imagination

The market, the academia, parents and even pediatricians have witnessed the growing avalanche of digital products aimed at appeasing adults’ anxieties regarding the education of future generations, of children who have already fallen prey to the fascination of the screens. Among this offer overdose, it is difficult to elucidate which products are actually fulfilling their promises and which are dull, ineffective or even aggravating the evils they are supposedly counteracting. This presentation will address some of the concerns regarding the future of reading education by focusing on the study of two bilingual works: an enriched digitized edition of an old children story and a piece of interactive fiction. Each textual modality requires different strategies to produce engaging forms of interactivity, though in both cases the pedagogical intention is the same: to promote the pleasure of reading. In the first case, we have chosen to refresh “Una ciudad de libros” (“A City of Books”), a forgotten text from the Spanish Silver Age Period published in 1923 inside the collection Plaga de dragones. This period, famous for the effervescence of its cultural life, saw the emergence of Saturnino Calleja Publishing House, or as it has been described today, the Zara of Books. Creating an enriched digital version of this text has allowed us to make relevant discoveries about this collection from a philological perspective. At the same time, we hope to have provided teachers, parents and children alike with an attractive new edition of the work which can help children today enjoy the same stories that their grandparents read nearly a hundred years ago, using digital edition to bridge a cultural as well as temporal gap between children from different times and places. (“Una ciudad de libros”/ “A City of Books” from the collection Calleja Interactivo/Interactive Calleja (prototype version)) The other selected work is an original piece of interactive fiction written by the Marino family entitled “El Cambiazo”/ “Switcheroo” from the collection of stories Mrs. Wobbles & the Tangerine House. This work, which progressively places young readers in front of nontrivial and difficult moral choices, allows us to study reader’s interaction from new angles given the potentialities of its infrastructure, the Undum platform, a free and open-source, JavaScript-based interactive storytelling platform developed by Ian Millington. Last year in Porto, the panel dedicated to children e-lit debated over the different types of interactivity found in e-lit works, establishing a gradation with respect to their ability to increase the reader’s appreciation and understanding of the story. This paper attempts to further this discussion by presenting some reading experiences carried out at several schools in Madrid and LA of these two types of interactive stories for children from 9 to 11 years old. These experiences will be used to test the design of the experiment, which could be hopefully carried out more extensively after opening it to criticism and discussion at the ELO venue.

The three papers in this panel seek to move beyond primarily formalistic discussions of electronic literature as well as approaches primarily concerned with drawing definitional boundaries for it. Instead, they propose to explore various works of electronic literature in terms of the potential dialogue they may open with concepts that are often locatable outside or beyond the current critical boundaries of electronic literature.

More specifically, Aquilina’s paper will explore how “literary eventhood” may occur in works which, in different ways, fall under the nomenclature associated to electronic literature. Callus’s paper, on the other hand, will focus on the concept of the “literary absolute” to try to discover whether it could bear any consequentiality to current understandings of electronic literature. While both papers will show an awareness of the potential “category mistake” that this may involve, they argue that such attempts are fundamental in discussions of the “ends” of electronic literature. Calleja’s paper will also seek to extend or trespass definitional restrictions by emphasising on the role of imagination in contemporary indie games, which highlights a continuity between print, electronic texts and cybertexts that we too often take for granted.

The approaches being proposed are not colonising discourses. Rather than simply applying terms from literary studies or from game studies to examples of electronic literature, they start from electronic literature (or some modes in which it functions) to speak about concepts that may potentially have a wider scope than it. Our interventions in electronic literature from peripheral starting positions will operate with both the risks and the potential originality that such approaches may bring.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. In so doing, transgression of linearity and the attempt to reduce the authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining characteristics of this literary form. Works of digital fiction were first described as fragmented objects comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of choice and a participatory role in the construction of the text. These texts were read by selecting several links and by assembling lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new types of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several media could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software and new devices is often followed by the creation of new texts. Head-mounted displays and tracking devices are being used to produce new textual responses. Bodily movement is often treated as the catalyser of these textual responses and the reader is often considered as the creator of a narrative written in real-time. This means that the attempt to offer the reader a participatory role continues to be fostered by electronic literature. In this thesis, digital fiction is described as part of an introspection and self-generating process catalysed by literature. Consequently, these new kind of texts will be defined as part of the ever-evolving field of literature.
While interactivity was often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion was frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was mostly regarded as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing interactivity as a set of cognitive and physical actions on the part of the reader and by defining immersion as a result and origin of these actions, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. This thesis aims at addressing the relation between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.

This paper looks at Nick Smith's (aka ulilllillia) "Mind Game" as an illustration of how augmented reality systems, while based in digital media, do not necessarily rely on digital software or hardware, but in the influence of digitally-mediated practices on the imagination. !Smith's "Mind Game" constitutes a form of experiential poetry mediated through augmented reality.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.

from ebr Electronic Book Review: D. Fox Harrell considers how a media theory of the "phantasmal" - mental image and ideological construction - can be used to cover gaps within electronic literary practice and criticism. His perspective is shaped by cognitive semantics and the approach to meaning-making known as "conceptual blending theory."