gender

Unlike other forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning that are used for creative production, female-presenting virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant are not designed to be collaborators nor content producers, but rather, to serve as mouthpieces and platforms for others' pre-designated scripts to be performed. This talk examines the gendered design and creative limitations of AI virtual assistants as part of a growing body of studies in the systemic biases of technological design

Ocean as Media Platform for Electronic Literature 

The ocean is a media platform. Recognizing it as such can change how we think of platform, media, and meaning. This panel takes an ecocritical approach. We understand the ocean to be a primary platform for life on Earth, encompassing 70% of our globe, and also a platform that inspires much of our digital life and literature. We take Joellyn Rock and Alison Aune’s FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as sinew connecting our diverse our critical methodologies and perspectives, as we consider how emerging knowledge from environmental humanities informselectronic literature.

Melody Jue: "Beyond Blue: Ocean and/as Platform":What might it look like to speculatively submerge our ideas about computational platforms in the ocean? How terrestrial is platform studies? Drawing from my book Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), this talk explores the valences of the “platform” in oceanic contexts, considering its media-specific meaning alongside others (oil platform, advocacy platform) and the metaphor of the platform as a flat, planar surface. I consider the affordances of platforms and oceans through a reading of the video game Beyond Blue, by BBC and E-line media, which presents an occasion to consider ocean health and resource extraction alongside multiple senses of “platform,” from computation to environmental politics.

Mark Marino: “Diving into the code of immersive e-lit.”From immersion in sound and image in Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998) to immersion in a downpour of letters in Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain” (2000) to immersion in a sea of text in Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s “Sea and Spar Between” (2010), artists of electronic literature have plunged readers into virtual oceans. This presentation will take a deep dive into the Processing code to explore the ways “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” immerses its participants in tides of gender, hybridity, and fantasy.

Diana Leong: “Silhouettes and the Sea: Mediating Racial Fetishism”:From Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist medallion to artist Kara Walker’s cut-paper installations, the silhouette has occupied a singular place within the iconography of slavery and its afterlife. This style of illustration can be understood as operating within the dynamics of racial fetishism as it attempts to resolve tensions between the universal (e.g., racial blackness) and the particular (e.g., black bodies). This talk examines how “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” evokes a similar dynamic by staging oceanic entanglements between depth (e.g., immersion) and surface (e.g., silhouette) as a complement to universal/particular. By mapping these entanglements onto the mermaid’s multiple forms of liminality, “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” gestures towards a reading of racial fetishism as a form of pleasure predicated on an ambivalent relationship to difference.

Jessica Pressman: “Mermaids in Elit”:This talk explores the role of mermaids in electronic literature, past and present, as poetic symbol and formal device. We can read the presence of mermaids as portending transformations in literature’s media, signifying change in the materiality of literary production and reception. In this talk, I use “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as exemplary of how electronic literature uses mermaids and what we can learn by diving deep into consideration of them.

As a digital genre, fanfiction enables the recontextualisation and transformation of characters, plots, and stories from popular culture. The dynamic combination of a community-driven writing practice with well-developed platforms that support an extensive and generative labelling system, supports the development of an ever-expanding network of tropes, which are continually being reinvented and reimagined in new forms. This article discusses one such trope, popularly known as “omegaverse” or alpha/beta/omega fanfiction. Currently counting 89 253 distinct works on the fanfiction platform aO3.org, omegaverse fanfiction draws on popular imaginations of wolf or canine social hierarchies and reproductive behaviours in order to reimagine characters from popular culture into a parallel gender structure as alphas, betas, or omegas. Using concepts from fan studies and feminist theory, this article shows how omegaverse fanfiction treats discourses about gender and embodiment in the same manner as it treats the original media texts, mining them for meaning in order to imaginatively transform them. Through this speculative mode, omegaverse fanfiction creates a space where the discourses associated with gender, biology, and embodiment are broken down into a set of building blocks with which individual authors can explore the inner logic of fictional gender systems on societies, relationships, and situations, examine their consequences, and imagine their downfall. Furthermore, by rewriting these discourses onto familiar characters through fanfictional narratives, the alpha/beta/omega system works as a node through which fans imagine how specific reconfigurations of differently gendered bodies would play out as lived, situated, meaningful experience. The speculative mode that is characteristic of fanfiction as a digital genre, in combination with the affordances of platforms such as ArchiveOfOurOwn.org, support the iterative play not just with products and works of popular culture, but also with the discourses and meanings with which gendered bodies are constructed and made intelligible. The constant reinvention of the trope is made possible through the interconnected and iterative process of this community-based, affect-driven, digitally native genre. Understood as an example of electronic literature, omegaverse fanfiction can be read as a kind of ‘low theory’, theory that exists at the margin of formal knowledge formations, creating alternative ways of talking and thinking about gendered embodiment.

