Conference panel or roundtable

The pandemic has enhanced awareness and reliance on digital platforms. Brick and mortar museums and libraries that are having difficulties pivoting to such platforms are presently unable to share works with the public for safety reasons. Consequently, special attention is being paid to platforms that produce, protect, and promote electronic literature, such as Electronic Literature Organization’s Repository. Housing 30 collections of 2500 digital-born works, the site must be maintained, the works thoroughly and accurately described, and digital art preserved and shared with scholars, artists, and the public. In light of the pandemic, it was realized that the Repository could fill more roles than storing digital artwork and the accompanying information. It had the untapped potential of becoming a space where digital art could be studied, experienced, preserved, and shared from anywhere. In short, it would become the next generation museum, library, and preservation site for born digital literature collected by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), the site now known as The NEXT. This panel showcases the newly designed Repository implemented by 39 students at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). 

In 2021, ELO in conjunction with the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) partnered with students at WSUV to implement this new vision for The NEXT. The new site makes digital artwork easily accessible to the public from a single digital space, enhanced by SEO and ADA compliance. From here, visitors have the ability to download permitted works and view any associated media, including images, videos, visualizations, and recorded interviews with the donor. They have also developed a search function for easily finding records. To further increase accessibility, students conducted usability testing on pages within the site, which includes an About page, Donations page, documentation regarding metadata schema, and more. With these components, The NEXT has transformed from an informational space into a multimedial site that is participatory, interactive, and experiential.

The architecture of the site is built to be scalable, allowing it to grow as new donations are offered to ELO. The NEXT sets a precedent for future museums and databases to follow. Blending information with human interaction stimulates The NEXT’s use as a virtual interactive museum and library, while increasing awareness of artists and their artwork. The site will continue to be maintained by ELL for ELO, and sustained by donations to ELO and ELL. Scholars volunteering their time and labor will further refine the metadata.

The NEXT will be presented at the conference by five of the 39 students involved in the implementation stage of the project. Kathleen Zoller will act as moderator, discussing the aim of the project and the components that made it come together; Katya Farinsky will share her process regarding copyediting; Betsy Hanrahan and Sarah West will demonstrate the site’s architecture and layout; Mallory Hobson will share design decisions made for The NEXT; Preston Reed will discuss the filming and interview process.

Recent pandemic-imposed restrictions on face-to-face exchanges have required that we find new ways to connect, often through networked platforms. Without classrooms, labs, and conference environments, ELO has embraced platforms such as Discord and Zoom for communication, and has also looked to online platforms for collaborative writing.

As we contemplate how platforms can keep us connected with our work and with each other, as well as the ways they may limit our interactions and thus arguably “disconnect” us, this panel explores what happens when e-literature—as research, practice, and field—is bound to platforms. E-literature scholarship and creative works that do not have the opportunity for in-person exchange provoke re-examinations of platform affordances and limitations. We ask: how may platforms may shape e-literature through their pre-set parameters, interfaces, and infrastructures? What are the promises and perils of platform-specific e-literature? Can we bring attention to platform through works of e-literature? Led by Marjorie C. Luesebrink, five speakers will answer these questions.

Lai-Tze Fan will trace the platform of a work of e-literature to its infrastructural origins. Nick Montfort’s generative poem Round (2013) is accompanied by a Note that describes the computational processes behind the poem. Fan will trace the specific hardware components’ production, manufacturing, assembly, and natural resource origins that support Round; in so doing, she provides an ecological understanding of the physical platforms that support e-literature.

Will Luers will sketch out some principles for a theory of recombinant fiction by exploring algorithmic flux (scripted variability) as something experiential within the digital text itself. His question for authors and readers of platform-based fiction production is: why is this play of forces between chaos and order thematically and formally important? Luers argues that algorithmic flux in digital fiction has a history, but that it presently lacks a theory and poetics for contemporary practice.

Erik Loyer will examine Google Sheets for how it enables users to treat spreadsheets as databases which can drive whole applications, effectively turning documents into platforms. He asks: what happens when we apply the same approach to digital narrative, giving individual stories the potential to function as their own platforms? Drawing on his experience developing creative tools for the digital humanities, digital comics, and e-lit, Loyer will sketch out some of the potentials and pitfalls of this mode of creation, and how our practices might better encourage it.

Christy Sanford reflects upon the processes for combining images and texts in some of her creative works. Sanford finds herself prompted by various platforms and platform-based texts around her, noting that in order to combine images and text, she needs technology’s assistance and inspiration to let unique characteristics of programs and platforms contribute to the development of her work.

