Video essay / documentary

This is a talk about police. The text is read by Alex from A dictionary of the revolution, a multi-media project that attempted to document the evolving language of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

The project's digital publication contains 125 texts, woven from the voices of hundreds of people who were asked to define words used frequently in conversations in public from 2011-2014. Material for the dictionary was collected in Egypt from March to August 2014.

Nearly 200 participants reacted to vocabulary cards containing 160 terms, talking about what the words meant to them, who they heard using them, and how their meanings had changed since the revolution. The text of the dictionary is woven from transcription of this speech.

The project's digital publication is accessible in Arabic and English translation at http://qamosalthawra.com. The website also gives access to an archive of edited sound clips, images, and transcriptions.

A dictionary of the revolution won the 2019 Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature, the 2018 New Media Writing Prize, and the 2017 Artraker Award for Changing the Narrative.

Source: ELO 2020

In electronic literature, the practice of writing under constraint is widely accepted as a creative catalyst; through self-imposed textual restraints, we find new meanings and forms. At the same time, some of us are often reading and writing under constraint due to various disabilities. Yes, we can describe electronic literature as “formally inventive” in its wide use of multimedial writing, but no text or its reception is purely formal because it is always material, situational, and embodied as well.

Bringing up accessibility of these texts generally leads to a knee-jerk reaction: "I don’t want to be limited", "it would stifle my creative freedom", or, god forbid, "why does everything have to be so politically correct?" What if we move past this initial resistance not toward denial, rejection, or a resigned compliance, but with the same creative energy that we allow other forms of writing under constraint?

This essay rewrites Joe Tabbi’s essay “Electronic Literature as World Literature, or, the Universality of Writing under Constraint” through the lens of disability. I explore the concept of digital accessibility by speculating upon what accessible electronic literature can be.

(Conference abstract)

Related to the artist's works 'Sea of Men' (2015) and 'Big Sausage Pizza I & II' (2012)

How did it become normal to share from our personal lives on the public internet? This documentary overshare: the links.net story looks at the limits of one person's desire for online attention. 

Hello, my name is Justin Hall and I've been sharing my personal life in explicit detail online for over twenty years. Starting in 1994, my personal web site Justin's Links from the Underground has documented family secrets, romantic relationships, and my experiments with sex and drugs.

overshare: the links.net story is a documentary about fumbling to foster intimacy between strangers online. Through interviews, analysis and graphic animations, I share my motivations, my joys and my sorrows from pioneering personal sharing for the 21st century. In 2004 the New York Times referred to me as "perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging." I hope this documentary reveals that I was a privileged white male with access to technology who worked to invite as many people as possible to join him in co-creating an internet where we have a chance to honestly share of our humanity.

Find the whole video free and even pay for it at http://overshare.links.net/

This film is released under a Creative Commons license.

(Source: Author)

A One Hour Video-Essay by Talan Memmott featuring interviews with 17 scholars and practitioners of electronic literature.

Futures and Foci, Platforms and Politics, The Human Problem, Senses and Screens, Reading and Writing.

Topics include:

does electronic literature have a future?is google the end of of the world?what is in-between text and image?where is the author and what is a scholar?can there be a national e-literature?what is the attraction of touch technologies?what is the place of digital poetics in global politics?is it possible to conceal intent?

Featuring: Mark Amerika, Simon Biggs, Serge Bouchardon, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Cris Cheek, Maria Engberg, Jerome Fletcher, Maria Mencia, Nick Montfort, Jörg Piringer, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, Christine Wilks, Jaka Železnikar

A trip report from E-Poetry 2007, featuring short video clips of performances shot on a cell phone.