Presented at conference or festival

This poster presentation discusses a forthcoming critical making project (part of The Digital Review's special issue on "Critical Making, Critical Design") at the intersections of electronic literature and asynchronous online pedagogy. In this research-creative project, I explore the role of “teacher” as creative maker, designer, and crafter of epistemological experiences. Building on the work of artist-scholar-teachers such as Lynda Barry (2014, 2019), Jody Shipka (2011), Kate Hanzalik (2021), and Hanzalik and Virgintino (2019), I investigate what it means to be a digital designer who cultivates aesthetic learning experiences for my students, with all the wonder, uncertainty, and risk this process entails. 

In the poster session lightning talk, I introduce the pedagogical webcomic (described below) and the theory and design practices behind it. I then compare the affordances and constraints for “instructor as maker” between two pedagogical platforms: a designer-controlled platform created via the “infinite canvas” (McCloud, 2009) of a website in HTML/CSS; and D2L Brightspace, the content management system used at my university. Overall, I ask audience members to consider how we can bring our work as makers and scholars of electronic literature to explore new horizons for engaging, experiential course delivery methods via online platforms. 

“Botanicals” is an interactive webcomic that reimagines an online platform for an asynchronous professional writing course informed by e-literary design. By breaking away from the temporal logics of a course content management system, a webcomic designed from scratch instead allows instructors to use the logics of the “infinite canvas” to craft spaces that foster exploration according to a student’s own pace, sequence, and learning goals. Inspired by interactive webcomics such as Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” (2011) and “Grave of the Lizard Queen” (2013), “Botanicals: An Interactive Pedagogical Webcomic” is built from HTML/CSS with embedded hyperlinked illustrations and other media. Designed around the visual metaphors of a greenhouse and a garden path, the comic offers two interwoven “tracks.” One track addresses students “wandering through” the comic in pursuit of a pedagogical experience, and another track addresses scholarly readers and fellow designer-teachers with “framed reflections” on the pedagogical-aesthetic decisions informing the webcomic’s design process. 

This project emerges from my ongoing work as digital scholarship designer and independent comics creator, in an attempt to bring this critical-creative practice into closer conversation with my teaching practices. Recent global shifts to online learning have offered increased opportunities to design media for students in online environments, via a range of teaching modalities. Responding to these exigencies, I strive to create pedagogical webcomics that are beautiful, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing for their own sake, as works (like Barry’s Syllabus [2014] and Making Comics [2019]) at the intersections of “pedagogical delivery tool” and “aesthetic object.” These interactive comics facilitate pedagogical user experiences (Borgman and McArdle, 2019; Borgman and McArdle, 2021) that invite students into inventive exploration, that will help them design their own learning experiences, and that encourage instructor-designers to bring their critical making imaginations to bear upon teaching as a way of creating knowledge together with students through interactive design.

The interdisciplinary Science Data Center for Literature (SDC4Lit) reflects on the demands that net literature and born-digital archival material place on archiving, research and reading. The main goal is to implement appropriate solutions for a sustainable data lifecycle for the archive and for research purposes, which include introductory uses at university and school level. The focus is on the establishment of distributed long-term repositories for net literature and born-digital archival material and the development of a research platform. The repositories will be regularly expanded by the project and its cooperation partners and will form a hub for harvesting various forms of net literature in the future operation of SDC4Lit. The research platform will offer the possibility of computer-assisted work with the archived material. Since such a repository structure, which integrates collecting, archiving, and analysis, can only be accomplished through interdisciplinary collaboration, the project brings together partners with expertise in the subfields of archives, supercomputing, natural language processing, and digital humanities: The German Literature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv) with a focus on archiving and preservation; the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) with a focus on computing; the Institute for Natural Language Processing and the Institute for Literary Studies at the University of Stuttgart with a focus on NLP, cultural and literary history and digital humanities. 

An important task of the project is the modeling of net literature and born-digital literature, which will initially be carried out in an example-oriented manner in dealing with an already existing corpus of net literature and exampes from the large born-digital collection at DLA. Underlying research on both technical and poetological challenges of digital, non-digital, and post-digital literature, e.g. on questions of genre or on computational approaches towards net literature and literary blogs as digital and networked objects. 

