remediation

Even before worldwide quarantines added impetus, material gaming had already become increasingly enacted in virtual spaces. Rather than virtual play replacing the material, as some speculated in the early days of videogames, material play has become increasingly entangled with virtuality. These increasingly complementary modes of play offer a rich space for exploring the multifaceted embodied and conceptual activity of play, the blending of material and virtual that in many ways defines games.The three panelists encompass a wide range of perspectives, including the perspective of a game maker translating material play into the digital realm, that of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholar who researched how players interact differently with the Catan boardgame and its digital implementations, and that of a theorist reflecting on how virtual spaces remediate material affects. Together, these diverse perspectives aim to explore the paradoxical yet generative spaces where materiality and virtuality intersect in gaming.The theoretical approach looks at analog games as capable of producing the specific circumstances that foreground the affective relationships between the players and the other pieces of the assemblage. Because of the procedural nature that necessitates specific types of interactions between parts of the play assemblage, analog games amplify the social interactions between players and differently produce affective orientations as a consequence of their systems. Then examines the ways that these games are remediated and adapted to digital platforms highlighting the things that are lost or changed in the move to digital, uncovering the types of experiences that are important for each type of adaptation.

The HCI approach presents Association Mapping (AM) in HCI; called so because the formation of a network is due to objects making associations in context. By recording the associations that form a network, it is possible to understand what objects are most central within that network. . This research contributes to the next paradigm of HCI by providing a new tool to understand use that is fragmented, distributed, and invisible. AM incorporates association as its measurement. This results in passive measures of attention, hybridity, and influence in network formation of any kind. It does this by making the systemic nature of use visible and capable of evaluation at any level.And finally the design approach applies design strategies for incorporating three main types of play: Screenplay, Gameplay, and Roleplay, seeking to answer questions about how to bridge the narrative and performance aspects of digital and analog play. This is particularly applicable to classic games that are associated with transmedia narratives and characters, such as the Clue board game, where there are established cinematic traditions and character roles.During the COVID-19 pandemic, board games have become a useful medium for examining our changing relationship with physical and digital interaction. In addition to presenting our own findings, this panel also offers several methodologies for furthering research into the intersections of the analog, digital, physical, and virtual.

The aim of PO.EX: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent the intermedia and performative textuality of a large corpus of experimental works and practices in an electronic database, including some early instances of digital literature. This article describes the multimodal editing of experimental works in terms of a hypertext rationale, and then demonstrates the performative nature of the remediation, emulation, and recreation involved in digital transcoding and archiving. Preservation, classification, and networked distribution of artifacts are discussed as representational problems within the current algorithmic and database aesthetics in knowledge production.

(source: abstract DHQ)

Modern forms of literature frequently question our reading habits, and provoke us to re-define the act of reading and the book form. The “magic” of the book, described by Bezos as its ability to be an invisible device that disappears in the reader’s hands, permitting them to enter a story-world, is nowadays replaced by the “real magic” of non-invisible interfaces. The latest manifestations of these interfaces invite us to do things we usually do not do while reading: to touch, to shout, or to shake the device. In the other words, our reading becomes a very sensual and corporeal action and our “reading behaviour” is important for discovering the meaning of the work. That’s why we need a revision of poetics (Simanowski 2009), like Bouchardon’s theory of gestural manipulation as a literary figure (2014). 

In this paper, while examining literary works dedicated to mobile devices, I ask how adding playability to the story and engaging readers’ gestures and body in act of reading can be useful to “renovate” the literary canon, and to remediate it for today’s digital natives. My main case study will be iClassic collection, in which playability and reader gestures are not used only to make well-known works more attractive. Every story is re-told in a new, multimodal way, not only illustrated or enhanced with mobile media possibilities – particular narration aspects are translated into new media language. 

Contexts for analysis will derive from both, the mobile-literature field (e.g. different remediation of Around the World in 80 Days, Elastico Press apps) and non-mobile e-lit (e.g. works that re-write the canon in playable versions: Concretoons, Bałwochwał). This remediated canon will be also analyzed in context of modern “mobile-books,” literary apps that use haptic aspects as primary strategy for reading digital-born stories (e.g. The Incredible Tales of Weirdwood Manor). But the context of various “new” (not only mobile) book forms that re-fresh and re-new the traditional vision of the book will be important, too. Thus, I will use examples of AR-books or digi-novels (Level 26), step-in-book technology (wuwu&co), playable non-mobile texts (The Winter House), texts that use biofeedback (The Breathing Wall), as well as locative and physical narratives (Turnton Docklands). Important context will also be the traditional tension between a book forms typical for children’s and adult literature (and actual evolution in these divisions, provoked by new-media).

