multimediality

The central objective of this paper is to provide a new conceptual theoretical framework starting from the role of new new media in shaping a new kind of literature, which I call Cosmo-Literature. Towards this, I start working from Levinson’s differentiation among old media, new media, and new new media to arrive at the difference among the variable types of media. Next, I address the role of new new media in establishing world democracies and changing the social, cultural, and political world map. After that, I investigate the terms of “global village” and “cosmopolitanism” in relation to literature. To clarify what I mean by Cosmo Literature, I will investigate two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel by the Moroccan novelist Abdel-Wahid Stitu, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel by Neil Gaiman, to infer the characteristics of Cosmo literature in general and Cosmo narration in particular.
What I mean by Cosmo-literature is all forms of literature produced by the capabilities provided by new new media. These include digital works but also examples where the digital artifact is printed or presented in other media.
Cosmo literature is derived from the political, social, and cultural context that the whole world lives in nowadays. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism as “universality plus difference” is the most significant term to refer to the pluralistic and universal society of today. Respecting diversity, caring about each other, and kindness are the moral principle of the cosmopolitan society according to Appiah. My project builds on Appiah to argue that digital media facilitate the cultural co-existence of the peoples of the cosmopolitan society. As long as such a society has its own morals and identity, it is logical to have its own literature, which I believe to be Cosmo-Literature.
The investigation of two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel, has shown many features of Cosmo-Literature in its relation to cosmopolitanism. At the heart of these features are interactivity, multilingualism, multimediality, suspense, new literariness, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional, and creating new dimensions of time. Those features also play as the characteristic features of the group identity of the universal society of today.

The presentation will explore narrative, intertextual and ideological aspects of The Numberlys iPad/iPhone app (http://www.numberlys.com/). The app, produced by Moonbot Studios and released in 2012, received an American Annie award for excellence in the field of animation in 2013.
The Numberlys is a fanciful tale about the origin of the alphabet. In a world where ways of organization and communication are based on numbers and nobody has a name, only a number, five friends decide to build the alphabet by transforming numbers into letters. By inventing the alphabet the five protagonists let the inhabitants acquire a personal name. Thus the app raises existential questions concerning the construction of identity and our needs for recognition.
The story is set in a futuristic cityscape inspired by the German-Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 silent film Metropolis. Other intertextual references include ABC books, German expressionism, popular early fantasy epics like King Kong, Flash Gordon and Superman, the Macintosh tv-commercial 1984 and more. Thus The Numberlys seems to address both children and adults.
By referring to the sci-fi universe of Metropolis, the depiction of an urban dystopia, The Numberlys may be understood as a critical commentary of a contemporary metanarrative: technology as a manifestation and a result of progress. Consequently traditional notions of history and nature are questioned in an unusual way.
The tale is worked out as a hybrid of a sequential film and an interactive game. Constructing a media rich mixture of linear storytelling and nonlinear, user driven components, the app challenges conceptions of narration, game activity and reader response.

(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)

In this interview Domenico Chiappe describes his works of both electronic literature and print literature published between the years 2000-2012. He gives insight into the interesting collaborative work for the work of electronic literature and ponders about the difference of the two forms of expressions: the printed book and new media. His then articulates discourse about the language of new media taking in account the SMS Literature and his concept of hiperphonia. On regard of the new possibilities provided by new media technology, he maintains that there should be a certain balance and harmony of the audio-visual effects and the written texts.

Rui Torres is Associate Professor at University Fernando Pessoa (UFP) in Porto and also author of several works of digital poetry. In this interview he explains how he started working in this field and where his inspiration comes from. Furthermore he explains why he sees the works of electronic literature as literary experiments and his concept of aesthetics taking in account his privilege for multimedia and the active participation of the readers in the creation of some his works. In the end he makes some considerations about preservation and archiving of works of electronic literature.

In Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler envisioned a digital future of demediation: all traditional differences between media and mediations would be ended in a fusion of digital numbers. Kittler’s vision, I argue in my paper, is premediated by Richard Wagner’s artwork of the future: despite their differences, both stage the dream of a multimedial future in which monomediality or medial compartmentalization is effectively aufgehoben. This idea of premediation is further explored by comparing Wagner’s music drama’s to digital multimedia works and events of the 1990’s and early years of our twenty-first century that try to fuse words, bodily gestures, sounds, and images.