aesthetics

Though scholars of literature and the arts remain skeptical, Strunk explores some of the ways "videogames are making the transition into being objects worthy of artistic attention."

This paper will outline the key elements of an ongoing research project, whose main focus is to explore the application of new technology to the study of key works of modernism, whilst simultaneously arguing that modernism can itself offer fresh perspectives on contemporary digital art. I am interested in the way modernism presents the artwork as both an object to be experienced and as a structured theory of knowledge. This tension can be seen most obviously in such canonical works as Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1917-1969) where his aesthetic of the ‘luminous fragment’ is set against the poem’s larger, Dantescan, vision of history. Concomitantly, I wish to argue that the resources of digital technology offer a significant new set of tools for approaching modernism itself, allowing us to explore the boundary between the work of scholarship and work of art.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

This doctoral thesis is dedicated to a form of storytelling which was added to the literary horizon
almost three decades ago. Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. The
transgression of linearity, a feature which is often related to print or, more precisely, to the novel, and the attempts to reduce authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining
characteristics of this literary form. These works were first described as fragmented objects
comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of
choice and a participative role in the construction of the text. This text was read by selecting several links and by assembling its lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new kinds of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several forms of representation could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons. Sound was also included as part of digital fiction.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software is often followed by the creation of new
types of texts. Virtual reality or augmented reality are presently being used to produce new textual responses. These demand an analysis of the relation between interactivity and immersion. While interactivity is often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion is frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the
reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the
result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was
mostly viewed as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing electronic literature as part of a long self-generating process known as literature, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. In fact, they represent intrinsic characteristics which can be identified in any kind of literary text. In order to better understand the relation between immersion and interactivity, the alleged transparency of the medium and its apparent immateriality will be discussed in this thesis. The hybridity and interactivity of digital fiction will be considered as aesthetic features that must be covered by literary analysis. This thesis aims to address the relationship between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.

The question of what are the aesthetic- politics of electronic literature in Latin America, constitutes the point of departure of this research. In this paper I aim to discuss about this issue regarding the electronic novel “Tierra de extracción” from Doménico Chiappe and Andreas Meier. Using macromedia director, this polyphonic novel was presented to the public for the first time in 2000 and it is available on internet since 2007. It was included in the 2010 second volume of electronic literature presented by the Electronic Literature Organization, in the category of multilingual or non-English narratives. The analysis considers two dimensions, the modes of production of electronic texts and its forms of reception. The first dimension — production— is related to the decisions of the authors about aesthetics, levels of interaction/participation of the readers and technologies used to produce the texts. The second dimension — reception — refers to two “sub-dimensions”. The first one is the creation of alternative ways of distribution/circulation of the texts (mainly internet). The second is related to changes on reading behavior and the development of creative communities (or collective-interpretative intelligences), which are directly related to a conception of the relation with technology contained in posthumanist theories. Terry Eagleton poses that modern literature has a contradictory function. On one side, literature cannot be detached from the ideological forms belonging to the modern society of classes. Thus, literature reflects the context where it is produced and, to some extent, it reproduces that context. On the other side, literature creates spaces that allow us to think in alternatives and transgressions to the dominant contexts we are living in. The ways electronic texts in Latin America are developed reflect Terry Eagleton’s proposals. In summary, from the analysis of Chiappe and Meier’s electronic novel we propose a definition of a mode of literary production characterized by the uses of the new digital technologies that derived into practices of distribution and reception, related to forms of appropriation of these technologies, which are creating cultural meanings and social relationships in the context of informational capitalism.

Whilst there may be aesthetic tropes within digital media, there is no universally accepted authority within contemporary culture nor is there an easy mutual acceptance of what is “right and proper” or indeed legitimate outside the now virtue of being popular and well followed. Indeed the now bodily distanced and disinhibited digital citizen frequently demonstrates a palpable distain for the elite and pretentious (1). Considering this, any community with Literature in its name may have an identity problem; literariness still pertains to an elevated quality of artistic or intellectual merit and is thus counter to popular cultural production. In addition, mainstream culture has successfully commoditized many counter-cultural communities (2). Electronic Literature has arguably not been through such commodification processes, and the question of interest is why not? To that extent this paper seeks to explore possible answers. Investigating the broader shifts towards increased visuality within modern culture (3) the paper will discuss and revisit the discourses on the power structures of the gaze, consider spectatorship’s dominance over readership and interaction and co-creation and the function of the image within contemporary narrative forms inside and outwith Electronic Literature (4). The paper will also consider the politics implied in the move to open access, the fluid distribution of often context-less “images”, how this relates to prior notions of literary publishing, and whether this manifests as an opportunity or a challenge to Electronic Literature’s dissemination. Lastly and toward a conclusion, the paper will propose that if we consider the tradition of literature as one that is driven by the expression of human experience, where in today’s context literary “traditions” are not longer built around specific commonalities of form (i.e. predominately verbal language) but rather subject matter, themes and worldviews then the questions of identity and of “literariness” can evaporate to make space for fuller participation in the ocular freedoms in contemporary culture.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Murmurs seeks to gather and link texts written with a poetic intention and available in the net in order to present them in a consistent form within the outline of a hypertext. These texts will be identified by an algorithm and interconnected through semantic links generated with the use of coincident words.

