English

Addressing conference themes of platform utopias, determinisms, identities, collaborations and modes, this conversational presentation discusses ways that concepts of time, space and narrative are expanded in The Key To Time https://unknownterritories.org/keytotime/. The Key To Time is a surreal and lyrical work for immersive, cinematic art experiences such as domes and 360 degree cinemas as well as for individual viewing on head-mounted virtual reality devices. Bridging 1920's silent film and virtual reality, the surface story draws viewers into a playful exploration of genre, identity and desire. In doing so, the work unravels narrative underpinnings of myths, genres, and technological constructs of time. 

The Key To Time is created by media artist/filmmaker Roderick Coover (FR/US) and composer Krzysztof Wołek (PL) as part of a program designed to build cross-cultural, composer-artist collaborations. The dreamlike story follows a scientist who is trapped in the future due to a time-travel experiment gone wrong. His only hope to escape his predicament is to travel through dreams. His dreams, however, are troubled by anxieties, fears and anger. As the scientist travels through time, aesthetics change from those of silent film of the early 20th century to those of VR and a future cinema. There is also slippage between these times, with figures from memories walking into color settings as black and white figures or cartoon ones, and visual references draw upon early cinematic works like Louis Lumiere's Arrival of a Train at Ciotat (1895) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). 

Through montage and collage, a mix color and black and white images, animation, intertitles, and sudden changes in dimension and perspective, The Key To Time toys with conventions and expectations. Song and dialog combine with layered and collaged imagery filmed in greenbox studio settings and natural settings. As with works like Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room (2015) and David Blair's Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991), this experimental artwork plays with the ways differing visual technologies shape consciousness, language and narrative forms. 

Whereas in many films, sound composition comes after the film is written, shot and edited, in this case the music was part of the process of invention rather than an afterthought done only in post-production. Five songs were at the center of design. The songs hold essential roles in the movement of the story, which is driven my emotional tensions and unseen forces rather than rational thought. Second, we decided to record the script in advance of shooting the film. This decision enhanced a creative freedom and allowed for lots of play between dialog, images and sounds. The result disconnect between voice and image is evocative of early film and radio drama, and the approach is also similar to a workflow frequently used in animation; in this way too, the platform stimulated news ways of thinking about the collaboration and the creative process.

Visual artists, writers, and other cultural producers have long leveraged networked technologies to establish platforms that circulate cultural products in participatory contexts intentionally distinct from cultural institutions. As technologies change over time—including deprecated plug-ins, changes to HTML, and linkrot—these platforms fall into various states of decay. In this paper, I examine an example of a platform, the Net Art Latino Database (1999-2004), an effort to document net-based artworks vulnerable to obsolescence that overall stands as a precarious monument to an earlier era of digital culture. As the platform slowly falls out of joint with current web technologies, the Database illustrates practices of cultural production that respond to the decay of the very technologies being used.

The Net Art Latino Database was initiated by the Uruguayan digital artist Brian Mackern to compile examples of net art activity by Latinx artists, working at the periphery of English-language dominant net art communities. The Database functions as an art platform in the sense offered by Olga Goriunova: a dynamic configuration of people and technologies amplifying new kinds of creative activities that push beyond the boundaries of existing categories of cultural production. As Goriunova’s theorization of art platforms suggests, the lines between categories like ‘net art’ and ‘electronic literature’ are often blurry, as artists and writers deploy the same technologies and pursue similar aesthetic strategies to circulate digital cultural production online.

While the Database catalogs principally digital visual artworks, it is instructive to think about this platform in the context of electronic literature specifically. First, the Database documents works that function expressly as electronic literature, including listings for e-zines. More fundamentally, though, the Database can be read as a work of electronic literature. Coded by hand in HTML, Mackern’s work exemplifies the scribal practices that were the foundation of early Web culture. The text-based work consists entirely of descriptions of other artworks and links to other projects. These sites are frequently located under the top-level domains of Central or South American countries, though many are no longer active, and these defunct sites are rarely captured in public web archives. As such, the Database serves an ekphrastic function, evoking multimedia artworks that no longer readily circulate online—and may no longer materially exist beyond this description.

