body

Event type
Date
-
Individual Organizers
Short description

Feeling without Touching is a workshop inspired by John Koenig's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a list of invented words that describe feelings that “give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.” Through a series of guided activities that include movement and writing with the body, participants will explore what it feels like to interact with one another without “physically” being in touch and reimagine new ways of languaging emotion in digital spaces.

Record Status
Short description

Attention à la marche! Mind the Gap! questions the place of electronic literature in a digital culture. Present since the 1980s, electronic literary practices must now adapt and renew themselves in light of the proliferation and massive use of digital devices in our lives. How do they make us think about literature in its broadest sense and its current occurrences? What forms do they take in public and urban spaces? How do they articulate our relationships to the body, to culture, to our representations of ourselves and the world?

 

Attention à la marche! Mind the Gap! exploits the multiple gaps that can arise between technologies, practices and their contexts. Bringing together some fifty works produced by pioneers and emerging artists, the exhibition offers a diversified panorama of electronic literature practices, at the crossroads of literature and computer science. In these works, the text is protean: it becomes matter, it is animated, spatialized, declaimed, intertwined with images and gives itself, in its more classical expression, in the form of statements, translated into different human and computer languages.

Description in original language
Images
Image
Image
Record Status
By Ole Samdal, 24 October, 2017
Publication Type
Language
Appears in
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

Have you seen a cyborg today? Would you know it if you had? A creature of science fiction novels, electronic engineering, and postmodern theory, the cyborg is like the white heron of Sarah Orne Jewett’s story: often discussed but seldom glimpsed. The ambiguity of what one means by a cyborg rumbles through Diane Greco’s electronic hypertext Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric as she plays a series of electronic riffs on Donna Haraway’s now famous essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” giving it, to my Los Angeles ear, an unsettling quality not unlike the queasiness I feel when I go through the mountain tunnel of the Universal Studios tour.

 

(Source: ebr)

Description in original language
By Malene Fonnes, 26 September, 2017
Author
Publication Type
Language
Year
Appears in
License
CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

In this review Veronica Vold charts the posthuman environmental ethic in Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and notes how the text draws together issues of race, (dis)ability, and the environment in a way that disrupts the boundaries between bodies and places.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/bodily

By Malene Fonnes, 26 September, 2017
Author
Publication Type
Language
Year
Appears in
License
CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

Beginning his review by reflecting on the book’s cover art, John Bruni speculates that a punk aesthetic runs throughout Alaimo’s posthuman environmentalism. Providing brief treatments of each chapter, he argues that the book’s trans-corporeal understanding of the relationship between bodies and places disrupts “the very heart of what we know about ourselves.”

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/punk)

Content type
Year
Language
Publication Type
Record Status
Description (in English)

Up until now, everyone alive on earth was bound to one another through African Eve, our last common ancestor, who 5,000 generations ago passed her genes and language to sons and daughters who did the same as they gradually populated the world. Today, however, Square, Circle and the other inhabitants of Flatland have the opportunity to step outside this lineage. To rearrange the bodies of animals, plants, and even themselves. VAS: An Opera in Flatland is the story of Square’s decision to undergo an operation that will leave him sterile for the good of his wife, Circle, for the good of their daughter, Oval, and for the good of society, including the unborn descendants he will never have. VAS is, in other words, the story of finding one’s identity within the double-helix of language and lineage—and Square’s struggle to see beyond the common pages of ordinary, daily life upon which he is drawn.

Utilizing a wide and historical sweep of representations of the body, from pedigree charts to genetic sequences, this hybrid novel recounts how differing ways of imagining the body generate differing stories of knowledge, power, history, gender, politics, art, and, of course, the literature of who we are. It is the intersection of one tidy family’s life with the broader times in which they live.

VAS will be of interest to anyone concerned with the futures we are now writing into existence.

(Source: http://www3.nd.edu/~stomasul/VAS_homepage.html)

Screen shots
Image
Cover VAS
Image
VAS page 62-62
Image
VAS page 72-73
Image
Vas page 266-267
Event type
Date
-
Organization
Address

Vancouver
Canada

Short description

ISEA2015’s theme of DISRUPTION invites a conversation about the aesthetics of change, renewal, and game-changing paradigms. We look to raw bursts of energy, reconciliation, error, and the destructive and creative forces of the new. Disruption contains both blue sky and black smoke. When we speak of radical emergence we must also address things left behind. Disruption is both incremental and monumental.

In practices ranging from hacking and detournement to inversions of place, time, and intention, creative work across disciplines constantly finds ways to rethink or reconsider form, function, context, body, network, and culture. Artists push, shape, break; designers reinvent and overturn; scientists challenge, disprove and re-state; technologists hack and subvert to rebuild.

Disruption and rupture are fundamental to digital aesthetics. Instantiations of the digital realm continue to proliferate in contemporary culture, allowing us to observe ever-broader consequences of these effects and the aesthetic, functional, social and political possibilities that arise from them.

Within this theme, we want to investigate trends in digital and internet aesthetics and revive exchange across disciplines. We hope to broaden the spheres in which disruptive aesthetics can be explored, crossing into the worlds of science, technology, design, visual art, contemporary and media art, innovation, performance, and sound.

(Source: http://isea2015.org/about/theme/)

Record Status
Short description

"The End(s) of Electronic Literature" Conference took place August 5-7, 2015, and was hosted by the BEL, the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen. Pre-conference workshops took place on August 4th. The call for papers and works resulted in more than 300 submissions and selections have been made for the conference, performances, and exhibitions. (Source: http://conference.eliterature.org/2015)

Record Status
Content type
Contributor
Year
Publisher
Language
Platform/Software
ISBN
1-55245-989-6
Record Status
Description (in English)

Fidget is a transcription of writer Kenneth Goldsmith's every movement made during thirteen hours on June 16, 1997 (Bloomsday). This online edition includes the full text, a self-running Java applet version written by programmer Clem Paulsen, and a selection of RealAudio recordings from Theo Bleckmann's vocal-visual performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Bloomsday 1998.

Fidget attempts to reduce the body to a catalogue of mechanical movements by a strict act of observation. Goldsmith aims to be objective like the photographer Edward Muybridge. In Fidget, Goldsmith reduces language to its basic elements in order to record and understand movement in its basic form. Despite these aims, the dictates of the work like the self-observation and the duration of the act, create a condition of shifting referent points and multiple levels of observation that undermine the objective approach.

Goldsmith and Paulsen's collaboration has reconfigured the text of Fidget to substitute the human body with the computer. The Java applet contains the text reduced further into its constituent elements, a word or a phrase. The relationships between these elements is structured by a dynamic mapping system that is organized visually and spatially instead of grammatically. In addition, the Java applet invokes duration and presence. Each time the applet is downloaded it begins at the same time as set in the user's computer and every mouse click or drag that the user initiates is reflected in the visual mapping system. The different hours are represented in differing font sizes, background colors and degree of "fidgetness", however, these parameters may be altered by the user. The sense of time is reinforced by the diminishing contrast and eventual fading away of each phrase as each second passes.

Fidget was originally commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris as a collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann. The live performance was at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris on June 16, 1998 at 8p.m. Bleckmann's vocal interpretations of Fidget are available here in RealAudio. A gallery installation of Fidget opened at Printed Matter in New York City. Printed Matter featured Goldsmith's collaboration with seamstress Sydney Maresca. The exhibition ran from June 11-September 4 1998.

(Source: http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/fidget/about.html)

Screen shots
Image
Fidget by Goldsmith (screen shot)
Image
Fidget by Goldsmith (screen shot)