archive

What happens at the edges of bordercrossing technologies? Our poster showcases an exploratory, Benjaminian digital experiment that queers the investigation into who and what and how emerging technologies connect with our bodies, lives and desires. This work is part of a larger project investigating tools, platforms and digital strategies that help us to weave together the digital and the analogue, human and machine, and interactivity that moves us beyond linearity to multiplicity, and for ELO we are excited to highlighting our proposed experimental project archive, still in the early stages of development as we are considering multiple platforms and seeking feedback. We’re building a kind of queer digital arcades - both platform and method - weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera to perform an interactive, technoerotic story that troubles the borders between technologies, selves, others and the world. Our goal is to offer de-centred and multiple entry points to explore the increasingly ubiquitous technologies that summon our curiosities, vulnerabilities and penetrability, and implicate our skin, our memories of the basement bar, and our bravery. This multivocal work includes both poetic and analytical texts, electronic literature and theory as we work to visually and associatively map a series of technologies and concepts into constellations and queer formations. We understand and use the term “queer” methodologically – that is, we believe that queerness is a way of doing, whether that doing is in the production, consumption, or circulation of digital forms. The queerness here is in the very structure of the interface, the affordances of the platform, the non-linear, expansive, and associative logics that are revealed through exploration. The result is aspirational as much as, or more than, it is analytic, prompting users to imagine new speculative queer worlds as we all grapple with the ones we currently inhabit. The larger project aims to literalize the circuit formed by the digital and the queer, thus representing an emerging, heterogenous interactivity that produces radical possibilities, possibilities that we call edge effects. Our Benjaminian digital arcade aims both to capture and perform some of these edge effects and will include new electronic writing alongside experiments in spatial theorymaking. We are considering a variety of platforms at this time, including: 1) VR Chat; 2) an emerging beta platform for webvr and 3) Unity. We anticipate having screen captures of prototypes across multiple platforms and perhaps active links to beta worlds to share at the time of the conference.

Funkhouser describes the PO.EX’70-80 project and highlights several elements of the database, praising the taxonomy and preservation/representation of works.

This  article  presents  “Ciberia”,  a  collection  of  electronic  literature  works  in  Spanish, housed  in  OdA 2.0.,  a  learning  objects‟  repository  of  the  University  Complutense  of  Madrid.  The Ciberia project involves experimentation at the humanistic and technological level, since it deals with the challenge of archiving digitally-born literary works as well as with the archiving process itself, which we  are  carrying  out  in  OdA  2.0,  a  data  management  system  for  the  creation  of  learning  objects repositories  on  the  Web.  OdA  allows  different  researchers  to  work  collaboratively  in  a  simultaneous manner on the data base, they can not only introduce new objects but they can also modify the data model. This entourage  allows us to create taxonomies in an  inductive rather  than deductive manner. The  article  covers  aspects  such  as  the  objectives  of  the  collection,  the  elaboration  of  Ciberia‟s bibliographic  card,  the  process  of  metadata  cleaning  and  reconciliation  with  other  collections  of  the Linked Data cloud, such  as the CELL  Project, and Ciberia‟s research and  pedagogical functions. Moreover, we will showcase some of its most representative literary works as we revise the process of the collection‟s creation.

Abby Adams discusses the challenges from the perspective of an archive, providing insights into the specific role of an institution’s archive in regards to making works accessible to the public.

Memories of «Cuéntanos un secreto» (Tell me a secret)
 understanding textualities in the Network and programmable media. Paper focuses on the electronic exploration collection. 

At first glance, secrets are experiences that are kept hidden from the outside world. They are hidden because of particular social circumstances. Those circumstances relate to the personal and social ethics in its historical context. 

For anthropologists and psychologists, secrets are archetypical, symbolic, psychological and/or behavioral patterns that constantly are repeated in human life and history. They provide explanatory frames, such as lack of eternal love, the punishment of the father, betrayal of the family, taboos, desire, etc. Secrets are a model of popular storytelling in society ́s everyday life. Tell me a secret is a secret-sharing project between communities. The secrets are graphically depicted by participants during visual communication workshops. At the end of every workshop participants are invited to anonymously share their own secrets in order to feed the project flow. Tell me a secret is an ongoing growing archive as well. The objective of the archive is to preserve, research and distribute the popular storytelling. The project considers as secrets both, the written stories and their graphical depiction.

Tell me a secret does not exist without the workshop. Although there are some samples where secrets have been depicted or shared outside the workshop, those are special exceptions. The base of the secret sharing project starts in intimacy. It is almost impossible to share a secret without trust in the other. The workshop is a link where participants connect and trust in the project, therefore in other community. 

During this presentation, I would like to focus on those objects regarding the electronic textualities explorations. These explorations have been followed by theoretical explanations using Katherine Hayley’s eventualize texts theory, Augusto de Campo’s concrete poetry manifesto and Ulises Carrion theory «The new art of making books» All of them bastions of these explorations.

The aim of current thesis is to propose an applicable model of an archive for works of digital and electronic literature in the context of a media laboratory that would document, collect, preserve and maintain works by native artist/authors in the Turkish scene. This thesis is both intended as a co-mediation that investigates and critiques the material infrastructure of the contemporary archival practices with a trajectory on the now-speculative forms of archival evolution such as DNA- storage through a media archaeological observance of existing examples of media laboratories that focus on the preservation of works of digital and electronic literature; and, rendered as a proposal for an actual archival project that would be utilized so as to establish a certain media laboratory for the archival, collection, documentation, preservation and maintenance of such literary works that defy the print-culture-bound dimension of traditional humanities. It aims to encourage the mediated thinking. By employing works of digital and electronic literature as digital objects, it also provide an ontological grounding for the media inherent thereof. Throughout the thesis, a media archaeological critique is reached in terms of contemporary archival studies through the notion of World Literature, that is the base of Comparative Literature, in order that a sense of interdisciplinary practice may be developed with media studies at large and computational arts for the betterment of knowledge preservation, and sharability thereof.

Keywords: Archive, Digital Literature, Electronic Literature, Media Archaeology, Media Laboratory