Finally, Caitlin Fisher will discuss the promises and perils of disconnection and connection inside VR platforms that support literary and artistic co-creation. As we consider the use of virtual environments and spaces in place of in-person meetings and engagements, Fisher explores the futures of these platforms as a novel means of creative exchange.

Since the 1960s, several Peruvian poets, insular and heirs to an experimental poetic tradition, created works with visual and verbal elements that advanced the presence of poetry in electronic media and platforms. Works such as those by Jorge Eielson, Raquel Jodorowsky, Ricardo Falla, Enrique Verástegui, César Toro Montalvo or Juan Ramirez Ruiz already showed in Peruvian creators an awareness of the existence and assimilation of electronic media to their productions based on references to circuits electronic (1964), computers (1973-1988) and formal and experimental games with the algorithm (1977). Works like these are used in key antecedents to reimagine the Peruvian poetic tradition, but, at the same time, they raise the need for an approach that analyzes and discusses the adoption of the media as part of poetic experimentation to understand, in all its dimensions, at the time of the internet boom and its platformization, the work carried out in later decades by José Aburto with interactive poems using Flash (2000); Oswaldo Chanove through the possibilities of the hyperlink in a web platform (2001); Enrique Beó with hypertext poems in binary language through Wix and Issuu (2010); and Rafael García Godos with MVX0 a video game poem programmed in Unity (2017). Therefore, the objective of this panel is to show how, since the 2000s, Peruvian poets have inhabited digital platforms with works that used different technologies in trend, as practices related to what was previously developed by their peers in the materiality of paper. For this, our research will focus on this problem from a media archeology with two areas that must necessarily dialogue: discursive and digital. In the first case, to trace the insularity of these authors, we start from Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy as the study of a non-linear and heterogeneous history of knowledge, contextualized by power relations. In the second case, to show the jobs that were hosted on the Internet, we will use various rescue platforms such as wayback machine, for old websites; Ruffle, for work done in flash; and videos of the experience in the case of wix. The result of this work will be exposed in a data visualization on what we have called the origins of electronic poetry in Peru. In this way, we consider that a genealogical work must combine the apparatus of symbolic evaluation and the consequent use of platforms to counteract the absence of a critical and theoretical approach to this complex field, but also the obsolescence of technology.

While both can produce choice-based interactive fiction works playable via a web browser, the hypertext authoring tool Twine and the narrative scripting language Ink are, at first glance, two very different platforms. Twine takes text input in the form of passages and transforms it into HTML. Ink, as a scripting language, uses applications like Inky to create JSON files representing a compiled Ink project capable of more easily being used with game engines like Godot and Unity. The communities for each, however, approach these processes in the same ways: they create guides, make tutorials, and build resources to help other users understand how each tool moves content from input to output. They provide, in a word, service. It is this labor supporting the connections between users across these platforms, and it is the members of these communities maintaining its resources and reinforcing the platformization of each. 

This roundtable examines two different primary documents related to these platforms, the community labor histories behind them, and their current iterations. The first, the Twine Cookbook, was born out of a collection of resources and has become, over three years, the go-to source of Twine knowledge. During its lifetime, it has slowly absorbed content spread across other services such as the Twine wiki, forum, and details found in development posts. The second document, the Unofficial Ink Cookbook, is a more recent creation that was born out of the combined experiences of two instructors. It has slowly grown into an expansive document now quoted and used as a reference document by students learning Ink and as part of the Ink Discord to help new users understand concepts within the scripting language Ink. 

As editors and contributors to these documents, the members of this roundtable will speak to the ways in which community labor, service, is the conduit through which knowledge is shared, rules are enforced, and the sense of a “platform” emerges through the pedagogical resources created by the communities around Twine and Ink. Given the variety of platforms and tools available for creating interactive fiction, the members of this roundtable will review common problems, discuss possible solutions, and examine how a “platform” cannot exist without its community supplying the labor to sustain it.

The possibilities for interaction in electronic literature (e-lit) are heavily shaped by the platforms on which that interaction occurs, yet audiences are rarely aware of the extent to which the digital interface may influence, if not define, their sociality. These limitations take the form of community moderation tools and explicit censorship (such as in the case of profanity filters), but also in the designs of emote systems and content popularity systems, and achievement and reputation systems, and even in gameplay design. Often players, users, and audience members must oscillate rapidly and continually between determining the affordances of the tools available to them and evaluating the capacity of those tools to provide the social aims they desire.

