In this riposte, Marie-Laure Ryan suggests Lisa Swanstrom has 'flattened' the dimensions of her arguments about digital narrative as well as the dimensions of the digital experience itself.
"Voice Inside My Head" is a poetic investigation into the internal monologue that occurs after an emotional crisis. There is a tendency to argue with oneself, re-explain events, playing out alternate scenarios. This flashing text-image appears to the eye as a jumble, but the mind naturally arranges and patterns the words until a voice emerges as if from an internal monologue. The mind makes use of memory after-image to form meaning, similar to how meaning is formed from a jumbled recollection of events. Whirlpools of thoughts spin in a loop for a time before eventually letting go and moving on.
Physical Description: LCD flatscreen behind a standard photographic matte embedded in a picture frame. The flatscreen is activated by laptop computer components that are also embedded in the frame.
(Source: artist's website)
Granoff Center for Performing Arts
154 Angell Street
Providence, RI 02906
United States
In computing, an interrupt (IRQ) is a command sent to the central processor (CPU), demanding its attention and calling for the initiation of a new task. Interrupt 2012 is a three-day international studio celebrating writing and performance in digital media. It will feature readings, performances and screenings, along with Interrupt Discussion Sessions (IRQds), all aimed at investigating the theme of interruption in digital literary art and performance. Events will take place February 10-12, 2012 on the Brown University campus. Interrupt 2012 is organized by graduate and undergraduate students associated with Brown University’s Department of Literary Arts and RISD Digital+Media. As organizers, we are interested in the interruptions that digitally-mediated writing and performance can initiate, as well as in identifying the systematic functions that they can interrupt. Our aim is to create a studio, broadly conceived, in which invited guests and community members not only interrupt trends in the field of literary aesthetics, but execute their interruption routines as informed critiques of the sociopolitical forces that condition the very possibility of the expanded writing practices with which we engage. ---- The IRQ Discussions are central to the processes of our Interrupt Studio. We conceive our Studio as structured, but radically open and subject to interruption. It is an opportunity to share our research for the sake of critical and aesthetic practice, more specifically, for the sake of language-driven digitally-mediated art. We ask all participants to review the following outline of how the IRQ Discussions will be conducted. We trust that all those attending will acquire some familiarity with the protocols of these discussions. We hope that everyone will participate—if only by listening to the discussion that transpires—and that, if they do wish to make an active contribution, they respect a format that is intended to allow openness and interruption while retaining a strong sense of productive direction. _ IRQds: the workings of an Interrupt Discussion Session _ IRQds are organized so as to encourage open discussion. There will be a number of artists, theorists, and researchers who have been invited to speak, but we do not ask them to give papers or even panel-style presentations. Instead, they will prepare a five-minute IRQ. An IRQ may take any form. Typically, it will be expository or performative. However, an IRQ should invite further processing in terms of discussion. The IRQds will be moderated by a designated CPU. The CPU will process but not generate IRQs. Further guidelines: - Invited speakers are asked, if at all possible, to attend all the IRQds scheduled for the Studio whether or not they hold an IRQ for a particular session. Invited participants will be seated in a large circle or semi-circle during each IRQds, with other attendees surrounding them. - At each IRQds four or five of the named speakers will have the right to use their IRQ. At any time, they may interrupt the discussion and hold the floor, uninterrupted, for a maximum of five minutes (no minimum). - One of the named speakers—chosen randomly or by consensus—will begin each IRQds with his or her five-minute intervention, and so use up an IRQ. If the chosen IRQ holder does not wish to begin the discussion, s/he may instead nominate another IRQ holder. - Once a speaker has completed an IRQ, discussion is open to all attendees, including the other IRQ holders. Discussion will be strictly moderated: all interruptions of all kinds must pass through the CPU. - The remaining speakers with IRQs are asked to attend to the discussion carefully and—rather in the manner of an old-school Quaker meeting, minus any ritual or dogma—listen for the moment when their prepared IRQs would be most beneficial to the overall IRQds’ expressive processing. ---- Interrupt II is generously supported by Brown University's Creative Art Council and organized under the auspices of the Department of Literary Arts, in particular its Electronic Writing/Literary Hypermedia program. Key organizers: Nalini Abhiraman, Mimi Cabell, John Cayley, Angela Ferraiolo, Edrex Fontanilla, Ari Kalinowski, Clement Valla (RISD), and the Writing Digital Media Cadre.
