Conference panel or roundtable

This talk shares collaboration strategies and “funnest practices” for using netprov — networked improvisation, online roleplay literature — in the classroom. In sequences of “jump right in” creative games, students explore such topics as character development and character voice in a real-time laboratory of quick creative exchanges (accompanied by mutual encouragement and laughter). By building a bridge between students’ own social media writing practices and learning about historic literature, their creative strategies are expanded and critical connections between canonical texts and contemporary, everyday writing are made. What students may not realize is that netprov also can help break through their own creative blockages and freezes.

We will discuss the issue of the platformization of culture from a Latin-American perspective and decolonial thinking. Platforms strive on the automated algorithmic administration of access and reproduction of creative works (text, sound, video, o code-based). The common trait of current platform culture is the maximization of profit by means of garnering data and attention in order to capture more attention (and more data). In this context, is there any space for pursuing artistic digital activism and decolonial e-lit? The presentations in this panel will try to answer this question. The panel will be Spanish-English based in a sort of tentative of linguistic decolonization of e-lit field:

Agustín Berti: The Country and the Platform, or The Issue of NanofundiaThe issue of latifundia and the consolidation of vast productive land owned by a very reduced minority of wealthy elites has been one of the distinctive traits of lasting inequalities in Latin-American countries. This has seemingly nothing to do with digital culture, and yet this push forward the concept of nanofundia as a continuation of the reprimarization of production in the developing world and the digital extractivism of platform economy described by Pasquinelli and Joler. If there is any chance of reverting this situation in terms of decolonial geopolitics of electronic literature, the struggles will be about national and regional digital infraestructures and the local regulations over the globalized attention economies.

Anahí Re: It Will Be Difficult or Won’t Be. Challenges of Latin-American E-Lit.Platforms that nowadays enable large scale production and distribution of third generation e-lit (Flores), and even this kind of e-lit itself, promote a specific temporality. Doing so they guarantee the permanence of users in social media. What is at stake is clearly our “available attention” (Stiegler). Following Stiegler’s organological perspective, this presentation will focus on why “the difficult” (Tisselli/Torres) is, and should always be, an emancipatory alternative within Latin American poetic industries.

Claudia Kozak: Occupy the Platforms. Scope and Limitations of Decolonial Contemporary E-Lit.This presentation will analyze cases of Latin American e-lit that particularly engage to deconstruct and/or occupy contemporary platform culture. Being these cases either strictly experimental e-lit based on “the difficult” (Tisselli/ Torres), or digital activism in indigenous languages or even attempts of decolonial mixtures between experimentalism and third-generation platform e-lit, there is an opening for discussing how e-lit might temporarily occupy contemporary platforms without being (completely) absorbed by their agenda.

Leonardo Solaas: The Pull of The Banal: Digital Systems and Programmed FreedomInternet platforms are based on a perfect formula: they provide us with the endless satisfaction of choosing, while they get to know all about us and better anticipate our tastes and desires. They create for us dazzling worlds of perfect visibility, while their own logic recedes into the unreachable depths of an ever-blacker box. We will analyze how the space of possibilities generated by digital systems deploys a field of power under the guise of freedom, and how users can adopt three positions with regards to it: integration, rebellion, or critique. 

First proposed by Annie Abrahams and Deena Larsen at the 2019 ELO Conference in Cork, the ELO Salons initially comprised 10 online sessions on the second Tuesday of every month from February to November 2020. The sessions encompassed close readings and ensuing discussions, collaborative writing experiments, ontological examination of elit, and approaches to increasing elit accessibility and archivability. Each session has been led by a different attendee, recorded, and archived. Conceived by Deena Larsen as "almost like an extended family, which has a core group of people that participated and could function online”, the Salons have been a point of brightness in an extremely difficult year for many. 

For this proposed Virtual Engagement Event, we would like to look back on the fascinating discussions and discoveries of the last year of salons, and look forward to the next. Hosting panelists will include Salon creators Deena Larsen, Johannah Rodgers, and Caitlin Fisher, as well as various session leaders. A Salon organizer will moderate, posing questions to the hosts and attendees alike, and supplement the discussion with images and documents arising from the last year’s engagement. 

Most importantly, the current Salon participants will open the floor to future participants, seeking to build upon its first year in terms of activities and members. What more can we do with these Salons? Who else can we reach? What doors can we open, and how can we enrich our community? We have already engaged in projects increasing accessibility to elit work, exploring marginalized voices, revisiting the foundations of elit, and developing new avenues for creation and discovery of elit. We welcome discussions as to how we can evolve these interactions further, and invite all ELO members and conference attendants to join us. 

