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.
The poem has been presented in libraries.
Samen met Kurt Demey ontwierp ik de installatie ‘Lezer,’. Het bovenstaande gedicht wordt daarbij op een magische wijze ontsloten in bibliotheken. (Het is moeilijk om uit te leggen, je moet het meemaken!)
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.
In their 2001 book Art with a Difference: Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art, Leonard Diepeeveen and Timothy Van Laar observe “Artwork is not just an object; it is an object (or event) that does something. The most basic thing an artwork does is give its viewers an implicit set of instructions for its use; it suggests ways in which it ought to be experienced” (95).
While not written with electronic literature in mind, the book was designed as a supplementary text for beginning arts courses with an awareness of the difficulty that many beginning or non- specialist readers have in understanding contemporary art. The e-lit classroom can be beset by similar difficulties; even the most avid readers in a class can be puzzled by or resistant to the diverse cognitive and ergodic “reading” activities that accrue under the banner of electronic literature.
In my upcoming Spring 2018 300-level Electronic Literature course, I will be exploring over two dozen pieces of e-lit with a group of upper-level fifteen students who will be keeping a reading journal over course of the term. The journal entries will be published WordPress sites and shared with the class as a whole.
For the purposes of this paper, I propose to work with the “assessment” criteria developed by James Pope in 2010 and recently revisited in his article “Further on down the digital road: Narrative design and reading pleasure in five new Media Writing Prize narratives” published in Convervegence (August 2017). Utilizing Pope’s “assessment” criteria, I will review my students’ reading journals and end-of-term survey responses with the goal of continuing to deepen our collective understanding of how readers react to and make sense of digital storytelling with a particular attention paid to the sites of resistance and potential parallels with the challenges associated with looking at other forms of difficult art. The proposed conference paper will share my findings as well as offering insights into how this course and others might evolve based on the findings with the objective of contributing to the ongoing development of e-lit pedagogies in the undergraduate classroom.
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)
Autorschaft und digitale Literatur widmet sich dem Phänomen der Neukonfiguration der Trias Autor, Leser und Text in Literatur, die den Computer als ästhetisches Ausdrucksmedium nutzt. Dabei beantwortet der Band die als beängstigend attribuierte Frage nach dem Autor dieses "neuen Etwas", indem erstmals ein systematisches Beschreibungsverfahren für das Zusammenspiel aller an der Textproduktion und -rezeption Beteiligten vorgestellt wird. Mit dem Entwurf des theoretischen Modells des Textuellen Handlungsraums überbrückt Zimmermann auch die bisher angenommene strukturelle Distanz zwischen gedruckter und digitaler Literatur. Der detaillierten Analyse exemplarischer kanonischer Werke der englischsprachigen digitalen Literatur ist ein grundlegender komparatistischer Überblick über die Entwicklung dieser Literaturform vorangestellt, die in ihren definierenden Eigenschaften gleichsam als Fortsetzung einer viel älteren Literaturgeschichte aufgefasst wird. Auch die Geschichte von Autorschaft und der Reflexion über Autorschaft wird von Zimmermann ausführlich nachgezeichnet. Neben einer umfassenden Diskussion der bisherigen Forschung zur Autorschaft digitaler Literatur bespricht der Band bekannte Probleme der Autor-Leser-Konfiguration wie nichtlineares und kombinatorisches Erzählen, Zwischenwesen wie den Wreader und kollaboratives Schreiben. Von den Ergebnissen der Analyse getragen, diskutiert Zimmermann schließlich Fragen zu Tradition und Theorie angesichts der elektronischen Medienpraxis, zu rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen und zum Mangel ernstzunehmender digitaler Literatur in Deutschland, sowie zur Produktivität theoretischer Modellierungen. Ein umfassender Index, ein Glossar und ein Kapitel über die Hauptbegriffe im Spannungsfeld um Autorschaft in digitaler Literatur erleichtern auch Neulingen in diesem Bereich die Lektüre. (Source: Author's Abstract)
This essay presents the points of convergence between the Brazilian fiction writer Clarice Lispector and the Portuguese poet Rui Torres, having, as corpus of analysis, the hypermedia poem “Amor de Clarice” (2005), written by him and based on her tale “Amor”, from the book Laços de Família (1960). In a comparative approach, with a focus on the impact of technology on today's sociocultural background, try to also examine the relation author-work-reader, with the advent of new information technologies and the use of computers as a semiotic machine. Discussions indicate that, in face of Clarice’s writings, the Portuguese poet promotes a rereading that dialogues creatively with the original, expanding its semantic load through audible and visual resources, including animation. Under the influence of the rich literary tradition of the Portuguese Experimental Poetry, "Amor de Clarice" bets on the intercrossing of literary language with media supports in order to break with traditional aesthetic values, suggesting new paradigms for the Luso-Brazilian contemporary literature.
(Source: Authors' Abstract)
Este ensaio apresenta os pontos de convergência entre a ficcionista brasileira Clarice Lispector e o poeta português Rui Torres, tendo, enquanto corpus de análise, o poema hipermídia “Amor de Clarice” (2005), este último, construído a partir do conto “Amor”, da autora de Laços de Família (1960). Numa abordagem comparativista, tendo como enfoque o impacto da tecnologia sobre o cenário sociocultural da atualidade, busca-se, igualmente, analisar a relação autor-obra-leitor, com o advento das novas tecnologias da informação e do uso do computador enquanto máquina semiótica. As discussões apontam que, diante do texto clariceano, o escritor português promove uma releitura que dialoga criativamente com o original, expandindo sua carga semântica por meio de recursos sonoros, visuais e de animação. Sob a influência da rica tradição literária da Poesia Experimental Portuguesa, “Amor de Clarice” aposta no entrecruzamento da linguagem literária com os suportes midiáticos para romper com valores estéticos tradicionais, apontando novos paradigmas para a literatura luso-brasileira contemporânea.
(Fonte: Resumo dos Autores)
J. Yellowlees Douglas looks at the new light that interactive narratives may shed on theories of reading and interpretation and the possibilities for hypertext novels, World Wide Web-based short stories, and cinematic, interactive narratives on CD-ROM. She confronts questions that are at the center of the current debate: Does an interactive story demand too much from readers? Does the concept of readerly choice destroy the author's vision? Does interactivity turn reading fiction from "play" into "work" - too much work? Will hypertext fiction overtake the novel as a form of art or entertainment? And what might future interactive books look like?
(Source: Book jacket)
As a programmable writing project, Letters from the Archiverse can be considered both a visual poem and an application. Its most current version was composed (and continues to be developed) with architectural modeling space software AutoCAD. Combining methods and techniques drawn from traditional lineages of concrete poetry and ―open-field‖ composition with 3D image modeling, the poem offers writers and viewers alike the opportunity to engage in the materiality of screen-based writing, while exploring new directions and theories in visual language art. In the current phase of the project, readers are able to explore and manipulate the poem on the iPad, using a commercial architectural drafting app.
Our demo of the app will emphasize the Archiverse project as a working model as well as a critical interrogation of the general future of digital composition tools – in a manner not dissimilar to Microsoft Word’s current technological augmentation and extension of the typewriter. Within the Archiverse, writing re-emerges as a boundary-less, multidimensional, networked field, inviting the reader to assume a position of constant ―field‖ exploration. Here, she becomes something more than a mere text producer or consumer; she takes on the roles and responsibilities of a collaborator and co-creator of a vast multimedia, intertextual cosmos.
(Source: Authors' abstract from HASTAC 2013)
