Exhibition

Electronic literature is an ever-changing field which makes clear the intersections between multiple art forms, semiotic languages and experiences with the medium. This literary form thrives on dialogues between digital art, cinema, performance or games. The exhibition “Shapeshifting texts” aims to present a selection of works that incorporate these possibilities of interconnection.
Between the 3rd and the 5th of November, we will present the collaborative work done by institutions and archives focused on the preservation of electronic and experimental literature and, simultaneously, demonstrate that electronic literature is part of an ever-evolving process which might have been catalysed by the first experiences with language and surfaces of inscription. At Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen, from the 3rd to the 5th of November 2016, visitors will find works that shapeshift at different levels, often depending on assemblage and recalibration to be experienced.
This exhibition is linked with the International Conference on Digital Media and Textuality and with an Evening of Performances.

(Source: https://digmediatextuality.wordpress.com/events/)

This event was introduced in 18 of February at The Stedman Art Gallery at Rutgers University in Camden. This new ELC - third volume features 114 works from 26 countries in 13 languages. The latest collection, drawn from over 500 submitted and solicited works, represents a wide range of forms and styles, including poem generators, bots, interactive fiction, mobile apps, and more.

On October 4–6, 2013, Eyebeam hosted the first event of its kind, PRISM Breakup, a series of art and technology events dedicated to exploring and providing forms of protection from surveillance. This event came about in part from Eyebeam’s mission to support the work of artists who critically expose technologies and examine their relationship to society, as well as offering continued support to its alumni following their residencies. The gathering brought together a wide spectrum of artists, hackers, academics, activists, security analysts and journalists for a long weekend of meaningful conversation, hands-on workshops, and an art exhibition that was open October 4–12. (Source: http://prismbreakup.org/)

Piksel is an annual event for artists and developers working with free and open source software, hardware and art. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free and open source software.

The development, and therefore use, of digital technology today is mainly controlled by multinational corporations. Despite the prospects of technology expanding the means of artistic expression, the commercial demands of the software industries severely limit them instead. Piksel is focusing on the open source movement as a strategy for regaining artistic control of the technology, but also a means to bring attention to the close connections between art, politics, technology and economy.

The first Piksel event was arranged in november 2003, and gathered around 30 artists/developers from all parts of the world. It consisted of artistic/technical presentations, coding workshops and live performances. All activities were documented in a daily blog: http://www.piksel.no/log.html

One of the results of the event was the initiation of the Piksel Technologies for ‘interoperability between various free software applications dealing with video manipulation techniques’ – piksel.org

Piksel is a member of the Pixelache network of electronic art festivals – network.pixelache.ac – and one of the nodes in the Production Network for Electronic Art in Norway – PNEK

(source: http://14.piksel.no/info/piksel)

“This Is Not a Utopia” is a collection of Russian electronic literary work from early 2000s through 2015. The show is based on the Russian Electronic Literature research collection in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/research-collection/russian-electronic-literature-col…) prepared in 2013 by Natalia Fedorova. The collection problematized a number of gaps in the development of Russian e-lit and the exhibit shows also the work that has been created since the gap was acknowledged.
Utopia is a society constrained with an aim of achieving collective happiness. The antiutopia of the post-soviet space alongside with many of the disillusionments was marked by the introduction of Internet and personal computing in the mid-90s. Teneta literary contest made the first “cyberature” works visible and Alexroma was one of the active participants of the cyberature community, represented by his work Falling Angels. Net art such as asciiticism by Ivan Khimin, inspired by Alexey Shulgin’s work, a legendary net artist of the 90s, was also important in Russian digital art. In the 2000s videopoetry captured the imagination of the poets in search of new tools of expression and remediation and Snow Queen by Machine Libertine add their recognizable AI touch to this tendency. Using different tools, Polarities by Elena Demidova remediates classical Russian Silver Age poetry to reveal atomic particles of a poetic language.
Experimental literature has a century-old tradition of futurist publishing and performance activity, which shifted to the underground in the Soviet era, and merged back on the surface in the 90s with the collapse of all the social realism constraints. Characters of the St. Petersburg underground scene of the late 80s are revived in Kuryokhin: Second Life, an interactive fiction debut by Michael Kurtov. 1/2/3 by Anna Tolkacheva, where the title is borrowed from Vsevolod Nekrasov, adds his minimalist lines of poetry to the Mozhaisky region of Moscow’s walls and fences.
The new impetus to electronic poetry was given by the Laboratory of Mediapoetry established by Elena Demidova in 2013 in Moscow and followed by Mediapoetry Machines art residency held in Skolkovo gallery lab in 2015. The exhibit features three of the works by Anna Tolkacheva, Elena Demidova and Irina Ivannikova that resulted from this project.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

The Interventions exhibition features works that engage with contemporary cultural discourse and political reality, challenging audiences to consider digital artifacts and practices that reflect and intervene in matters of the environment, social justice, and our relation to the habitus. The program also includes a presentation of works originally made for 3D CAVEs adapted for the Oculus Rift, and in Cinemateket a performance of a “code opera” and screenings of a film about the field of electronic literature.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

The Hybridity and Synaesthesia exhibition at Lydgalleriet features works that push at the edges of literature and other art forms. These works appeal to other aspects of the sensorium than those we typically associate with reading, for example involving haptic sensation, touch-based interactivity, innovative audio elements, interactive
images, or locative technologies.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

An exhibition exploring the details (and tangential experiments) hidden in elemental residues, using water and flow as a principal starting position to connect the audience to both the work and to the outside port lands.

Three artists, Fleeta Chew Siegel, Maria Mencia & Fiona Curran will touch on/swim in/float by /on ideas informed by (and in response to) elemental substances and forms, using e-poetry, data visualization, film, sonics, calligrams, and photography to showcase a complex series of composite art works.

Sigmund Freud understood the unconscious as a place of libidinal repression. Art in turn found inspiration in psychoanalysis—surrealism took as its manifesto Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1913), and later abstract expressionism explored the irrational desires of the Freudian unconscious. With new technologies of the 21st century, science exposed a deeper mental reality and proved that human behavior is the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and unconscious levels. Even with technologies today that allow for an empirical observation of the mind, reality itself is still debated. As in gestalt theory, the brain completes external imagery the eye cannot produce—all done at an unconscious level. If a central function of the unconscious is to fill in the blanks in order to construct a useful picture of reality, how does this affect our understanding of the world? “The New Unconscious” explores how human behavior is dually dictated by the conscious and unconscious mind.

(source: http://www.sciartcenter.org/events.html)

The p2p exhibition brings to the public different digital literary works produced by Polish and Portuguese authors in the past four decades. Polish and Portuguese literary, artistic, social, political, and even religious contexts are quite similar, even if geographically distant, and still quit divergent. It has been a fascinating surprise to find evidence of several common threads in works of experimental and generative literature from Poland and Portugal, including Spectrum-based animated poetry/Demoscene, and ActionScript-based digital poetry and fiction.
The exhibition will therefore be constructed around three nuclei: experimentalism, activism and animation. For this purpose, the p2p exhibition proposes to present, face-to-face, works by authors such as Pedro Barbosa, Silvestre Pestana, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Rui Torres, André Sier, Manuel Portela, Luís Lucas Pereira, Józef Żuk Piwkowski, Marek Pampuch, Michał Rudolf, Kaz, Piotr Puldzian Płucienniczak, Leszek Onak and Andrzej Głowacki.

A part of the ELO 2015 exhibition “Decentering: Global Electronic Literature” at 3,14 gallery in Bergen, Norway (August 4-23, 2015).

(Source: Álvaro Seiça and Piotr Marecki)