This panel explores the current limitations of contemporary literary and art criticism when applied to interactive narratives in order to build a richer dialogue attentive to sociological factors affecting platform-based literary activity. A diffusion of social and literary perspectives, we argue, is ultimately more appropriate for understanding the complex role networked communication and collaboration plays in the very fabric of these works. Considered together, the presentations on this panel will look deeply into how social media platforms generate increasingly innovative experiments in narrative structure by adapting interpersonal communication and live social exchange to online writing and reading practices. Digital network culture, dating back to the earliest text adventure games and first BBS servers, marked a fascinating conjunction between art works and participatory activity, aligning in the process many established literary and artistic aims with an array of diverse social behaviors and habits. The narrative structure of interactive fiction tends to offer the same points of reference key to any story, beginning with its setup followed by examples of conflict and resolution. Upon migrating to platform-managed media tools, narrative design has continued to sponsor a variety of coordinating behaviors among users, including what we’ve identified as consistent patterns of aggregation, accumulation, and competition. In addition, as critics like Manuel Castells, Lev Manovich, and more recently Manish Mehta have shown, networked media platforms invoke powerful programmable determinisms in the process of managing, and, in some cases, defining our cultural and social interactions.

Aligning these behavioral patterns with new literary guidelines and frameworks, the panel will look critically and, we hope, provocatively at narrative construction as collaborative digital network interaction. As these technologies continue to entwine human agents into increasingly complex actor-network systems, the resulting shift in writing practices and attitudes compares well to the new linguistic consciousness Russian theorist Mikhail Bahktin attributed a century ago to the emergence of the novel within modern literature. Panelists Kirill Azernyi, Stephanie Jennings, Andrew Klobucar, Rebecca Rouse, and Kate Tyrol will contribute presentations covering a variety of perspectives on these considerations, including online conspiracy theory, classroom gamification, player and user experience, interactive sculpture, and the role of debate in public discourse.

The panel will consist of traditional oral presentations, and attendees will also be invited to concurrently experience the panel through a custom-built Twine narrative.

Tabletop Role-Playing Games (ttrpgs) are games of communal storytelling. These gameworlds exist in the minds of players who collectively populate them with people, events, and histories. Traditionally played in-person, groups found themselves hard hit when social-distancing rules came into effect. While some went on hiatus, others took to the web to continue their sagas. For some, this was an uphill battle of new technology and social norms. For others, the move was trivial as ttrpgs in fact existed online even before the pandemic. 

For this panel, we take for granted that playing ttrpgs is an act of oral literary production. We talk about the ways this storytelling – once done cooperatively but semi-privately – has grown beyond the table through various internet platforms to include a much larger production base. We will also cover the ways platforms have enhanced the building aspects of ttrpgs – the building of community, worlds, and narratives. Our panelists are as follows. 

We often hide the learning process, not wanting anyone to see our vulnerability. In an attempt at normalizing learning and imperfection, Krista-Lee Malone decided to live-stream her process of learning to be a dungeon master (DM) on twitch.tv/gameranthro. Additionally, she hoped that by live-streaming this she would be able to tap into the shared knowledge and experience of her audience. Although she has been a player for over 20 years, she had never before been a DM. She began live-streaming her preparation in January with many questions. 

Casey James O’Ceallaigh was live-streaming as a DM on twitch.tv/serious_play before the pandemic. At that time the players used a campus lab to play and stream. When the pandemic shut down campus, the group was forced to negotiate not only how to continue the game, but also how to continue sharing the lab channel. Previously, all streaming was done at the lab which was set up specifically for this purpose. Suddenly, the group had to set-up across multiple computers and locations. Casey will be discussing these negotiations and the struggles of DMing virtually while streaming. 

Edword Flabberjackson is the personality behind twitch.tv/pokeyoureyesoutgames and founder of the GCGG (Good Community, Good Games) stream team. Noticing the hard time some were having with the current state of the world and guided by the truth that we are the stories we tell ourselves, Edword decided to change those stories through a ttrpg stream. By having the players play both characters and themselves, he hoped to slowly get the players to start changing the stories they tell about themselves and therefore change how they feel. He will be talking about how those stories progressed. 

Andrew C. Fudge runs a ttrpg dedicated Discord server for the LGBTQ+ community. He is also preparing a Twitch stream dedicated to diversity in D&D. He will be discussing the process of content-making and building spaces dedicated to marginalized identities and how these spaces often become places for players’ first “coming out” moments, an integral step for LGBTQ+ people.

