intermediality

Some children story apps have incorporated a reflexivity typical of the metafictive picturebook but this reflexivity is altered in the digital medium by the possibility of interaction – as the reader is addressed by the story, there is in interactive texts the possibility of a response that affects the narrative. The construction of metafiction is also changed by the extended multimodality of these texts, that now incorporate movement and sound, for example, creating a different kind of immersion from that promoted by the image-writing dynamics of the print picturebook. In this paper, I will discuss the realization of metafiction through the participation of the reader in the app The Monster at the End of This Book (Stone & Smollin, 2011).

(Source: Author's Abstract at ICDMT 2016)

Shelley Jackson’s Snow does not easily conform to established literary categories or interpretative strategies – words written on snow are evanescent and fragile, vanishing as soon as the surface on which they had been inscribed melts away. The text in progress is offered to the audience only as the documentation of the artist’s own acts of inscription, made available through the accounts on Flickr and Instagram dedicated to the project. Additionally, reading the story in a traditional way on Instagram is possible only in reverse order of the photostream. In my presentation I would like to broaden the notion of a literary text taking into consideration the very materiality of this project’s affordances – especially the specificity of the inscription surface, evoked to the audience with photos regularly uploaded to Instagram (which itself can be seen as a domain of fluidity with its constantly changing visual stream). What I am particularly interested in is the specific mode of meaning distribution – in this case performed between the evaporating substance, photographic documentation and networked media.

(Source: Author's Abstract, ICDMT 2016)

The end-point of any form of literary communication is the reader, as acknowledged by the shift towards studying reception in fields such as book history and cultural studies. Electronic literary studies has, to date, remained principally concerned with issues of textuality and medium. Certainly it has, from its inception, extensively explored theoretical issues around the nature of authorship and the extent reader agency. However, this “reader” has tended to remain broadly a theoretical construct rather than a documented empirical reality. Indeed, the first wave of electronic literature has been criticised for imbuing this idealised “reader” with an appetite for digital literary experimentation, common amongst electronic literature scholars and practitioners but scarcely evident amongst the broader reading public.

This paper examines reader behaviour in digital environments through focussing on one of the major configurations of contemporary reading – the writers’ festival. These are also known as “festivals of ideas” or take the form of cultural festivals with a significant bookish slant. Intriguingly, digital-only writers’ festivals are beginning to emerge, such as the US-based #TwitterFiction Festival (http://twitterfictionfestival.com/, 2012- ) and the Melbourne-co-ordinated Digital Writers’ Festival (http://digitalwritersfestival.com/2014/, February 2014- ). These innovative events are characterised by web-streamed panel presentations by geographically dispersed writers, live webchats between writers and organisers, Twitter interaction with and between “readers”, online book clubs and collaborative, real-time literary composition. They hence showcase reader modes of interaction with digital literature and document actual readers’ responses to digital literary texts.

More broadly, even major site-specific writers’ festivals (Edinburgh, Hay-on-Wye, Sydney, Toronto) now commonly incorporate significant digital elements, such as live tweeting during sessions, guest bloggers, online fora, live inter-festival link-ups and extensive online archiving. There is a question of whether, by the second decade of the 21st century, any writers’ festival can be considered purely site-specific.

The mainstreaming of the digital writers festival offers a rich new field of research for scholars of electronic literature, permitting as it does examination of actual reader encounters and responses to electronic (and print) literary forms in digital environments. However it simultaneously provokes some unsettling questions. While digital literary festival components greatly expand audiences for writers’ festival events, overcoming limitations of geography, time and disposable income, do they dilute the performative specificity of the event: the special aura of being physically present at a one-off reading by a particular author? If writers’ festivals move increasingly online, can they continue to expect significant cultural policy support from state and local governments on the basis of their contribution to local tourism and civic branding? Does social media’s increasingly audio-visual orientation undermine the literary festival’s traditional (even aggressive) assertion of the primacy of print?

Scholars of electronic literature have been at the forefront of exploring such inter-medial issues since the genre’s emergence in the late 1980s. But the rise of the digital literary festival casts disciplinary consensus into a new light and prompts urgent questions about who the readers of electronic literature – the end-point of this cultural form -- actually are.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1986 is a digital work produced by the Labyrinth Project Research Center of the University of Southern California. Part paper, part DVD-ROM, part real, part fiction, it is based on an unsolved mystery, and unfolds the story of Molly, an Irish immigrant who moved to Los Angeles in 1920. She was at the heart of an investigation in the late 50’s early 60’s as she was the main suspect in the death of her second husband Walt. The project gathers hundreds of different data types like maps, pictures, texts, newspaper articles, books and movies, through which the user navigates in order to ultimately, resolve the crime. But how does the user build an interpretable narrative through this hypermedial database?

