English

Tabletop Role-Playing Games (ttrpgs) are games of communal storytelling. These gameworlds exist in the minds of players who collectively populate them with people, events, and histories. Traditionally played in-person, groups found themselves hard hit when social-distancing rules came into effect. While some went on hiatus, others took to the web to continue their sagas. For some, this was an uphill battle of new technology and social norms. For others, the move was trivial as ttrpgs in fact existed online even before the pandemic. 

For this panel, we take for granted that playing ttrpgs is an act of oral literary production. We talk about the ways this storytelling – once done cooperatively but semi-privately – has grown beyond the table through various internet platforms to include a much larger production base. We will also cover the ways platforms have enhanced the building aspects of ttrpgs – the building of community, worlds, and narratives. Our panelists are as follows. 

We often hide the learning process, not wanting anyone to see our vulnerability. In an attempt at normalizing learning and imperfection, Krista-Lee Malone decided to live-stream her process of learning to be a dungeon master (DM) on twitch.tv/gameranthro. Additionally, she hoped that by live-streaming this she would be able to tap into the shared knowledge and experience of her audience. Although she has been a player for over 20 years, she had never before been a DM. She began live-streaming her preparation in January with many questions. 

Casey James O’Ceallaigh was live-streaming as a DM on twitch.tv/serious_play before the pandemic. At that time the players used a campus lab to play and stream. When the pandemic shut down campus, the group was forced to negotiate not only how to continue the game, but also how to continue sharing the lab channel. Previously, all streaming was done at the lab which was set up specifically for this purpose. Suddenly, the group had to set-up across multiple computers and locations. Casey will be discussing these negotiations and the struggles of DMing virtually while streaming. 

Edword Flabberjackson is the personality behind twitch.tv/pokeyoureyesoutgames and founder of the GCGG (Good Community, Good Games) stream team. Noticing the hard time some were having with the current state of the world and guided by the truth that we are the stories we tell ourselves, Edword decided to change those stories through a ttrpg stream. By having the players play both characters and themselves, he hoped to slowly get the players to start changing the stories they tell about themselves and therefore change how they feel. He will be talking about how those stories progressed. 

Andrew C. Fudge runs a ttrpg dedicated Discord server for the LGBTQ+ community. He is also preparing a Twitch stream dedicated to diversity in D&D. He will be discussing the process of content-making and building spaces dedicated to marginalized identities and how these spaces often become places for players’ first “coming out” moments, an integral step for LGBTQ+ people.

The concept of a workshop refers to an arrangement whereby a group of people learn, acquire new knowledge, perform creative problem-solving, or innovate in relation to a domain-specific issue (Ørngreen & Levinsen, 2017). In this round table session we will discuss the rulesets and social dynamics applied in different collaborative workshops within the context of Networked and Programmable Media (Cayley, 2009). We will share our experiences with three series of workshops organized in the past and current year, aiming to create platforms to socialize and build communities in the context of COVID19: 

(1) Viral Imagina (imaginaviral.net) is a series of online brief workshops and art performances that have been taking place throughout 2020. The project has emerged as an independent effort to spread art language practices in digital environments for the global Spanish speaking community.

(2) Salutches (https://salutches.viniciusmarquet.com/) is an online platform for social experiences that aims to strengthen the community of students and researchers at LUCA School of Arts. Several workshop formats have been developed in the context of Salutches, among which Trueque (an online exchange of digital objects and services) and Pastiche (eclectic pedagogic experiments in collaborative creation). 

(3) Blend&Bleed. An online symposium organized at LUCA School of Arts, addressing the concept of trans-reality: the zone of experience whereby a player moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual realms, brought together in one unified game space (Lindley, 2004). Blend&Bleed aims to initiate new collaborations between the fields of Artistic Research, Performance, Game and Interaction Design. 

These workshops have been iteratively developed and tested, in the context of the Ph.D. projects of the first and third author, according to the methodologies proposed by Shön (1983) and Latour (2005), outlining a design cycle that integrates practice with theoretical reflection. The round table discussion will feature both practical lessons and theoretical insights gained in the research process. Each presenter will provide a short description of their experiences as workshop organizers, after which we will initiate an interactive dialogue.

Ocean as Media Platform for Electronic Literature 

The ocean is a media platform. Recognizing it as such can change how we think of platform, media, and meaning. This panel takes an ecocritical approach. We understand the ocean to be a primary platform for life on Earth, encompassing 70% of our globe, and also a platform that inspires much of our digital life and literature. We take Joellyn Rock and Alison Aune’s FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as sinew connecting our diverse our critical methodologies and perspectives, as we consider how emerging knowledge from environmental humanities informselectronic literature.

Melody Jue: "Beyond Blue: Ocean and/as Platform":What might it look like to speculatively submerge our ideas about computational platforms in the ocean? How terrestrial is platform studies? Drawing from my book Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), this talk explores the valences of the “platform” in oceanic contexts, considering its media-specific meaning alongside others (oil platform, advocacy platform) and the metaphor of the platform as a flat, planar surface. I consider the affordances of platforms and oceans through a reading of the video game Beyond Blue, by BBC and E-line media, which presents an occasion to consider ocean health and resource extraction alongside multiple senses of “platform,” from computation to environmental politics.

