hybrid

Erasure is a powerful technique that allows contemporary creative writers, visual artists, and political activists to reveal underlying patterns within extant narratives. Perhaps because of its imbrication with book arts and other tactile forms, erasure poetry is relatively unexplored in the domain of e-literature. However, educational platforms like Wave Books’ interactive erasure poetry website, as well as recent artistic projects such as Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul, and Nick Montfort’s web browser extension The Deletionist, Jacob Harris’s Times Haiku, and my own participatory platform The Infinite Woman demonstrate some of the possibilities for making and reading erasure poetry in a digital context. In this one-hour hands-on workshop, I’ll briefly introduce the form and technique of erasure in contemporary creative writing, looking at some physical examples (like Lauren Russell’s chalk erasure of Descent) in addition to the digital examples mentioned above.

We’ll discuss the aesthetic and political choices in handcrafted and computationally generated erasure poems; consider erasure’s overlap with and distinction from other approaches like remix, appropriation, and conceptualism; and explore how erasure allows writers and artists to stretch and innovate poetic technique. Then, I’ll introduce a series of hands-on exercises designed to get participants quickly making their own physical and digital erasures. Participants will experiment with user-friendly tools to make their own erasure poems on a variety of platforms. Participants will need to have access to a web browser (Chrome or Firefox) and a word processor, as well as a design program. I’ll be using the free, user-friendly, online platform Canva in lieu of an Adobe product; if participants do not already have a design program, they should sign up for a free Canva account before the workshop (https://www.canva.com/). They will also need paper, scissors, pens or markers, found physical text (like a newspaper or electrical bill), and found digital text (like a speech, blog post, or literary passage).

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)