collaboration

This talk shares collaboration strategies and “funnest practices” for using netprov — networked improvisation, online roleplay literature — in the classroom. In sequences of “jump right in” creative games, students explore such topics as character development and character voice in a real-time laboratory of quick creative exchanges (accompanied by mutual encouragement and laughter). By building a bridge between students’ own social media writing practices and learning about historic literature, their creative strategies are expanded and critical connections between canonical texts and contemporary, everyday writing are made. What students may not realize is that netprov also can help break through their own creative blockages and freezes.

In this panel moderated by Lai-Tze Fan, we examine Twine at ten, exploring the ongoing influence of this hypertext platform on pedagogy, play, and literature: 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Twine (Moulthrop) - Creating digital stories and games involves many cultural registers. Just as important is the unmapped, semi-formal culture that underlies communal, open-source software. In the case of Twine, this can involve distinctions among versions of the core software, associated scripting languages, and "story formats." Learning this buried lore can reveal a technologized "artworld," in Howard Becker's term, and raises questions of hierarchy, value, and the nature of creative work in what is essentially a gift economy – questions that may ultimately apply to any form of art. 

Twine at 10: Reflections on Pandemic Storytelling (Salter) - Hypertext and games platform Twine recently marked its ten year anniversary, complete with a celebratory game jam. Twine’s affordances as a web-driven, open source tool drive its renewed significance as a platform for rapid response storytelling, enabling users to build playful, poignant responses to the many challenges of 2020 as exemplified by Mark Sample’s 10 Lost Boys; Cait Kirby’s September 7, 2020; and Adi Robbertson’s You Have to Ban the President. 

Twine, The EpistoLab (Laiola) - A frustrating element of teaching with Twine is the platform’s limitations with real-time collaboration across devices. Before COVID, when the classroom could operate as a lab, this limitation could be solved by students gathering around a single machine. But when shared machinery and gathering becomes impossible, Twine offers another model--“the epistolab.” The epistolab follows an epistolary model of collaborative work, dispersing colLABoration across times and spaces, and prompting a reevaluation of the roles that simultaneity and liveness play in collaboratory, pedagogical work. 

Twine as Literature, Not Literacy, in the Program(ming) Era (Milligan) - In the 21st century digital humanities, “digital literacy” has seemingly become the humanistic endgame for how we conceptualize, rationalize, and advertise the skillsets we impart; In e-lit, Twine as well is often presented to students in these terms. As the potential shortcomings of literacy as sole pedagogical outcome, however, become increasingly clearer (for instance -- as we reckon with its limitations to prevent insurgency-through-misinformation in the US), I propose another way to teach Twine and its promise of digital storytelling differently: through a model, based on the creative writing workshop, that highlights the literature and literary possibilities of Twine. 

The panel will conclude with an open discussion of Twine’s future as a platform

Addressing conference themes of platform utopias, determinisms, identities, collaborations and modes, this conversational presentation discusses ways that concepts of time, space and narrative are expanded in The Key To Time https://unknownterritories.org/keytotime/. The Key To Time is a surreal and lyrical work for immersive, cinematic art experiences such as domes and 360 degree cinemas as well as for individual viewing on head-mounted virtual reality devices. Bridging 1920's silent film and virtual reality, the surface story draws viewers into a playful exploration of genre, identity and desire. In doing so, the work unravels narrative underpinnings of myths, genres, and technological constructs of time. 

The Key To Time is created by media artist/filmmaker Roderick Coover (FR/US) and composer Krzysztof Wołek (PL) as part of a program designed to build cross-cultural, composer-artist collaborations. The dreamlike story follows a scientist who is trapped in the future due to a time-travel experiment gone wrong. His only hope to escape his predicament is to travel through dreams. His dreams, however, are troubled by anxieties, fears and anger. As the scientist travels through time, aesthetics change from those of silent film of the early 20th century to those of VR and a future cinema. There is also slippage between these times, with figures from memories walking into color settings as black and white figures or cartoon ones, and visual references draw upon early cinematic works like Louis Lumiere's Arrival of a Train at Ciotat (1895) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). 

Through montage and collage, a mix color and black and white images, animation, intertitles, and sudden changes in dimension and perspective, The Key To Time toys with conventions and expectations. Song and dialog combine with layered and collaged imagery filmed in greenbox studio settings and natural settings. As with works like Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room (2015) and David Blair's Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991), this experimental artwork plays with the ways differing visual technologies shape consciousness, language and narrative forms. 

Whereas in many films, sound composition comes after the film is written, shot and edited, in this case the music was part of the process of invention rather than an afterthought done only in post-production. Five songs were at the center of design. The songs hold essential roles in the movement of the story, which is driven my emotional tensions and unseen forces rather than rational thought. Second, we decided to record the script in advance of shooting the film. This decision enhanced a creative freedom and allowed for lots of play between dialog, images and sounds. The result disconnect between voice and image is evocative of early film and radio drama, and the approach is also similar to a workflow frequently used in animation; in this way too, the platform stimulated news ways of thinking about the collaboration and the creative process.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has made me further address the value that artistic research has for our mental and psychological health and its significance in community healing. I have, for a while now, used digital technologies to create poetic spaces of shared personal stories interconnecting narratives to bring up issues of power, territory, displacement, historical memory, gender and violence. The need to live, work, socialise at a distance, through digital platforms has highlighted the importance of finding ways to share stories, connect and heal through community creative research practice. How can we engage global communities through electronic literature art practices?

This paper will explore the use of digital methods and tools to conduct and disseminate research in interdisciplinary projects alongside artists and communities and will address the motivations to researching with participants. It will draw from the findings coming up from our workshop in ‘Creative Digital Practices: Community Platform for Healing and Mapping’, (also submitted to the ELO conference).

As co-investigator of the AHRC funded project Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict my role was leading the creative team working on the artistic research project titled Invisible Voices: Women Victims of the Colombian Conflict and give voice to the women in their participation in the construction of memory. This was an enriching experience where both parties - the academics/artists and the community group – gained knowledge through the physical co-creative workshops with tailored designed research methods for this specific context, and the subsequent digital documentation and archival of the artistic experience. Taking this project and others as core studies, this paper will address questions in connection to community research; the value of creative storytelling and artistic approaches to share personal stories; and discuss pertinent issues in connection to the value, impact and societal change these projects can contribute, not only to the specific group, but to society in general.

This paper explores collaborative processes in electronic literature. Specifically, it examines writer authority as it applies to text, code, and other media. By drawing from cinematic auteur theory, Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994), Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Cayley’s Grammalepsy (2018), and Flores’s (2019) generational approach to digital literature, this paper highlights unique issues that arise in the creative collaborative production of digital literary works, and the influence these processes have on how these works are ‘read’. The creative processes employed in Montfort, Rettberg, and Carpenter’s respective Taroko Gorge, Tokyo Garage, and Gorge (2009), Jhave’s ReRites (2017–2018), and Luers, Smith, and Dean’s novelling (2016)), as well as reflections on the author’s own collaborative creative experiences (Paige and Powe (2017) with Lowry and Lane, Little Emperor Syndrome (2018) with Arnold, and V[R]erses (2019–) with Breeze) are explored in detail. From these analyses, this paper concludes that in digital literary practices code should be regarded as a meta-authority that denotes authority to specific components of the work. A better understanding of these complexities as they apply to attribution is emphasised in the future development of digital literary creative practice and education.