In addition to digital objects and corresponding metadata, the accruing research data are also stored in a sustainable manner. Research data includes, first, research data generated in the course of the project's work, especially data used by regular services on the platform such as named entity recognition trained with data from the archived material. Secondly, the repository should offer the possibility to store research data generated by users of the research platform in a structured way and to make it available for further research. The connection of archival repository, research platform and research data repository follows standard research data management practices (FAIR principles) and works toward the goal to support a sustainable research data lifecycle for archivists and researchers working with electronic literature (on the web) and born-digital literature archived at the DLA archive and potential future cooperating institutions.

Tenure Track is a postmodernist critique of 21st-century academia in the form of a simulation game. In the vein of satirical games like Cow Clicker—a product of “carpentry,” or a strategy for creating philosophical, creative work, according to its designer Ian Bogost—Tenure Track also borrows game mechanics from popular puzzle simulators like Papers, Please, merging the finite potentiality of a critical text with the lightheartedness and non-prescriptiveness of play. Additionally, the simulation game as a genre harkens back to philosophical toys of the 19th century, such as the thaumatrope, the purpose of which was demystification through wonderment. The proposed poster would include imagery from the game, as well as links to interactive components (gameplay footage, demos) and brief descriptions of the mechanics and concept of the game. 

Developed in Unity for desktop and VR over the past year, Tenure Track visually consists of a 3D re-creation of a nondescript office, viewed from a first-person perspective, with every object in the space being manipulable. The goal of the game is to achieve tenure by completing research, grading papers, and communicating with students and administrators. Much of this “work” is mediated through a variety of simulated digital platforms, which are accessed via a desktop monitor and a mobile phone. The centering of platforms underscores the degree to which they are essential to what constitutes labor. Post-pandemic, this can be read as referencing a potentially obsolete “platform”: the physical office. 

As the player performs a litany of menial tasks over the course of a series of seconds-long days, they are interrupted constantly by notifications and knocks at the door. Over time, this produces a simulacrum of the frantic yet mundane administrative role many modern-day academics find themselves “playing” as they strive for the promised land of tenure. The sequence of predefined yet somewhat open-ended steps in the tenure process lends itself to this kind of gamification, which resists the interpretation of a prescribed process as fair or logical. The many small but cumulatively important decisions players make imparts a feeling of decision fatigue common to most knowledge work, playing with the assumption many outside of academe have of the professoriate as belonging to an exceptional, noble profession. What is not known until the game’s conclusion is that, once a player reaches one of several possible “endings,” the days continue to loop continuously. 

While the game rewards literacy of both games and academe by subverting the former and reifying the latter, arguably the most satisfying interactions are the ones that are, in reality, the most disruptive (dropping the mobile phone and cracking the screen) or least salient (disposing of empty beverage containers in a recycling bin). Those who misunderstand the tenure track job as a stairway to heaven, or even as fundamentally different from other types of white-collar jobs, stand to see it in an uncanny light. 

My poster will be full of works of participants of the first Russian Laboratory of Mediapoetry 101 for teenagers (12-19 years old).It just turned out that the fate of the project is closely related to circumstances of pandemic that is why a search for new forms of creative cooperation, ways of communication and methods of creating new projects has become overarching issue of the work of the laboratory participants.

I am the curator of the Mediapoetry Laboratory 101. Although “curator” is poorly conclusive definition. An ideologist, a dreamer, an inspirer, the one who has got a grant (financial support) from the government for a genre of mediapoetry which is not recognized in Russia yet.The project got the grant in February, 2020. My gladness did not see any limits. Off-line sessions had to start from April, 2020, but everyone knows what prevented it to happen.

The terms of the project were extended for several times in accordance with a level of my optimism. Either to autumn or to winter. Due to formal limitations and restrictions of the grant I found myself among different restrictions: necessity to hold the Laboratory not later the spring 2021, to hold at least some meetings offline. But at the same moment the government makes new resolutions not in advance enough. All of us know about new rules approximately a day before the come into force. And for the audience of my laboratory the restrictions were the most severe ones.

However I believe that, such disempowerment is breeding ground for creators. Isn’t it allowed to gather in the room? We will prepare a media poetic walk&performance. Isn’t it allowed to come up to each other closer than 1,5 meter? We will make a performance about disengagement and invisible relations. Isn’t it allowed to go out? We are glad to remember about air mail and surface mail, about telegrams and helium balloons.