Mark Marino: “Diving into the code of immersive e-lit.”From immersion in sound and image in Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998) to immersion in a downpour of letters in Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain” (2000) to immersion in a sea of text in Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s “Sea and Spar Between” (2010), artists of electronic literature have plunged readers into virtual oceans. This presentation will take a deep dive into the Processing code to explore the ways “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” immerses its participants in tides of gender, hybridity, and fantasy.

Diana Leong: “Silhouettes and the Sea: Mediating Racial Fetishism”:From Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist medallion to artist Kara Walker’s cut-paper installations, the silhouette has occupied a singular place within the iconography of slavery and its afterlife. This style of illustration can be understood as operating within the dynamics of racial fetishism as it attempts to resolve tensions between the universal (e.g., racial blackness) and the particular (e.g., black bodies). This talk examines how “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” evokes a similar dynamic by staging oceanic entanglements between depth (e.g., immersion) and surface (e.g., silhouette) as a complement to universal/particular. By mapping these entanglements onto the mermaid’s multiple forms of liminality, “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” gestures towards a reading of racial fetishism as a form of pleasure predicated on an ambivalent relationship to difference.

Jessica Pressman: “Mermaids in Elit”:This talk explores the role of mermaids in electronic literature, past and present, as poetic symbol and formal device. We can read the presence of mermaids as portending transformations in literature’s media, signifying change in the materiality of literary production and reception. In this talk, I use “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as exemplary of how electronic literature uses mermaids and what we can learn by diving deep into consideration of them.

When the global pandemic spread in early 2020, we, as many others, wondered what was happening and what it all meant. Almost all cultural activity moved online and the electronic platforms took even stronger hold of our lives. We started gathering material about the impact of the Covid 19 on e-literature and digital creativity for a round table presented at the ELOrlando 2020, the first completely online ELO conference ever. This work led to the project Electronic Literature and Covid 19 (supported by DARIAH EU), which includes an exhibition at this year’s conference, a research collection at the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, other presentations and further research. 

Life under the pandemic is like living under a largely invisible threat that emerges as catastrophic and tragic when death rates go up. At other times the threat of the virus is barely visible and can mainly be traced as deserted streets. Sometimes the way it invades our shared, common imagination gets quickly normalized as yet another persuasive data visualization, digital map demonstrating a sudden upsurge in viral spread or simply another infographic with increasing numbers. It might be compared to how Svetlana Alexievich describes the Chernobyl disaster (in Chernobyl Prayer, (1997), Penguin 2016), as an unknown catastrophe that was and is difficult to understand for the many Belarusians and Ukrainians living in the disaster zone since it did not look like war or natural disaster. Chernobyl’s invisible radioactive cloud that in 1986 spread across Europe, functioned at the time much like invisible viral danger today, as a post-human, ecological crisis requiring a new understanding and politics. And, like Chernobyl, the pandemic has demonstrated the fractures in many societies’ foundations such as economic inequality, racism, inadequately equipped institutions and health services, and incompetent leaders (see also Latour, Hayles Taussig, Mbembe, Chun et al. in Critical Enquiry, vol. 47, number S2, Winther 2021). Luckily, the pandemic has also shown caring communities and societies, newfound interests in the domestic, the local, and the environmental, including the climate crisis (see e.g. Markham AN, Harris A, Luka ME. Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking During COVID-19 Times. Qualitative Inquiry. October 2020.). 

Besides its importance for health, society and the economy, the pandemic might be seen as a paradigmatic cultural change happening in a time with locked down cultural life, which can be seen from behind the global screens of platforms. Electronic literature plays an important role in exploring how people gets through daily life during the pandemic, how we see our homes, communities, cities, environments, institutions, how people become part of both progressive (BLM, Metoo, etc) and reactionary (QAnon, etc) movements. Digital platforms have played a large part in this, e.g. through the various #, through their ways of promoting extremism through profiling algorithms, through their transforming of institutions, etc. 

This panel will present early outcomes of the project, present a framework for the exhibition, and an analysis of the themes of the submitted works. We will also invite feedback from the ELO community of researchers, practitioners and artists.

Panel description 

This panel explores how digital environments affect literature, and more specifically, how writing and reading practices speak across electronic literature platforms. If it is true that every medium develops its own telling structure and, thus, each platform allows authors specific literary affordances and constraints. It is also true, from a narratological point of view, that the same medium could spawn different products (Ryan 2004). With this in mind, panel members focus on female literary creations, coming from different geographic regions. Their papers analyse the ways in which platforms affect narrative and poetic construction, including gender patterns highlighted in the selected examples. Methodologically, qualitative and quantitative research methods are used, including close reading, digital hermeneutics, distant reading, semiotics and Material Engagement Theory (MET). 

