Conference

Freeplay is Australia’s longest-running and largest independent games festival, located in Melbourne, Australia. Freeplay draws Australia’s independent games community together at its conference, public events program, arcade, and awards. The festival joins players, makers, critics, artists, designers, coders, academics, students, and families for a critical celebration of the artistry of games and digital culture.

Freeplay continues to champion creative and artistic exploration and experimentation in games, highlighting and uncovering grassroots talent in Melbourne and Australia, as videogames continue to grow and gain cultural significance and legitimacy.

The theme for ELO2019 #ELOcork is “peripheries”: delegates are invited to explore the edges of literary and digital culture, including emerging traditions, indeterminate structures and processes, fringe communities of praxis, effaced forms and genres, marginalised bodies, and perceptual failings.

(source: homepage ELO2019 website)

This spring, Brown CS will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the official founding of the department. But as we know, CS started as an informal track within Applied Math more than a decade before that. One of the earliest themes of the pre-department days was “Hypertext.” When the first project started back in 1967, hypertext –non-sequential writing and linked documents – was a concept known by probably fewer than 100 people in the world. Fast-forward 52 years, and 4.4 billion people -- more than half of the Earth's population -- uses hypertext on a regular basis. Brown CS and Brown in general had a significant impact on the hypertext revolution. Recently, at the request of the Computer History Museum, two “ancient” Brown systems have been resurrected and are running again. FRESS, started five decades ago, is running on an emulated IBM/370 mainframe with an emulated Imlac graphics terminal replacement. IRIS Intermedia, started three decades ago and presumed lost, was discovered on an old disk drive; it has been restored and is running on actual 30-year-old Macintosh hardware. The revival of both of these led to the idea of having a symposium around Commencement time, to show these two systems plus as many additional Brown hypertext systems from the past half-century as possible and to discuss the impact they have had on the pervasiveness of hypertext in the world today. The Symposium will feature live demos of more than half-a-dozen systems ranging from 1967 to the present, as well as content from courses taught with these systems.

The research project REP+REC+digit – Representations and Reconfigurations of the Digital in Swe­dish Literature and Art 1950–2010 – and Linköping University, Sweden, invite scholars in media archaeology, digital culture, artistic practice, media history, electronic texts, comparative literature and adjacent fields to the conference THINKING THROUGH THE DIGITAL IN LITERATURE – REPRESENTATIONS+POETICS+SITES+PUBLICATIONS, to be held at Linköping University, Sweden, 29 November to 1 December, 2017.

REP+REC+DIGIT explores different aspects of how digital technology and digital culture have influenced aesthetic and literary expressions since 1950, including digital artifacts, the digi­tization as motif, post-digital aesthetics and digital epistemology.

The topics of this event are derived from the questions that have been asked and explored throughout the project. The conference subtitle suggests four aspects of these explorations: The actual representation in art and literature; Aesthetic forms and critical reflec­tions; The material sites for writing and reading texts; and New interfaces for dissemination.

(Blog description)