Thanks to this process, the texts with poetic format, already published online, will become a sole extensive and surfable piece that can be analyzed and can receive feedback from blogs, twits, and by any other indexable means. This way we seek to generate a piece of e-poetry by uniting those expressive texts in the net that cannot individually be classified as e-poetry. In order to achieve this we will use algorithmic processes, databases, crawlers for indexing, Big Data analysis, all presented as self-generated hypertexts.

The study of these texts through systems of computer linguistics will allow finding coincidences in the use of language with expressive intentions in the net. In a second moment, an API (application programming interface) will open and allow the free processing of the information gathered.

Murmurs dreams of waking up one day and finding an ocean of poems united by transparent threads of saliva through which we may roam from one brilliant moment encountered to another one especially felt by somebody in some corner of the net for you.

In this paper, we will address all the theoretical aspects of the project and the reasons for its implementation. Starting from the analysis of (1) the aesthetics of written poetry in digital format and the characteristics that make it possible to be analyzed through algorithms. After this we will review the way (2) the isolation of poetic texts in the net appears as a phenomenon that weakens their possibilities to be found by potential readers.

Later on, we will address (3) the text as a coinciding correlation which will open the doors for a solution out of the nature of the very poetic digital text, which in turn will allow us to consider (4) the “findability” as a new paradigm replacing the editorial distribution and (5) the relevance as the new utopia of the poetic text, thus allowing a better access to these text thanks to a unifying proposal. Finally, once we have achieved this we can present (6) the computation as a tool for the literary criticism of online poetic texts where we will see the implications of an articulate poetry corpus in digital format ready for the academic analysis.

The final aspect goes deep in (7) our proposal where we present the tools we will use, the key factors, the progress of the project up to the current moment, and the possibilities for cooperation in the community of developers. Musarañas is the prototype of Murmurs, created out of a database of the author’s poems, which allows us to test the basic functions such as the style of navigation, indexing, managing tools for tagging and the bunches of words necessary.

Currently, there is a functional prototype of the tagging system available at http://labs.phantasia.pe/musarana/.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

TOC's promotional tease – “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” – became awkwardly literalized when, after a Mac OS update, I could no longer open the novel. The tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC – exhibited internationally, prize-winning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press – is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, “may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization”.

TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts “only two or three years.” It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad, an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share. TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed 1 million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker. TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon. But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.

What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures. The reader’s touch is a performance not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, code, human body and the physical setting in which the performance transpires. TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996) is a medial evolution that prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what's at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.

(soucr: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The digital turn brings about not only changes in young adult literature considered as aesthetic artifacts and literary works but also changes in the perception and reception of the reader. Digital young adult literature is increasingly multimodal and interactive, and it integrates elements from game aesthetics. When young adult literature navigates between media, new analytical approaches are required to explore the way in which it operates among various aesthetic strategies and medialities and the way it affects the young adult reader. With this development it becomes essential to combine different fields of research, e.g. research in literature and media science; thus, the focus of this paper will be research in children’s literature in an intermedial perspective. The analytical approach can be either diachronic when the object is the study of how various aesthetic expressions (text, picture, sound, etc.) have been used to create the literary artifact, or the approach can be synchronically based when the object is studying the categories which cut across the aesthetic expressions with the aim of transgressing conceivable media specific borders, and the latter will be the focal point here.

The pivotal point of this paper will be exploring how transgressing analytical categories, e.g. rhythm, sequentiality, time, space and dialogue with the reader, can shed light on the formation of meaning in a specific digital young adult literary work, i.e. Tavs (Camilla Hübbe, Rasmus Meisler and Stefan Pasborg 2013) which prompts different reading methods, paths, and types of interaction. The analysis will focus on selected analytical categories in order to explore the integration of various art forms and sensory appeals, viz. visual, auditory, and tactile modalities. In other words, the paper will investigate the ‘denaturalization’ of the reading process and it will attempt to investigate and offer analytical categories which can be used also by young readers so that they can become competent cross media readers of young adult literature in a digitalized and medialized landscape of texts.

Theoretically, the presentation will be based on theory on digital literature and media (Hayles, N. Kathrine Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2008, Simanowski, Roberto, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla (ed.) Reading Moving Letters. Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. Bielefeld, Trancript Verlag 2010, Bell, Alice, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad Analyzing Digital Fiction. New York: Routledge 2014) and theory on picturebook (Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott (2006) How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge).

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The participants of the workshop, experts from the field of IT and computer technologies, are acquainted with the concept and history of sound sculptures, learn about the technologies used in this field, and participate in a poetic media performance by Machine Libertine.

Art in public space shapes the character of the city, more traditional statues and public monuments in the city usually don’t have sound incorporated into them. Nevertheless, they are surrounded by a variety of sounds: noise from construction, talking, the hum of machinery, etc. – a steady stream of such sounds we call “sound pollution”. One of the ways to improve the climate of public spaces and to eliminate sound pollution is via sound design. Sounds of the city are included into the composition of the works, transforming them into a harmonious piece of music. A therapeutic oasis is formed around a sound sculpture, a special space for respite from the busy rhythm of the city. Interactivity is a central element of a sound sculpture: the sound parameters are determined by the audience, the data on the time of day, time of year, weather conditions, etc. Such multi-channel sound composition is designed to breathe life into static sculptural artifacts, as well as to create harmonious sound aesthetics for the urban environment.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)