HStudies Research Group, University of Jyväskylä, Finland 

Individual abstracts 

Posthuman Intermedial Semiotics: From the Holodeck to Mez Breeze’s micro-V[R]erseAsun López-Varela (Complutense University Madrid, Spain)

From a semiotic perspective, this presentation explores V[R]erse, a collection of poems and micro-stories that celebrates well-known E-lit artists, turning the pieces into Posthuman VR experiences. Australian net.artist and game designer Mez Breeze uses VR sculptures to add to these micro-stories. From a semiotic and MET perspective, the paper explores desktop-based VR. 

A Hermeneutics of Stephanie Strickland, Cyntia Lawson Jaramillo and Paul Ryan’s SlippingglimpseMaya Zalbidea (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)

This study offers a hermeneutical analysis of the Flash interactive poem Slippingglimpse. This hermeneutical analysis pays attention to the common features of poetry such as poetical language, structure, form and rhythm, as well as the particular signs used, as well as the effects and the computer elements it integrates.

Labiba Khammar’s Critical and Creative WorksEman Younis (Beit Berl College, Israel)

This paper sheds light on the experience of the Moroccan writer and critic Labiba Khammar, who is one of the pioneering Arab women writers in the field of digital literature. Labiba wrote an important theoretical book, a theoretical project that was followed by a practical creative project: Guraf wa Maraya. Through this work, Khammar discussed the issues of writing a novel through a series of stories that are disconnected and connected simultaneously.

Unfixed Gender Patterns in World Electronic Literature PlatformsGiovanna Di Rosario (Polytechnic of Milan, Italy) and Nohelia Meza (Independent Scholar, Mexico)

This research describes and analyses the ways in which traditional markers of identity, such as gender, are reconfigured in digital literature. The study aims at understanding the role of place and gender in a poetic digital environment. By investigating and applying distant reading techniques to works authored by female writers from Europe and Latin America, Di Rosario and Meza trace the unfixed and polyhedric feminine literary and poetic voices embedded in E-lit creations.

This talk shares collaboration strategies and “funnest practices” for using netprov — networked improvisation, online roleplay literature — in the classroom. In sequences of “jump right in” creative games, students explore such topics as character development and character voice in a real-time laboratory of quick creative exchanges (accompanied by mutual encouragement and laughter). By building a bridge between students’ own social media writing practices and learning about historic literature, their creative strategies are expanded and critical connections between canonical texts and contemporary, everyday writing are made. What students may not realize is that netprov also can help break through their own creative blockages and freezes.

We will discuss the issue of the platformization of culture from a Latin-American perspective and decolonial thinking. Platforms strive on the automated algorithmic administration of access and reproduction of creative works (text, sound, video, o code-based). The common trait of current platform culture is the maximization of profit by means of garnering data and attention in order to capture more attention (and more data). In this context, is there any space for pursuing artistic digital activism and decolonial e-lit? The presentations in this panel will try to answer this question. The panel will be Spanish-English based in a sort of tentative of linguistic decolonization of e-lit field:

Agustín Berti: The Country and the Platform, or The Issue of NanofundiaThe issue of latifundia and the consolidation of vast productive land owned by a very reduced minority of wealthy elites has been one of the distinctive traits of lasting inequalities in Latin-American countries. This has seemingly nothing to do with digital culture, and yet this push forward the concept of nanofundia as a continuation of the reprimarization of production in the developing world and the digital extractivism of platform economy described by Pasquinelli and Joler. If there is any chance of reverting this situation in terms of decolonial geopolitics of electronic literature, the struggles will be about national and regional digital infraestructures and the local regulations over the globalized attention economies.

Anahí Re: It Will Be Difficult or Won’t Be. Challenges of Latin-American E-Lit.Platforms that nowadays enable large scale production and distribution of third generation e-lit (Flores), and even this kind of e-lit itself, promote a specific temporality. Doing so they guarantee the permanence of users in social media. What is at stake is clearly our “available attention” (Stiegler). Following Stiegler’s organological perspective, this presentation will focus on why “the difficult” (Tisselli/Torres) is, and should always be, an emancipatory alternative within Latin American poetic industries.

Claudia Kozak: Occupy the Platforms. Scope and Limitations of Decolonial Contemporary E-Lit.This presentation will analyze cases of Latin American e-lit that particularly engage to deconstruct and/or occupy contemporary platform culture. Being these cases either strictly experimental e-lit based on “the difficult” (Tisselli/ Torres), or digital activism in indigenous languages or even attempts of decolonial mixtures between experimentalism and third-generation platform e-lit, there is an opening for discussing how e-lit might temporarily occupy contemporary platforms without being (completely) absorbed by their agenda.

Leonardo Solaas: The Pull of The Banal: Digital Systems and Programmed FreedomInternet platforms are based on a perfect formula: they provide us with the endless satisfaction of choosing, while they get to know all about us and better anticipate our tastes and desires. They create for us dazzling worlds of perfect visibility, while their own logic recedes into the unreachable depths of an ever-blacker box. We will analyze how the space of possibilities generated by digital systems deploys a field of power under the guise of freedom, and how users can adopt three positions with regards to it: integration, rebellion, or critique.