workshop

Memories of «Cuéntanos un secreto» (Tell me a secret)
 understanding textualities in the Network and programmable media. Paper focuses on the electronic exploration collection. 

At first glance, secrets are experiences that are kept hidden from the outside world. They are hidden because of particular social circumstances. Those circumstances relate to the personal and social ethics in its historical context. 

For anthropologists and psychologists, secrets are archetypical, symbolic, psychological and/or behavioral patterns that constantly are repeated in human life and history. They provide explanatory frames, such as lack of eternal love, the punishment of the father, betrayal of the family, taboos, desire, etc. Secrets are a model of popular storytelling in society ́s everyday life. Tell me a secret is a secret-sharing project between communities. The secrets are graphically depicted by participants during visual communication workshops. At the end of every workshop participants are invited to anonymously share their own secrets in order to feed the project flow. Tell me a secret is an ongoing growing archive as well. The objective of the archive is to preserve, research and distribute the popular storytelling. The project considers as secrets both, the written stories and their graphical depiction.

Tell me a secret does not exist without the workshop. Although there are some samples where secrets have been depicted or shared outside the workshop, those are special exceptions. The base of the secret sharing project starts in intimacy. It is almost impossible to share a secret without trust in the other. The workshop is a link where participants connect and trust in the project, therefore in other community. 

During this presentation, I would like to focus on those objects regarding the electronic textualities explorations. These explorations have been followed by theoretical explanations using Katherine Hayley’s eventualize texts theory, Augusto de Campo’s concrete poetry manifesto and Ulises Carrion theory «The new art of making books» All of them bastions of these explorations.

Mixed-media artists Joellyn Rock and Alison Aune offer a hands-on visual art workshop on collage, paper-cutting, silhouettes and digital compositing. What does this have to do with electronic literature you ask? Well... In Rock and Aune's multimedia installation, Fish Net Stockings, which will be exhibited at the Hybridity Exhibition at ELO 2015, the little mermaid story unfolds with multivalent versions echoing folk art patterns and digital iterations. Bifurcating imagery, like that made by folding and cutting, plays a role in the aesthetics of the work. Hans Christian Andersen was known for his live scissor writing. His version of scherenschnitte was an improvised performance art with paper cut imagery, integrating the haptic visual experience into his storytelling. Andersen’s cut paper collages anticipate the collage art of dadaism and surrealism, and some e-lit experiments can trace their roots back to these very methods of assemblage. Join us for a playful workshop generating mixed-media collages, paper cuts, silhouettes, and testing their use in digital compositing for video projection. Investigate how to combine imagery in layers in Photoshop and video in final cut for rich digital composites and short animations.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Learn a cutting-edge method of performative creative writing based on human-computer interaction.

You will learn to “write with your voices” (as opposed to typing on a keyboard) by using speech recognition software. We will take turns saying impromptu lines out loud into a microphone. The computer will recognize the lines with varying accuracy and turn the speech into text on the computer screen. We will develop a set of improvisational tools to enhance dramatic writing by utilizing the computer’s errors (misrecognitions) in collaboration with other participants. You will be confronted with situations requiring quick decision-making, because the computer does not reproduce your speech with hundred-percent accuracy – a fact that will challenge you to deal with technological dysfunction in the here-and-now of a performative writing situation. Also, you will be challenged to listen and respond to your human writing partners and their texts. Through guided practice, you will learn to take the writing process in unexpected directions, further into an improvisational realm.

While practicing this collaborative, performative live writing method with human and computer partners, we will work toward creating short fictional scenes. The scenes will be based on dramatic situations that we will come up with together through rehearsals and discussion. In addition to this practical work, we will spend time discussing readings of relevant texts (live writing, new technology, human-computer interfaces and drama).

At the end of the workshop, we will present a live, performative writing event, in which you will have the opportunity to perform those aspects of the writing method that you find most compelling. The showing will be planned and performed collaboratively. At the end of this workshop, you will have the tools to continue exploring the relationship between text, digital media, and performance in your own work.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

This half-day workshop will be focused on the preservation and archiving of Electronic Literature Organization events and conferences. Scott Rettberg has been asked by the ELO board to establish a standing committee of ELO members that will be focused on documenting and archiving current and past ELO events. This workshop will be focused both on the future scope and projects of that committee and on the hands-on documentation of ELO conferences in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. We will consider questions including:

What are the best practices related to archiving for ELO conference organizers?
Should relationships be established with one or more libraries or archives to preserve data and ephemera from ELO conferences?
How should we best go about gathering ELO archives materials and preserving them?
How can we archive events using the platform of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base?

The session will include a discussion of these issues followed by hands-on work in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Participants will learn how to document their presentations, papers, creative works, and events in order to preserve them and make them available to other international researchers.

(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)

This workshop invites participants to consider the possibilities for their work of emerging forms of digital scholarship. Participants will consider how digital platforms permit them to create media-rich and interactive publications that bring scholarly analysis and visual media together in lively and engaging ways. At the heart of the workshop is a hands-on introduction to the digital authoring platform, Scalar (http://scalar.usc.edu), a project funded by the Mellon Foundation as part of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)