Conference

This paper discusses a semester-long classroom project in which senior seminar students were required to take Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14 and convert it into various media objects and texts. The assignments made use of Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” (“a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation”), assigning tasks based on the core concepts of “encoding” and “algorithm.” Some objects were electronic (music, twitter feeds) while the majority were physical objects, but they all made use of a procedural rhetoric sketched out by the original shape of the sonnet itself and the long tradition of scanning poems. In doing so, the objects produced force us to ask: where, exactly, do we “hold the light”? Is it e-lit if there’s no “e”?

(Source Abstract Author)

Participants will be researchers having attained international recognition for their work in two fundamental lines of literary and cultural theory that we would like to pull together here, just as this is reflected in the presentation of the call for papers (see the attached file): 1. literary globalization phenomena and 2. cyberculture. Thus, we hope to generate a fruitful debate that might contribute to providing answers.

This international and transdisciplinary project aims at exploring hybrid objects: pop-up books, artists books, sculpture-books or animated books and new digital books, in the shape of e-books and applications that, because they belong to both litterature and graphic culture, actually avoid preexisting categories.

The idea is to work with the material to explore textual architextures as well as tactile possibilities, even kinetic ones. Book-bjects will be considered in their historical dimension — by retracing existing filiations between mechanical books and digital books — but also analyzed from the angle of materiality. We will try to understand the way these books, digital or not, stretch the limits or paper and operate on new types of surfaces to create innovative, playful, tactile and esthetic devices.

Ce projet international et transdisciplinaire envisage d’explorer la gamme d’objets hybrides que sont les livres pop-up, les livres d’artistes, les livres-sculptures ou encore les livres animés jusqu’aux nouveaux livres numériques, sous forme d’e-books et d’applications qui, par leur appartenance à la fois au domaine littéraire et à la culture graphique, échappent, de fait, aux catégories préexistantes.

Le temps du numérique est-il un présent continu sans mémoire ou presque, le sujet étant capté et contraint par l’affichage à l’écran ? Ou bien, si l’on creuse plus avant la question du rapport entre le sujet et le support, peut-on postuler qu’un tel présent sans mémoire serait l’avers d’une construction temporelle plus complexe, une forme de « multinaéité » où les temporalités propres à l’inscription et au déchiffrement du sens par le sujet se télescopent et se superposent avec celles d’autres utilisateurs et des supports connectés ? Quels en sont les effets sur l’identité narrative du sujet ? Si le numérique permet un changement de paradigme temporel, déployant différentes dimensions à partir de la ligne temporelle comme un origami, alors quels en sont les effets sur les modes de représentation littéraires et artistiques ?

(Source: Programme's Abstract)

The IEEE 2014 VIS Conference is held in Paris, France.