Presented at conference or festival

The Reverberatory Narrative: Toward Story as a Multisensory Network is an evolving, transmedia series that employs print, film, installation and digital practices in the assembling and disassembling of lyric essays, poetry, graphic design, photography and physical artifacts in an experimental documentary of memory, time and story. The initial form of this documentary work was an installation at the photography gallery Agnes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1993, titled "Undressing Audrey," in which the viewer physically "undressed" the book, slipping text from a woman's garments, one button and layer at a time. Through subsequent, increasingly digital interpretations, Pretty relied on a layered structure that attempted to approximate the original installation experience through a series of overlapping narrative threads that could be sorted and resorted by different contexts and media types, such as time, place, character, artifact, image, audio, and video, among others. Its current experiment extends the work to augmented reality in an effort to return Pretty to its origin as installation — as a multi-sensory experiment in physical space with a digital layer — the final leg of a journey began in 1989.

(Source: ELO Conference site)

Stéphane Mallarmé's “Demon of Analogy” is a prose poem about demonic nature of mishearing. Francis Ford Coppola's “The Conversation” is about the demonic technologies that allow us to hear all-too-well. Joe Milutis' “Stéphane Mallarmé's 'The Conversation,'” with little to no editing mashes up these classic texts, to suggest that one may be a mishearing (or spooky translation) of the other. In addition, the original text of the Mallarmé poem is translated by way of a number of bending techniques that, while getting back to the original sound and meaning of the French, bend, distort and remix the original. This project is part of a larger scholarly and creative exploration of experimental translation as an extension of remix and appropriation practices. A number of chapbooks, videos, lectures and performances have emerged from this project, including Monkey pOm! (a translation of Hanuman Chalisa), Mao Vincit Omnia (a translation of Mao's Little Red Book), The Numbers (a translation of a German translation of Robert Creeley's number poems), and Twenty Beloved French Poems, Treated Poorly (a translation of 19th-century French poetry, of which “Stéphane Mallarmé's 'The Conversation'” is a part). (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

How do we perform ourselves in digital space? In Not Not 0.1, Catherine Siller uses her own custom software and a motion capture camera to generate projected text and images of herself. She immerses herself in these projections and dances between the virtual and the real in a duet with her digital double. The piece destabilizes language and gesture as it repeatedly redraws the boundary between the physical and the digital self.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Wandering Meimei / Meimei Liu Lang Ji is a bilingual interactive fiction app designed for mobile interfaces for the Chinese market. This story is an intertext to the traditional Chinese comic strip, Sanmao Liu Lang Ji (Wandering Sanmao), a homeless boy. Meimei, meaning little sister, is an allegorical character and contemporary representation of the largest migrant population the world has ever seen: the migrant female factory worker. Through the app, you can make contact with the character Meimei who works in a smartphone factory in the Pearl River Delta city Guangzhou. Meimei's only technology and access point to the outside world is through her own phone. The social media hub and interface enable you to enter and become a part of Meimei's story.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS is a web audio adventure about the meaning of death. It draws audio drama, audio tours and alternate reality gaming. The use of audio is an attempt to create a sense of unity in a highly fragmented experience. I see the techniques and experience of audio tours as a way to bring disparate elements together. Just as an audio tour involves guiding a listener to different places, this audio experience guides players to different websites. I include both custom and existing sites, and so this project continues my interest in pervasive design: where the players’ world is part of the fictional world. The story is born out of the pain of suddenly losing my mother, and facing the meaninglessness of my life. I got past heaviness of the subject matter by drawing on my early days in sketch comedy theatre, unifying the disparate times of my life.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

The Obsolete Book in a Post-Obsolete World as Represented by a Post-Obsolete Book About Dance is a multimedia archival rhizome ecology in ten parts, and a reflection on the obsolescence of obsolescence, documented on the cloud, and open-sourced as a defense against post-post-obsolescence. It is a performable website, a pseudo-academic lecture, and a dance about architecture, in the spirit of Michelle Ellsworth. It exists as a website, and/or an installation, and/or a 10-minute performance. The book is dead. Long live the book. (Source: ELO Conference website)

Teenage heartache has become a public commodity. On social media, young people now broadcast the most intimate moments of their lives to a global audience. Context collapse has replaced the small, specific audiences we once opened our hearts to with a vast, undifferentiated swarm of humanity. Falling in and out of love, breaking up and reconciling, seeking solace or revenge – all are enacted in the midst of the data stream. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) explores this new, performative model for love and loss that is emerging in networked environments. Deploying what might be described as a “poetics of search”, the artwork sources relevant tweets from Twitter in real-time, performs string manipulation and anonymizes them, then assembles the fragments into a three-act dialogue that is projected onto the installation space. What results is an emergent narrative that reflects the new modes of online interaction unique to millennials – but also the timeless tropes, customs, dreams and anxieties experienced by every generation. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) was first presented in 2013 at the Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, Australia. (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

Abra is an exploration and celebration of the potentials of the book in the 21st century. A collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and a potentially infinite number of readers, the project merges physical and digital media, integrating a hand-made artist's book with an iPad app to play with the notion of the “illuminated” manuscript and let readers "hold the light" of language. In the artist’s book, the poems grow and mutate as the reader turns the pages, blurring the boundary between text and illumination, marginalia and body. Animating across the surface, the poems coalesce and disperse in an ecstatic helix of words, taking turns "illuminating" one another's margins and interstices.They play with the mutation of language, both by forming new portmanteaus and conjoined phrases, and also through references to fecundity as it manifests in the natural world, the body, human history, popular culture, decorative arts, and architecture, placing the shifting evolution and continuous overlap of all these spheres in dialogue with the ever-changing technology of the book. The iPad version of Abra, which provides a physical backdrop for the artist's book into which it is inserted, extends and revels in this ephemerality, putting special emphasis on interactivity to highlight the role of the reader. The poems spring to life onscreen: not only do they conjoin and separate, with a swipe of his or her finger, readers may join the collaboration and mutate the text further, creating new juxtapositions and surprising turns of phrase. Their texts provide scores for potential performances of the work, making Abra function much like the magic word of its origin–abracadabra–as an unpredictable living text. We are interested in both exhibiting the hybrid artist's book / iPad app and performing from the work. We would also be happy to give a presentation, if that is of interest. While the project is a collaboration between 3 people, only Amaranth and Ian are applying to present it. We both plan to attend the conference and are especially interested in the opportunity to expand the performative possibilities of the text, which to date has been performed by Kate and Amaranth in conjoined costume. Abra is being produced under an Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. The project will launch this spring. For exhibition, our piece requires an iPad running iOS7 and a podium. We can provide the artist's book. For performance, we can provide iPads and adapters. Amaranth Borsuk's books include Between Page and Screen and Handiwork. She teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell. Kate Durbin's books include The Ravenous Audience and E! Entertainment, among others. She teaches at Whitter College. Ian Hatcher is a text/sound artist and programmer living in New York.

(Source: Author's abstract)

This piece won the 2017 Turn on Literature Prize.

An infinitely scaling story about the possibilities moments can contain. Written for "Strange Times / Strange Tellers," a night of experimental fiction.

Curlew is an interactive, multimedia poem about one man's encounter with the forces of nature. The narrative centers on Catsinas, a fisherman living alone in a makeshift shack on Curlew, one of several barrier islands in the Gulf Coast known as the Chandeleurs. Based on a true account, the story chronicles the man's futile attempt to save Curlew's shoreline to a storm's destruction of his adopted home.