digital technology

Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:- a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;- a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;- a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.In order to reduce these limitations, to stimulate the reading practices and, at the same time, to develop young readers’ competencies in digital literacy, a website dedicated to children’s digital literature has been conceived, in partnership with the Littérature Québecoise Mobile group, directed by Bertrand Gervais: Lab-yrinthe.The website is intended as a virtual laboratory on contemporary children’s digital literary phenomena and aims at providing information based on scientific observations, as well as conceptual and didactic tools to educators, publishers and researchers.More particularly, Lab-yrinthe presents a catalog of heterogeneous digital literary works produced or distributed in Quebec, including enriched books, mobile apps, narrative video games, geolocated narrations, augmented reality creations, interactive theater performances, virtual installations and podcasts. Each creation is analyzed from a set of descriptive parameters conceived by the research team (Acerra, Lacelle et al., 2021) with the purpose to illustrate the semiotic, multimodal and technological materials of the text, as well as the poetic or rhetoric effects of their combinations. From this basis, some educational and didactic suggestions are depicted: teachers can refer to this section to find a reading key of the digital work and, at the same time, to have clear examples of the possible exploitations of a digital writing process in the school context.Finally, a dedicated section of the Lab-yrinthe website presents the main co-creation and co-production projects, carried out with partners from the cultural industry (ranging from the National television, to the Montréal Poetry Festival and Bookfair, from digital and analog publishers to National libraries and archives). In this case, both the actors, the contents and the distribution conditions are presented as indicators of the current orientations of the digital publishing field.BibliographyAcerra, E., Lacelle, N., et al. (2021, in press). « Décrire les œuvres littéraires numériques pour la jeunesse », Lire, comprendre, interpréter et apprécier des supports composites, La Lettre de l’AIRDF, n° 68.Lacelle, N., et al. (2017-2020). Soutien au développement de démarches d’édition numérique jeunesse au Québec à partir de pratiques favorables de production, diffusion et réception. Research project financed by the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture (Québec).

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

Since the emergence of photography in the 19th-century, ‘technical images’—which media philosopher Vilém Flusser defines as images constructed through the use of an ‘apparatus’— have replaced traditional images (sketching, drawing, painting, etc…) as the principal mode of objective documentation for mapping and representing reality. In fact it is this perceived objective character of the medium that has historically problematised its classification as an accepted artform. As a reaction, artists have long explored methods for circumventing the overriding social status of photography, by developing practices that operate to undermine its primary existence as strict documentation. Historical examples of this include, the photomontage of the early 20th-century by Dada artists (eg. Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield), who spliced together images from mass media in order to construct new aesthetic scenes, and The Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s (eg. Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince), who utilised methods such as staged and found photography in order to question the long embedded interpretation of the medium as that which is simply a transparent window overlaying the world. In more recent years we have seen the appearance of many artists deploying glitch techniques as a means of probing the limits of digital objectivity in contemporary image culture. Technically referring to an unexpected error that occurs within a machinic system, encounters with glitches have become much more prominent due to the increasing prevalence of computerized technologies. Caleb Kelly has argued that artistic practices that explicitly attempt to exploit and utilize glitches for aesthetic purposes, ‘became popular in the late twentieth century’ and are ‘a key marker in the development of digital arts practices.’ This turn towards harnessing the artistic potentiality of the glitch has been described by Kim Cascone as part of the ‘postdigital aesthetic,’ which developed from immersion within ‘environments suffused with digital technology’. Constant envelopment within these spaces has made us more attuned to the ‘“failure” of digital technology’, resulting in a growing awareness of the presence of errors that exist within all computational systems. This paper will explore what happens when technologies of representation break down, through an analysis of the concept of the glitch as utilised within photographic artworks. The central aim is to highlight how the dominant social construction of the technical image—and its historically indelible relationship to the real—is undermined by instances of glitch art, by problematising its claim as objective document of reality, and via an extension of the aesthetic possibilities of machinic agency through its foregrounding of (non-human) noise and error. Through an articulation of the inherent presence of randomness and non-objectivity in the technical image, the indeterminate and speculative dimension of the medium will be discussed as that which is not simply a trait that should be ignored, but instead one which forms a necessary condition of its perceptual existence.

