The animation 'pulls' and 'pushes' the reader without 'knowing' into the text.
De animatie maakt een trekduwende beweging en voert de lezer daarmee ongemerkt de tekst binnen.
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.
Palacete dos Viscondes de Balsemão
Porto
Portugal
In this exhibit, sound is represented as an overarching medium connecting the artworks displayed. Visitors of the “Affiliations” exhibit will find poetic works that radically explore language and sound. For the curators, sound is one of the fundamental aspects, if not the core, of experimental and digital poetics. Yet, as some writers and critics have pointed out - especially Chris Funkhouser, Hazel Smith, and John Barber - sound has not been sufficiently highlighted as a fundamental trait of electronic literature.
The “Affiliations” exhibit presents works that embrace appropriation and remix of older and contemporary pieces - be they merely formalist or politically engaged - as pervasive creative methods in experimental poetics. Furthermore, it suggests that electronic literature can be seen as a heterogeneous field of self-reflexive experimentation with the medium, language, sound, code, and space.
At the Palacete dos Viscondes de Balsemão, connections between several art forms and movements, ranging from the baroque period to Dada and experimentalism will be underlined. In so doing, the “Affiliations” exhibit will present works printed on paper, composed of sound or generated by computational media. This exhibit is divided into nuclei of practice, where works can be independently or simultaneously read, played, listened to, watched, and remixed.
(Source: Books of Abstracts and Catalogs)
The old-school demo based on scroll-text, which moves up and down the screen. Fifth Demo is a kind of short story about the author’s imaginary struggles with the computer and his attempts to rein it in, as illustrated by the strange behavior of the scroll, allegedly caused by the computer. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)
This kinetic poetry generator is based on the texts by two polar authors, husband and wife, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev. Letters from their decomposed texts are moving according to the magnetic field principle like positively and negatively charged particles. The work is produced by two authors, a computer programmer and an artist, who are also husband and wife.
(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)
Recent innovations in digital environments may suggest that the possibility to manipulate the literal movement of the text could be one of the essential variables separating digital literature from printed literature. This bipolar distinction between digital and print media hides, however, a complex historical background. A fuller comprehension of movement as a variable in literature calls for the clarification of the historical development from the "analogies of movement" in printed literature to the innovations in video art, experimental film and multimedia poetry.
In classifying types of textual movement at least the following questions are relevant: What can be kinetic in the poetic text? How does the movement take place? Where does it take place? What is the result of the movement? And finally, what (or who) makes the text move? The article develops conceptual divisions that make answering these questions possible and thus helps to make the question of the specificity of digitally manipulated movement more precise.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
The poem-program Universo was developed by João Coelho in BASIC for a IBM PC. This is a computer poem which draws its own title - universe, in english - in a spiral that evokes endless movement, symmetry and chance - forming words in portuguese along the way.
Rea and the Squaw is a kinetic poetry piece I created three months after my Grandma Rea died at the age of 96 on December 18, 2012. When she died, I was left with: memories, some pictures, and pages and pages of her unpublished and published poetry. So I began to dissect her poetry, dissect each word. And then I couldn’t stop. I wanted to mold her words, shift them, strain them. I wanted to understand where these words could be cornered, shaped, and colored. I cherished them, chained them, tamed, and mazed them. I sized and seized them. Who was this woman? How has she influenced who I am as a person? As a poet? The words on the digital interface are hers, and the particular shaping, movement, and coloring of the words is proof that I’ve traversed them.
(Source: ELO conference: First Encounters 2014)
When we strip the lexical band-aid ‘embodiment’ off the more than 350 year-old wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body, we find animation, the foundational dimension of the living. Everything living is animated. Flowers turn toward the sun; pill bugs curl into spheres; lambs rise on untried legs, finding their way into patterned coordinations. The phenomenon of movement testifies to animation as the foundational dimension of the living.
We propose that the importance of movement in the distribution of space and time is one of the things digital media works make palpable. While western aesthetics – consonant with its spatialised images of subjects and objects – has traditionally paid more attention to spatial form, this is being challenged by new forms of mobility made possible by digital media. These provide both the opportunity for immersion in mediated and programmed/programmable environments, but also the opportunity to move through existing and technologically augmented environments in different ways, using different surfaces and forms of literary inscription.
In these contexts, for example, the silent and stable forms of letters and words on a page that we associate with books take on an animatory force. Letters move and make sounds, as in the programmable works of writers such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland , Maria Mencia,, or else they are reclocated off the page so that one can touch and play with them (exemplary here is Camille Utterback’s ‘Text Rain’, or more recently, work being done in the CAVE environment at Brown University) , or else they are transported and translocated in processes that bear witness to movement and mobility through landscapes.
The programmable and interactive works that we analyse in this paper re-designate and redeploy of sensory ecologies in terms of movement through space. By introducing movement as an aesthetic dimension these new forms of writing and aesthetic practice implicitly acknowledge the importance of time or duration in the constitution of being, that is, in the constitution of objects, subjects and things which echo and mimic processes of ‘Life’.
(Source: Authors' abstract, ELO 2013 conference site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/ethos-life-digital-w… )
Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence -- movement, affect, and sensation -- in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate onmultiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing and assessing William Jamesʹs radical empiricism and Henri Bergsonʹs philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation.
Source: Publisher description