interfaces

By Chiara Agostinelli, 3 October, 2018
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Abstract (in English)

Private reading practices and public spaces collide at the mobile browser, and this interactive installation imagines a browser that amplifies the intimate co-presence of its readers. In an ambient immersive environment, it asks if an interface could become more expressive of our influence on each other, and it embodies how language slips from one screen to another in an always shifting hybrid of reading-writing. Users join a public reading area equipped with a row of iPads, each opened to an experimental web browser. The darkened gallery combines the interstitial nature of the public waiting room with the intimacy of a bedroom, and the illumination from each screen invites digital eavesdropping and attention to fellow users. Upon browsing, each reader witnesses other readers' touch behaviors layered in colorful, ephemeral trails on their own screen as they browse. Fragments of text tapped by their neighbors float over their own reading choices, interceding in their chosen narratives, both as alteration of the reading experience and also as reminder that their reading behaviors are written elsewhere. In addition to the in-app display, the program collects these text fragments from all readers into an accumulating archive and conceptual poem, written collaboratively and programmatically. This shared composition is made publicly available on site, as the performance of digital reading becomes an act of writing in an era when every action becomes data. Language has always been about that spark gap of transmission from one mind to another. This work explores how digital reading negotiates the gap between readers as we share anonymous physical proximity but diffuse digital intimacy, plumbing the tensions alive in the intersections of reading–writing, physical–digital, self–other. The work directly engages ELO conference themes including "mobile technologies' effect on writing and reading habits" as well as considerations of screens and presence. The paper draws on interdisciplinary scholarship from media studies and classics, cognitive science and design research, to explore cultural and historical contexts for digital reading practices that ground the considerations of the installation. It argues that digital reading environments contribute to a more fragmented experience of subjectivity, one that reflects an existing social ecology which technology should be used to emphasize.

By Chiara Agostinelli, 3 October, 2018
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Abstract (in English)

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…

Description in original language
By Hannah Ackermans, 6 April, 2016
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The Global Poetic System (GPS) is an information system that explores four types of interfaces (mobile phones, PDA, desktop applications, and Web application) and three manners of reading (literary adaptive texts, literary classic texts, texts constructed by community interaction) through an interface that delivers literary content based upon real-time geographic positioning. This project is being executed by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC, Spain) and the Advanced Research Center in Artificial Intelligence (CAVIIAR, USA) thanks to a 200,000€ grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Technology for one year of execution during 2008. The GPS is an ambitious project that tries to incorporate the literature into the space of digital technologies, bringing the literature over to the greater public. It presents one of the most complex multi-channel, multimodal information systems to date. This talk will offer a preview and a sample of the text.

(Source: ELO 2008 site)

By Hannah Ackermans, 31 October, 2015
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Five minute lightning talks addressing the question: What comes after electronic literature?

Steven Wingate: eLit and the Borg: the challenges of mainstreaming and commercialization
Leonardo Flores: Time Capsules for True Digital Natives
Maya Zalbidea, Xiana Sotelo and Augustine Abila: The Feminist Ends of Electronic Literature
Mark Sample: Bad Data for a Broken World
José Molina: Translating E-poetry: Still Avant-Garde
Daria Petrova and Natalia Fedorova: 101 mediapoetry lab
Judd Morrissey: Turesias (Odds of Ends)
Jose Aburto: Post Digital Interactive Poetry: The End of Electronic Interfaces
Andrew Klobucar: Measure for Measure: Moving from Narratives to Timelines in Social Media Networking
David Clark: The End of Endings
Damon Baker: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!": New Developments in the CaveWriting Hypertext Editing System

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Description (in English)