I approach this analysis from the discipline of library and information science (LIS). A deeper understanding of Mackern’s artistic and curatorial practices can help to shape professional perspectives on the preservation of net art, electronic literature, and digital cultural production more generally. Unlike a traditional institutional repository, the diverse artworks included in the database are documented as part of a living, interconnected media ecology. Rather than adaptively preserving individual works through migration to new technological environments, Mackern’s Database enacts a poetics of obsolescence, carefully stewarding works on a platform built with the recognition of its own fragility.

The contemporary digital environment is made possible through a matrix of behemoth infrastructures that traverse the orbital, atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial domains. These infrastructures manifest not only in the narrowly technical sense, but encompass the manufacturing chains, regulatory interfaces, and geopolitical contexts that enable (or forestall) the development, deployment, and maintenance of digital systems at a global scale.

Underpinning all these aspects are the flows of energy and materials constituting the liveable Earthly ecology. The latter comprises the ultimate baseline ‘platform’ on which specific digital platforms, as more commonly expressed, are enabled—but which, being so defined, can obscure these far larger structures and processes in which they are embedded.

Coming out of all this, we can note that the global scale of digital infrastructure is now foundational to the charting and modelling of a rapidly deteriorating planetary ecology, but this comes with the recognition that the former is both the product, and a critical facilitator, of economic processes that are driving the very pollution, wastage, and largely unhindered exploitation behind our present environmental calamities.

It is in these contexts that we are encouraged to evaluate how works of digital art and electronic literature are responding to this uncomfortable paradox. We might recall here how early digital art sought to demonstrate (with admittedly varying success) different possibilities for computing beyond militarised technoscience, and the creative and critical challenge today is to rework and reframe digital platforms so they might perform and inspire substantive ecological critique and expression, rather than be relegated only as perpetuators of extractive, accelerationist, technocentric paradigms. Contemporary electronic literature, in its very particular fusions of data, writing, and the algorithmic, affords rich experimental pathways for just this kind of work—as deftly illustrated by the recent outputs of artists such as J.R. Carpenter and Eugenio Tisselli.

This paper will contextualise and document the author’s latest experiments with creating electronic literary works that bring together a diverse, unconventional assemblage of platforms as a key aspect of their creation and expression. Cameras, satellites, drones, canvas graphics, esoteric code, and printed outputs are combined to establish elaborate, contingent exchanges, with the ‘work’ itself being enacted across these different platforms—each contributing to an always provisional outcome—and drawing its creative and critical force as much by examining and reflecting on these aspects and processes, as the varied marks they leave behind. In particular, the author will discuss his newly emerging work, “Landform”, in which satellite and drone image data of terrestrial landscapes are parsed into esoteric visual algorithms, that, once interpreted, are compiled into code poems that draw on a vocabulary derived from scientific, scholarly, and poetic texts discussing present ecological concerns. The aim is to actualise a set of speculative, experimental relations between the platforms, materials, and concepts involved, investigating their potential for enacting novel modes of environmental computational practice, and, thus, suggest another vector for articulating the entanglements and contingencies that are driving the present situation.

What do Jeremy Hight’s Glacial, A Novel (whose content he has pledged to Tweet one word at a time every day between the November 2020 and June 2042), Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love At the End of the World (a Twine romance unfolding at the eleventh minute before the apocalypse which readers are allowed to devour in just ten seconds), and Claire Dinsmore’s The Dazzle as Question (a hypermedia prose-poem about old-school artistry versus the onset of the digital with a penchant for blind(sid)ing its reader) all share in common? For one, they are narratives mediated by computer-hosted platforms and invested in wresting lection from their readers. For another, this paper will argue, they are examples of the post-literary according to a very specific and not strictly conventional definition.