The ELO Salons have been a fun thing to look forward to, rather than another dreary required zoom meeting. We started a bit before the pandemic, promising a chance to examine issues and works, and even collaborative tools that lie at the heart of our mutual obsessions: electronic literature. This virtual engagement session will be an open working session to allow participants to reflect on the highlights of the ELO Salons and to help shape its future.

E-Lit is yet to be discovered by many scholars, educators and students at different levels of education but the impact it has had on the teaching and learning of those who have already come across this field is worth sharing in order to broaden not only the recognition of the field but the impact it might have in the teaching and learning of modern languages in our fast-evolving technological societies. In light of the benefits that a critical study of e-lit works presents, this panel addresses three scenarios where the teaching and learning of e-lit has proven a challenging yet productive path to broaden educators and students’ horizons alike. Whereas one presentation seeks to reflect on the training of educators at the elementary and high school level in literary and digital literacy, the other two presentations discuss scenarios where the teaching of e-lit in higher education has demonstrated how e-lit with its richness opens the way for interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning, approaches that emphasize the digital and the literary (Saum- Pascual, 2017).How do educators and students take advantage of the affordances of the different platforms either to teach or analyze e-lit? What does a critical interdisciplinary analysis of e-it works bring to a modern language course?

Spaces Speak is a panel presentation to raise awareness and enlist participation in (RE)VERB an Audio AR ‘zine for e-lit writers/artists. (RE)VERB is an audio augmented reality zine dedicated to spatially conceived electronic literature projects that explore the aesthetic possibilities of sonically delivered language engaging with the physical and corporeal experience of the environment. As a publication (RE)VERB was inspired by the Emerging Spaces for E-Lit Creations initiative to expand works that engage with popular social media spaces. 

Spaces Speak will consist of five presenters including editorial board members, the guest curator for issue one and artists who created work for the first issue. The artists and curators will discuss the challenges and rewards for producing site-specific work and the concepts driving their creative decisions. 

The panel will also feature an overview of the goals and artistic vision for the ‘zine. A discussion of the first issue, with a sneak-peak/advanced listen to excerpts from the forthcoming ‘zine to be released in June 2021. Other details discussed will include the release schedule for future issues, explanations for how listeners can access content, integration with social media platforms and how e-lit community members can participate in upcoming issues. 

In addition, Spaces Speak will highlight the partnerships with organizations the ‘zine will be pursuing to participate in its open calls and curation (Eyebeam, NEW INC, AFROTECTOPIA, the New Media Caucus, Rhizome, Harvestworks, and AudioAR.org) for E-Lit to reach new audiences in related fields like new media art, internet art, sound art and audio AR. 

The last segment of the panel discussion will be an open dialog with the ELO community to hear the directions they would like the ‘zine to pursue, what might be compelling thematic topics and locations, what other organizations should we include in our outreach and who they would suggest for international curators and artists for future issues as we continue to expand the global reach of the ‘zine. 

In relation to the conference themes, the (RE)VERB ‘zine can be seen as a case study of a third space, instead of a large corporate behemoth platform siloed from the content or individualistic artist vision, (RE)VERB is a partnership between publication and platform, working in dialog with the Gesso, an AR platform dedicated to spatially conceived projects, to create a sustainable E-Lit creative space. 

Taken as a whole, (RE)VERB enables electronic literature writers to engage with the sensorial experience of place, the granularity of the human voice and chance occurrences in the environment to provide an expansive opportunity for aesthetic experimentation and a vital co-mingling of creative communities. Spaces Speak provides an opportunity for an open exchange of ideas and an exploration for how all community members can be involved on any level of the project.

"Utterings" is a networked performance and research group whose members gather online and, while blindfolded, engage in utterings as communication. We want to create an on the fly “new” language, that forwards attention, trust and affects, above rationality. Put another way, we seek to develop a shared, experiential, supra-semiotic form of communication based on our ongoing performance history with each other. Michael Bakhtin's concept of the "utterance event" as a node of intersection between lived, present-tense communication and atemporal, semiotic meaning has informed our research. Over the past year, we have enacted eight performances online "at" festivals "in" Nantes (France), Birmingham (UK), Linz (Austria), and London (UK). Members of our group will collectively discuss what we have pragmatically learned and experienced in our performance research thus far. During the panel we will make a writing pad available, where the audience can collectively write their thoughts on utterings as a communication form. Our group will join and continue the discussion on the writing pad in the last part of the panel.