Students of the Laboratory have been already chosen and are on the point of starting the work. In April I will see different projects in mediapoetry genre: games, performances, chat-poetry, texting-games, locative narrative etc. I am sure that we are waited by interesting experience of creative work. The teenagers are very flexible they needed just a little time to get used to new communicative reality of the pandemic, switching over to distant studying was easier for them than for teachers.To my mind, adolescents have better skills of new media language. They are more organic in using it that means they have greater chances to leap forward from creative and semantic point of view.Together with this young audience we are going to discuss about culture of platforms, how they have changed visually and our feelings about communication with society, what we have known about ourselves during lockdown and how to create and keep creative collaborations.

Results of this breathtaking work will be presented by me at the conference as a poster which unites works of the Laboratory participants, their thoughts, discoveries and predictions.

Speak, Pen is a web-based art tool programmed in JavaScript. It’s a drawing tool that replaces the traditional paintbrush with custom text inputs. Users are free to use text on the canvas to make visual poetries, interactive drawings, and performances, etc. The work explores the materiality of text, and ways in which users experiment with texts beyond their semantic functions.

Created during a radical tool workshop at SFPC, Speak, Pen takes inspiration from other “radical” tools that encourage DIY spirit and playfulness. It is not just a digital drawing tool, but rather, a community that aims to inspire makers to experiment with texts beyond their daily functions. It is something that can be performed, alone, or alongside others. I intend to blur the lines between users and the creators or mediators of a platform. Our community guidelines are based not on rules for how to use the text brush, but examples of how past audiences have experimented with it. The meaning of the works lies not within the interpretation of the texts in the drawings, but the different engagements with the tool within and outside its community.

(Source: ELO 2021)

During the winter of 2017, a tree died in my front yard. Afterwards, a gale uprooted it and smashed it into lumber. But before the fire, new trees emerged. Árboles de mi Desierto: Wind Songs is a recombinatory video poem shaped by my dead tree as it was documented misusing a panoramic camera in order to generate impossible landscapes of bark, wood, assorted detritus and desert sand. The words, sometimes fleeting and otherwise stark, work together with the images to create something akin to a palimpsest of reflections on the human penchant for unnatural progress, growth, vertical lifestyles and upward mobility. It uses espanglish as the lingua franca of the MX-US border where I reside in San Agustin, a small, very much under developed rural town outside of Ciudad Juárez.

This is a Covid, no touching, rethinking of the digital version of the Trajectory Cabinet, which, in physical form, transforms the 32 drawers/key presses of a library card catalogue into an interactive artwork. Pulling the drawers open and pushing them closed is how the work is read. And each drawer connects to a place on a map of Brisbane, triggering poetic elements. Overall, the Trajectory Cabinet tells the story of environmental destruction and consequences in Brisbane Australia. There are 32 drawers/key presses total, each with their own poetic/artwork element. And there are 10 hidden artworks, generated by secret combinations of drawers.

In every step of this interactive game-poem find the point-and-click trigger, to make the dialogue evolve. The game consists of approximately forty screens/events, which you may read or explore until you get to the end. Some times you may be asked to write down an intimate thought. All answers typed and submitted by players are collected to create a collective think-tank of the overall game experience.

The proposed work is an ode to the struggles of human communication. It reflects on the hardships of unfortunate dialogues, the splendor of reaching to the other side, the rise and fall of human connectedness, the agonies of stray meanings and words. Expressed through the poetics of weather phenomena, this conceptually driven interactive work represents the mental landscape between two lovers, a parallel metaphor for the contemporary digitally mediated condition. Early cyberspatial theories referred to an erotic ontology of digital experience. Michael Heim described the platonic dimensions of an augmented Eros. Roland Barthes on the other hand described language as the skin with which we struggle to touch the 'other'. In this game-poem, senses, meanings and ideas appear to be all permeated by the ‘spell’ of technology, a rhetorical as well as an erotic act of mediation through different worlds. The reader/player is asked to become part of the dipole, to meander through poetic texts and tormented emotions, at times linear, other times bifurcating, while exploring a dialogue ‘atmosphere’ inspired by visual poetry. Endeavoring to reach the 'other side' through the use of spoken language, this piece of work is an affective journey to the tempests of a fallen dialogue.