This paper will outline the key elements of an ongoing research project, whose main focus is to explore the application of new technology to the study of key works of modernism, whilst simultaneously arguing that modernism can itself offer fresh perspectives on contemporary digital art. I am interested in the way modernism presents the artwork as both an object to be experienced and as a structured theory of knowledge. This tension can be seen most obviously in such canonical works as Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1917-1969) where his aesthetic of the ‘luminous fragment’ is set against the poem’s larger, Dantescan, vision of history. Concomitantly, I wish to argue that the resources of digital technology offer a significant new set of tools for approaching modernism itself, allowing us to explore the boundary between the work of scholarship and work of art.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

Electronic literature exists in a perpetual state of flux, due to its reliance on digital technology; with the rapid progression of processing power and graphical abilities, electronic literature swiftly moved from a reliance on the written word into a more diverse, multi-modal form of digital arts practice. The literariness of early electronic literature is manifest: the work was primarily textual, the centrality of reading paramount. The current crop of electronic literature--with its audio-visual, multimodal nature--calls into question the literariness of this work, however, as is evidenced by this year's call for papers. I propose that this ambiguity as regards literariness and written textuality in electronic literature disadvantages the field, in both academic circles and in the search for a wider reading audience. If electronic literature as field is to assert and validate its position within the greater literary tradition, links between electronic literature and past literary achievements need to be uncovered and illuminated. In this paper, I will explore the connections between works of postmodernism (in particular, experimental authors such as William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, and authors explicitly critiquing their own craft, such as Paul Auster), and electronic literature. In doing so, I hope to uncover a richer, more nuanced background for the literary in the traditions/practices of print and oral cultures, rather than in arts where the literary may or may not be present. Literature qua literature is currently present only as a minority element in works claiming the status of electronic literature, and it is therefore unlikely that literary studies will set itself up for reading just this sub-genre within an as yet minority arts practice. Turning to the works of Tom LeClair and Joseph Tabbi, postmodern novels are seen as coming into existence at a time when the world was on the brink of the globalized, world system. LeClair writes of the art of excess, in which the "recognition of radically new and massive information in the world and the impulse to represent this information are. . . the ultimate motives for the art of excess" (48) in postmodern novels. Tabbi, building off of LeClair, understands Gaddis and Pynchon as not only accurately representing a globalized world of excessive information, but also as representing the cognition developing out of this world system. My paper will explore how we can understand our own contemporary world system through works of electronic literature. If postmodern authors turned to their own material supports--the written language marked on a page through the course of a particular writer's thinking--then how are we to understand electronic literature as representing a certain mode of consciousness, especially considering electronic literature's distinct marginalization of the written word? My paper will offer close readings of earlier works of hypertext fiction and new works of electronic literature (published in 2012), in an effort to uncover the uniquely literary accomplishments of chosen texts/authors writing in a medium in which the literary is not always evidently manifest.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

"Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings. Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual."

(Source: Publisher website)

In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel Vas: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. Jackson’s book, alluding to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about a monster composed of various bodies while the book itself is also a monstrous text: a nonlinear patchwork of links across networks of words and images. Tomasula’s Vas—alluding to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 satire, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions—is set in “Flatland” foregrounding the two-dimensional materiality of the page, all while the linear novel within the pages of Vas is under siege by supplementary information about the body in the form of collaged digital images, scientific facts, and historical citations that address such issues as body modification, in vitro fertilization, genetic code, and DNA. Both Vas and Patchwork Girl can be read as exemplary works in the late age of print because they foreground the materiality of the book, while radically transforming the conventions of the book. In so doing, both works utilize paratextual and extratextual elements that at once reflect on literatures past, while pointing toward a possible literary future.

This paper explores the ontology of the digital. Specifically I argue that digital technologies, digital aesthetics, and digital culture express characteristics of the binary code. The binary code, which defines the digital, balances between ideal and real; tied always to some material substrate, the binary code nevertheless operates according to a logic of perfectly specified 0s and 1s. And it tends to bring this idealized perfection into the real, dividing up the world into neat, discrete categories, offering predefined choices with predictable outcomes, and shaping not only the materials of the machine but also the bodies and habits of users according to this binary logic. The binary code is an apotheosis of abstraction, but it is an operative abstraction, which becomes effective even while retaining its pure formality. Brief examples will elaborate this overarching argument, considering the digital’s ontological relationships to temporality, space, material, virtuality, uniqueness, identity, determinism, and language.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).