 The broader context for my research is a question about the actual evolution (remediation) of canonical genres and literary forms. Here one of examples can be the classic epistolary novel and its modern incarnations as email- or sms-novel and then twitterature or other (trans)literary projects on social platforms (blogs, FB, flickr).

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: 

Critics have understandably fetishized the electronic page or digital screen as a way to understand the relationship between the algorithmic logics that drive computation and the public rhetorics of display. At the same time an evolving set of practices within electronic literature continues to be in dialogue with contemporary digital media arts practice and its move to explore the meaning of incorporating autonomous sensing and new forms of human-computer interaction in dialogic works. Considering the rhetorical position of devices such as the iPad and considering them as more than viewing apparatuses or interfaces for reading it is possible to engage differently with a whole set of binaries around camera vs. scanner, optics vs. sensors, and representation vs. registration.

This presentation focuses on three writers who are utilizing augmented reality technologies to expand the repertoire of digital poetics. Judd Morrissey has collaborated with choreographer Mark Jeffery to stage The Operature (2014), combining live performance and augmented reality multimodal poetry to highlight anatomical science and voyeuristic erotic spectacle in which the temporary tattoos worn by the work’s dancers can be read by a surveillance apparatus. In contrast, a voice of intensely personal lyricism that speaks very intimately to the listener defines Caitlin Fisher’s Circle (2011), which is an “augmented reality tabletop theatre piece” that deploys the iPad or smart phone in a much more private setting. Amaranth Borsuk’s approach to augmented reality multimedia favors an aesthetic of sleek mid-century modernism and machined characters in Between Page and Screen (2012), which investigates “the place of books as objects in an era of increasingly screen-based reading.“ The actual pages of this artist’s book contain no legible text; the reader is presented with only abstract geometric patterns and a URL leading to the Between Page and Screen website, where the book may be read by using any browser and a webcam. With a new generation of reading machines that can perceive contrast relationships in a 2D visual environment, sensors can read the “ink” of tattoos, the grain of family artifacts, and the code of a numbered artist’s book or print-at-home emulation.

These works may also spur a new kind of criticism that may require that we rethink the theoretical framework of immediacy, hypermediation, and remediation proposed by Bolter and Grusin as we reconsider our own interchanges with the sensorium of the mechanical apparatus. In responding to Galloway, Thacker, and Wark’s theses about “excommunication” and the possibility that the relation between “objects and things” problematizes the standard narrative about media, mediation, and communication, Benjamin Bratton has suggested that this could more precisely be characterized as “incommunication” around the activities of “sensing, addressing, and pricing.” Borsuk, Morrissey, and Fisher create works that dramatize device-to-device relations and their associated modes of reading.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

In this presentation, we will see how the authoring tool impacts on the thinking of electronic literature. If we consider that electronic literature cannot exist without digital tools, and digital writing requires tool, software and technologies, we can easily imagine how huge the role of the authoring tool is for the authors and how their imaginary can be challenged. Tools propose and impose choices and directions that ask the creative act in electronic literature.

Then, in our research, we define the concept of the “rhetoric for creative authoring” that will be focusing on power relations between the authoring tool and the author. And what does it mean in electronic literature to use such a tool? Is electronic literature producing works depending on the software the author uses? It means that the software tool, as the edge of the electronic work itself, could be considered as part of the electronic work. In other hands, this approach could help to define electronic literature.

Also, the notion of “cultural software” by Lev Manovich that we develop in this paper could be followed by another concept as a “societal theory of tool” which could be the challenge of the future of electronic literature. If we consider software tool as a support of ideological way of thinking, the consequences on electronic literature need to be analyzed.

Where and when does electronic literature start and stop? At the border of literature, art and computing, electronic literature is characterized by three basic forms that are animation, interactivity and multimedia, and sometimes mobilizes programming skills. Regarding this last point, the question would be to evaluate whether the creator should be a programmer to practice electronic literature? In our research work, we interviewed authors of electronic literature who have expressed different visions regarding this crucial question.