In Small poetic interfaces we will explore a series of four interactive and experimental poems written by José Aburto during 15 years of poetic work. Each of these proposes a form of special navigation not based in the use of a mouse or a keyboard. The poems are the following: Badly wrapped: It reflects upon the language as a construct where the cell is the written letter. The interface is based on a thread linked to a screen. As the reader pulls the thread, the poem unwraps. http://test1.phantasia.pe/entalpia/_dig/envuelto.swf Scream: If the reader wishes to read, then he/she must scream. The digital poem thus seeks to take the reader’s breath in order to ride the strength of the human voice turned into a scream. The interface is a microphone linked to a screen. http://test1.phantasia.pe/entalpia/_dig/grita.swf Conception of the dragon: We witness the entire process of poetry writing. We may see each of the poetic “bursts,” from the first to the last one, thanks to an automatic technique of saving in each pause. The interface consists of a screen connected to a dial that the reader may twirl in order to move forward or backward during the analysis of the poem. http://test1.phantasia.pe/entalpia/_dig/dragon.swf Returning is a place: Spherical poem which allows a physical, manual navigation. Working with the physical layout of the connections this textual surface was generated completely contained in a spherical format. A computer or screen will no longer be necessary for navigation. In this case, a 3D printout of the poem will be displayed. http://test1.phantasia.pe/entalpia/_coc/esfera/esfericas.htm

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Description (in original language)

Post-mémoires est un projet d'autoportrait littéraire et graphique. Les post-mémoires sont des souvenirs condensés en micro-récit, inscrits sur un post-it, qui s'affichent sur différentes interfaces. Ces feuillets sont ici réunis dans une application tridimensionnelle où se dessine mon visage. Par ses mouvements dans l’espace d’exposition, le visiteur peut survoler cette surface et parcourir ainsi des visions de mon enfance. Face projette le temps dans l'espace en modelant mon visage avec mes souvenirs. Façade est une interface d'écriture pour moi, et de lecture pour vous. Facettes mélange mes souvenirs enfouis pour révéler l'inatendu du surgissement. Le galerie facebook ouvre un espace discutable. La préface explicite mon intention de partager une expérience intime. Ainsi, le projet Post-mémoires relève autant de l'entreprise autobiographique que de la recherche d'une forme singulière de langage. Mémoire Une entreprise autobiographique est un travail de sélection et d’organisation de souvenirs qui vise à recomposer une mémoire dans un sens chronologique afin d’apporter un témoignage personnel ou historique. En ce sens, le projet Post-mémoires ne constitue pas une autobiographie. Certes, mon intimité est ici exposée, mais dans une ambition plus poétique que littéraire. Je cherche moins à raconter ma vie, qu’à rassembler des instantanés évoquant mon enfance. Ainsi, le projet est avant tout une exploration psychique. Cette introspection est par définition égocentrique. Mais elle vise à échanger une expérience sensible avec autrui. Écriture Les post-mémoires répondent à des contraintes à la fois graphiques et textuels. Ils sont rédigés à travers une interface graphique dans un cadre commun : des carrés de couleurs. Ceux-ci représentent les bouts de papier autoadhésifs, amovibles et réunis en bloc, sur lesquels on note des idées, des messages, des choses à ne pas oublier et que l’on oublie sitôt passées. Objets jetables en série, les post-its illustrent la futilité de nos actions courantes. Ils permettent ici de jouer du contraste entre l’importance subjective des souvenirs et leur volatilité. Par ailleurs, ce cadre impose de synthétiser les événements en quelques phrases : un titre, une phrase introductive, un "développement" et quelques mots de conclusion. Codifié comme un haïku, direct comme une microfiction, un post-mémoire cible l’essentiel dans la narration. Il doit évoquer en quelques lignes l’impalpable des choses vécues. Derrière la simplicité d’un polaroid, se cache l’impact d’une sentence. La blessure sous la cicatrice. Les post-mémoires sont d'abord rédigés au fil de ma mémoire : les souvenirs sont récoltés au gré de mon inconscient et de ses associations d'idées. Cette phase d'écriture a lieu sur une page web, façade, qui alimente et affiche les données stockées sur une base. Saisie Les bases de données sous-tendent nos sociétés informatisées. Elles modélisent des aspects pertinents de la réalité pour permettre un accès optimal à certaines informations. Elles offrent ainsi aux utilisateurs une vue de la réalité. En ce sens, une base de données et son système de gestion rappelle le fonctionnement de notre mémoire. Pendant la phase d'écriture, les post-mémoires sont stockés dans une base de données : le titre, le texte et la couleur sont associés. Parallèlement, mon visage est scanné en 3D et les coordonnées sont traitées pour y être également intégrées. Les deux séries de données constituent la matière première de l’autoportrait. Ces aspects techniques sont constitutifs du projet puisque qu'ils permettent la mise en relation et le partage de ces informations. En combinant structure psychique et structure physique, la base de données compose l'ossature du projet. Ces coulisses structurent l'interface par laquelle le visiteur accède aux post-mémoires. Par ailleurs, les textes sont enregistrés vocalement pour former un troisième tableau de données. Interfaces La restitution principale du projet est une page internet sur laquelle est projetée une animation interactive : face. Une requête, passée à la base de données, crée une boucle qui produit l'affichage des post-mémoires. Les textes enregistrés composent un murmure indistinct tandis que les feuillets s'assemblent pour déformer l'espace et dessiner mon visage. L'internaute peut alors approcher pour examiner cet objet tridimensionnel. Il découvre ainsi ce que recèle cette surface manuscrite et bigarrée. Il remonte le cours de ma vie en frôlant ma peau de papier. En lisant les post-its, il explore les anecdotes tantôt drôles, tantôt graves, les curiosités et les failles, une famille et une époque, les couleurs et les odeurs, un monde centré et ouvert. Il y reconnaîtra l'identité d'un petit bourgeois de province né alors que s'inventait le courrier électronique. Cette forme multimédia est complétée par d'autres représentations. L'interface d'écriture qui compose une façade régulier permet une lecture à plat des post-mémoires. En procédant à un mélange aléatoire, facettes donne un sens inattendu à ma mémoire. Au travers de la galerie facebook, cette mise à nu prend le contre-pieds de l'ambiance généralement festive et pose la question de l'image de chacun sur le réseau. Enfin, la mise en espace d'installations interactives et l'édition d'un objet-livre apporterait une dimension plastique au projet. (Source: www.fredmurie.net description)