A by-product of what Brian McHale styles the “name-that-period sweepstakes for what comes after postmodernism” has been the proliferation of commentaries on the meaning of the ‘post-literary’. Reference has been made to some kind of after-literature which, as the product of a succession of literatures, is expected to retain a vestige of what anteceded it while making for a fresh direction. The general narrative concerning the ‘post-’ has been about unlearning the past, innovation and progress, but also one of a limbic sense of living on after the end times. To a different reader, Hight, Anthropy, and Dinsmore’s work might exemplify one or all of these definitions of the condition of being ‘post-’. However, this reader prefers to think of their work in the broad terms established by the journal, CounterText – that is, as manifestations which are implausibly represented by the term ‘literature’ yet register belonging in the “domain” of the post-literary, where “any artefact that might have some claim on the literary appears”.

Hight, Anthropy, and Dinsmore thumb their noses at conventional reading practices, employing digital affordances to force narrative to move at a glacial pace, accelerate it impossibly, and place a variety of obstacles in the way of reading. Yet, it is clear from the way they goad the reader that the works still expect to be read. They seem thus to be at the bleeding edge of the ontological challenge identified by John Cayley when he hypothesizes, “if literature is a practice that is determined, chiefly, by material cultural formations that orbit practices and conventions of reading, then it is literature that faces its ontological challenge with respect to digitization.” Given the way digitization has skewed conventional reading practices, Cayley concludes: “Electronic literature is, precisely, no longer literature”. Besides, if Jean-Paul Sartre is right that “the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject – freedom”, so that “any attempt to enslave his readers threatens him in his very art”, then Hight, Anthropy, and Dinsmore cannot be writing literature when they employ programmed platforms to regulate and curtail their readers’ freedom quite simply to read; theirs must be a kind of ‘electronic post-literary’.

‘In a strict sense, I don't believe there's any definition of poetry that applies to all poets. Different poets have different goals. Different poets have different things in their hearts that they’re trying to express in different ways that they want to express them. Are my videos where I'm running around in the woods talking about YOLO and dogs and dads – are these really poetry? Why call them poetry?’ 

These are the words of Steve Roggenbuck (https://www.youtube.com/user/steveroggenbuck), a twenty-something self-proclaimed video artist and poet who released YouTube videos from 2010 to 2017. Roggenbuck’s video poems comprised clips of his stream of consciousness, often filmed while he rolled in the grass or ran through natural scenes, screaming. Amongst random - and, frankly, weird - comments, Roggenbuck inserted motivational moments urging viewers to appreciate nature and follow their dreams. Many videos have been edited to include musical accompaniment, green screen-facilitated backgrounds, and/or additional graphics.

Over seven years, Roggenbuck’s fanbase grew larger and more devoted, with Roggenbuck being established as one of the alt-lit (alternative literature) movement’s most renowned contributors. In October 2018, though, Roggenbuck’s fans turned their backs to him as he confirmed allegations of sexual misconduct: allegations that followed numerous others made against alt-lit contributors.

There are, to be sure, many Internet and alt-lit poets. Roggenbuck makes for a particularly interesting case study because he embodies various facets of Internet culture: visual and aural disjointedness, conscious contempt for grammatical correctness (a poetic license, so to speak), premeditated performance of personality, and – as he has confirmed – sexual harassment brought to light in the #MeToo moment. His online persona embodies the complexities of human connection in an increasingly digital context. Rather ironically, though, most of his videos aim to ignite viewers’ passion for the natural world. ‘Worms! Worms! Worms!’ he excitedly screams as he runs through a desert in one video. ‘Fucking llamas! Llamas! Whales are so big!’

This paper introduces readers to Roggenbuck’s poetry, and explores its place within poetic traditions by highlighting the distinctive stylistic features of his work. It considers how Roggenbuck’s video poetry represents a kind of electronic literature that both reflects and parodies meme culture for young adult viewers less inclined to engage with poetry in printed form. This paper also considers how the allegations against Roggenbuck impact interpretations of his work. It aims to start a conversation about negotiating literary value and socially unacceptable authorial behavior on digital platforms with new expectations and potential issues. To use Roggenbuck’s own words: ‘I am the bard. I am the poet. And to be a poet while the Internet exists. Man, we got an opportunity.’ The ‘opportunity’ offered by the Internet allowed Roggenbuck to rise to fame. It was also his demise.

