ELO

In this presentation, the author argues that we should “mind the gap” between screen and skin, especially where it eclipses the precarious identities vulnerable within our hegemonic cultures. The contact zone where users interface with electronic media is actually constructed out of far more political scaffolding than people often recognize. Though “user friendly” assumptions reinforce the invisible logic of idealized interfaces open to all, the realities of social conditions which contextualize those technologies should make us rethink who the “user” really is. How has the threshold of the interface become a barrier for them? The presentation investigates how precarious identities, such as the indigenous and the queer, must navigate the contested boundaries of language and embodiment through electronic literature as haptic media. Caleb Andrew Milligan begins by considering how Jason Edward Lewis plays out politics upon the surface of the touchscreen. With help from Lori Emerson’s critique of the iPad, he argues that Lewis’s Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media is furthermore Poetry for Ephemeral [Maintainable] Media, as it relies upon digital technology vulnerable to what Terry Harpold terms the “upgrade path” and its movements toward eventual inoperability. He argues that this feature is an intentional subversion on Lewis’s part (himself part Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan) as an aboriginal design practice which explores through the medium’s ephemerality an aesthetic of materialized erasure—the erasure, that is, of aboriginal cultures in the face of forced assimilation into Canadian cultures. As Lewis poetically performs the precarity of identity-through-language upon precarious platforms that kill more electronic literature than they preserve now, we are left with only the fleeting sense of touch that connects (soon to be only connected) us to his appoems. He then considers the just as ephemeral haptics of Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive. As a beautifully brutal examination of escape from toxic cultures, Porpentine’s Twine game literally escapes the confines of the screen as it encourages players to draw symbols upon their skin that correspond with the narrative beats. Beyond just the quick clicks of hypertextual interaction, players actually have to feel the physical prick of inscripting themselves, and join in the game’s cycle of pain. Combining the work of Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett on toxic geekdom with Jaishree K. Odin’s on feminist hypertext, he considers Porpentine’s precarious identity as a trans woman game developer in artistic opposition to a digital climate of “Gamergaters.” Her work reaches outside of norms and touches where other texts flatly cannot go. He draw in Diogo Marques’s claim that our skin is just as much interface as screen to finally consider the ephemerality of Porpentine’s text as well, once the hand-drawn markings are washed away. The embodied art fades, and the Twine game’s intoxicatingly violent world of language remains. The presentation ends to question how we are similarly just as ephemeral as the gestures and drawings of these electronic literary texts. The “touchy” subjects between screen and skin that these works explore highlight the precarious identities that cultures often aim to erase. Electronic literature as haptic media helps us to get in touch with these overlooked lives, and to not only mind the gap, but to stick our fingers in it.

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1124/Betw…

Article about ELO and NT2

The annual conference and festival of the Electronic Literature Organization took place in 2018 at UQAM (Montreal, Canada) to present state-of-the-art research and creative projects as well as discuss future collaborations and strategies of the field. This blogpost outlines the elements of the conference that are relevant to Machine Vision, and show examples of works using machine vision from the exhibition and performances.  

In this roundtable we propose to present and discuss those aspects and goals of the project NAR_TRANS (University of Granada, website under construction) that are most relevant to ELO and the conference. Nar_Trans aims to build an active and relevant research core in the Spanish I+D+i system, able to become part of the international research network on transmedial narratives & intermediality.

This academic network also aims to become a gathering place for fellow researchers, students and creative artists through different events, such as meetings, seminars and workshops, or the mapping of the Spanish transmedial productions through a web critical catalogue, with a view to the most outstanding works in Latin America. The project holds also the first university prize for young transmedia creatives as well as the publication of an e-book with a selection of essays on transmediality at the crossroads of Literary, Cultural and Media Studies.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

An article about The Electronic Literature Organization, including history, past publications, and ongoing activities and publications.

This talk for the Archive & Innovate conference will present to the ELO community a new major research project and research network focused on electronic literature in Europe. ELMCIP is a 3-year collaborative research project that will run from Spring 2010-2013 and funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) theme: 'Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation.' ELMCIP involves seven European research partners (University of Bergen, Edinburgh College of Art, Blekinge Technical Institute, Univeristy College Falmouth, University of Jyväskylä, University of Amsterdam, and University of Ljubjlana) and one non-academic partner (New Media Scotland) who will investigate how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment.
The research goals of the project are to:
• Understand how creative communities form and interact through distributed media
• Document and evaluate various models and forces of creative communities in the field of electronic literature
• Examine how electronic literature communities benefit from current educational models and develop pedagogical tools
• Study how electronic literature manifests in conventional cultural contexts and evaluate the effects of distributing and exhibiting e-lit in such contexts.
The outcomes of the project will include:
• Series of case studies and research papers (for publications and conferences)
• Series of public seminars
• Online knowledge base (including materials from seminars, project information and an extensive bibliographic record of e-lit works)
• Pedagogy workshop and anthology (Resulting in extensive documentation, presented as an accessible website and DVD-ROM)
• International conference in 2013 in Edinburgh
• Public exhibition of electronic literature artworks and performances
• Openly distributed publications (conference proceedings, exhibition catalog, project documentation and a DVD anthology of e-lit works)
With a budget of just under €1,000,000 we can anticipate that the project will have a major impact on the field of electronic literature and present numerous opportunities to authors and scholars of electronic literature. In the presentation at the ELO conference in particular, my goal will be to identify opportunities for individual artists, writers and scholars of electronic literature to contribute to and to collaborate with ELMCIP, and also to identify some and discuss ways that we can develop mutually beneficial research collaborations between ELMCIP, the ELO, and other international organizations active in the field of electronic literature.

The Electronic Literature Directory has served over the years as an ongoing project of the ELO. The recently revamped directory will, by the time of ELO_AI meeting, have been formally launched and will be approximately six months old. The purpose of this proposed panel is to allow sitting editors to provide a face-to-face introduction of the evolving directory to ELO community. Participants will address issues of design, bibliography, editorial process, tagging, and pedagogical relevance of the project. Vincler, a special collections librarian, will address issues of cataloging and archiving. Branda, the site programmer, will address technical aspects of the site's development. Engberg and Heckman will address the potential use of the format in a variety of educational settings. Tabbi will address the general implications of the directory for the future of the field. Special attention will be given to the continued development of the site content, and active discussion will be encouraged.

The aim of this paper, titled “The magnificent Seven” as an echo of the homonymous film, is to introduce the works of different authors that have been included in the Electronic Literature Collection (vol. II) and that are not in English. Following the panel that the ELO introduced in Maryland that opened the e-lit works in languages other that English, here the step has moved convincingly forward since 12 authors from countries such as Brazil, Portugal, France, Israel, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Perú, México, Catalonia and Spain have been introduced in the vastest English corpus. Some of these authors write in English or have had their works translated into English (Tisselli, Berkehenger, Kruglanski, etc.) but this paper, included in a specific panel that deals with e-lit works non written in English, will analyze in an exercise of “close-reading”, this “magnificent seven” works in Romance languages on the collection: Isaías Herrero’s La casa sota el temps and Universo molécula, Doménico Chiappe’s Tierra de extracción, Ton Ferret’s The fuguebook, Chico Marinho et al. Palavrador and Amor de Clarice and Poemas no meio du caminho by Rui Torres. It is interesting to see the sort of different variety of digital literature that emerges from the comparison.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)