transformation

This presentation, "Axolotls and Perfume Bottles", was delivered by Strickland and Luesebrink as part of the ELO 2017 panel, "Forms of Translation: Experimental Texts Rewritten As Migrations To Digital Media". Its ELMCIP record includes a PowerPoint file with extensive embedded movies, and the script for the presentation, both exactly as delivered.

The first portion discusses Regina Celia Pinto's work Viewing Axolotls, her transformation of Julio Cortazar's 1952 story "Axolotl", which she considers together with Gustavo Bernardo's book on Vilem Flusser.

The second portion discusses the transformations and migrations of the authors' work To Be Here As Stone Is from print to multiple digital incarnations. The perfume bottle referenced is associated with this poem in the print version of Strickland's True North.

As the script says, "If Viewing Axolotls outlines a path to the interior humid space of aquarium tank or nightmare brain--always crossing over into confined space--To Be Here As Stone Is traces a path that breaks out from the interior of a perfume bottle to a cosmic location."

[Archivist's note: the content presented at the conference was in PPTM (macro-enabled MS PowerPoint file) and DOC (MS Word) formats. To prevent the spread of malicious macros, neither of these formats may be uploaded to ELMCIP. Following the "translation" theme of this panel, I have therefore saved the PPTM as a PPT file, and the DOC as PDF, before uploading the attachments. I have checked that both still read/play as they were presented; if you prefer, you may download and re-convert them. As the slide presentation (56 MB) contains multiple video segments demonstrating the two works, please allow sufficient time for all elements to fully load. On certain slides the presence of video segments is indicated by a change to the cursor (and mentioned in the script).]

"Cloud Computing" is a rather foggy notion, according to which the World Wide Web will be increasingly seen as a platform where not only information, but also different kinds of services and applications will become immediately available, as if coming out of an undifferentiated, nebular space. People will rely less on the software installed on their personal computers, and more on whatever is usable online.

New technologies-- whether used for artistic or scientific ends--require new shapes to speak their attributes. Feminist writers too have long sought a narrative shape that can exist both inside and outside of patriarchal systems. Where like-minded theorists have tried to define a gender-specific dimension for art, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics demonstrates that feminist artists have already built and are happily inhabiting this new technological room of their own. This dissertation is an exploration of the architectural shapes of mnemonic systems in women's narratives in the new media (focusing on Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, M.D. Coverley's Califia and Diana Reed Slattery's Glide and The Maze Game as exemplary models). Memory is key here, for, what gets stored or remembered has always been the domain of official histories, of the conqueror speaking his dominant cultural paradigm and body. I explore at length three spatial architectures of the new media: the matrix, the unfold and the knot.

Within quantum mechanics, the science of the body in motion, the intricacies of the interiorities of mnemonic time--no longer an arrow--are being realized in the (traditionally) feminized shape of the body of the matrix. This is the real time realm of cyberspace where the multiple trajectories of the virtual engender a new kind of looking: disorientation as an alternative to linear perspective. Where women have usually been objects to be looked at, hypermedia systems replace the gaze with the empowered look of the embodied browser in motion in archival space. Always in flux, the shape of time s transformation is a Möbius strip unfolding time into the dynamic space of the postmodern text, into the unfold. As quantum interference, the unfold is a gesture that is a sensory interval. In this in-between space, the transformance of the nomadic browser takes place; she performs the embodied knowledge acquired in her navigation of the world of the text. Quantum space in hypertexts is shaped as an irreducible knot, an entangled equation both in and out of space-time, spanning all dimensions as a node in a mnemonic system. Wanderlust is the engine driving the browser on her quest through the intricately knotted interplay of time and space in these electronic ecosystems. What the browser finds there is rapture--an emergent state of embodied transformation in the experiential realm. What she acquires is not mastery, but agency, and an aesthetic interval of her own.

Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Electronic Narrative & the Limits of Memory

Chapter 1. The Archive: Memory, Writing, Feminisms i. Mnemotechnics and Quantum Feminisms ii. The Arts of Memory: What Came Before iii. Writing As a Mnemonic Technology iv. Women s Writing and Feminisms

Chapter 2. The Matrix: Information Overload i. Temporal Perspectives on Information Culture ii. Feminist Dis/Orientations iii. Space-Time Architectures: The Aesthetics of Memory iv. Archival Structures and Fractal Subjectivities

Chapter 3. The Unfold: Immersion i. Unfoldings: Bodies of Memory ii. Transformance: The Body as Interface iii. Hierophanies and Choric Space

Chapter 4. The Knot: Disorientation i. Incrementals: Where Visual Time Meets Virtual Space ii. Knots in the Cosmos iii. The Tangled Trajectories of Nomadic Logic iv. Wanderlust

Chapter Five: Conclusion(s)

(Source: LABS: Leonardo ABstracts Service)