Dene Grigar begins by detailing the challenges that current archival practices pose for preserving electronic literature. Examples from various library collections and experiences with preparing works for archives in her own lab help to foreground the problems needed to be solved.
Originally published in BeeHive 3:4 (December 2000), this poem maps human experiences, narrative, weddings, funerals, and memory onto the ebb and flow of waters in tidelands— those coastal regions where rivers flow into the sea. The metaphorical relations between tidelands and individual and collective experience, past and present, knowledge and intuition are enacted in the use of hypertext and layers. This layering of text and image makes some lines and words difficult to read, breaking with the tradition of sequential arrangement of texts to draw attention towards new juxtapositions and the blending of human experiences. The poem also references estuaries, islands, and water during high, low, and neap tides— lunar and maritime cycles presented as a female analog to the more masculine solar solstices and equinoxes that have received such archetypal attention.
This is a work worthy of rereading and reflection to allow its language and images to ebb and flow in and out of your conscious mind.
(Source: Leonardo Flores)
Most new media work establishes interactivity within a curated installation space: a gallery, a festival, or an area whose purpose is to exhibit art. However, recent experiments in new media narratives have made use of the capabilities of smartphones and tablets to present experiences that are aware of the user’s position in space and
even their current behavior or object of attention.
Specifically,augmented reality works set themselves apart by re-contextualizing environments and objects encountered in everyday life, removing the fourth wall and blurring or eliminating an interactive experience's boundaries. This differs markedly from the purism of the imagination tapped by literature, and often even favors more realistic integration, in contrast to stylistic depictions and abstractions used in monitor-based works. Augmented reality’s strength and interest lies in how it embeds a story in an environment, or how it can be used to awaken new awareness of a viewer to their surroundings. This bridges the world of the reader with the diegesis of the narrative, resulting in works that react to the immediacy of the experienced space.
The major draw to augmented reality in industry has been to use this immediacy to push a product or service, and embed it within the viewer's world. As with any new platform for generating content, its commercial appropriations and implementations threaten to control the discourse of its use. It is important therefore to establish an artistic framework that conveys and critiques the narrative affordances AR makes possible.
Augmented reality is a relatively nascent medium, especially when set alongside other works of electronic literature. Our talk will start with a brief illustration that will allow audience members with smartphones to collaboratively experience an augmented reality work.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)