Seminar

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glazier@buffalo.edu
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SUNY Buffalo
Buffalo, NY
United States

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I-2012 presents an engaging range of topics in and out of digital media and language, film, interactive art, and performance in an innovative format typified by human communication, generous presentation times, extended segments for response by peer scholars, and open and creative thinking as a group. The idea here is for presenters to propose their own field of references — in an effort to enlighten themselves and to help others locate new resources for themselves — in open conversations exploring connections. In terms of content, though numerous other venues exist for considerations of processor determined digital arts (the unreadable, machinic cum machinic, special effects, and data-dominant informatic), I-2012 focuses on the LANGUAGE edge of innovative emergent media practice, i.e, as we speak, read, and intimate, what is happening between the cracks in processing? Such attention is given as simply ONE relevant locus in the larger conversation and it is given cognizant that practice does not fall into distinguishable camps, but exist as contours within a larger media fabric. It asks: What are words when we “mean” through them? What language layers cascade in malleable forms? What our antecedents and contemporaries, without rigid adherence to genre, format, or theme? What are literary production, reading, and philosophy in reconfigured media landscapes? What is performance when language performs? Recognizing larger connections to poeisis as artistic practice, what possibilities are there for extending the reach, impact, and reception of digital media? (Of course, if asked, each Fellow and Invited Speaker would have a different proposal as to the topic of this event. Nothing could be better!) In any event, we hope to be able to share a middle way in the often disparate field of approaches to digital media practice.

(Source: Event site)

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Associated with another event
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Providence,
United States

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The site of this year’s ACLA conference is also home to the Center for Computation and Visualization that enables vibrant research and pedagogy within so-called virtual reality environments, the best-know instance of which is known by the recursive acronym “CAVE” (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment).  In the Brown University Center students may take a ‘Cave Writing’ course and explore what it means to compose poetry or fiction with language in 3D, art students can use Cave Painting to produce pictures that float in space, and Geologists travel to Mars or Antarctica for fieldwork.

This seminar will bring into dialogue those who are working with actual-existing virtual reality and those who are studying its fictional representations.  We will accept papers on a wide range of topics related to virtual reality, cyberspace, and cyberpunk.  Of particular interest are those papers treating emerging aesthetic or political issues: What is the phenomenology of reading and writing in virtual reality?  Is language in the media of virtual reality or is it itself the media?  What are the consequences of virtual reality for the future of education?  Will virtual reality be the ultimate form of alienation or will it reduce alienation, connecting cultural workers in new ways?  How has virtual reality been used to depict issues of race, gender, class, and migration?  Might virtual reality be a future site of cultural exchange and translation?

Our aim is to explore the relationship between existing virtual reality technology and its extrapolation into the future by literature and film.

Source: Seminar Website

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As part of the ELMCIP research project, and under the aegis of University College Falmouth, participants in a seminar at Arnolfini, Bristol will investigate the relationship between e-literature/digital text and performance. Members of the ELMCIP project, international speakers and practitioners will discuss the function and understanding of performativity and its relationship to digital literature through a series of papers, presentations and practical engagements.

Although the field of e-literature is rife with references to performance, they have tended to remain relatively untheorised. In the main, analysis or investigation of performance is restricted to the relationship between the text output (on the interface or projected into a performance space) and the live body responding performatively to that text, or else generating text through performance. There has been little attempt to fold digital text performance into the wider context of the ‘turn to performance’ among the humanities in recent decades. It is against this background of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, the ethnography of ritual, performance of self and gender, performance writing, etc, that the conference will take place.

While continuing the investigation of live performance, we will be seeking to broaden the scope to include; interactivity, the performative gesture of the hand and fingers (digital text) on the interface, the performativity of language itself on the screen, social performance or how digital texts ‘perform’ us, the performance of codes and scripting, and the performance of the machine itself, i.e., what does an engineer mean when s/he talks about performance? In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital environment (dispositif) and, in order to give a fuller account of this complex of performative modes, we will also be investigating how they interact and collaborate with each other.

Conference proceedings, along with artist’s pages, will be published in a dedicated issue of the journal Performance Research (2013).

A schedule of the event is available for download as a pdf.

