English

The global COVID-19 pandemic has made me further address the value that artistic research has for our mental and psychological health and its significance in community healing. I have, for a while now, used digital technologies to create poetic spaces of shared personal stories interconnecting narratives to bring up issues of power, territory, displacement, historical memory, gender and violence. The need to live, work, socialise at a distance, through digital platforms has highlighted the importance of finding ways to share stories, connect and heal through community creative research practice. How can we engage global communities through electronic literature art practices?

This paper will explore the use of digital methods and tools to conduct and disseminate research in interdisciplinary projects alongside artists and communities and will address the motivations to researching with participants. It will draw from the findings coming up from our workshop in ‘Creative Digital Practices: Community Platform for Healing and Mapping’, (also submitted to the ELO conference).

As co-investigator of the AHRC funded project Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict my role was leading the creative team working on the artistic research project titled Invisible Voices: Women Victims of the Colombian Conflict and give voice to the women in their participation in the construction of memory. This was an enriching experience where both parties - the academics/artists and the community group – gained knowledge through the physical co-creative workshops with tailored designed research methods for this specific context, and the subsequent digital documentation and archival of the artistic experience. Taking this project and others as core studies, this paper will address questions in connection to community research; the value of creative storytelling and artistic approaches to share personal stories; and discuss pertinent issues in connection to the value, impact and societal change these projects can contribute, not only to the specific group, but to society in general.

It was in Summer 2020 that Seraphine - a ‘virtual influencer’ in the mould of Brüd’s Lil Miquela – began building an audience on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud. Each of her posts served to flesh out her persona: that of an anxiety-prone aspiring musician with an ‘adorkably’ girly personal style and a cute pet cat. In September it emerged that Seraphine was a new playable character in e-sports giant Riot’s League of Legends (Riot 2009), a free-to-play ‘multiplayer online battle arena’ funded by the sale of sale of ‘skins’ and cosmetics items that allow players to customise the appearance of their chosen characters. While the character proved highly popular, the launch was not without controversy, with some pundits finding Riot’s bids for ‘relatability’ clumsy and their portrayal of the Seraphine’s mental health issues ‘perverse’ and ‘offensive’ – especially when set against the backdrop of a worsening pandemic (Jackson 2020). The controversy intensified when, in a post published two months later, Medium user Step-nie (2020) recounted her ‘brief relationship with a Riot employee’ and outlined her belief that the company had essentially plagiarised her online persona to create Seraphine, a character who ‘looks like me, and talks like me, and sounds like me, and draws like me’. 

The Seraphine incident highlights how shifts in the development, distribution and monetisation of digital games driven by the rise of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2017) are fostering new approaches to characterisation and storytelling - approaches informed by (and often modelled on) the ‘self-branding’ strategies (Duffy and Hund 2015) and ‘small storytelling’ practices (Georgakopoulou 2016) of young social media users. For a sense of how these approaches diverge from previous paradigms we might look to The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog 2020). Naughty Dog’s blockbuster sequel confirms that gaming has yet to shake the case of ‘cinema envy’ that Eric Zimmerman diagnosed it with almost two decades ago (2002, 125). If the game’s photorealistic visuals and its use of state-of-the-art performance capture techniques mean it often looks like a film, its approach to plotting and characterisation is similarly steeped in Hollywood conventions, and entails subjecting protagonists Ellie and Abby to a series of life-threatening trials and life-changing tests of character set in motion by a shocking inciting incident. But while the game was one of the highest-grossing releases of last year, as a story-led singleplayer console game it is also a specimen of what many consider a dying breed. Drawing on accounts of fictional characters as ‘quasi-persons’ (Frow 2014), studies of transmedia characterisation (Thon 2019; Steinberg 2012; Azuma 2009) and work on games and social media, this paper asks what Ellie, Abby and Seraphine can tell us about the functions of fictional characters in an entertainment ecosystem being reshaped by platformisation.

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.

What Do We Call This?

Between 2019 – 2020 The University of South Wales collaborated with a consortium of creative commercial practitioners dubbed Fictioneers in a UKRI funded, Audience of the Future R&D demonstrator project designed to further develop digital storytelling within the UK Creative Industries. Using the popular Wallace and Gromit IP, the consortium drew upon their combined skills in games production, animation, creative marketing and new technology development to create a location-based experience targeting young audiences entitled Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up, designed to propel new and playful identities for a traditional narrative media.

Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up is an ambitious and complex production. Through their research and development efforts, Fictioneers sought to develop a viable production alternative to branching tree, digital story-telling structures which risk combinatorial explosion. Instead, the application delivers a rich tapestry of serialised, short media elements. Linked by a central, enhanced mobile application, the multi-platform media include YouTube videos and comics, as well as augmented reality game-play challenges. The application aims to engage new audiences and provide innovative ways for long term fans to interact with media favourites. Mimicking a variety of social newsfeed items these media elements are variable, chunked and optional to view. They are also pre-determined and closely networked via the central newsfeed. The story-flow is complex nevertheless, incorporating enhanced augmented reality story-telling, multi-platform media and mobile game-play.

The hybridity of this experience posed new challenges regarding the most definitive way to describe the experience on offer, as well as the most helpful frameworks to evaluate it. With few alternative terms on hand to describe this genre, the term experience was often used to describe the sort of hybrid encounter made possible via this complex network of media influences, but experience is still an open-ended concept that can be hard to pin-point. Alternative terms like digital story-telling may also be useful place-holders to help delineate interactive and narrativised experiences from traditional media encounters, nevertheless such terminology is still only useful to an extent. Narrative frameworks such as characterisation, pace and tone are relevant to projects like Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up, but they don’t capture all the elements that audiences encounter in real time. Describing the experience as a game can be equally problematic, since it can set up expectations of a very different type of challenge-driven, dramatic experience than this application delivers.

In this paper I explore what additional insights can be gained by also considering the interplay of technology and creativity within the research and development process. Technology is a defining feature of this digital storytelling experience. Augmented reality technologies, for example, offer dynamic, enhanced tracking and visualisation opportunities, whilst also demanding strict file-size constraints, comprehensive audience testing and extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. By evaluating the creative and technical processes shaping the development of this hybrid media identity, I explore the ways in which any effective definition of this new type of distributed genre is likely to be as much about co-ordination, as new experience.

Following the increasing hypertext practice in digital culture over the past decades, reinventing the medial mode of academic publication becomes desirable to open up new research practices and knowledge production. New digital platforms are taking practice-based steps towards more multimodal publications. This paper examines the born-digital book Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop which was published in the humanities publication platform Scalar. In Pathfinders, four classic works of electronic literature are documented using a combination of Traversals (filmed walkthroughs by authors and readers), filmed interviews and carefully described and photographed physical materials. As such, Pathfinders is positioned as a DH practice to "rescue" early works of electronic literature from both technological obsolescence and oblivion.

Using the ‘Follow the Thing’ method, I trace the various stages in the publication to induce the themes that are important for born-digital publications. The first stage is the technical platform Scalar and its technological affordances. The second stage is the scholars’ adoption and appropriation of the platform for their own purposes. The third stage is the media text, the born-digital book publication, and its media-specific arguments. The fourth and final stage is the reader’s experience of the multimodal book.

Through a combination of interviews (with author Dene Grigar and two readers), textual analysis, and literature review, I distill the themes that are key in this publication. The first theme is platform adoption. Here, I focus on the technological affordances of Scalar in relation to the use of Scalar by the authors and readers of Pathfinders. This includes a discussion on software sustainability in terms of labor as well as a media analysis on the 'bookishness' of the work. A second theme that arose is the implementation in institutional and academic publication structures. Previously mainly researched in the context of digital pedagogy, I take this to a new level by considering how Pathfinders has fared as a seminal publication in the field of electronic literature and the role of accessibility in its functioning as an academic resource. Third, I focus on the technological context, which includes a reflection on the embedded media as an iteration of the metainterface paradigm and the role of documented physical materials in the understanding of early electronic literature. Finally, I discuss the theme of documentation and publication as a research value. Pathfinders is a prime example of the argument the documentation needs to be at the center of research on ephemeral media, using the platform's tool and functionalities to highlight this in the book.

My video presentation and article provide a nuanced understanding of Pathfinders, using video clips from the various interviews. I take my analysis into a broader perspective by considering how this understanding can be extrapolated for other born-digital publications.

Drawing parallels between the open web platform and the open way a fictional body can be constructed from a text, this paper explores the creative and ethical strategies employed in the creation of a feminist interactive digital fiction for body image narrative therapy, advocacy and plurality. The digital fiction was created with and for young women and gender non-conforming individuals from diverse intersectional backgrounds.If, as Possible Worlds theory posits, the real world serves as a model for the mental construction of textual fictional storyworlds, it follows that our experience and knowledge of real bodies, including our own bodies, serve as a model for the mental construction of textual fictional bodies. Unless a text draws attention to the physical appearance of a fictional character, the reader will tend to assume, according to Ryan's 'principle of minimal departure' (1991), that their body conforms to a familiar or generic norm (two eyes, two arms, two legs, etc.).The main character of the Writing New Bodies project's digital fiction, Jordan, has body image issues relating to her size and shape. This becomes evident from her negative self-talk. Jordan describes herself as fat, flabby and repulsive, but is that true in the textual actual world or is it a distortion of her body image problem? In our interactive text-based fiction, where the reader-player makes choices on Jordan's behalf that can affect her body image, there is no narratorial voice to authoritatively describe her body and none of the characters are ever depicted in mimetic visual form. Therefore Jordan's body is open to interpretation, open to (re)construction. Although normative concepts of the body are insidious, the reader-player has some latitude to give body to her in their own idiosyncratic way, perhaps empathically shaping her in their own self-image. This openness is a deliberate strategy to make the bibliotherapeutic benefits and socio-political commitments of the work as fluid and widely accessible as possible.Similarly, with accessibility in mind, we chose to build the digital fiction on and for the open web platform using a mobile-first, responsive web design approach for the greatest reach. But the affinity between these twin approaches runs deeper. Both the refusal to visually represent a (female-gendered or sexed-coded) body in a digital fiction and the refusal to use proprietary closed platforms represent a form of resistance to the normative forces of cultural hegemony within neoliberalism; not least because the big tech platforms that want to lock us in to proprietary systems are amongst the most prolific purveyors of imagery and messaging that contribute to body dissatisfaction in young people. In this context, choosing the open web platform is a feminist strategy that pragmatically and aesthetically underpins the concerns of our digital fiction, where the body is relatively open to (re)construction rather than defined and limited by the restrictive norms and unattainable ideals commonly found in digital media representations of bodies.

Early cyberspatial theories reflected on the qualities of computer mediated experience by introducing aspects of immateriality, incorporeality, symbolism, abstraction, as well as exploring the mental, perceptual, and psychological dimensions of digital experience itself. Electronic interactions have been described as platonically erotic, transcendental, allegorical, even ecstatic conditions, that still seem timely and compelling nowadays, even since the pre-pandemic era. Human mind appeared as an inherent ingredient of the digital phenomenon since its birth. On the other side, ideas such as ‘body amnesia’ or ‘fleshworld’, emerged denoting the rigidity of the physical body to reach the other side of the screen.These days, the superfluous, excessive, sometimes obsessive use of digital technology, pervasive software as well as the internet of things have surpassed the Cartesian mind-body dualism and have given rise to novel hybrid approaches of our contemporary relation to technology. Hybridity has created space for intertextual interpretations of experience, that do not divide the notion of mind and body, but comment on the complex interactions of self with digital culture, through numerous differentiated contexts, evolving cyborg ontologies, alternate bodies, human-nonhuman systems, transformative personas, all rendered through a daily mediated reality.The study attempts to look at the mind-body ever-present conundrum, through a quest on digital spatiality. Digital experience has always been inseparable from the metaphoric use of spatial concepts. At the same time, textual space constitutes an allegorical or symbolic construction with its own architecture, ambience, and other characteristics. Space is not only relating to the strict conception of geometry, physics, or mathematics, but also to an anthropological reading of existence, a quality that is often elusive and immeasurable, thus it helps define abstract, psychological, experiential phenomena, or in other words, that which is in fact indefinable.In this context, self takes the role of a mental dynamic, while space is interpreted as a metaphoric, volatile construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from digital culture. The idea of digital experience is approached though a series of textual-spatial concepts and projects that reflect on space that is constructed in the interstitial area between the digitally platformed self and the mediated environment. This exploration takes the form of creative writings, chatbot interviews, exercises of verbal configurations, visual poetics, interactive game-poems and other abstracts of writing in both artistic and educational contexts. The overall idea of the digital mind-body interpretation takes the form of a series of mental spatialities that comment on our contemporary way of being in the digital world. In architecture, to read means to uniquely understand and thoroughly grasp the phenomena of the surrounding environment - in this case, space is translated in an altered vocabulary that helps us understand what it means to ‘read’ the contemporary self in a platformed culture.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the first confinement measures in most countries, COVID-19 has been a defining factor of our lives through 2020 into 2021. Due to the pandemic, all our lives were drastically changed; not simply by the losses and inevitable pain that comes with the disease, but also by the way in which it completely shifted the way in which our lives were organized. Where activities were once separated between the “inside” and the “outside” there is now only the “offline” and the “online,” both confined within our own household. Work and education are done remotely when possible, and socializing has abruptly become a virtual experience. Even attempts at socializing “in real life” must always be monitored by strict rules of social distancing and the wearing of a mask, which are marked by an absence of physicality. As a way to cope with such a situation, people have found ways to transfer their social lives online. How many Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving or the Winter Holidays on Zoom with their families in 2020? As we moved into an online social space, I found it interesting to look around me and see the reaction of my fellow students, teachers, or friends. Some of them could hardly adapt to the sudden need for technology, which they had never been comfortable using. Others lamented the lack of genuine human interaction that came with meeting people by pure chance; in the Zoom era, all is scheduled, after all. These reactions struck me in different ways, as all I could see was my acquaintances suddenly walking into a lifestyle that I recognized as my own and describing it as a living hell.

In this paper I want to engage with the ways in which online interactions can provide an alternative to social contact, especially in terms of physicality. Specifically, I want to focus on how video games offer ways to circumvent the frustration of distance and virtuality in order to offer new approaches to thinking about physical interactions. This paper will be based in great part on my own experiences as an online gamer, interacting with friends living across the world, and having to find ways through gaming in which one could find intimacy, physical contact, and at times eroticism. My argument is that while all media can offer some form of erotic or intimate interaction with its content, gaming, and especially online gaming, can push those boundaries further through a process of incarnation and transposition of the self into an avatar. This paper starts with the ways in which a player can interact with non-player characters and find solace in the virtual intimacy provided by said characters. This paper will address how an online interface allows for a different physicality through the control of an avatar. Finally, I want to discuss the specificities of VR socializing when it comes to experiences of virtual physical interactions.