Beyond Maximalism: Resolving the Novelistic Incompatibilities of Realism, Paranoia, Omniscience, and Encyclopedism through Electronic Literature. 

In The Maximalist Novel, Ercolino defines a type of novel that displays multiform maximizing and hypertrophic tension. He lists Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixon (1997), Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), and Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) as examples of the term, and classifies the maximalist novel using ten elements: length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, intersemioticity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. While Ercolino’s ten elements accurately identify and classify a significant novel form that has emerged, I argue that these elements are incompatible with one another, which has resulted in criticisms of maximalist novels, as well as a number of maximalist novelists to abandon the form. While Ercolino argues that these incompatibilities represent an ‘internal dialectic’ of the genre, I argue that this is too conflicting to be stable as a novelistic form. These incompatibilities include the incompatibility of multiple (hybrid) realisms, the incompatibility of paranoid imagination with ethical commitment, and the incompatibilities of narratorial omniscience and an encyclopedic mode with a persuasive realism. By examining contemporary fictional works written by previously maximalist novelists, I reassess Ercolino’s ten elements in order to identify the reasons why certain authors have moved beyond the limits of his definition. In so doing, I compare and contrast Ercolino’s ‘maximalist novel’ with Woods’s ‘hysterical realism,’ and Johnston’s ‘novel of information multiplicity.’ Using the Franzen and Smith corpuses as examples, this paper speculates on the future form of the novel as it progresses into the 21st Century. From this literary interrogation, I apply these conclusions to my digital creative practice by developing the digital novel The Perfect Democracy (funded by the Australia Council for the Arts). This work takes as its subject the entire population of contemporary Australia. Such a vast subject is impossible to represent in a work of fiction. The whole work is presented as a 3D frame-like artefact, that can be navigated as a whole, allowing readers to be presented with a multivalent, broad-canvas novel, while resolving the paradoxical issues identified in my interrogation of Ercolino. I propose that this will be achieved by utilising Calvino’s Six Memos. Images of Australian currency will be used as a structural device to remove weight by representing the whole society from the richest to the poorest in the quickest way possible, and a multitude of simultaneous digital writing formats and voices will be used to precisely depict characterisation. 

Works CitedCalvino, I. (1988) Six Memos For The Next Millennium, trans. P. Creagh, London: Vintage, 1988.Johnston, J. (1998) Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Smith, Z. (2001) ‘This is how it feels to me’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan (accessed 18 November, 2018).Wood, J. (2001) ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’, The New Republic Online. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhuman (accessed 18 November, 2018).

‘Lost water! Remains Scape?’: Transformation Waterscapes in Coimbatore from past to present through digital poetryThe digital poetry ‘Lost water! Remains Scape?’ is written in Tamil by the environmental poet Mohamed Rafiq and in English by Shanmugapriya T, the co-author of this paper. It is created using 2D and 3D environments, and photos in Blender and Adobe Animate software. The 2D and 3D environments reflect the narrative about the ecosystem of waterscapes in the past and the photo animations represent the current situation of the water bodies in Coimbatore, the southern region in South India. This digital poetry is created based on the findings from our AHRC-funded project ‘Digital Innovations in Water Scarcity, Coimbatore, South India’. This interdisciplinary project investigates the changed waterscape in Coimbatore, South India across 150 years by using range of materials and activities including studying historical maps and satellite imagery, and conducting interviews with local farmers, activists and NGOs. This digital poetry is an endeavour to bridge gap between digital literature and digital humanities. The questions we ask in this paper are how can the adoption/integration of digital literary method be an effective agency and actor to represent the environmental objects and disseminate the findings for targeted audiences? How can tools and methods contribute to the digital humanities and digital literature grounded in materials from the global south? The main aim of this paper is to explore the digital literary method as an effective agency to communicate the research findings to the broader public.

