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Fan–idol relationships are shown to be based on emotions and to go beyond mere identification to include parasocial relationships and neo-religiosity. Results thus confirm the theoretical paradox between the television industry’s promotion of celebrity to attract loyal audiences and the rejection of fandom through a carefully constructed representation hereof as ‘freaky business’. How could a virtual girl, customized by hundreds of disparate fans across Japan, and quickly the world, come to have a singular persona? Easy, fans of Miku drew from an existing culture around adorable young pop stars to script a subjectivity for the drawing. Pulling from tropes in anime and manga, Miku was assimilated into a growing culture that celebrates fantasies of girlhood. Using social media and live-streaming services, many young girls in Japan are using performative techniques modelled in Anime shows to be signed by music producers and develop lucrative careers as entertainers. Not quite musicians, not actresses, and too invested in the affect of cuteness to be professionals, these young girls are called “idols”. 

The focus of my paper is to bring forward some information regarding the development of the electronic literature in an ex-communist country, Romania, at a certain, representative moment: after four decades of communism and almost thirty years of democracy and free book market. In the first part, the main purpose is to explain how the Romanian writers’ literature was affected over the last decade of communism: on the one hand, the technological deficiency, which made difficult, almost impossible for the Romanian writers to investigate new digital creative writing formulas, and, on the other hand – and the most important one – the excessive political control of Ceaușescu’s regime that cut off absolutely the contact with the international literature. In my thesis I will try to lay out how the literary scene has been working during the last thirty years: the recovery of the freedom and the reconnection of the Romanian writers to the international literary world, with an emphasis on the process of linking of the Romanian writers to the experimental-technological sphere of fiction in the universal field. I focus on the beginning of the ’90s, when, in the post-communist Romania, the political censorship has been abolished, being replaced, first of all, with the „financial censorship” and with the publishers’ attempts to the financial struggle. In order to publish literature with a promising success and an aura of a bestseller, the publishers had to follow a specific „recipe”: potential financial successes instead of literary creations opened to innovation. Moreover, this happens in a context in which, after almost a half of a century of censorship, the readers wanted to recover the most important forbidden or censured books, being less interested in reading experimental literature. I plan to pay a special attention to the last decade, a period when, along with the tremendous spreading of the Internet connection, the first Romanian electronic literary experiments have appeared slowly, in the marginal fields, especially in the Science-Fiction genre. Afterward, the change continued to spread in the sphere of literature. Overall, this study regarding the level of development of electronic literature in post-communist Romania – restrained by technological barriers and excessive political control during the Communist era, followed by a complicated period of free book market – reveals a lot of similarities in most of the Iron Curtain countries.

(Source: Author's abstract from ELO 2018 site)

Over a year and a half ago, a group of scholars, programmers, artists and translators started working on a research project focusing on the translation of various works of electronic literature, ranging from e-poetry (Maria Mencia’s The Poem That Crossed the Atlantic), digital database (Luís Lucas Pereira’s Machines of Disquiet), installation (Søren Pold et al’s The Poetry Machine), digital aurature (digital language art in programmable aurality) (John Cayley’s The Listeners) and hyperfiction (Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story). In order to identify common and divergent issues depending on the genres, formats and languages of the works under study, they were all examined through the prism of the following concepts: Translinguistic translation (translation between languages), Transcoding (translation between machine-readable codes and between machine-readable codes and human-readable text), Transmedial translation (translation between medial modalities), and Transcreation (translation as a shared creative practice).

 One of the recurring questions raised throughout the project was: how interventionist/creative should our translation/remediation be as we are also touching upon the very materiality of the works? A current theme has been to combine the cybertextual or software dimensions with the textual, semantic dimensions and to discuss translation as much as a translation of processes as the (finished) product of a particular tradition of translinguistic practice. Some of the theoretical terms for this has been the concept of electronic tropes, “radical mediation” (Richard Grusin), and how different languages relate to each other in ways that cannot be revealed. With Walter Benjamin, we could also ask whether translation is “merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other,” including the question of code in our reflection.

 This roundtable will give the members of the project the opportunity to share their observations on their collective endeavors; bridging the gap between the practice-based approach and a theoretical perspective on the task of translating electronic literature. In addition to a brief presentation of each work and the specific challenges they raised, the participants will offer key insights into the collective methodologies elaborated throughout the duration of the project.