In 2015 a colleague and I set up a Tumblr and Twitter account called Crap Futures. The tagline was a quote from Ray Bradbury: ‘People ask me to predict the Future, when all I want to do is prevent it.’ At the time it felt slightly pessimistic — not to mention unscholarly, as we were using the blog to work out ideas from our research. Then came the double surprise of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election, and by 2020 ‘crap futures’ felt downright tame, almost conventional wisdom. At the same time we felt it was important not to fall into the trap of doomscrolling, apocalyptic paralysis, and the aesthetics of collapse. Instead we should start building the future we want — a point we made in our manifesto — and hold onto a glimmer of hope.The flourishing of manifestos of all types showed 2020 to be a period of both action and reflection. More precisely it was a year of reflection (spring) followed by action (summer) followed by hope (autumn) followed by reaction and acceleration into near collapse (winter). The manifesto is the ur-genre of the avant-garde, reflecting (and often encouraging) crisis and upheaval in politics, society and the arts. The genre’s high period, what Mary Ann Caws calls the ‘manifesto moment’, was a century ago during a similarly tumultuous decade — 1909 to 1919 — the decade following the first manifesto of Italian Futurism; there have been several waves since. Most studies of the manifesto, however, were written before 2008, so they (largely) miss the latest wave — the digital manifesto — and the unprecedented changes that accompanied this newly invigorated form between 2008-2020. I wrote about some of these issues in The Manifesto Handbook, which came out in February. In March, Breanne Fahs’ extensive anthology Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution was published. Through social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as niche and alternative platforms, the manifesto has reclaimed its function as a primary marker of history in the making. But whether analogue or digital, the manifesto has always served extremely diverse aims and movements.In this paper I will survey some of the dozens of manifestos that have appeared online in the past year and attempt to draw some conclusions and place them in a wider context of online culture. As I note in my book, manifestos are always at the bleeding edge of culture and politics. The threats they contain are potent because they are sincere: there is always enough instability, enough wildness about the manifesto to give it real menace — the possibility, near or distant, of real danger, real action, actual revolution. What kinds of manifestos will we need going forward into the 2020s — a decade that (let’s face it) is not off to an easy start, and that urgently requires our active engagement as scholars and citizens? What kinds of manifestos do we deserve, and what kind will we get?

William James famously defined attention in terms of focused concentration: an act of zooming in on one out of many possible objects. In our current hypermediated moment, such acts of focused attention have become more difficult, to the point where we have come to rely on multiple sources of input in order to be able to concentrate. How to decide what to attend to and what to disregard becomes a pressing aesthetic, ethical, and even political issue (if it hadn’t always been).Traditionally, literary studies have celebrated the close reading of texts in a mode of ‘deep’, focused attention, as a core skill. Yet in our present attention economy, where we are bombarded with texts and images from multiple sources and channels on a daily basis, attentional flexibility and modulation become sought-after skills as well. There is simply too much to read, and we do not always know beforehand what might turn out to be of importance.In this paper, I examine a range of works in electronic and digital literature to go beyond the juxtaposition of close or deep literary reading on the one hand, and hyperreading as modality of the information age on the other. I argue that this binary fails to grasp the different rhythms and modalities of literary reading. This becomes especially clear in the case of electronic works that incite us to combine a whole range of attentional stances and foci from broad to narrow, vigilant to absorbed to distracted, and deep to hyper. How do contemporary and older works of electronic literature both reflect and anticipate different modes of reading and attention? How does the design of the text and its utilization of platform affordances incite us to modulate our reading rhythm and attention?I examine such diverse works as Stuart Moulthrop’s hegirascope (1995); Jim Andrews’ Stir Fry Texts (1999-); the serial flash texts of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries; With those We Love Alive by Porpentine Charity Heartscape (Twine, 2014); Pry (Tender Claws, 2014); The Ice-Bound Concordance (Reid & Jacob Garb 2014), and the novella and ‘meditative story app’ Lotus (‘t Hooft & Freeke 2019). I make an inventory of devices that structure attention, including alterations of speed, expanding and contracting text, foregrounding and backgrounding devices, maximalist and minimalist forms, ‘useless’ text, pop ups, and time outs. Thus, I map out the ‘rules of un/notice’ (Rabinowitz 1987) for multimodal, digital works of literature, with attention to their platform- and media specific affordances. In my conclusion, I reflect on possible uses of electronic literature to inspire strategies of attending in increasingly information-rich environments.