gesture

This paper investigates how the theoretical concept of embodiment and related keywords such as touch, movement, gesture and haptic appears within the current practice of tagging creative works in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. It further suggests how this practice can be extended within the Knowledge Base platform both in terms of providing more precise tags, and through the forthcoming Platform content type which will give users the possibility connect specific hardware and software with a creative work. Finally, it presents the outline for a research collection that explores the notion of embodiment. The collection gives an introduction to relevant researchers, artists, creative works and scholarly works exploring the concept of embodiment and technology, in the hopes that such a framework can inspire the further investigation of works related to the field of electronic literature.

The intensification of tactile/haptic research by academia and the digital technology industry, has given rise to several instrumentalizations of the adjective haptic, often contradicting an entire philosophical haptological tradition, going back to Aristotle and allowing us to think of the haptic from a multisensory perspective capable of destabilizing the idea of pure sensory modalities. On the one hand, such intensification is evidenced by the ubiquity of digital technological devices that call for interaction through touch and gesture as tactile/haptic functions necessary for experiencing digital content. On the other hand, it may be seen in the increasing demand for tangibility between human and machine, particularly through sensory experiences made possible by virtual/augmented reality, as well as, mixed reality/virtuality platforms. Such intense literalization of the haptic also, paradoxically, ends up reinforcing the existence and primacy of a visual culture inherent to an ocularcentric society. It is in line with this haptological tradition, as well as through the recovery of a multisensory perspective explored by a series of avant-garde artistic practices that permeate the history of twentieth-century art, that I propose to (re)think digital literary works via means of an alternative and operative redefinition of haptic drawn from the metamedial and intermedial specificities of current digital poetic practices. Based on the mapping and analysis of carefully selected digital literary works, this research intends to understand how digital poetic practices make use of certain processes of haptic reading enabled by current digital technology, in order to explore and question the processes of writing and reading in media. In order to validate an argument largely based on the examination of ambiguities and tensions highlighted by the literary exploration of interface functionalities in arts and literature, this thesis will attempt to analyze the referred ambiguity, by showing a parallel between an inherent circularity of (multi)sensory perception and the way certain circular, or rather, spiral-like, trajectories, are able to be identified across multiple arts, artists and movements. All of this, of course, is put together via a process of dialectic subversion/disruption that characterizes multiple variants of experimentalism across the centuries. Moreover, doing so is a way of finding possible answers, or perhaps, raising new questions, regarding longstanding problematics pertaining to the relationship between tradition and innovation, from which the digital era is not exempt.

Modern forms of literature frequently question our reading habits, and provoke us to re-define the act of reading and the book form. The “magic” of the book, described by Bezos as its ability to be an invisible device that disappears in the reader’s hands, permitting them to enter a story-world, is nowadays replaced by the “real magic” of non-invisible interfaces. The latest manifestations of these interfaces invite us to do things we usually do not do while reading: to touch, to shout, or to shake the device. In the other words, our reading becomes a very sensual and corporeal action and our “reading behaviour” is important for discovering the meaning of the work. That’s why we need a revision of poetics (Simanowski 2009), like Bouchardon’s theory of gestural manipulation as a literary figure (2014). 

In this paper, while examining literary works dedicated to mobile devices, I ask how adding playability to the story and engaging readers’ gestures and body in act of reading can be useful to “renovate” the literary canon, and to remediate it for today’s digital natives. My main case study will be iClassic collection, in which playability and reader gestures are not used only to make well-known works more attractive. Every story is re-told in a new, multimodal way, not only illustrated or enhanced with mobile media possibilities – particular narration aspects are translated into new media language. 

Contexts for analysis will derive from both, the mobile-literature field (e.g. different remediation of Around the World in 80 Days, Elastico Press apps) and non-mobile e-lit (e.g. works that re-write the canon in playable versions: Concretoons, Bałwochwał). This remediated canon will be also analyzed in context of modern “mobile-books,” literary apps that use haptic aspects as primary strategy for reading digital-born stories (e.g. The Incredible Tales of Weirdwood Manor). But the context of various “new” (not only mobile) book forms that re-fresh and re-new the traditional vision of the book will be important, too. Thus, I will use examples of AR-books or digi-novels (Level 26), step-in-book technology (wuwu&co), playable non-mobile texts (The Winter House), texts that use biofeedback (The Breathing Wall), as well as locative and physical narratives (Turnton Docklands). Important context will also be the traditional tension between a book forms typical for children’s and adult literature (and actual evolution in these divisions, provoked by new-media).

 The broader context for my research is a question about the actual evolution (remediation) of canonical genres and literary forms. Here one of examples can be the classic epistolary novel and its modern incarnations as email- or sms-novel and then twitterature or other (trans)literary projects on social platforms (blogs, FB, flickr).

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: 

With this paper it is my intention to reevaluate the use of the adjective “haptic” with respect to a growing demand for tangibility between human and machine, namely through multisensory experiences made available by mixed reality/virtuality. From a haptological philosophic perspective, a tradition oscillating between the emphasis on vision and the emphasis on touch, this paper also intends to analyze notions of touch, gesture and contact, in their multiple meanings, in which the latter serves as a probe to explore the idea of cybrid bodies within processes of haptic perception in HumanMachine Interface (HMI).

The replacement of mechanical-electronic interfaces for tactile haptic contact with the screen, using hands, fingers and, in some cases, biological bodies, brings to the fore a series of literal gestures with obvious influence on the way we read and write in digital multimodal environments. Making use of a rhetoric based on perceptual qualities such as “transparency” and “softness”, this prosthetic reduction seems to give continuity to an ancestral desire of immediate and non mediated access to knowledge. On the other hand, it ends up by paradoxically reinforcing the domain of visuality propelled by Gutenberg’s paradigm as well as an understanding of reading as a visual process. Based on approaches and departures that paradoxes like these are able to trigger, I propose to examine notions of touch and gesture, in relation to writing and reading processes. Namely, taking into account the way it was understood by artistic vanguards such as the Portuguese Experimentalists – whose intermedial, cybertextual and intersensory concerns are still able to give birth to renewed readings when it comes to transactions between literature and digital. Furthermore, a special emphasis will be given to confluences of both analog and digital gestures, as one of the central characteristics of haptic reading processes produced by actual and virtual manipulations of the text in digital literary artworks

The present article proposes a reflection on the much-discussed theme of the ―neobaroque‖ in experimental literature. Drawing attention to the presence of baroque influence in the literary art of Italian Futurists and Experimental Portuguese Poets, I argue that, if cybernetic poetry is to be seen as a continuation of Experimentalism, its growing emphasis on gesture and touch should be analysed in accordance with theories pointing to the presence of a gestural dimension in the baroque and, as a consequence, in historical avant-garde movements. Particular emphasis will be given to the theoretical writings of Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Experimental Portuguese Poet Ana Hatherly, two Vanguard exponents whose artistic works were directly concerned with the tactile/haptic dimension of arts.

In this interview Serge Bouchardon resumes his many activities in the realm of digital media. Besides a professional background in e-learning and the activity as researcher and professor he has also authored a book about electronic literature and several literary works. He explains why in his book he chose the theories of structuralism to analyse a topic that reaches out to post-structuralism or post-modern theories. Furthermore he describes the way the aesthetics of the literary text changes in the digital context. He then ponders about the status of electronic literature in the field of academia and talks about his current projects.

Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.