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Technical notes

Flash application for face interface, php/mysql for writing and reading interface

By Patricia Tomaszek, 27 August, 2012
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9782940373581
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176
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All Rights reserved
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Approved by librarian
Abstract (in English)

The book examines the way digital technology is forcing a complete rethink of creative priorities for artists in the twenty first century. Written from an artist's perspective, the author has had the cooperation of many important practitioners in digital arts in countries across the world. The book is written in an accessible style and alongside examples of work offers practical know-how that will enable to reader to begin using some of the methods described for themselves.The Fundamentals of Digital Art has six sections and each of these takes a specific aspect of the subject.Historical perspectivesDynamic “live” artThe use of data sources in artThe place of programming languagesNetwork considerationsHybrid practice and the blurring of specialist boundaries.176 Pages with 150 colour illustrations

Source: book presentation on accompanying website

By Patricia Tomaszek, 4 May, 2012
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This interview appeared alongside three works by Jason Nelson in Cordite's Electronica issue, giving insight into Nelson's creative practices and digital poetry.

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Poetry has a long tradition of using the poetic form to drive, or serve as the engine, of the poem. Historically as new ideas, technologies and cultural trends arrived, poets used them as poetic interfaces. Digital poetry is simply an extension of that long history, using the various possibilities of the computer to build interfaces.

Every environment/machine/structure/poem ever created is governed to some extent by its uses of and reliance on limiting factors. I see those constraints as opportunities in the creating a digital poem, they are tools and techniques for engaging with the text/media and whatever audience comes along.

By Patricia Tomaszek, 20 January, 2012
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Abstract (in English)

Paper written for ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, on August 20, 2004 (Scott Rettberg presented). The investigation into early computer writing starts with the observation that "early interaction with computers happened largely on paper: on paper tape, on punchcards, and on print terminals and teletypewriters, with their scroll-like supplies of continuous paper for printing output and input both." Montfort traces back history and challenges the "screen essentialist" assumption about computing.

Pull Quotes

By looking back to early new media and examining the role of paper — the pun is difficult to avoid here — we can begin to see how history contradicts the "screen essentialist" assumption about computing.

Creative Works referenced