Reminiscence is the primary theme of our digital poetry. It will be mediated through text, animations and images. Waterscape is an imperative source and forms a conducive ecological community in every villages of the region Coimbatore. It is a primary source for drinking, irrigation and other economic and cultural activities. However, the forgotten waterscapes due to drought, dereliction and climate change have become conduit of drainage waters, and garbage dumbing areas. The photos that have taken during our field visits depict the current condition of waterbodies among which most of them are in dreadful state. On the other hand, the oral testimonies of the local farmers illustrate a different situation of waterscapes a few decades ago. They narrated how they were blessed to have had a healthy waterscape in the past. They also told us that there were particular flora and fauna that belong to the region had been destroyed and some of the specific species such as Noyyal Otter had gone extinct. The interactive 2D and 3D environment of digital poetry will provide a revisitation to such lost waterscapes created based on the oral testimonies. It will also portray the current condition of waterscapes through photo animation and text narration. This digital poetry will be disseminated to students, scholars, activists and the general public through our academic and NGO partners and local schools and colleges. Feedback and some of the interviews conducted will be made available via the project website.

As an adjunct instructor during the pandemic, I am in a rather unique position to speak to the use of the Learning Management System (LMS) as a pedagogical platform (I currently teach at three different post-secondary institutions and use three different LMSs). This pandemic has clearly laid bare several of the difficulties of precarious labour in the academy, and the need to fluently navigate several disparate platforms is just one. But, I would like to use this unique position to begin to speak to the role of pedagogies of digital literature to help students develop critical digital literacies, and how the proprietary LMS might influence or impede that process.This paper’s primary focus is a scholarly analysis and critique of the use of the LMS Blackboard for course delivery of ENGL4309 Digital Adventures in English, a fourth-year seminar that is marketed primarily as a course in DH tools for the study of literature and the digital literary. One of those DH tools I am using in a module on digital literatures is Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” and the many remixes thereof. By situating the e-lit classic in this way, my goal is to treat the code and the popularity of its remixes as a DH tool, and to thus follow in the excellent arguments made throughout 2020 about electronic literature as digital poetics (see, of course Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan’s Electronic Literature as Digital Poetics, or Alex Saum-Pascal and Scott Rettberg’s “Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities” for the Electronic Book Review).

As a part of this module, I ask my students to remix “Taroko Gorge,” as we did when I first encountered the work through the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) several years before. However, extending that same project to upper-year students who were, until that point unfamiliar with the field, and most of whom had never interacted with code before at all, proved to be difficult. And one of the difficulties of this assignment, indicating barriers to access for student and instructor alike, was attempting this project using the proprietary software of the LMS.

Of course, one of the assignment’s learning objectives is building the critical digital literacy of recognizing that all digital texts are two texts: a code, and its reconstitution. Following Serge Bouchardon’s arguments in his “Mind the Gap! 10 Gaps for Digital Literature,” this assignment is designed to at least in part reveal the basic mechanisms of how code shapes the digital text to readers who do not know how to program (like me!), and to thus begin to close “the gap separating us from digital literacy” that Bouchardon observes. But, the incongruity of the LMS and the remixing project reveal a potential limitation that we need to be cognizant of as instructors of the digital literary and beyond.

This work presents an artistic process based on a dream that took place in the capital of Czechoslovakia, a region unknown to the dreamer, which happened at the beginning of the quarantine period due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The first stage of this creative process started with the confirmation of coincidences between real-life Prague and the dreamed Prague. The similarities, discovered mainly through the search algorithms that led to Google maps, touristic blogs, Wikipedia, and other websites allowed the collection of data for the memories would not be lost and could be used as tools for the creative process. That fact so unique and different from other experienced dream phenomena aroused a series of sensations and reflections on the possibility of incorporating the unforeseen and irrational element as a means of promoting academic inquiry and artistic research. It was also an encouragement at the critical moment of confinement and pessimism.

In Antiquity, as the work of Artemidoro confirms, the dream had a cosmic dimension related to the mystical tradition and the collectivity. However, the psychoanalytic conception, influential in Western society since the first decades of the twentieth century, contributed to fixing the perception of dreaming as a private event that concerns only the individual dimension. On the other hand, neuroscience favors a biological approach to dreaming, even though Sidarta Ribeiro is a dissonant voice in this environment. The Brazilian neuroscientist relates dreams and memory since we dream as a way of remembering what we are and what we do. According to him, we also dream to prepare ourselves for the future.

