Kaashi, or Varanasi, is one of those places to surely feature on anyone’s Freudian bucket list.
"Thirteen Ways of Killing a Scrubjay" is a prose-poem in the form of a blog that explores the theme of modern violence. The work is a "playful" response to the Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1954). The journal entries detail ludicrously gruesome and elaborate plans to murder the helpless birds: from poison pellets to cyanide darts to water cannons.
The blog fiction was first published online in 2007. In 2015, it was exhibited at ISEA International.
Organized in the format of numerous blog entries, the text follows Belén Gache, the protagonist, and her journey in a fictitious world taken over by semiotic dictatorships. In this environment overrun by lingüistic oppression, Gache rebels through her quest to understand poetry, its meaning, and its relationship with technology. Through Gache’s alliance with other semiotic rebels, her struggles against word forgers, and her desire to uncover the truth behind the poetry of the semi-autonomous robot, AI-Halim, the author conveys an analysis of the relationship between human intelligence, artificial intelligence, and poetry.
Organizado en formato de múltiples entradas de un blog, la trama de la obra sigue el viaje de la protagonista, Belén Gache, en un mundo ficticio que ha sido dominado por dictaduras semióticas. En este entorno de opresión lingüística, Gache se rebela a través de su búsqueda del entendimiento de la poesía, su significado y su relación con la tecnología. A través de la alianza de Gache con otros rebeldes semióticos, sus desafíos contra los falsificadores de palabras y su deseo de revelar la verdad sobre la poesía del robot semiautónomo, AI-Halim, la autora propone un análisis de la relación entre inteligencia humana, inteligencia artificial y poesía.
La tierra nunca comprenderá forma parte de Kublai Moon, un proyecto multimodal que consiste de tres blogs y un generador de poemas. Interesantemente, se puede decir que el generador de poemas tiene dos niveles de existencia: (1) existe en sí mismo por sí mismo, como obra poética en el mundo real/extra-diegético (2) pertenece al mundo ficticio (diegético) de Kublai Moon.
Detective bonarense is a detective novel with all the characteristics of the genre and certain excepcional eccentricities: it is written as the diary of the detective Aristóbulo García, an avatar, who moves through Swedish geography chaising Aranita, one of the members of the robbery of Bank Río; a case that was on the news in 2005. The author explained his experience with blog fiction: “the truth, is what makes the reader get into the ‘lie’ I am telling, it is achieved sweating ink-instead of bytes-it is a fight with one word and another.
Detective bonaerense es una novela policial con todas las características del género y con algunas rarezas geniales: está escrita a manera de diario personal del detective Aristóbulo García, un personaje avatírico, quien se mueve por una geografía sueca persiguiendo al Aranita, uno de los prófugos del robo a la sucursal de Banco Río; caso que fue noticia en el 2005. Al explicarnos su experiencia con la blogonovela nos dejó muy claro esto: “la verosimilitud, lo que hace que el lector se sumerja en la ‘mentira’ que le estoy contando, se logra sudando tinta -no bytes- en una lucha con y contra la palabra.
Nowadays the relationship between cyberliterature and traditional literature is very complex. Despite there is a number of digital works and the increase of using the Internet, cyberliterature does not appeal easily to readers, editors and critics. The general public, even though active on the Net, does not seem to be interested in this new narrative form that hypertext uses, multimedia and interactivity. In this situation we wonder: To what extent digital genres inherit from the printing machine or its hybrid modalities -transmedia, crossmedia, multimedia, mash-ups, pastiches- from successful genres of the 20th century -photography, radio, cinema and television?And to conclude, the main question is: Can we talk about literature when most of the digitally born works have made of words (LITER) a "litter", a waste element substituted by the NET and its images, sound, videos, animations, digital art, graphic design, etc? To sum up, is LiterNETature, LITERature?
La relación entre la ciberliteratura y la literatura tradicional es actualmente muy compleja. A pesar del número creciente de obras digitales y del aumento de uso de Internet, la ciberliteratura tiene dificultad para atraer la atención de los lectores, de los editores y de los críticos. El público general, aunque sea usuario activo de la red, parece no interesarse por esta nueva forma narrativa que utiliza el hipertexto, los recursos multimedia y la interactividad. Ante esta situación nos preguntamos: ¿Hasta qué punto los géneros nacidos digitales heredan a la imprenta o son modalidades híbridas (transmedia, crossmedia, multimedia, mash-ups, pastiches) de los géneros triunfantes en el siglo XX (fotografía, fonógrafo, radio, cine, televisión)? Y en fin, la pregunta fundamental: ¿Puede hablarse de literatura cuando la mayoría de las obras nacidas digitales han hecho de las palabras (LITER) un elemento residual, siendo sustituidas por la NET y sus imágenes, sonidos, videos, animaciones, arte digital, diseño gráfico, etc.? En suma, ¿es ya la LiterNETura, LITERatura?
Dream Blog is a personal diary. In fact, it isn’t really a diary if by “diary” we refer to the events that take place during the day time. It is better to call it a “nightry” as it registers what happened in my dreams during the nights of 2007 and 2008. Being a "nightry" it is written with white ink.
El blog de los sueños es un diario personal. En realidad, no es un diario, si con diario nos referimos al registro de lo que sucede durante el día, sino más bien un "nocturnio" dado que registró mis sueños durante las noches de los años 2007 y 2008. Por ser un "nocturnio" está escrito con tinta blanca.
The spread in the use of blogs, bulletin boards and wikis during the first half of the present decade gave rise to discussions about the possible applications of these emerging technologies to a wide range of collaborative enterprises. From building Internet communities to authoring encyclopedias, or producing collective narratives in the form of fan-fictions, blog-fictions or wiki-novels, users from around the world have been exploring the opportunities for innovation, socialization, and artistic creation brought forth by these collaborative platforms. This paper examines the intersections between two of the most influential collective narratives produced in recent years in cyberspace: Train Man, the Internet story of a 23-year-old geek (otaku) who relies on an online community to reduce his geekiness and find a girlfriend; and A Fat Woman Weblog (Weblog de una mujer gorda), the story of a middle class family from Mercedes, Argentina, as told from the perspective of an Argentine housewife (a fictional character impersonated by Hernán Casciari). Some of the elements shared by both stories that will be explored in this paper are: 1) the presence of pseudonymic narrative voices using the possibilities afforded by different collaborative platforms to tell a story interactively on the Internet; 2) the spontaneous emergence of a fan community who rallies around each of the characters to animate the progression of the story, and try to negotiate its continuation and possible developments; 3) the creation, over time, of a pop culture phenomenon that goes beyond its original scope to includeprinted books, comics, theatrical plays, TV series, or films. Despite being so distant from one another, both geographically and culturally, these two stories exhibit a number of communalities pointing to the new ways in which a narrative can be produced and appropriated within the context of network society.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI.