Workshop

This fun, playful, one-hour workshop is primarily intended for participants who identify as women, femme, nonbinary, trans, and/or queer. However, anyone is welcome to attend. What’s a queer femme aesthetic? I conceptualize it as a hyper-saturated, self-conscious, postmodern, performative femininity. Glitter, sequins, lip gloss, nail polish, dELiA*s magazine, ‘90s neon pink and slime green. Digitally, the queer femme aesthetic was innovated in spaces like Tumblr and MySpace, with tools like Blingee and Angelfire Dollz. Of course, there is no one definition of a queer/femme digital aesthetic, though I’d argue that the nail polish emoji is pretty key! In this workshop, we’ll first explore how and why net artists like Olia Lialina, Marisa Olson, and Momo Pixel break “good design” rules and embrace a Web 1.0 aesthetic. Queer femme internet aesthetics often intentionally subvert minimalist design principles and usability heuristics, making the user aware of the platform/medium rather than concealing it. Building on the “Queer & Femme Digital Literature” panel that I chaired at AWP 2020, featuring Sarah Ciston, Sam Cohen, Kate Durbin, Feliz Lucia Molina, and Sandra Rosales (https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/event_detail/17596), we’ll also discuss these multimedia aesthetics in a literary context. Then, we’ll experience digital femme history and culture firsthand through the embodied limitations and affordances of using web 1.0 technology: participants will make an old-fashioned glitter GIF. Although the 1.0 Blingee aesthetics are echoed in contemporary Instagram and Snapchat stickers, we’ll use one of the “original” platforms, clunky by our current standards, to experience not only the aesthetics but also the tools and techniques inherent to the platform that enabled those aesthetics. Since the Blingee platform, developed in 2006, is no longer functional, we’ll use the open-access platform GlitterPhoto (https://www.glitterphoto.net/), developed in 2003. Finally, we'll share our creations and think together toward queer femme digital aesthetic futures. Participants will need to have access to a web browser (Chrome or Firefox).

The I Ching can tell you possibles futures. Depending on how 3 coins land in a series of tosses, you'll get a different fortune - stories of how you should or could procede. And in the classic Arabic nights, every night the sultan hears a different story. These are examples of multilinear texts. In this workshop you will create multilinear story that have so many different possibilities as to seem nearly infinite. We'll do this using Non Infinite Stories, a dynamic electronic publishing system that gives each reader their own unique story. For the reader, this means a captivating experience and for the writer, this opens possibilities of new storytelling with the combinations of specific fragments. The workshop is open to everyone without writing or technological skills. Technology is creating the opportunity to explore our creative ideas in ways previously unimaginable. In this workshop, you'll learn about the creative possibilties of Quantum Narratives and what it means not only for you as a writer, but also for the future of narrative storytelling.

Feeling without Touching is a workshop inspired by John Koenig's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a list of invented words that describe feelings that “give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.” Through a series of guided activities that include movement and writing with the body, participants will explore what it feels like to interact with one another without “physically” being in touch and reimagine new ways of languaging emotion in digital spaces.

In this interactive workshop, participants will be introduced to two platforms that can facilitate online communication and storytelling. These platforms include our own open source tool Virtual Director, developed in TouchDesigner, for compositing multiple participants in a shared virtual space in order to communicate tele-immersively [1], as well as open-source creativity helpers such as an automated slide generator [2].The workshop will start with warm-up exercises taken from improvised comedy practice, and conclude with short live improvised presentations made by the participants. Over the course of the workshop, participants will learn a range of skills and best practices, derived from applied improvisation and cinematographic language, that will help them foster a sense of presence, connection, and creativity in digitally immersed environments. In Part I: “Virtual Director - Designing tools for improvisation”, participants will learn how to use our own open source tool for facilitating live interactive tele-immersive performance, rehearsal, and improvisation. In Part II: “The virtual theatre DJ/VJ: Directing ensembles in virtual spaces”, participants will engage in a series of games and activities that demonstrate best practices for helping performers feel connected and present with each other, facilitating physical and emotional connection through the visual language of cinema and the pedagogy of improvisation.

Erasure is a powerful technique that allows contemporary creative writers, visual artists, and political activists to reveal underlying patterns within extant narratives. Perhaps because of its imbrication with book arts and other tactile forms, erasure poetry is relatively unexplored in the domain of e-literature. However, educational platforms like Wave Books’ interactive erasure poetry website, as well as recent artistic projects such as Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul, and Nick Montfort’s web browser extension The Deletionist, Jacob Harris’s Times Haiku, and my own participatory platform The Infinite Woman demonstrate some of the possibilities for making and reading erasure poetry in a digital context. In this one-hour hands-on workshop, I’ll briefly introduce the form and technique of erasure in contemporary creative writing, looking at some physical examples (like Lauren Russell’s chalk erasure of Descent) in addition to the digital examples mentioned above.

We’ll discuss the aesthetic and political choices in handcrafted and computationally generated erasure poems; consider erasure’s overlap with and distinction from other approaches like remix, appropriation, and conceptualism; and explore how erasure allows writers and artists to stretch and innovate poetic technique. Then, I’ll introduce a series of hands-on exercises designed to get participants quickly making their own physical and digital erasures. Participants will experiment with user-friendly tools to make their own erasure poems on a variety of platforms. Participants will need to have access to a web browser (Chrome or Firefox) and a word processor, as well as a design program. I’ll be using the free, user-friendly, online platform Canva in lieu of an Adobe product; if participants do not already have a design program, they should sign up for a free Canva account before the workshop (https://www.canva.com/). They will also need paper, scissors, pens or markers, found physical text (like a newspaper or electrical bill), and found digital text (like a speech, blog post, or literary passage).

This workshop presents a hands-on introduction to the RiTa v2.0 tools, including the new RiScript language. Version 2 of RiTa is a complete rewrite of the library that is easier-to-use, faster and more powerful. The workshop will cover the basics of RiTa and RiScript in JavaScript, with a specific focus on the Observable notebook environment. The number of addition topics covered, and the depth to which they are explored, will vary in relation to the time allotted by conference organizers and the experience of participants. While no specific skills are required for participation, familiarity with JavaScript and a basic knowledge of programming concepts (conditionals, variables, loops, etc.) will be assumed.

In this workshop we will bounce about in the egg carton of zoom and experiment with ways to dissolve the 6th wall (the camera) (the other 5 being: the 3 walls of the room and the 2 side walls of the image frame) through collaborative story and through dance and physical performance. Building on the practice of netprov — internet improv, online roleplay narrative — we will use words and movement to explore those zones of video meeting practice that have yet to coalesce into social norms: awkward beginnings, sudden disappearances, background guests, dropped connections, mis-timings, garbles, and lags. Each of these can lead to narrative. We also will build on art history and comics to experiment with ways to make the platform’s grid echo and expand shared visual traditions, or, comically, to play against them. We will share and co-create methods and moments you can apply in art and education.

In this workshop, attendees will learn to create "story instruments," a genre of performative e-lit with a very simple interaction model. In a story instrument, the author decides *what* happens, and the user, through a one-button interface, determines *when* it happens. This form, with its inherent connections to music, video games, interactive comics, and slide presentations, has been used to collaboratively remix the works of noted California poets, sonify the history of Mars exploration, create multi-vocal lyric videos for Hamilton, and visualize samples of martial arts films in hip-hop tracks — to name just a few applications. The software attendees will use to create their story instruments is Stepworks 2, a new version of the web-based tool I first introduced in 2017. Stepworks (http://step.works) has been described as "an ideal platform for teaching e-literature through feminist critical making pedagogies" (Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, "Back in a Flash: Critical Making Pedagogies to Counter Technological Obsolescence" [The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, December 10, 2020]). It can be used to create interactive works, live-streamed presentations, or linear videos (one example being last year's popular ELO talk "Temporal Aesthetics in Digital Comics: An Introduction for Makers and Researchers"). Stepworks standardizes multimodal interactive media in a way that simplifies authoring, while collapsing the boundaries between text, visual, audio, and musical content. Instead of tracks or layers, Stepworks features "characters" who take actions in discrete steps. Each character appears as a rectangular panel that can be rendered anywhere on screen. When a character "speaks" a word, that word appears in its panel. When they "show" a video, that video fills the panel's area. Put another way, Stepworks takes the visual logic of Zoom we've been living with during the pandemic — in which each box equals a person — and allows authors to build on it in creative ways. Stepworks 2 introduces a web-based authoring environment to augment the Google Sheets model launched with Stepworks 1, making possible more sophisticated compositions (even including the user's webcam) while maintaining ease of use. Attendees will come away from the workshop with basic knowledge of the tool, and free accounts which they can continue to use afterward (while Stepworks will ultimately include a paid tier to support continued development, the essential set of authoring features will continue to be free, and its file format is open and JSON-based). The workshop will be held over Zoom, and participants (up to 15) will be required to use the Chrome web browser. Each attendee will use Stepworks to follow along with workshop activities, creating their own experiments using media they possess locally or find online. Attendees will be encouraged to show progress via screen sharing, and will save their work locally, while also learning how to publish projects online (a secondary account like a GitHub account may be required for this). Finally, participants will receive tips for using Stepworks to expose students to basic e-lit creation in a classroom setting.

The global coronavirus pandemic has brought up a series of challenges which have made us change our lifestyle by balancing work and family life, education and recreation. It has brought up feelings of uncertainty, isolation, hopelessness, fear, anxiety, depression, stress; impacting on our mental health and well-being as well as our economic situation. This global disaster has hitted harder those people from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as socioeconomic status, physical and health issues, living in violent and abusive relationships and has brought up to light the imbalance in society. For some of us, online platforms have served to make this situation more bearable. We are learning to do what we did before, at a distance. Based on this and previous creative projects where we were already dealing with a community-based goal, the aim of this workshop is to make visible (through sharing) social, personal or collective issues/challenges which have become more apparent during the pandemic. We will be using digital methodologies of collaboration and visualisation to highlight the main concerns of the community taking part in this discussion. For this purpose, we are providing you with an online platform where you will be able to share a personal or collective issue to heal. The shared stories will be distributed amongst the participants, who will find solutions to heal them through a creative digital proposal. All participants sharing and healing will be anonymous.

GOAL: The workshop is directed towards authors and translators of hypertext fiction and poetry created in Storyspace. We demonstrate the future direction of the in-house development environment used for translation and migration of Michael Joyce’s afternoon.a story (2011) and Twilight. A Symphony (2015) into browser/online ports. The framework has been recently updated to its third edition which – apart from its support for guard fields, roadmaps, link scripting – introduces form-based import layer and a mobile friendly visualizations of Storyspace Map Views based on D3.js JavaScript library. During the workshop a workflow of importing the work, processing its metadata, and preparing the linking system for the visualization module will be demonstrated and analysed. The hypertexts used during the workshop are: Izme Pass by C. Guyer, M. Joyce, and M. Petry; WOE by M. Joyce, and The Life of Geronimo Sandoval by S. Ersinghaus. Participants will prepare an html export from Storyspace and be able to then upload these files on a server for further processing in order to prepare an online, mobile friendly version of a Storyspace work. BACKGROUND: More than 20 years after their publication web-based hypertexts such as Hegirascope or The Unknown are available, read and viewed just as intended on their publication date. “Html and a bit of Javascript” or “Javascript and a bit of html”, in case of Web based text generators such as Taroko Gorge, seem to constitute the best formula for creating long-lasting e-literature. Any platform, old or new, which supports exporting to html improves not only the longevity of the work, but can also bring it new life on platforms of the future. Important platforms, most notably Flash, did not follow this path. Some platforms, including Storyspace, did. In spite of being a paid software and the popular perception of it as a platform for commercial circulation of e-literature, Storyspace managed to preserve its path to open formats in form of its html export functionality (although by default in limited form).