data mining and visualization

The field of Electronic Literature comprises new forms of literary creation that merge writing, computation, interactivity, and design in the creation of writing that is specific to the context of the computer and the global network. While electronic literature is a field of experimental writing with a history that stretches back to the 1950s, it has grown most expansively in the late two decades. Forms of electronic literature such as combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, kinetic and interactive poetry, and network writing bridge the 20th century avant-garde and practices specific to the 21st century networked society. Yet electronic literature has faced significant hurdles as it has developed as a field of study, related to the comparative instability of complex computational objects, which because of their formal diversity are often not easily accommodated by standardized methods of digital archiving, and are subject to cycles of technological obsolescence. Rettberg's presentation will address efforts to disseminate, document, and archive the field of electronic literature. After providing some examples of genres of electronic literature, Rettberg will discuss projects such as the Electronic Literature Collections, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, and the Electronic Literature Repository that seek to preserve a corpus of work and criticism for the future.

The transformation of physical phenomena into data —the pass from analog to digital— has played an important role in expanding our understandings of what is art and what it means to be an artist. This transformation has also changed the way we understand and perform with media and has opened innumerable avenues for experimentation within and across different forms of representation. The outcomes of this experimentation could illuminate our knowledge of creative processes. As part of our research on glitch pedagogy and transmediation over the last two years (Peña, James & DLC, 2016), we have experimented with the functionalities of raw data by comparing patterns of mis/representation between textual, aural and visual data. Our inquiries have allowed us to engage in the intervention and purposeful disruption of these patterns while shedding light on the underlying processes behind these disruptive practices. Delivered as a performance, this paper will demonstrate a few such practices. In our role as noise-musicians, we will improvisualize a transmediatic piece while describing the process behind it. This performance/presentation will start with the production of a natively visual digital artifact (i.e., a digital photograph). This artifact, produced during the session involving attendees, will be then translated into while modifying the sound with analog synthesizers. Simultaneously poetry will be performed, recorded and interpolated with the raw data of the pictures' sound file. This step will effectively involve passing digital data through an analog channel before its re-digitization in real-time. Finally, the intervened artifact will then be re-presented in its visual form. Our presentation will not only contrast between performance as a process and performance as a product, it will allow participants to compare the aesthetic properties of an artifact when presented both in a native and in a non-native format, and will reveal the patterns-in-common between these different media by merit of disrupting them.

Sources: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/854/Trans…; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327163262_Transmedia_an_improv…

In this essay [Digital Art: Pixel, Algorithm, Code, Programming, Data], we reached a theoretical framework that could withstand a hyperdisciplinary analysis and encompass one of the characteristics that both electronic literature and digital art share: the transfer and transformation processes. In order to recognize these processes we used the concept of transduction to perform a theoretical migration capable of supporting these aspects: the transducer function.
Swapping between a critique of textuality and a critique of visuality we analyze two of the most important genres of digital art: net.art and digital installation. Firstly, we investigate the concept of infoduct as a channel of information dissemination in the virtual environment and the characteristics of periphery and discontinuity in digital image, composed by pixels, in opposition to punctum, studium and continuity, key characteristics in analog photographic image, composed by dots, whose concepts were identified and coined by Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire (1980). Secondly – by focusing on the nomination of the artwork and the relevance of the title in its intelligibility, from the abstract movement until nowadays – we reflect on the use of code as an emerging language, which reveals a new aesthetic sensibility, e.g. the k. series by André Sier. Finally, the third and fourth points develop the analysis of the transducer processes in the works by Pavel Braila, R. Luke DuBois and Sier, considering the aesthetics of data transfer and recreation in mutant works as a common phenomenon to art that uses programmable and networking media. In digital art, the transducer function originates a pictorial, visual and aesthetic transformation, which we observe in SSB, Hard Data, or 32-bit Wind Machine , and erects the artist as a data filter and data miner.
In this investigation, we highlight mechanisms, patterns, languages ​​and common motifs: authorship, user, cybertext, surface, infoduct, interactivity, pixel, algorithm, code, programming, network, software and data.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

In this essay I introduce the notion of transducer function in the fields of electronic literature and digital art. Firstly, I survey the transduction concept throughout its history in such domains as physics, genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, physiology, psychology, philosophy, logic and computer science. Secondly, I discuss the relevance of a transduction theory versus the advantage of a transducer function. I migrate the transduction concept into the fields of electronic literature and digital art, showcasing the contexts of application, and several transfer processes and functions. Finally, I apply the transducer function as a theoretical typology and a recognizable system, highlighting some artworks by R. Luke DuBois, André Sier and Scott Rettberg that can be read within this framework. Thus, it means taking into account a set of transfer and conversion processes: information, patterns and data among mechanisms, technologies, themes, creative and theoretical guidelines. In this sense, I develop a critical framework that operates as a method for analyzing and comprehend further digital artworks.

(Source: Author's Abstract)