exhibition

Short description

On December 31, 2020 Adobe dropped support of Flash software, a premier platform for net art popular in the late 20th century to first decade of the 21st. Within weeks, born-digital literature created with the software was no longer accessible to the public––including the 447 the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) had collected for its repository. By the end of January 2021 the Electronic Literature Lab’s efforts to restore ELO’s Flash archives began in earnest with a variety of methods: Ruffle.rs, Conifer, Webrecorder, and video recordings attained with the Pale Moon browser and the Wayback Machine.This exhibition, featuring 48 works the lab selected from the online journals and anthologies held in the ELO’s archives, lays bare both the importance of Flash as a platform for conveying highly experimental and compelling literary art and the challenges artists and preservationists face in keeping the art produced with it accessible to the public.

List of Artists and Works:

Annie Abrahams, "Séparation" / "Separation"Ingrid Ankerson & Megan Sapnar, "Cruising"Adriana de Barros, "Blinding Lights"Giselle Beiguelman and Helga Stein, "Code Movie 1"Alan Bigelow, "Brainstrips"Serge Bouchardon, "Toucher" / "Touch"Mez Breeze, "_Clo[h!]neing God N Ange-Ls_"Oni Buchanan, "The Mandrake Vehicles"David Clark, "88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand)"Sharon Daniel and Erik Loyer, "Public Secrets"Juliet Davis, "Pieces of Herself"Claire Dinsmore, "The Dazzle as Question"Tina Escaja, "Pinzas de metal"Caitlin Fisher, "These Waves of Girls"Muriel Frega, "Alice in the 'Wonderbalcony'"Peter Howard, "Xylo"Yael Kanarek, Evann Siebens, Meeyoung Kim & Yoav Gal, "Portal"Aya Karpinksa, "mar puro"Rob Kendall, "Faith"David Knoebel, "Thoughts Go"John Kusch, "Red Lily"Deena Larsen, "Firefly"Donna Leishman, "Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw"Jason Edward Lewis, "Nine"Mark Marino, "Stravinsky's Muse"María Mencia, "Birds Singing Other Birds's Songs"Judd Morrissey, "The Jew's Daughter"Stuart Moulthrop, "Under Language"Jason Nelson, "i made this. you play this. we are enemies."Millie Niss, "The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh"Santiago Ortiz, "Bacterias Argentinas"Regina Pinto, "Café de Pao"Joerg Piringer, "Soundpoems I and II"William Poundstone, "3 Proposals for Bottle Imps"Kate Pullinger and babel, "Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China"Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, "Flight Paths"Brian Kim Stefans, "The Dreamlife of Letters"Reiner Strasser and M. D. Coverley, "ii — in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory"Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim, "Tao"Stephanie Strickland, "slipping glimpse"Thom Swiss, "Shy Boy"Rui Torres, "Amor de Clarice"Ana Maria Uribe, "Anipoemas"Dan Waber, "Strings"Christine Wilks, "Fitting the Pattern"Jody Zellen, "Disembodied Voices"Natalie Zeriff, "Meditation on a Barstool"John Zuern, "Ask Me for the Moon"

Record Status
By Milosz Waskiewicz, 27 May, 2021
Language
Year
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

When the global pandemic spread in early 2020, we, as many others, wondered what was happening and what it all meant. Almost all cultural activity moved online and the electronic platforms took even stronger hold of our lives. We started gathering material about the impact of the Covid 19 on e-literature and digital creativity for a round table presented at the ELOrlando 2020, the first completely online ELO conference ever. This work led to the project Electronic Literature and Covid 19 (supported by DARIAH EU), which includes an exhibition at this year’s conference, a research collection at the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, other presentations and further research. 