Far from pretending to be an analysis based on reception theories, this proposal seeks to understand the mechanisms of language that enable interpretation in a hypermedial digital work by exploring the relational dynamics between the different media representions in Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 - 1986. Literature, Cinema and Computer language rely on very different semiotic systems that somehow collide in Bleeding Through. Frames are visible; the project shows the different media types, and each one is used for its specificity. What can’t be read is shown; what can’t be seen is written, but at the end, it may just be programmed…

The hypermedial nature of the work calls for an intermedial interpretation. Between literature, cinema, geography, journalism lies an unraveled plot (real or fake), a possible storyline that still needs to be imagined, and which relies on literary imaginary. It’s Molly’s story, and maybe that’s exactly where literature starts and ends. As the user is scrolling through the maps, articles, and photographs the elements are presented and or confronted to one another. Along with the user’s reading, gaps are revealed between the significant units leaving a space where narratives are created, where facts and fiction merge into a unified and coherent virtual assemblage; it’s the figural space.

In Reading the Figural, David Norman Rodowick considers what has become of reading, of interpretation in art through intermedial practices. As he says, “contemporary electronic media [are] giving rise to hybrid and mutant forms that semiology [is] ill equipped to understand. […] New media [are] emerging from a new logic of sense – the figural – and they could not be understood within the reigning norms of a linguistic or aesthetic philosophy.” (Rodowick. 2001. p.ix-x).

By exploring the intermedial relations between the significant elements in Bleeding Through, the boundaries and frontiers of these same units fuse into a blur, and are at the same time reflected on the content of the work itself, until facts and fiction become undistinguishable and the narrative takes over.

***

“It is now time to unravel or commit literary murder. I am now convinced that Molly had Walt murdered in 1959. He hasn’t been heard of or seen since. […] Have I hit a motive that is convincing yet? It is daunting prospect to give up all those newspaper clippings in order to make this story legible. […] I promise to murder him off as much as the evidence will allow. I have about a thousand photographs and newspaper articles, over two hundred relevant movies on file, and over twenty interviews, along with hours of interviews with Norman Klein; and hundreds of pages of text. With all of these elegantly assembled in a DVD-ROM, I can […] make an entertainment, a tristful paideia, a mocking of the truth.” (Klein, Norman. 2002. Bleeding Though: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1986. p. 27)

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

The digital turn brings about not only changes in young adult literature considered as aesthetic artifacts and literary works but also changes in the perception and reception of the reader. Digital young adult literature is increasingly multimodal and interactive, and it integrates elements from game aesthetics. When young adult literature navigates between media, new analytical approaches are required to explore the way in which it operates among various aesthetic strategies and medialities and the way it affects the young adult reader. With this development it becomes essential to combine different fields of research, e.g. research in literature and media science; thus, the focus of this paper will be research in children’s literature in an intermedial perspective. The analytical approach can be either diachronic when the object is the study of how various aesthetic expressions (text, picture, sound, etc.) have been used to create the literary artifact, or the approach can be synchronically based when the object is studying the categories which cut across the aesthetic expressions with the aim of transgressing conceivable media specific borders, and the latter will be the focal point here.

The pivotal point of this paper will be exploring how transgressing analytical categories, e.g. rhythm, sequentiality, time, space and dialogue with the reader, can shed light on the formation of meaning in a specific digital young adult literary work, i.e. Tavs (Camilla Hübbe, Rasmus Meisler and Stefan Pasborg 2013) which prompts different reading methods, paths, and types of interaction. The analysis will focus on selected analytical categories in order to explore the integration of various art forms and sensory appeals, viz. visual, auditory, and tactile modalities. In other words, the paper will investigate the ‘denaturalization’ of the reading process and it will attempt to investigate and offer analytical categories which can be used also by young readers so that they can become competent cross media readers of young adult literature in a digitalized and medialized landscape of texts.

Theoretically, the presentation will be based on theory on digital literature and media (Hayles, N. Kathrine Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2008, Simanowski, Roberto, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla (ed.) Reading Moving Letters. Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. Bielefeld, Trancript Verlag 2010, Bell, Alice, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad Analyzing Digital Fiction. New York: Routledge 2014) and theory on picturebook (Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott (2006) How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge).

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

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)

The 2015 ELO Conference’s call for papers states that "[e]lectronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice, between literature, computation, visual and performance art. The conference will seek to develop a better understanding of electronic literature’s boundaries and relations with other academic disciplines and artistic practices."

This roundtable discussion, led by both established and emerging e-lit scholars and artists, will explore the idea of electronic literature as an intermedial practice, looking at the topic from a wide range of forms including literature, performance, sound, computation, visual art, and physical computing. Drawing upon artistic work they have produced or studied, each panelist will provide a five-minute statement that touches on qualities related to intermediality like hybridity, syncretism, and collaboration. Following this series of brief presentations, the panelists, then, encourage engagement in a wider conversation with the audience.

Because it is our contention that multiple media in combination in a work of art provide endless opportunities for innovation, contemplation, and “fresh perspectives” (Kattenbelt), rendering the notion of an “end” impossible to reach, the goal of the panel is to engage the ELO community in a discussion about the shifting boundaries of electronic literature and its ongoing development as an art form.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)