These projects ultimately portray a bleak picture of a metainterface industrial control of literacy and of how literature, art and aesthetics is commodified and instrumentalized. However, they also point to how literature potentially becomes sites of critical reflection of the way reading-writing is encased in a big data drama. In this way, they point towards redesigning and rewriting the metainterface character.
"Grosser’s works show how Facebook’s metrification parasites on affective social dimensions, such as relations between an I and a You (You like...), emotive reactions (Go Rando) and social activity and status (Facebook Demetricator)."
Online social networks and video games are prevalent in today’s society, and using both video game characters and social networking profiles cam potentially be used to help people better understand others’ experiences, delivering meaningful experiences which enable critical reflection upon one’s identity, and on others’ experiences related to identity. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text fields are insufficient to convey the richness of our real world identities. As a step towards conveying richer identity experiences, we introduce our interactive narrative game called Mimesis, which aims to allow players to explore identity phenomena associated with discrimination. The story of Mimesis takes place in an underwater setting with subtly anthropomorphized sea creatures as characters. The player character is a mimic octopus, which is a species of octopus adept at emulating other creatures. The octopus is on a journey that takes it from the dark depths of the ocean to its home in the tropical shallows. Along her way, the octopus will encounter several sea creatures who inhabit the waters and whose actions serve as examples of particular kinds of covert discrimination. These sea creatures provoke the octopus, leaving the player to must choose between different emotional responses to the creatures in order to guide the octopus through a series of short conversations. In this way, the project maps the experience of discrimination onto gameworld based on an underwater metaphor. (Source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/mimesis)
The course is divided into three thematic modules. Each module consists of six lectures and one assignment. After each module students have a week to write a 1000 word draft paper. The following week the next module’s lectures begin, and students will receive feedback on their paper. They will choose two of their drafts to revise and expand to two 2000 word papers that they will hand in as your portfolio. Their grade for the course depends on the assessment of this final portfolio.
Module 1: Digital Self-Representations (Jill Walker Rettberg)
Module 2: Identity Online (Kathi Inman Berens, Fulbright Scholar visiting from Univ. of Southern California)
Module 3: Digital Media Ethics (Álvaro Seiça)
In 2013, as a part of the Culture Programme of Ireland’s EU presidency, The Poetry Project was set up by the Kinsale Arts Festival in partnership with Poetry Ireland and the Royal Hibernian Academy. In the project, poems by established and emerging Irish poets were coupled with works by Irish video artists. The resulting collaborative works were published each week, for nine months, on the project website and emailed to recipients in Ireland and in more than one hundred countries around the world. This presentation focused on how the verbal, visual and auditory elements of the works published within The Poetry Project simultaneously enact and reflect the challenges and discontinuities related to representations of place, space and landscape in the poetry of the digital era.