Author's reading from work for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Mo) 2017 The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex.
The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex is 800-page novel generated by a Python script.
This presentation regards to development of a place-based, geotagged, online mapping of an innovative, mobile phone-native, spoken word genre of poetry. The website www.phonemeproject.com hosts poems that are left as messages by calling 1-604-PHONEME (746-6363) and leaving your name, location of the call or topical location of the poem, title of the poem, and then recording a poem of up to four minutes in length. The poem is pinned on an interactive map that features a google street view image of the location, the MP3 audio file, and in some cases the text of the poem. Longer poems can serialized. The intent of this project is to give voice to community-based writing about real places and spaces within the community. As such, it began with a year of workshops conducted in the downtown east side of Vancouver, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in North America, in order that poets in the community to speak back to media representations of their neighbourhood. We have moved on to working with schools, providing workshops for hundreds of students in British Columbia, Canada. These workshops provide instruction in creative uses of mobile phones and techniques for performance of spoken word poetry, as well as touching on broader issues related to tagging and identity. The intent of this project is to offer a form of social media for the sharing of poetry and networking among poets, and as well, to provide a means for others to get a poet’s-eye-view on locations around the world. The site can be navigated by location, by contributing poet, or by a reverse-chronological tour through posted poems (or phonemes). We are currently working on automating this initiative with innovative tagging and search functions, as well as user-curated content management. This presentation will include the opportunity for participants to follow some of our writing workshop templates, create a phoneme (a Phone Poem), and have it pinned by location on our interactive map. The presentation will review some of the technical challenges and opportunities that the project has encountered over the two years since it began. As such, this presentation focuses on two of the thematic threads of the ELO 2018 conference, namely “Mobile technologies’ effect on writing and reading habits” and “Spoken screens: the gap between performance and presence” by providing a sense of how spoken word can function online to provide a sense of presence through performance that is captured in situ, giving an ambient sense of location of the performance of a phone-native genre of creative writing / performance poetry. The presenters are members of the Digital Literacy Centre of the University of British Columbia where this project is currently situated.
Since Will Crowther created the first text-adventure game in 1976 (Jerz 2007), digital media has provided ample opportunity for fictional storytelling to evolve. One evolutionary pathway has led to computer games, now the most dominant form of entertainment media. Digital fiction, however, has developed along a more understated pathway, and has yet to emerge into its mainstream or commercial niche; it is not sold on Amazon, Google Play, or Steam; it is not regularly reviewed in The New Yorker or The Guardian; it does not get adapted into popular films or television shows. Yet digital fiction persists, and in recent years has expanded beyond its roots as experimental texts created and shared amongst academics and avant garde artists, as demonstrated by trends in book apps, Twine games, and educational tools.
It is possible that digital fiction remains on the fringes not because the mainstream public dislikes it, but simply because they can’t find it. Publishing models for digital fiction have not yet emerged; rather, it is still primarily shared on the “gift economy” (Currah 2007) of the internet. Promising avenues have emerged in the indie games sphere in the form of Twine games and walking sims, but the generally single-authored, narrative-driven digital fiction has yet to find a solid footing in mainstream, commercial publishing spheres.
This presentation summarizes the convergent evolution in different media, from e-lit to indie games to webcomics, and examines each for its successes and failures in terms of commercialization. It offers insight into the future of digital fiction based on these case studies, as well as the author’s own practice-based research into publishing and commercializing digital fiction as both a creator and a publisher (in the form of Wonderbox Publishing).
“InstaPoets” are a collection of individual Instagrammers who’ve converted their social media capital (hundreds of thousands of followers, millions of “likes” and reposts) into printed book bestseller status. Rupi Kaur alone tallied 1.4 million sales of her first book of Insta Poetry, Milk and Honey, in 2017. Uniquely among books by social media celebrities (c.f.books by YouTube celebrities), fans of InstaPoets buy printed book versions of exactly the same content that’s available for free in an Instagram feed. Why do these fans buy what they already have for free?