In this panel moderated by Lai-Tze Fan, we examine Twine at ten, exploring the ongoing influence of this hypertext platform on pedagogy, play, and literature: 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Twine (Moulthrop) - Creating digital stories and games involves many cultural registers. Just as important is the unmapped, semi-formal culture that underlies communal, open-source software. In the case of Twine, this can involve distinctions among versions of the core software, associated scripting languages, and "story formats." Learning this buried lore can reveal a technologized "artworld," in Howard Becker's term, and raises questions of hierarchy, value, and the nature of creative work in what is essentially a gift economy – questions that may ultimately apply to any form of art. 

Twine at 10: Reflections on Pandemic Storytelling (Salter) - Hypertext and games platform Twine recently marked its ten year anniversary, complete with a celebratory game jam. Twine’s affordances as a web-driven, open source tool drive its renewed significance as a platform for rapid response storytelling, enabling users to build playful, poignant responses to the many challenges of 2020 as exemplified by Mark Sample’s 10 Lost Boys; Cait Kirby’s September 7, 2020; and Adi Robbertson’s You Have to Ban the President. 

Twine, The EpistoLab (Laiola) - A frustrating element of teaching with Twine is the platform’s limitations with real-time collaboration across devices. Before COVID, when the classroom could operate as a lab, this limitation could be solved by students gathering around a single machine. But when shared machinery and gathering becomes impossible, Twine offers another model--“the epistolab.” The epistolab follows an epistolary model of collaborative work, dispersing colLABoration across times and spaces, and prompting a reevaluation of the roles that simultaneity and liveness play in collaboratory, pedagogical work. 

Twine as Literature, Not Literacy, in the Program(ming) Era (Milligan) - In the 21st century digital humanities, “digital literacy” has seemingly become the humanistic endgame for how we conceptualize, rationalize, and advertise the skillsets we impart; In e-lit, Twine as well is often presented to students in these terms. As the potential shortcomings of literacy as sole pedagogical outcome, however, become increasingly clearer (for instance -- as we reckon with its limitations to prevent insurgency-through-misinformation in the US), I propose another way to teach Twine and its promise of digital storytelling differently: through a model, based on the creative writing workshop, that highlights the literature and literary possibilities of Twine. 

The panel will conclude with an open discussion of Twine’s future as a platform

William H. Dickey, who died of complications from HIV in 1994, was born in 1928 and brought up in the Pacific Northwest. He published fifteen books of poetry, including Of the Festivities, which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1959, More Under Saturn, which was awarded the California Silver Medal for Poetry in 1963, and The Rainbow Grocery, which won the Juniper Prize in 1978. In the Dreaming: Selected Poems was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1994, and The Education of Desire appeared posthumously from Wesleyan University Press in 1996. 

While a professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University in the 1980s, he became interested in the potential of early personal computers to expand the boundaries of poetry. The California Association of Teachers of English cited him as "Friend of the Machine." 

Beginning in 1988, Dickey used the HyperCard software on his Macintosh SE to compose what would become fourteen "HyperPoems." Integrating images, icons, animation, and sound effects with typography and text, the HyperPoems address many themes critics acknowledge as central to Dickey's print oeuvre: history, mythology, memory, sexuality, the barrenness of modern life, and (over and under all of it), love and death. But they also represent an important technical progression of his poetics, one with clear roots in the ideas about poetry he had forged through decades of mindfulness about the craft. 

Three of the poems (those in Vol. 2) may fairly be called erotica, and represent unique documents of gay life in San Francisco at the height of a prior pandemic. They are certainly some of the very earliest (and most explicit) digital creative works by an LGBTQ+ author. 

None were ever published in his lifetime. Plans for a posthumous edition (prepared for publication on floppy disk with technical and editorial assistance from Deena Larsen) ultimately went unfulfilled. In the summer of 2020, however, the HyperCard Online emulator at the Internet Archive (in Dickey's own home city of San Francisco) finally offered us a platform. This panel discussion will mark the first public presentation of Dickey’s innovative HyperCard poetry to the electronic literature community. Panelists will include: 

Matthew Kirschenbaum (Chair), Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland. Kirschenbaum led the effort to recover the poems from older storage media and migrate them to the Internet Archive. 

Deena Larsen, the original technical editor for Dickey’s HyperPoetry. Larsen will walk us through one or two poems in detail, discussing both poetics and the nature of her posthumous editorial interventions. 

Andrew Ferguson, lead for the HyperCard Online emulator. Ferguson will discuss technical challenges involved in migrating thirty-year-old HyperCard stacks to a browser-based environment. 

Susan Tracz, Professor Emerita and the California State University Fresno and Dickey’s literary executor—and long-time friend of the poet. Tracz will fill in the human story behind the poetry and the computers. 

References: 

https://archive.org/details/william_dickey_hyperpoems_volume_1https://a… 

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.