Conference

This conference will focus on the increasing use of the network as a space and medium for collaborative interdisciplinary art practices including electronic literature and other network based art forms. Researchers will present papers exploring new network-based creative practices that involve the cooperation of small to large-scale groups of writers, artists, performers, and programmers to create online projects that defy simple generic definitions and disciplinary boundaries. Topics might include online collective narratives, durational performances, evolving networked publication models, creative commons and open source art, remixes, and mashups. The seminar will be organized by the LLE Digital Culture group and will invite contributions from about 20 international researchers and artists. In addition to the scholarly seminar Nov. 9th and 10th at the University of Bergen, two evening programs will take place Nov. 8th and 9th at Landmark Café at Bergen Kunsthall, to showcase innovative work and will be open to the public.

(Source: Conference website.)

Digital Arts and Culture 98 was an international conference which aimed to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of theoretical and artistic developments in digital arts, media and cultures. Through paper presentations and ample space between sessions, as well as an informal social program, the conferenced aimed to create a good atmosphere for strengthening the links between the many different players and subfields within the rapidly expanding field of digital culture and aesthetic studies.

Digital Arts and Culture  was the first iteration of what has become an annual conference, commonly referred to as DAC.

The first conference was organised by Espen Aarseth at the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen. Humanistic Informatics is now the program for Digital Culture.

Conference Committee:Espen Aarseth, University of Bergen (Chair)Ingela Josefsson, Sødertørn CollegeTerje Rasmussen, University of OsloBjørn Sørenssen, Norwegian Technological UniversityHilde Corneliussen, University of BergenJan Rune Holmevik, University of BergenTorill Mortensen, Volda College

(Source: Conference website)

The 4th International Conference and Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, dedicated to Robert Coover.

two overarching themes :

Archive

We are concerned with archive - although not primarily, in the context of this particular gathering, with preservation. (Preservation has been the focus of ELO attention in other contexts and fora.) Here and now we ask: what are the electronic literary, digital poetic works that are worth putting into any institutional archive, and why? What archives exist and how do we use them? What has been done to build the new archive and where is it?

We will also be asking our host institution to address these questions. Brown University's Literary Arts Program offers the only 'terminal' - teaching-qualified - degree in Electronic Literature, a creative writing MFA. Where is its current archive and where will it be in five or ten years time? Thanks to Robert Coover, Andries van Dam, George Landow, momentarily Ted Nelson, and others, Brown was the pioneering institution at the center of a hypertextual, metafictional perfect storm. Where is the archive? Brown's Library is now building an innovative, flexible Digital Repository at the university level. We will be asking the institution to rediscover our archive in this repository and aim to provide - by the time of our gathering - accessible openings into what will be a rich resource for both scholarship and poesis: for writing and its futures.

Innovate

We have not renounced the obligation to produce literary innovation that is specific to our media. Why do we innovate? Why must we innovate? Do we, indeed, innovate? What has happened to those forms in our media that were, once - and not long ago - new? Was it the requirement to innovate that caused us to disregard these forms and stifle their brief lives? Are we right to disregard them thus? If so, what will be the ultimate effect of innovation? Other than to ensure: the ever-swifter onslaught of breaking media, reducing today's novelties to this evening's broken media? The mutually assured - by readers and writers - obsolescence of digital literary practices?

It seems clear, in today's media culture, that we must be, we are, driven to innovate. How can we inflect this drive and make it critically, aesthetically productive? Make it generative of significant culture practice - of writing - that will, even if paradoxically, persist and continue to demand our attention and affection.

one celebration :

Festschrift Coover

Robert Coover has been a major champion of literature in new media since the typewriter began to pass. He has done more than any other significant literary figure to promote the field, all but single-handedly adding a 'genre' to 'creative writing' in the world of institutionally-recognized and professed literary arts. It's time to address, honor, and celebrate Coover's contribution and its potential and potentially problematic legacy.

(Source: ELO_AI website)

The symposiums to the poetics of digital texts orient themselves provisionally on the following question: They would like to explore and discuss the specific performances and functions of a literature, which is conceptualized or conceived particularly for digital media. As a literature form, those in the field of electronics between innovation (the changed conditions of digital and intertwined writing as well as multimediality) and tradition (resorting to the tradition of the literary avant-gardes) operate, ask themselves even for scientific work the question about the classification and handling of this literature in a media-theory and literature-theory perspective.