contexts

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH) that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic.

The domain of DH is typically segmented into the two seemingly disparate strands of criticism and building, with scholars either studying the synthesis between cultural expression and screens or the use of technology to make artifacts in themselves. This book regards electronic literature as fundamentally DH in that it synthesizes these two constituents. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities provides a context for the development of the field, informed by the forms and practices that have emerged throughout the DH moment, and finally, offers resources for others interested in learning more about electronic literature.

(Bloomsbury description)

This paper explores the concept of narrativity throughout space by analyzing the distributed novel Implementation (Rettberg and Montfort 2012). Distributed narratives are literary texts that are distributed across different spaces and times to create divergence rather than unity (Walker 1). Implementation consists of 240 stickers with text fragments and people are invited to put up stickers in a place of their choice on public surfaces. The stickers could then be photographed and added to the project website.The practice of putting up the stickers highly influences the way in which the actor views the space, connecting elements in the text fragment to elements in their surroundings. The actor who places the sticker might not have noticed certain elements if it hadn't been for the text on the sticker. Once the sticker is placed in its context, the opposite occurs: the surroundings influences the reading of the narrative.This diffraction between narrative and space is highlighted by the act of photography and online collection, as the digital interface shows the immediate context of the sticker but makes the city as a whole invisible. For the 'analog' reader, however, the context of the whole city is highly visible as the sticker has to be found inside the city.  The combination of analog and digital practices of Implementation thus highlights the representation of the city as a visual practice. In this way, the city becomes part of the work and vice versa in both physical and digital settings.

This paper analyses the work by means of a new materialist "diffractive reading" (Barad and Haraway) between the narrative and its urban context. I propose to regard the urban space as a ‘text’ and read how this (con)text interacts with the narrative stickers. My paper will also outline future plans for empirical experiments Implementation. 

This is an open session designed to build understanding of evolving contexts and conditions for making and presenting creative works by drawing upon the experiences of those involved both with making works for arts contexts and with curating exhibitions and other arts-venue contexts. The session will invite current and past ELO arts committee leaders, including ELO members involved in the ELO new Media Arts Committee, and gallery curators to help lead the open conversation. The open forum will share knowledge and develop new ideas about making and staging works for the public sphere. The open session may confront practical, theoretical, and perhaps even ideological and political issues, conditions and their cultural paradigms.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)