentive cognitive dissonance.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 14.06.2012 - 16:41

4. Is Your Computer's Sound on? Fiction on the Flash Platform

   With the arrival of the electronic media, the limits and possibilities for writers of prose fiction changed fundamentally. On the Internet, writers, who had had to depend on the linearity of the signifier in the printed media for the production and consumption of their fiction, explored the new patterns of signification suggested by the computer-based media. And, since the late 1990s, multimedia platforms have appeared, allowing writers to manipulate all kinds of text – video as well as audio, written as well as spoken – in an almost endless variety of ways. My paper takes a look at what happens to prose-fiction when it moves from the world of the printed book to the screen. I'm interested, first and foremost, in the work of contemporary writers who are using the multimedia platform FLASH in their attempts at "adapting" fiction already in print for the computer screen, e.g. Jeanette Winterson, or who have moved beyond hard copy fiction and are producing multimedia events instead, e.g. Alan Bigelow.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 10:43

5. Sámi literature in the age of digitalization and globalization

   This paper is concerned with the adaptation of Sámi narratives to new media. Sámi literature has proved its power of adjustment in the past, and the emergence of new forms of literature and texts in different shapes and genres that we witness today, indicates that this strength has not faded. Sámi literature finds its roots and inspiration in oral tradition. The first Sámi writers were storytellers who established a transition from oral to written literature. Recently, examples of adaptation to audio-visual genres and Internet have multiplied, motivated by the contemporary sociopolitical context for minorities and minority languages in Sweden. From a historical perspective, Sámi literature has undergone an adaptation from an oral to a written medium. Today, the spoken word, sound and visual effects meet again in new media. The transition from a narrative told orally as a performance to an audiovisual medium entails an adaptation not only to a new medium, but also to a new audience, and a new context. In this paper, I investigate how Sámi literature and folklore emerge in new media, more specifically television and Internet.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 11:00

6. Electronic literature or digital art? And where are all the challenging hypertextual novels?

   Lack of new and challenging, interactive hypertextual fictions causes a continuously growing frustration among literary scholars like myself. While we are witnessing a growing and exciting field within digital poetry, and especially digital art as such, hypertextual fictions seem to have become part of and/or floating into interactive digital performance and installation artworks. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s CAVE-work Screen and Camilla Utterback’s Text Rain are among digital artworks based on text and words. According to Roberto Simanowski in “Holopoetry, Biopoetry and Digital Literature” (2007), however, Utterback’s work in particular, must be seen as a work of digital art rather than literature, since its aim is not to be read but to be played with. So how much text, how many literary generic traits must a hypertextual fiction include to be called literature and not digital art?

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 11:10

7. ә-măn’yoo-ĕn’sĭs

   In tandem with this installation, we propose to present an approximately ten-minute-long collaborative theoretical paper entitled ‘ə-măn’yoo-ĕn’sĭs.’ BRIEF DESCRIPTION āmanuēnsis is a Latin word derived from ab + manus, or “by hand.” Originally used to refer to slaves, the word was later applied specifically to personal secretaries. We (Claire Donato and Timothy Terhaar) work as freelance amanuenses in Brooklyn, NY.
   Our presentation will be twofold, taking on the form of both a scholarly presentation and an onsite installation. Throughout the conference, we will set up and run an on-site transcription booth.
   Conference attendees will be invited to sit for exactly five minutes at the booth, to be monitored
   by a timer. Each participant will be expected to assume the position of the Source in producing
   dictation. At the end of the five-minute session, the participant will receive a hard copy of his or her document.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 19.06.2012 - 15:05

8. Reading Virtual Geographies

   In John Muir's first published article, "Yosemite's Glacier," the eminent nature writer compares Yosemite Valley to a worn book, suggesting that to understand the physical geography of the valley a visitor must employ a reading practice similar to the study of literature. Over the century since, nature writers and ecocritics have continued to call for a more critical engagement with our natural world through literature and other media. However, as 21st century readers who are perhaps more likely to experience Yosemite Valley via Google Earth than in Muir's prose--much less as a physical space--we must begin to ask how or in what ways can we continue to "read" natural spaces as that are increasingly mediated through digital tools such as Google Earth and Second Life. To address this question I argue that we must learn to apply the same ecocritical reading practices that give subjectivity to the natural world to the digitally mediated geographies that increasingly define the spaces we inhabit.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 12:41

9. Slow Games, Slow Poems: The Act of Deliberation in "Slow Year"

   “Video games are actions,” declared Alexander Galloway in a manifesto that stakes out the
   essential differences between videogames and other forms of expressive culture, such as
   literature, photography, and cinema. But what about videogames in which action looks like
   inaction? What about videogames in which action means sitting still? What about a videogame
   that purports to be less a game and more a meditation—a work of literature? In this paper
   I explore a prominent yet remarkably understudied example of a slow game—a game that
   questions what counts as “action” in videogames. This game is A Slow Year (2010), designed
   for the classic Atari 2600 console by Ian Bogost. Comprised of four separate movements
   matching the four seasons, A Slow Year challenges the dominant mode of action in videogames,
   encouraging what I call “acts of deliberation.” These acts of deliberation transform the core
   mechanic of games from “action” (as Galloway would put it) into “experience”—and not just
   any experience, but the kind of experience that Walter Benjamin identifies as Erfahrung, an
   

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 12:55

10. Bob Brown's Reading Machine and the Comic Experience of Electrified Reading

    A recent essay by Jessica Pressman explores Bob Brown's The Readies (1929) as an important predecessor of electronic literature. Pressman argues that Brown's reading machine, which was designed to automatically unfurl scrolls of magnified text before the reader’s eyes in a way similar to a film projector, exemplifies a “machine poetics” that emphasizes the mediation of reading itself, much in the way that electronic literature often does. Brown’s description of his reading machine does indeed seem to offer an uncanny prophesy for subsequent developments in visual poetry and in reading technologies, as Pressman and other critics, including Jerome McGann and Craig Saper, have pointed out. In emphasizing the futurist possibilities of Brown’s machine, however, critics have tended to ignore or downplay the willfully comic aspects of the manifesto in which he proposes it. The tone of Brown’s writing suggests that we ought to count Rube Goldberg, as much as Thomas Edison, among the inspirations for the machine.

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 13:55

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