All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. Disrupting the Digital Humanities seeks to rethink how we map disciplinary terrain by directly confronting the gatekeeping impulse of many other so-called field-defining collections. What is most beautiful about the work of the Digital Humanities is exactly the fact that it can’t be tidily anthologized. In fact, the desire to neatly define the Digital Humanities (to filter the DH-y from the DH) is a way of excluding the radically diverse work that actually constitutes the field. This collection, then, works to push and prod at the edges of the Digital Humanities — to open the Digital Humanities rather than close it down. Ultimately, it’s exactly the fringes, the outliers, that make the Digital Humanities both heterogeneous and rigorous.

This collection does not constitute yet another reservoir for the new Digital Humanities canon. Rather, its aim is less about assembling content as it is about creating new conversations. Building a truly communal space for the digital humanities requires that we all approach that space with a commitment to: 1) creating open and non-hierarchical dialogues; 2) championing non-traditional work that might not otherwise be recognized through conventional scholarly channels; 3) amplifying marginalized voices; 4) advocating for students and learners; and 5) sharing generously and openly to support the work of our peers.

(source: back cover of the book)

In our contemporary, increasingly transnational world, national literatures may seem increasingly arbitrary—even more so in the context of electronic literature, whose barriers of circulation tend to be marked by transnational, rather than national, groupings based on, for example, language or access to certain technologies. In contrast to the frequently (hyper-)nationalized literatures of mainstream literary study, electronic literature is often framed as an international or transnational literature. There are very good reasons for this: for example, the medium of electronic literature naturally lends itself to transnational dissemination and readership through the global reach of the internet. However, this transnational approach, which frequently exhibits an unacknowledged bias towards works produced in the US, also frequently ignores the ways in which an understanding of national contexts may enrich the understanding of a work. Through this paper, I hope to facilitate discussion regarding the relative merits and demerits of a transnational or national framing of electronic literature by using my own larger project, which focuses on works responding to Canadian contexts, and its sub-study of the decidedly transnational setting of J.R. Carpenter’s Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl as a case study. This paper begins by briefly describing my larger project, which examines works of electronic literature that consider how gendered, queer, racialized, and economicallydisenfranchised identities navigate physical, regionalized Canadian spaces of the past, present, and future. In this project, I examine e-lit that uses temporally- and spatially-dynamic techniques to explore how marginalized identities operate on the peripheries and navigate Canadian spaces and historical contexts, and how these works trouble the dominant narratives that these marginalized groups encounter and resist. As a part of this study, I look at J.R. Carpenter’s works of electronic literature, which transform the aesthetics of predominantly male-authored printbased forms into non-linear, female-narrated digital explorations of girlhood and the formation of gender identity. In this paper, I briefly consider the thematic trajectory of Carpenter’s works (from a focus on Nova Scotia and North American maritime settings, to Montreal and urban settings, to a transatlantic aesthetic) before diving into a short case study of her work Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, set in a transatlantic space. The location of the work’s narrative in transatlantic waters means that this work is less obviously situated within a Canadian space, thus troubling my framing of her work within a Canadian context and making this work a perfect candidate for a study with a transnational approach. However, this work is also very much informed by the diasporas of the British Isles towards the now Atlantic Canadian shores, and the pre-digital communication networks that grew out of the transatlantic relationship between these two landforms. Thus, I argue that an understanding of both Canada’s history of colonization and exploration and its transnational underpinnings enriches our understanding of this work in which a girl’s appropriation and transformation of narratives of past colonialist endeavours is a subversive repurposing of those words in service of a feminist journey of personal discovery.

Jussi Parikka interviews artist Zoe Beloff about her relationship to the emerging set of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies known as media archaeology. In way of response, Beloff discusses some past works, including: Lost (1995), Shadow Land (2000), Claire and Don in Slumberland (2002), Charming Augustine (2005), The Somnambulists (2008), and The Dream Films (2009).

(Source: ebr)