The conceptual project started from a dream and proceeded, at first, with the help of Internet search engines. The dream experience allowed a deviation in the search algorithms using private intuition. This methodology contradicts the rational tendency behind the “improvement” of the artificial intelligence of these mechanisms. This effort included bibliographic research and the construction of a web page that will contain more information about the work in development. The process also allowed the idealization of Oneirographia, which is a 3D interactive online environment that is under construction. In this work, the interactor can build or simulate his digital dreams with data input that´ll randomly create a sensory ambiance. First, the user will fill a form and, then it will be possible to choose between a dream or a nightmare to define the atmosphere of the digital experience. After that, the user will navigate between images, words, and sounds, and, at any moment, he can choose to capture photographs of the digital dream to download or share them on the social media networks.

Dreams hold relevant messages and memories that we cannot access otherwise. However, its encrypted language makes it difficult to understand, and usually, during the wake, we quickly forget what we have dreamed of. Oneirographia aims to facilitate the remembering, reimagining, and sharing of this important aspect of our lives.

Theatre is a sometimes forgotten casualty of the current pandemic. Social distancing precludes the assembly necessary for participatory theatre. Theatre and theatrical improvisation rely on participants--performers and audiences alike--gathering in the same space, exploiting their physical proximity to tell stories. Because of the limited modalities of communication, virtual gatherings using video-conferencing platforms are, at best, an ersatz solution for audiences longing for connection in an ever more disconnected world. While some performance groups have embraced tele-conferencing and streaming for workshops, practice and performance, many theatre makers and performers are preferring to temporarily pause while waiting for the conditions of performance to resume [1]. We took the opposite view, believing that live theatre cannot wait for the pandemic to wane. 

We therefore built a computer tool for online performance. Our system, called the Virtual Director, enables actors to recreate a feeling of presence with stage partners while performing and storytelling remotely [2]. 

Our research combines cinematic and video communication technologies with the theatrical practice of improvisational and scripted theatre, and aims at recreating presence, virtually.Virtual Director relies on commodity software (TouchDesigner, web browsers), widely adopted video conferencing tools (Zoom, Microsoft Teams) and streaming platforms (YouTube, Twitch)--digital platforms for streaming and video conferencing that we subverted for participatory online performances.

We deployed Virtual Director during community-based performances at the Online Paris Fringe festival. We noticed that the audience was curious about new interaction formats and performance modalities. We believe that our streamed performances redefined the nature of live performance, as we identified four levels of participation: performer, privileged audience member, general audience member, and onlooker who watches the recording of the show. First, our tool enabled visual collocation and presence among performers. Second, Virtual Director enabled visual collocation and audio interaction between selected audience members and the performers, or recreated visual presence if we placed them in a virtual “amphitheatre”. Third, audiences could interact indirectly via chat. Finally, onlookers followed the show via streaming. As a complement to previous analyses of the performers’ experience of presence in a tele-immersive virtual space [2], this paper examines the perception of the performance by audiences and their participation in collective storytelling; we situate our work in literature on improvisation and interactive performance. 

As we performed remotely with multilingual actors from different countries, we exploited live translation and speech recognition technology to enable actors to improvise in multiple languages while being understood by cast members and audiences. Building up on an existing multilingual improv stage show [3], we combined tele-immersion with translation to create a multilingual performance that transcends typical physical limitations of the stage. Our paper concludes with our ongoing work: once we assemble again in a post-pandemic world, we will keep the tele-immersion and translation tools to create mixed-presence connected international shows. 

[1] Berger, "The Forgotten Art of Assembly”, April 2020, retrieved January 2021, https://medium.com/@nicholasberger/the-forgotten-art-of-assembly-a94e16…] Branch et al, “Tele-Immersive Improv”, SIG CHI 2021.[3] Mirowski et al, “Rosetta Code: Improv in Any Language”, Computational Creativity 2020.