The concept of a workshop refers to an arrangement whereby a group of people learn, acquire new knowledge, perform creative problem-solving, or innovate in relation to a domain-specific issue (Ørngreen & Levinsen, 2017). In this round table session we will discuss the rulesets and social dynamics applied in different collaborative workshops within the context of Networked and Programmable Media (Cayley, 2009). We will share our experiences with three series of workshops organized in the past and current year, aiming to create platforms to socialize and build communities in the context of COVID19: 

(1) Viral Imagina (imaginaviral.net) is a series of online brief workshops and art performances that have been taking place throughout 2020. The project has emerged as an independent effort to spread art language practices in digital environments for the global Spanish speaking community.

(2) Salutches (https://salutches.viniciusmarquet.com/) is an online platform for social experiences that aims to strengthen the community of students and researchers at LUCA School of Arts. Several workshop formats have been developed in the context of Salutches, among which Trueque (an online exchange of digital objects and services) and Pastiche (eclectic pedagogic experiments in collaborative creation). 

(3) Blend&Bleed. An online symposium organized at LUCA School of Arts, addressing the concept of trans-reality: the zone of experience whereby a player moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual realms, brought together in one unified game space (Lindley, 2004). Blend&Bleed aims to initiate new collaborations between the fields of Artistic Research, Performance, Game and Interaction Design. 

These workshops have been iteratively developed and tested, in the context of the Ph.D. projects of the first and third author, according to the methodologies proposed by Shön (1983) and Latour (2005), outlining a design cycle that integrates practice with theoretical reflection. The round table discussion will feature both practical lessons and theoretical insights gained in the research process. Each presenter will provide a short description of their experiences as workshop organizers, after which we will initiate an interactive dialogue.

Ocean as Media Platform for Electronic Literature 

The ocean is a media platform. Recognizing it as such can change how we think of platform, media, and meaning. This panel takes an ecocritical approach. We understand the ocean to be a primary platform for life on Earth, encompassing 70% of our globe, and also a platform that inspires much of our digital life and literature. We take Joellyn Rock and Alison Aune’s FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as sinew connecting our diverse our critical methodologies and perspectives, as we consider how emerging knowledge from environmental humanities informselectronic literature.

Melody Jue: "Beyond Blue: Ocean and/as Platform":What might it look like to speculatively submerge our ideas about computational platforms in the ocean? How terrestrial is platform studies? Drawing from my book Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), this talk explores the valences of the “platform” in oceanic contexts, considering its media-specific meaning alongside others (oil platform, advocacy platform) and the metaphor of the platform as a flat, planar surface. I consider the affordances of platforms and oceans through a reading of the video game Beyond Blue, by BBC and E-line media, which presents an occasion to consider ocean health and resource extraction alongside multiple senses of “platform,” from computation to environmental politics.

Mark Marino: “Diving into the code of immersive e-lit.”From immersion in sound and image in Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998) to immersion in a downpour of letters in Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain” (2000) to immersion in a sea of text in Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s “Sea and Spar Between” (2010), artists of electronic literature have plunged readers into virtual oceans. This presentation will take a deep dive into the Processing code to explore the ways “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” immerses its participants in tides of gender, hybridity, and fantasy.

Diana Leong: “Silhouettes and the Sea: Mediating Racial Fetishism”:From Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist medallion to artist Kara Walker’s cut-paper installations, the silhouette has occupied a singular place within the iconography of slavery and its afterlife. This style of illustration can be understood as operating within the dynamics of racial fetishism as it attempts to resolve tensions between the universal (e.g., racial blackness) and the particular (e.g., black bodies). This talk examines how “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” evokes a similar dynamic by staging oceanic entanglements between depth (e.g., immersion) and surface (e.g., silhouette) as a complement to universal/particular. By mapping these entanglements onto the mermaid’s multiple forms of liminality, “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” gestures towards a reading of racial fetishism as a form of pleasure predicated on an ambivalent relationship to difference.

Jessica Pressman: “Mermaids in Elit”:This talk explores the role of mermaids in electronic literature, past and present, as poetic symbol and formal device. We can read the presence of mermaids as portending transformations in literature’s media, signifying change in the materiality of literary production and reception. In this talk, I use “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as exemplary of how electronic literature uses mermaids and what we can learn by diving deep into consideration of them.

When the global pandemic spread in early 2020, we, as many others, wondered what was happening and what it all meant. Almost all cultural activity moved online and the electronic platforms took even stronger hold of our lives. We started gathering material about the impact of the Covid 19 on e-literature and digital creativity for a round table presented at the ELOrlando 2020, the first completely online ELO conference ever. This work led to the project Electronic Literature and Covid 19 (supported by DARIAH EU), which includes an exhibition at this year’s conference, a research collection at the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, other presentations and further research. 

