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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.

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By Hannah Ackermans, 28 November, 2015
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Abstract (in English)

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)

Description (in English)

Teenage heartache has become a public commodity. On social media, young people now broadcast the most intimate moments of their lives to a global audience. Context collapse has replaced the small, specific audiences we once opened our hearts to with a vast, undifferentiated swarm of humanity. Falling in and out of love, breaking up and reconciling, seeking solace or revenge – all are enacted in the midst of the data stream. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) explores this new, performative model for love and loss that is emerging in networked environments. Deploying what might be described as a “poetics of search”, the artwork sources relevant tweets from Twitter in real-time, performs string manipulation and anonymizes them, then assembles the fragments into a three-act dialogue that is projected onto the installation space. What results is an emergent narrative that reflects the new modes of online interaction unique to millennials – but also the timeless tropes, customs, dreams and anxieties experienced by every generation. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) was first presented in 2013 at the Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, Australia. (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

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Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
190, Avenue de France
75013 Paris
France

Short description

The seminar/conference is organized in collaboration between the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen (UiB), Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Centre Franco-Norvègien en Sciences Sociales et Humaines (CFN) in Paris. The seminar was held at CFN's premises in Paris.

(Source: Full Program here in attachment)

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By Scott Rettberg, 19 June, 2014
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Abstract (in English)

The film-poem emerges from the crossroads of literature, film and animation. Giełżyńska's works appear as ironic, personal, cross-medial statements. The Polish author sets herself an ambitious task: "to play at the world's own game" by describing it in a fast-paced, polimedial, synesthetic way. Resembling "animated posters", the film-poems reflect the condition of the contemporary artist and her cultural, linguistic and technological context and try to redefine the answers to the old question: how to describe the world? who is the author? what is the difference between the human and non-human? The message carried by the film-poems is quite universal, if not global, hence the decision to translate them into English

(Source: ELO 2014 conference.)

Description (in English)

The Mandel.brot Project (http://www.mandelbrot.fr, in French) has existed online since 1999. From the beginning, we dedicated our project to an experimentation with the aesthetics of the ephemeral and the flow; we thus refuse any archiving of the source files of our creations. The creations remain on the web for a few months. Then they are removed forever. And even when they are online, they permanently face extinction: the instability of the digital device is integrated as a fundamental aesthetic principle in all our works (see « Flux »: the movement of the words was supposed to be calm and relaxing; but on powerful computers, the flow is transformed into a wild torrent). Each creation on Mandel.brot thematizes this instability in a specific way.The Mandel.brot Project is a dialogue (we invite you to compare for example « Soleil Amer » and « Inexorable »), which sometimes becomes animated, and sometimes stops for a long time. None of the creations on Mandel.brot can be separated from their context: the website and the device, which remains deliberately unstable.

(Source: Authors' description for ELO_AI)

By Eric Dean Rasmussen, 30 April, 2012
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Abstract (in English)

Introductory remarks to the ELMCIP Seminar on Digital Text with/in Performance, hosted by University College Falmouth at the Arnolfini, Bristol.

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Digital texts take place.