essay

daddylabyrinth is an interactive new media memoir, a combination of traditional writing and personal video assembled and delivered through the authoring system SCALAR <http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/&gt;. It exists at the cusp of several forms—the lyric essay, the archive, the family history, the home movie—and delves into questions that shape our contemporary narrative practices, such as navigational readership and new ways of experiencing the cinematic. daddylabyrinth is a father/son book, in a long tradition of such, refracted through the lens of new media’s narrative possibilities. The legacies of my father that I carry—objects he left behind and a flotilla of unresolved emotions that continue to vex my self-identity nearly forty years after his death, when I am a father myself— resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR for this project because it lets me create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions. These two legacies have with time become inextricably bound, and the stories that I weave from them resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR to write daddylabyrinth because it allows me to create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I could track and explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions—ranging from objects of his that I’ve given my children to ways that my father has shown up in my fiction. A portion of the work is currently up to view on demo at http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/daddylabyrinth/index. Approximately 25% of its pages are available at the moment, and I will have a significantly more robust version of it available for the ELO conference next spring should my proposal be selected for the Media Arts Show—ideally a premiere of the whole work before I seek a publisher for it. Exhibition at ELO could take one (or both) of two forms. Internet-connected desktop, notebook, or tablet computers with headphones could be used in a stationary gallery situation, where readers could explore the work at their own pace. I could also present it in a live venue, talking my way through the labyrinth as I navigate it live and play some of its short videos. A combination of these two exhibition approaches would be ideal, and I am amenable to either a full presentation or a split one with another artist. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

The Reverberatory Narrative: Toward Story as a Multisensory Network is an evolving, transmedia series that employs print, film, installation and digital practices in the assembling and disassembling of lyric essays, poetry, graphic design, photography and physical artifacts in an experimental documentary of memory, time and story. The initial form of this documentary work was an installation at the photography gallery Agnes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1993, titled "Undressing Audrey," in which the viewer physically "undressed" the book, slipping text from a woman's garments, one button and layer at a time. Through subsequent, increasingly digital interpretations, Pretty relied on a layered structure that attempted to approximate the original installation experience through a series of overlapping narrative threads that could be sorted and resorted by different contexts and media types, such as time, place, character, artifact, image, audio, and video, among others. Its current experiment extends the work to augmented reality in an effort to return Pretty to its origin as installation — as a multi-sensory experiment in physical space with a digital layer — the final leg of a journey began in 1989.

(Source: ELO Conference site)

The Montaigne Machine is a work of electronic literature that invites users to participate in the creation of multimedia personal essays. The essays generated by The Montaigne Machine each center on a specific topic taken up by the inventor of the genre, Michel de Montaigne. The essays combine text from Montaigne’s famous Essais, first published in 1580 and here translated into English, with original text from each visitor who uses the machine. These texts are placed within an image that has been uploaded by a photographer on Flickr, designated as available for remixing, and most recently tagged with a term appropriate to the essay’s topic. The resulting essay is a collaboration, perhaps even a conversation, across time and media by three artists.

(Source: http://conference.eliterature.org/media/eric-lemay-montaigne-machine)

Writing (2012) was inspired by and built with Joe Davis’s Telescopic Text, pairing the possibilities of expanding, effacing essay with the musings of a Monson or a Mezzanine. An introspective, interactive non-fiction, the work unfurls, an exploration of the processes of composition as much as a finished literary product. As the piece grew to dozens of junctions and thousand of words, the editing interface slowed dramatically, each erasure oredit taking a minute or more. This in turn forced an accountability to first thought – it became easier to publically ‘rewrite’ mistakes, misspeaks and infelicitous phrases than to invisibly edit them away. The result is a thinking aloud on the (web)page, a map to the writer’s trains of thought for the reader to unfold and explore. Writing featured in the 2013 electronic poetry edition of Australian literary journal Overland.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Eight attempts in understanding what a book is.