This paper describes the Instagram Poetry phenomenon, then situates it in two contexts: debates about high- and lowbrow digital literary culture; and book industry efforts to understand--and monetize--digital interactivity.
Electronic literature artists emulate the high modernist aesthetic of difficulty. Once a small community of North American and Western European academics, e-lit is now global, and its canonical status is established: e-lit is featured on university syllabi, publishes its own curated and peer-reviewed collections, has launched a branch of digital humanities scholarship, and awards prizes. Bestselling InstaPoetry, in this context, is a populist upstart at odds with “digital literature” as it’s been construed. However, the InstaPoets provide clues about how digital literary interactivity might be financially sustainable outside of university sponsorship—a conversation that transpired at ELO 2017 in my talk: “What Book Publishers can Learn from Electronic Literature Installation,” on a panel chaired by Lyle Skains. Later, Leonardo Flores openly asked Matt Kirschenbaum in the QA after his keynote: what is e-lit’s #1 hit? My paper is one response to that question.
Printed Instagram Poetry’s “warm materiality” (McLuhan) converts the social media capital of algorithmic reinscription (likes, shares, reposts) into book sales and bestseller status. This paper analyzes what the Instagram Poets’ social and economic success tell us about new practices of digital-born authorship and e-literature’s financial sustainability.
Beginning with punch cards, an IBM1130 computer, FORTRAN, and space exploration in the late 1960’s, Arriving Simultaneously on Multiple Far-Flung Systems is a virtual reading machine, created/recreated with JavaScript in a HTML/CSS structure and read “on-the-fly”. With a complex array of randomly-generated texts, the work mirrors the life of Diana, an early aerospace information retrieval programmer, who later worked to bring community networking to rural and urban areas. The gap between the acceptance of women programmers who worked — not only during WWII but also in the decades after WII — and the current dominance of men in the field, is core to this narrative of one woman’s journey through an environment of changing technologies.
(Source ELO 2018.)
Everything was happening at once... "I spent last week at Langley", he said. FORTRAN, as the unforgettable manuals in my memory and the faded notes in my code workbook have memorialized "is a language that closely resembles the language of mathematics; it is designed primarily for scientific and engineering computations." The occasionally unfathomable behavior of the computer... The data in an automated library catalog does not create itself. Like a glass-enclosed gold and silver work of art, the satellite was housed in a clean room.
"On October 1st 2015, ten people were shot and killed at UMPQUA COMMUNITY COLLEGE in Roseburg, Oregon. The University of Washington where I work is located near the slaughter, enough for the medias to consider the event as local and send journalists on the site. It was definitely close enough for me to think: "But what if...".
Nick Wing wrote in The Huffington Post that the Umpqua Shooting was the 45th school shooting this year as well as the 142nd taking place since the slaughter at SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012.
Several of these shootings were considered as mass killing, wich means, according to the FBI, a shooting involving at least four victims or more exculing the perpetrator. Many people died in our schools.
The Umpqua shooting made me react to that. What could I do to pay respect to the victims of Rosenburg in Oregon? What could I do to pay respect to the those across the whole country? I thought that by pronouncing all these names, we could remember the victims, confirm their existence and in the end, keep them from being forgotten."
(Source: bleuOrange : http://revuebleuorange.org/)
"Le 1er octobre 2015, dix personnes ont été tuées par balle au Umpqua Community College à Roseburg en Oregon. l’université de l’état de Washington où j’enseigne se situe assez près de la scène du massacre pour que les médias traitent la nouvelle comme étant locale et envoient des journalistes sur les lieux. C’était définitivement assez près de la scène pour que je pense: «et si…».
La fusillade de Umpqua, écrit Nick Wing dans The Huffington Post, a été la 45e fusillade de l’année s’étant produite dans un établissement scolaire, ainsi que la 142e ayant eu lieu depuis la tuerie de la Sandy Hook Elementary School à Newtown au Connecticut en décembre 2012.
