English

We live in a world where everyone with access to technology can publish. From YouTubers to Instagram-influencers, from gamers watching each other play online to writers self-publishing, content is everywhere. And yet, the biggest company with its most promising title and the podcaster putting their first episode online share the same problem: how to find an audience. Over recent years, digital technologies have fostered the proliferation of new platforms for publishing and broadcasting, and the rise of video streaming has further dissolved the boundaries between these two modes. Publishing no longer refers only to words but also images, video and sound and its reach is pervasive and global. Amplified Publishing, part of the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D project, a collaboration between four universities in the UK is examining what publishing has come to mean across sectors, platforms and media and explores its future direction. As a wide-scale research project, it looks at questions such as; What does ‘publishing’ mean in the 21st Century? How will the increased availability of seamless and synchronous visual and audio media enhance and expand traditional media, like books and magazines? What does personalisation offer to both content creators, their publishers, and their audiences? With the rise of visual storytelling, what is the future of reading? And, most importantly of all, who are our audiences, where are our audiences, and what does our audience want? This paper addresses this question of audience and seeks to understand specifically how narrative-based digital publishing, a theme within the Amplified Publishing project, can reach an active audience across platforms. In particular, it questions how audiences experience innovative forms and how their experiences can be mediated and guided by writers, producers and technologists. It uses findings drawn from an understanding of audience from electronic literature and ambient literature to draw conclusions about the future of audiences as they experience digital published content across platforms. It reaches beyond the Covid-19 digital landscape and seeks to understand how audiences have changed and what they might be looking for next. 

Subject-making is profoundly aesthetic. In the current moment, of data-intensive cultures and identity wars, the subjects that are made stem from machine learning techniques that engage aesthetics differently, nonetheless profoundly. My talk will focus on subjects of data abstractions, poetics of idealisation and aesthetic recognition. 

Unlike other forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning that are used for creative production, female-presenting virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant are not designed to be collaborators nor content producers, but rather, to serve as mouthpieces and platforms for others' pre-designated scripts to be performed. This talk examines the gendered design and creative limitations of AI virtual assistants as part of a growing body of studies in the systemic biases of technological design

In my essay titled “Third Generation Electronic Literature” I describe this new wave of electronic literature as one “based on social media networks and widely adopted platforms and apps” which is less interested in the Modernist, avant garde, or experimental poetics of 2nd wave elit. In 2019, I described that relationship between generations as analogous to popular culture versus high culture divides. More recently Nacher (“Weeding” 2020) and Berens (“Decolonize” 2020) initiated a conversation that connects 3rd gen elit to decolonization of the field, and I elaborated on that idea in my 2021 lecture, titled “Technological Imperialism and Digital Writing,” by discussing the history of digital technologies, their spread throughout the world, and how they establish an imperialistic and colonial relationship with the world, situating the US and its allies at the center of a global digital empire.My proposed paper will examine key open and proprietary platforms-- such as programming languages, the Web, Unicode, Flash, iOS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram-- focusing on their spread, access, cultural and ideological underpinnings, potential for electronic literature, audiences, and adoption. It will advance the claim that all these technologies are hegemonic, historically privileging and centering the US and its allies in an uneven relationship to the rest of the world by creating dependence on the platforms they develop and profit from. This analysis will be supported by the research and critiques of digital infrastructure, search engine platforms, the semantic capitalism of interfaces, and digital colonialism by Domenico Piermonte, Safiya Noble, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold, and Herbert Shiller, respectively. In highlighting some of the dependencies and varying barriers to access these platforms create I will interrogate the notion that open platforms like the Web or programming languages are less complicit than private commercial platforms in creating and perpetuating digital colonialism.The essay will expand on the work of Eugenio Tisselli, Rui Torres, and Claudia Kozak’s by exploring how electronic literature uses, engages, and challenges digital technologies enacting strategies of resistance against the political, commercial, and cultural underpinnings of digital platforms. I conclude by discussing how electronic literature-- of all generations-- helps advance the common goals of widespread adoption of digital writing practices and decolonization of the field while interrogating the usefulness of generational frameworks when considered in a global context.