Software formats are, more than ever before, at the center of creation. Does the creative act ask for the intent of the author, when starting from prefabricated element? With the examples of the three softwares, frequently used in electronic literature, we will talk about the concept of remediation, and will show how structure influences the imaginary work of the authors and how they live the tension between the tool and the creation in their electronic literary works. May we still define electronic literature as a confidential and experimental literature thought for and through the digital? Will the power of the tool define electronic literature, such as authoring tool literature? When we define electronic literature we also say something about the authors and their imaginary work. Writing experimental digital works of literature involves various figures of an author, usually producing his work by his/her own. The author often combines multiple functions (academic, researcher, programmer and artist) that require the production of an electronic work, from critical posture to computer skills. In our paper, we will question this approach and, at the end, will be proposing a classification of postures of authors, based on the interviews we have had with a panel of sixteen authors, which can help define the boundaries of electronic literature.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Many publishers—pure players or “traditional” publishers—are now exploring the field of digital literatures by producing enhanced e-books aimed at young readers. Whether they are ePub3 e-books or apps for mobile devices, more and more of these digital works are created for commercial purposes and try to settle in the cultural industry market by adapting to the evolution of digital reading. This new generation of publishers is only now discovering the poetic potential of hypertext narratives and the endless possibilities that derive from the hybridisation of text, image, sound and video. Yet they find themselves facing many obstacles throughout the design process. Psychologically, digital reading is often associated with disorientation, cognitive overload and discontinued ways of reading (as opposed to the immersive reading experience known with printed novels) (Gervais 1999 ; Baccino 2011). Economically, few examples of profitable models exist. Technically, many constraints emerge, on the one hand from the open and standardised ePub format, on the other from the ideology imposed by the software and hardware industry. Bearing these elements in mind, publishers remain reluctant to offer hyperfictions to their readers and prefer investing in “traditional” models inherited from the print (i.e. models that still rely on pages, tables of content and linear reading) as well as fun, educational games, all of which tend to standardise new reading experiences. The first part of this paper will present the results of an empirical study carried out with a dozen of digital publishers of children’s literature (Tréhondart 2013). The study tries to define how publishers conceive hypertext and their expectations and fears towards interactivity: the fear of losing the reader, the belief that animations might be preposterous, etc. It also aims at defining the socio-technical and socio-economic aspects that hold back the development of “commercial” digital literature.
The second part of this presentation will present the creative research project The Tower of Jezik , a hyperfiction for young readers initiated during the 2014 Erasmus program in Digital Literatures held in Madrid. Originally designed for web browsers, this project is being remediated in ePub 3 by one of the author of the article, as part of the Textualités Augmentées research and creation workshop at Paris 8 University. Through the semio-pragmatic (Jeanneret, Souchier 2005) and semio-rhetoric (Saemmer 2013) approaches of the work (design models, hypertext rhetorics, features of reading) and the presentation of its script, we will try to suggest a hyperfiction model that steps away from the standardised models used in the digital publishing industry, while simultaneously exploring the semiotic, cultural and ideological constraints imposed by the ePub 3 format.

(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)

This paper puts forward haunted media as theory of mediation able to address contemporary networked writing practices communicated across and through multiple media, multiple iterations, multiple sites, and multiple times. Drawing upon Derrida’s invitation to consider the paradoxical state of the spectre, that of being/not-being, this paper considers the paradoxical state of long-distance communications networks which are both physical and digital, and which serve both as linguistic structures and modes of transmission and reception for computer-generated texts. These texts themselves are composed of source code and textual output. They are neither here nor there, but rather here and there, past and future, original and copy. The complex temporaility of this in-between state is further articulated through Galloway’s framing of the computer, not as an object, but rather as “a process or active threshold mediating between two states” (23). This theoretical framework for haunted media will be employed to discuss a web-based computer-generated text called Whisper Wire (Carpenter 2010). Whisper Wire 'haunts' the source-code of another computer-generated text, Nick Montfort's Taroko Gorge (2008), by replacing all of Montfort’s variables with new lists of words pertaining to sending and receiving strange sounds. Drawing upon Freud’s notion of the uncanny and heuristic research into Electronic Voice Phenomena, Whisper Wire will be framed as an unheimlich text - a code medium sending and receiving un-homed messages, verse fragments, strange sounds, disembodied voices, ghost whispers, distant wails and other intercepted, intuited or merely imagined attempts to communicate across vast distances through copper wires, telegraph cables, transistor radios and other haunted media.

(Source: Author's Abstract)