Plusieurs de ces fusillades ont été qualifiées de mass killing, qui se définit par le FBI comme un massacre par arme à feu comprenant quatre victimes ou plus excluant l’auteur de la tuerie. Beaucoup de personnes sont mortes dans nos écoles.
La fusillade de Umpqua m’a fait réagir. Que pouvais-je faire pour honorer les victimes de Roseburg en Oregon, que pouvais-je faire pour honorer celles du pays en entier? J’ai pensé qu’en prononçant tous ces noms, nous pourrons nous souvenir des victimes, nous pourrons confirmer leur existence et nous pourrons finalement préserver leur mémoire de l’oubli."
Se souvenir des morts does not require any input from the spectator, it just requires him to listen while every name is pronounced by a text-to-speech device. It is important to notice that the text-do-speech orgram uses a french voice.
The names are randomized so every victim will come up in a different order every time the work is opened.
YELLOWFLOWERPOWER (2017) is the fifth film by Norwegian concrete poet Ottar Ormstad. Here again viewers encounter letter-carpets and a yellow y he identifies with. The work is based on slogans and song-titles from different countries at the end of the Sixties, presented in their original language, intentionally without translation.The texts are combined with photographs of sculptures from the Vigeland Park in Oslo/Norway, where Ormstad lives and shot the naked people exposed in stone and iron by sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943). This park is the largest in the world based on one artist and contains more than 200 works.The film also includes live video-footage of Charles Lloyd playing saxophone in front of a huge painting by Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch (friend/enemy of Vigeland), as well as an unpublished photo of the young Mick Jagger, both shot in Oslo by Ormstad.Like in earlier works, Ormstad uses a strong sound in the very start for creating a period of silence at the beginning of the film.The animation is created in close collaboration between artist Margarida Paiva and Ormstad.YELLOWFLOWERPOWER invites viewers for an individual experience dependant upon the viewer's language background and tolerance towards non-translation.
Video HD 16:9, duration: 07:17Animation: Margarida PaivaSound: Hallvard W Hagen & Jens P NilsenConcrete poetry, cameras, piano and production by director Ottar Ormstad© Ottar Ormstad 2017
This VR Literature work is an allegorical poem deliberately designed to emulate conventions established in early cinematographic days (the silent soundtrack, white on black intertitle-like text, parallels to Kinetoscope viewing) so as to echo a similar sense of creative pioneering/exploration. Our Cupidity Coda is designed for read through multiple times in order to unstitch its poetic denseness. It’s a slow burn work for those that click with it.
Instructions and Navigation: Our Cupidity Coda is designed for viewing via an internet browser using a VR headset – no hand controllers are necessary. The work is designed for (initial) quick sharp consumption, then repeat plays for those with which it resonates. It is also viewable using only a desktop browser/monitor, but the recommended setup is a HTC Vive using the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox browser.
Artistic reenactment of the speech “Against Poets” from Buenois Aires from 1947 with using digital media
Witold Gombrowicz (one of the most important Polish writers and an icon of XX century European literature) spent almost 25 years in Buenos Aires. In 1947 he gave a talk "Against Poets" at Fray Mocho’s bookshop, then in 1951 he publish the text in "Kultura" in Paris, which provoked a lot of poets and scholars to respond, e.g. Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel Prize winner). In this well known statement Gombrowicz attacked the very institution of Poetry (Form), as a kind of religion. The institution of Poetry attacked him back. Such controversies give a kind of new energy and awareness to the field and get artists out of their routine positions. The point of departure for this project is to reenact his statement in the new digital context.