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This talk is not a report on a particular project; it is an attempt to reflect on the state of our mediascape today, which is made up of both traditional media (such as film, television, and music) and new digital forms that we here in the GVU are helping to create. Today's media can be characterized by a productive tension between catharsis and flow. For example, popular film aims to provoke catharsis, an emotional release through identification with a main character, while videogames and some contemporary music aim through repetition to induce in their audience a state of engagement that the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has famously named “flow.”  We can think of flow and catharsis as individual, psychological reactions to our media, but they also define different strategies for media producers and designers. These two modes compete and cooperate in a variety of entertainment forms and industries, and their interaction defines our media culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 

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This seminar is one of the ELMCIP events and is organised by Yra van Dijk at the University of Amsterdam.

In recent years, both criticism and practice of digital literature have created a theoretical basis for the approach of the new artform. Ideas have been brought forward on the historical, contextual and institutional embedding of digital literature. Critics have proposed various ways to analyze the hybrid that digital literature is and have emphasised the necessity of a ‘media-specific analysis’. Now the time has come to look closer at techniques and effects of digital literary works, and at the contemporary contexts in which they are created. Digital literature does not operate in isolation: it is in all respects a contemporary artform. The seminar focusses on this question of digital ‘poetics’, understood as the question to the nature and the value of the work, both in criticism as in practice itself.

In addition to the scholarly presentations during the days, there are evening performance events.

December 9

20.00-22.00: Words in motion. Digital authors from different European countries will present new work.  With JR Carpenter and Jerome Fletcher, Serge Bouchardon, Maria Mencia, K. Michel, Henk van der Waal,  and Tonnus Oosterhoff. Location: cultural and political debating center De Balie, Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10. Amsterdam. 

December 10

20.00-23.00 Evening show of digital literature: Aesthetic strategies as critical interventions. New work by JR Carpenter, Renee Turner, Andreas Jacobs. Panel hosted by Rita Raley. Location: Perdu Theater, Kloveniersburgwal 86.

 

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Michael Joyce, author and professor at Vassar College, Steve Tomasula, author and professor at University of Notre Dame, and Jay David Bolter, Ian Bogost, and Maria Engberg from Digital Media/LCC spoke about how the literary arts respond and relate to an age of digital media culture. Some of the issues included:

  • What is the function of literature in a digital culture? 
  • How does our immersion in digital practices affect our reading and appreciation of literary texts? 
  • Has literature changed in response to a new digital aesthetic?
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This seminar seeks to broaden the conceptual space of media-shaped electronic literature through a ground-up conceptualisation that draws inspiration from various textual practices based on an experimental account with cyber-language at the intersection of various fields and disciplines. The seminar is structured as an event of peer-reviewed theory panels, demonstrations (including artistic performances by practitioners) and individual presentations.

A goal of the Ljubljana seminar will be to discuss the challenges posed by new media and to situate electronic literature within a history of new media. Topics that might be addressed include:

• Discussing and interrogating the key concepts, devices, methods and approaches within the field of electronic literature.• Questioning the literary nature of often hybrid and mixed-media digital texts within the constraints of electronic literature.• Defining innovation in the field through considering it as a deviation from print-based literature and applying the concept of de-familiarization.• Querying the social implications of new media textual practices and how they relate to issues of gender, the digital divide, new media literacy and social networking.• Defining the reading of digital texts which, in terms of their interruptive and nervous nature, demand the tactile motor activity of “mouse reading”.• Analyzing electronic literature through relating it to textual practices and performance within the (European) avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.• Evaluating the audience of electronic literature, asking how such novel textualities produce new audiences sometimes closer in character to DJ and VJ culture.• Questioning the aesthetics of electronic literature, taking into account the hybrid modalities of new-media affected perception, such as "not-just-reading" and "not-just-seeing", by addressing the roles of proprioception and tactility in reading.• Exploring electronic literature and the language of the Internet within the expanded field of 'post-print' text, as found in email, SMS texting, chat forums and other popular textual communication media.• Analyzing and defining the ontological specificity of an E-Literary art articulated as process, software and performance that disrupts the expectations of readership.• Evaluating digital creative communities as temporary social and artistic structures embedded in present social realities in relation to concepts such as post-Fordism, hactivism, "playbour", the attention economy and P2P initiatives.

 

(Source: CFPs)

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A lab/symposium dedicated to the rapidly evolving field of interactive documentary

In an era of pervasive computing, social media and a networked ‘information society’, digital documentary is embracing new forms. Web-docs, docu-games, photo-reportages, trans-media projects and locative narratives are developing new languages of factual communication that challenge the established linear narrative of documentary. i-Docs is the first lab/symposium to be dedicated to the rapidly evolving field of interactive documentary. The symposium will be a day-long event to showcase new projects and to discuss the artistic, economic and political implications of new forms of factual representation.

(Source: description from i-Docs site)

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