(Source: John Cayley)
Initiated on March 15, 1997, ebr's electropoetics "thread" is devoted to discussions and debates about digital poetics and writing in electronic environments. Most, but not all, of the articles published in ebr about electronic literature and digital literary art appear in this thread.
The first editor of electropoetics was Joel Felix, who edited a special issue by that title. David Ciccoricco (2002-2005) and Lori Emerson later served as electropoetics thread editors.
For many who are committed to working in electronic environments, an electronic "review" might better be named a "retrospective," a mere scholarly commemoration of a phenomenon that is passing. There's a technological subtext to the declining prestige of authors and literary canons. To bring that subtext to the surface will be part of ebr's agenda.
E-literature dwells in the multi-media environment of the Internet, for which connectivity to other virtual and real phenomena is of the greatest importance, since it brings the literary components into close relations and interdependencies with languages of other disciplines. The visual languages of art and mass-media culture give shape and context to the literary content. Moreover, the programmability of e-literature references a wide variety of disciplines, e. g. logic, mathematics, computer and information science ... The social exchange and the performative character of communication is manifest especially in the projects that involve digital communities. The paper will present several e-literary projects by two established Slovene new media artists, in a time span of fifteen years of their exploration of the medium. Jaka Železnikar is a poet of e-literature. He writes literary algorithms and codes interventions into the user-browser communication. His e-poems involve words as well as they draw attention to the ways how we communicate with online content that is organized on the mainstream web 2.0 platforms. His poetic expression and activist observations are integrally encoded into the new medium of e-literature. Srečo Dragan is a new media artist whouses literary excerpts and practices of reading to build new models of techno-modified experiences. He focuses on the discursive potential of each medium as he constructs the integrated post-media projects that connect real-time streams of images, dialogic exchange of words, culturally coded communication schemes, online communication and networked mobile devices. The two authorial approaches, Železnikar's and Dragan's, emphasize two starting points that converge in the e-literature domain: while Železnikar brings together “traditional” literature and computer and web-based creativity, Dragan's textual works stem from his visual arts and conceptualist background.
In the talk Mencía describes how her art practice moved from using electronic devices to create physical inscriptions, such as in the installation "I Love You" which was a sort of fax machine that made images in response to the interactor moving a toy car over a stone with the works "I Love You" engraved in it, and collaborative performance works based on collective activities and gestures, to a practice in digital media based on communication and miscommunication in human and computer language.
City Hotel Conference Center
Dalmatinova Street 15.
Ljubljana
Slovenia
This seminar seeks to broaden the conceptual space of media-shaped electronic literature through a ground-up conceptualisation that draws inspiration from various textual practices based on an experimental account with cyber-language at the intersection of various fields and disciplines. The seminar is structured as an event of peer-reviewed theory panels, demonstrations (including artistic performances by practitioners) and individual presentations.
A goal of the Ljubljana seminar will be to discuss the challenges posed by new media and to situate electronic literature within a history of new media. Topics that might be addressed include:
• Discussing and interrogating the key concepts, devices, methods and approaches within the field of electronic literature.• Questioning the literary nature of often hybrid and mixed-media digital texts within the constraints of electronic literature.• Defining innovation in the field through considering it as a deviation from print-based literature and applying the concept of de-familiarization.• Querying the social implications of new media textual practices and how they relate to issues of gender, the digital divide, new media literacy and social networking.• Defining the reading of digital texts which, in terms of their interruptive and nervous nature, demand the tactile motor activity of “mouse reading”.• Analyzing electronic literature through relating it to textual practices and performance within the (European) avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.• Evaluating the audience of electronic literature, asking how such novel textualities produce new audiences sometimes closer in character to DJ and VJ culture.• Questioning the aesthetics of electronic literature, taking into account the hybrid modalities of new-media affected perception, such as "not-just-reading" and "not-just-seeing", by addressing the roles of proprioception and tactility in reading.• Exploring electronic literature and the language of the Internet within the expanded field of 'post-print' text, as found in email, SMS texting, chat forums and other popular textual communication media.• Analyzing and defining the ontological specificity of an E-Literary art articulated as process, software and performance that disrupts the expectations of readership.• Evaluating digital creative communities as temporary social and artistic structures embedded in present social realities in relation to concepts such as post-Fordism, hactivism, "playbour", the attention economy and P2P initiatives.
(Source: CFPs)