Nowadays there are a lot of attacks, controversies in the public sphere, and also in literary, artworld circles (on the Internet). We are going to research and mix some „attacking-” and „against-” poetics. Using words, phrases, sentences which we find in a selected cultural contexts (European, Argentinian, American) we will produce a generated speech reenactment in a new context in which artists, writers, and also anonymous Internet haters attacked eachother. To produce such an output we will create an archive which will provide input for the generation of speeches. This project has one goal: to unify the community through controversy. We hope to give rise to a variety of emotions among the e-poets (support, rejection, disgust, lack of interest).
"In 2015, E-Poetry, which is headquartered in Buffalo, New York, organized its festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Spanish and Portuguese languages seemed to take a leading role during research presentations as well as artistic events. During the festival segment titled NEW PATHS, NEW VOICES/NUEVAS RUTAS, NUEVAS VOCES, a coalition was forged against the domination of the English language in the field. During a performance (an intentionally antagonistic one, dedicated to trolling) presented in Spanish and Polish and abiding by the spirit of major Internet trolling strategies, it was established that the name of the coalition would not be announced in English, and the performance also was expressly forbidden from being translated to English. This was a gesture aimed at opposing the most significant type of domination in the field—namely, language domination and all the hegemonic practices that stem from it. It was a move modeled after that of the Coalition Against Gringpo5 and assumed this sort of trolling approach as a reply to having languages and practices identified as being at the ‘end(s)’. "
Piotr Marecki, Nick Montfort, Renderings: Translating literary works in the digital age https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_1/i84/3077164
“En una sala a oscuras, de espaldas al público, un hombre de estatura media, pelo canoso y un cuerpo de apariencia frágil recita algo en una lengua que no existe pero en la que se distinguen rasgos de todas partes: sonidos nasales franceses o polacos, morfemas en español, aglutinaciones de consonantes de ecos indoamericanos, entonaciones tangueras, vocales cerradas anglófilas"
http://reseniasbds.blogspot.no/2015/07/cronica-del-e-poetry-festival-lu…
„Street Flower” is application designed by Jan K. Argasiński and Piotr Marecki. The technical side of the project is based on the creation of a mobile application that runs in conjunction with iBeacon devices (Estimote Beacons). This technology includes a text generator in a spatial context and action based on the position relative to specified, "electronically tagged" objects. With this combination, dynamically created texts will operate in the context of a specially prepared micro version of the Internet of Things. In our project, we focus on the work of the Polish poet Tadeusz Peiper (1881–1969), sometimes referred to as the Pope of the Avant-garde, an artist and theoretician of the socalled Kraków Avant-garde. His greatest achievement was a poetic form he called a “blossoming arrangement”, in which the constraint stems from the fact that the poem gradually unfolds from smaller units of the poem. We adapt Peiper’s classic „Kwiat ulicy” („Street Flower”), a blossoming poem from 1924, for Estimote Beacons. Thanks to the spatial possibilities of the iBeacon device, Peiper's work gains the spatial shape of a blossom, which was limited by the page. The reader navigates the space with his mobile device in hand and by using the specially designed app, he/she discovers the 4 layers of the work. Operation of the proposed mobile application is based on three contextual aspects: the action of the paired smartphone and beacon working in tandem, the tracking capability of the beacon’s distance from the smartphone and recording the current direction of smartphone’s movement in relation to the beacon. The actors in the created application include: users (operator with respect to whom and in response to whose actions that text will be generated), application (as the recipient of user actions; works in real time and reacts to those actions), smartphone (on which the application is running; the operating system [Android in this case] allows for use of built-in device sensors and transmitters/receivers that enable proper operation of an application and communication with the beacon), and the beacon (passive sender of the radio signal; its task is to broadcast continuous information about itself; in the project we assume that the beacons are fixed in one position). The system consists of three main components and communication between them. The first component are passive signal senders, the Estimote Beacons. They broadcast information about themselves via Bluetooth Low Energy. Another component is the user application installed on the mobile device, smartphone. The application begins to listen for beacon signals in the vicinity. The last component is the Internet with freely realized connection between it and the application.