Life under the pandemic is like living under a largely invisible threat that emerges as catastrophic and tragic when death rates go up. At other times the threat of the virus is barely visible and can mainly be traced as deserted streets. Sometimes the way it invades our shared, common imagination gets quickly normalized as yet another persuasive data visualization, digital map demonstrating a sudden upsurge in viral spread or simply another infographic with increasing numbers. It might be compared to how Svetlana Alexievich describes the Chernobyl disaster (in Chernobyl Prayer, (1997), Penguin 2016), as an unknown catastrophe that was and is difficult to understand for the many Belarusians and Ukrainians living in the disaster zone since it did not look like war or natural disaster. Chernobyl’s invisible radioactive cloud that in 1986 spread across Europe, functioned at the time much like invisible viral danger today, as a post-human, ecological crisis requiring a new understanding and politics. And, like Chernobyl, the pandemic has demonstrated the fractures in many societies’ foundations such as economic inequality, racism, inadequately equipped institutions and health services, and incompetent leaders (see also Latour, Hayles Taussig, Mbembe, Chun et al. in Critical Enquiry, vol. 47, number S2, Winther 2021). Luckily, the pandemic has also shown caring communities and societies, newfound interests in the domestic, the local, and the environmental, including the climate crisis (see e.g. Markham AN, Harris A, Luka ME. Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking During COVID-19 Times. Qualitative Inquiry. October 2020.). 

Besides its importance for health, society and the economy, the pandemic might be seen as a paradigmatic cultural change happening in a time with locked down cultural life, which can be seen from behind the global screens of platforms. Electronic literature plays an important role in exploring how people gets through daily life during the pandemic, how we see our homes, communities, cities, environments, institutions, how people become part of both progressive (BLM, Metoo, etc) and reactionary (QAnon, etc) movements. Digital platforms have played a large part in this, e.g. through the various #, through their ways of promoting extremism through profiling algorithms, through their transforming of institutions, etc. 

This panel will present early outcomes of the project, present a framework for the exhibition, and an analysis of the themes of the submitted works. We will also invite feedback from the ELO community of researchers, practitioners and artists.

Panel description 

This panel explores how digital environments affect literature, and more specifically, how writing and reading practices speak across electronic literature platforms. If it is true that every medium develops its own telling structure and, thus, each platform allows authors specific literary affordances and constraints. It is also true, from a narratological point of view, that the same medium could spawn different products (Ryan 2004). With this in mind, panel members focus on female literary creations, coming from different geographic regions. Their papers analyse the ways in which platforms affect narrative and poetic construction, including gender patterns highlighted in the selected examples. Methodologically, qualitative and quantitative research methods are used, including close reading, digital hermeneutics, distant reading, semiotics and Material Engagement Theory (MET). 

HStudies Research Group, University of Jyväskylä, Finland 

Individual abstracts 

Posthuman Intermedial Semiotics: From the Holodeck to Mez Breeze’s micro-V[R]erseAsun López-Varela (Complutense University Madrid, Spain)

From a semiotic perspective, this presentation explores V[R]erse, a collection of poems and micro-stories that celebrates well-known E-lit artists, turning the pieces into Posthuman VR experiences. Australian net.artist and game designer Mez Breeze uses VR sculptures to add to these micro-stories. From a semiotic and MET perspective, the paper explores desktop-based VR. 

A Hermeneutics of Stephanie Strickland, Cyntia Lawson Jaramillo and Paul Ryan’s SlippingglimpseMaya Zalbidea (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)

This study offers a hermeneutical analysis of the Flash interactive poem Slippingglimpse. This hermeneutical analysis pays attention to the common features of poetry such as poetical language, structure, form and rhythm, as well as the particular signs used, as well as the effects and the computer elements it integrates.

Labiba Khammar’s Critical and Creative WorksEman Younis (Beit Berl College, Israel)

This paper sheds light on the experience of the Moroccan writer and critic Labiba Khammar, who is one of the pioneering Arab women writers in the field of digital literature. Labiba wrote an important theoretical book, a theoretical project that was followed by a practical creative project: Guraf wa Maraya. Through this work, Khammar discussed the issues of writing a novel through a series of stories that are disconnected and connected simultaneously.

Unfixed Gender Patterns in World Electronic Literature PlatformsGiovanna Di Rosario (Polytechnic of Milan, Italy) and Nohelia Meza (Independent Scholar, Mexico)

This research describes and analyses the ways in which traditional markers of identity, such as gender, are reconfigured in digital literature. The study aims at understanding the role of place and gender in a poetic digital environment. By investigating and applying distant reading techniques to works authored by female writers from Europe and Latin America, Di Rosario and Meza trace the unfixed and polyhedric feminine literary and poetic voices embedded in E-lit creations.