Life under the pandemic is like living under a largely invisible threat that emerges as catastrophic and tragic when death rates go up. At other times the threat of the virus is barely visible and can mainly be traced as deserted streets. Sometimes the way it invades our shared, common imagination gets quickly normalized as yet another persuasive data visualization, digital map demonstrating a sudden upsurge in viral spread or simply another infographic with increasing numbers. It might be compared to how Svetlana Alexievich describes the Chernobyl disaster (in Chernobyl Prayer, (1997), Penguin 2016), as an unknown catastrophe that was and is difficult to understand for the many Belarusians and Ukrainians living in the disaster zone since it did not look like war or natural disaster. Chernobyl’s invisible radioactive cloud that in 1986 spread across Europe, functioned at the time much like invisible viral danger today, as a post-human, ecological crisis requiring a new understanding and politics. And, like Chernobyl, the pandemic has demonstrated the fractures in many societies’ foundations such as economic inequality, racism, inadequately equipped institutions and health services, and incompetent leaders (see also Latour, Hayles Taussig, Mbembe, Chun et al. in Critical Enquiry, vol. 47, number S2, Winther 2021). Luckily, the pandemic has also shown caring communities and societies, newfound interests in the domestic, the local, and the environmental, including the climate crisis (see e.g. Markham AN, Harris A, Luka ME. Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking During COVID-19 Times. Qualitative Inquiry. October 2020.). 

Besides its importance for health, society and the economy, the pandemic might be seen as a paradigmatic cultural change happening in a time with locked down cultural life, which can be seen from behind the global screens of platforms. Electronic literature plays an important role in exploring how people gets through daily life during the pandemic, how we see our homes, communities, cities, environments, institutions, how people become part of both progressive (BLM, Metoo, etc) and reactionary (QAnon, etc) movements. Digital platforms have played a large part in this, e.g. through the various #, through their ways of promoting extremism through profiling algorithms, through their transforming of institutions, etc. 

This panel will present early outcomes of the project, present a framework for the exhibition, and an analysis of the themes of the submitted works. We will also invite feedback from the ELO community of researchers, practitioners and artists.

Description (in English)

River Writer is a proof of concept for virtual-reality based interactive poetry-writing application. Set on a virtual levee at golden hour, users fish words out of a literal stream of consciousness-- words put into an array that flow from spawning volumes into an kill volume. This method creates randomization. The user then has the ability to carry and drop these word selections on an environment that essentially acts as a couplet palette in the three cardinal directions opposing the river of words. Over the course of “creative play,” a user has space to create at least 3 couplets or 6 lines of poetry, intentionally placing the randomized, fished diction on the level. The diction utilized for this proof of concept was taken from the digital born text “Diamonds in Dystopia” (written by Vincent A. Cellucci, published in Absence Like Sun" (Lavender Ink. 2019) and anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing, 2018, Wesleyan University Press), but other texts can be substituted in future iterations. This application and level was created by Vincent Cellucci with assistance from Marc Aubanel using Unreal Game Engine 4. The words were modeled with great facility, albeit individually, in Rhinoceros 6.

Multimedia
Remote video URL
Description (in English)

An experimental piece, drawing from the artist's Waveform project, this 10 minute film depicts a single, overhead shot of incoming ocean waves, which are scanned and analysed at various points by a machine vision system, which then parses the data gathered into short, poem-like texts. This film marks an attempt at using the dynamics of the moving image to better apprehend both the subject matter and the technical processes behind Waveform.

This piece was displayed at the Peripheries: Electronic Literature and New Media Art exhibition held at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork, as part of ELO2019, in July 2019.

 

Contributors note

Sound Designer: Mariana Lopez

Content type
Author
Year
Language
Platform/Software
Record Status
Description (in English)

Rediscovering Springfield will be an art-type walk that is a site-specific exhibition using mobile devices and printed items to unearth content by walking along Main Road Moonah. Rediscovering Springfield will be a project that engages with the community of Springfield and the greater Moonah area in Hobart, Tasmania.

The work Rediscovering Springfield will add another chapter in the history of Tasmania. It will share the personal untold stories from migrants who came to Tasmania in the mid 20th Century onwards. Their contribution to the building and adding to this state is not often talked about or acknowledged in Tasmaniaʼs history.

The work will investigate how they communicated, what they brought with them, how their concept of home and food was re-created and experienced in their new “home” in Australia. How they shared their culture with other communities, how they spoke with one another, especially as many of them didn’t speak fluent English, if at all, on their arrival. How does one negotiate a space one does not understand fully?

These are some of the questions Rediscovering Springfield will explore – we can consider how did they navigate their lives through their new foreign home? Those who speak English natively will gain insight into this day-to-day experience of the new migrant.

The work will be realised by encouraging community involvement, through the exploration of people’s personal archives of the area or street – including photos, audio, etc. realised as moving images plus video and audio interviews.

Screen shots
Image
Image
Image
Image
By Scott Rettberg, 13 September, 2018
Publication Type
Language
Year
Publisher
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

A review of the ELO 2018: Mind the Gap! exhibition at the Galerie du Centre de Design at at L’Université du Québec à Montréal.

Pull Quotes

It’s not exclusively electronic, nor is it necessarily literary, but it’s all exhibited under the banner of electronic literature. For their annual conference, this year at L’Université du Québec à Montréal, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO)—a group dedicated to the propagation and preservation of such media—put on a materially and conceptually diverse exhibition of dozens of e-lit works at the university’s Galerie du Centre de Design. The conference’s bi-lingual theme, Attention à la marche! / Mind the Gap! references the many voids in scholarship, representation, and preservation that the global e-lit community is trying to fill, and this associated exhibition features works that show progress towards this goal.

Event type
Date
-
Associated with another event
Email
margrete@bergenbibliotek.no
Address

Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek (Bergen Public Library)
Strømgaten 6
5015 Bergen
Norway

Short description

Bergen Public Library presents an exhibition of 18 digital works of high quality in today's most creative literary genre, never before exhibited in Norway.

Access to digital literature is limited in Norway and may appear too academic and difficult to access. This exhibition is an effort to spread digital culture to the general public.

More information about the various exhibited works can be found in  the exhibition catalog.

The exhibition is part of Turn on literature project.

(https://bergenbibliotek.no/tjenester-a-a/utstillinger/turn-on-literature)

Record Status
Event type
Date
-
Email
cortesm@uni-bremen.de
Address

Bremen
Bibliothek Straße 1
28359 Bremen
Germany

Short description

Electronic literature is an ever-changing field which makes clear the intersections between multiple art forms, semiotic languages and experiences with the medium. This literary form thrives on dialogues between digital art, cinema, performance or games. The exhibition “Shapeshifting texts” aims to present a selection of works that incorporate these possibilities of interconnection.
Between the 3rd and the 5th of November, we will present the collaborative work done by institutions and archives focused on the preservation of electronic and experimental literature and, simultaneously, demonstrate that electronic literature is part of an ever-evolving process which might have been catalysed by the first experiences with language and surfaces of inscription. At Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen, from the 3rd to the 5th of November 2016, visitors will find works that shapeshift at different levels, often depending on assemblage and recalibration to be experienced.
This exhibition is linked with the International Conference on Digital Media and Textuality and with an Evening of Performances.

(Source: https://digmediatextuality.wordpress.com/events/)

Images
Image
Shapeshifting Texts (poster). Design: João Rui
Record Status
By Hannah Ackermans, 31 October, 2015
Language
Year
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

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)

Short description

An exhibition addressing various aspects of the festival’s theme, the End(s) of Electronic Literature Festival exhibition at the University of Bergen Arts and Humanities Library includes kiosk displays of international web-based electronic literature, installations made specifically for the library context, an “Emergence of Electronic Literature” exhibit (documented in a separate catalog) featuring early works of electronic literature, antecedant works of print literature, posters and other ephemera from the history of the field, and an Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3 preview exhibit.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Record Status