innovation

The 2015 ELO Conference’s call for papers states that "[e]lectronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice, between literature, computation, visual and performance art. The conference will seek to develop a better understanding of electronic literature’s boundaries and relations with other academic disciplines and artistic practices."

This roundtable discussion, led by both established and emerging e-lit scholars and artists, will explore the idea of electronic literature as an intermedial practice, looking at the topic from a wide range of forms including literature, performance, sound, computation, visual art, and physical computing. Drawing upon artistic work they have produced or studied, each panelist will provide a five-minute statement that touches on qualities related to intermediality like hybridity, syncretism, and collaboration. Following this series of brief presentations, the panelists, then, encourage engagement in a wider conversation with the audience.

Because it is our contention that multiple media in combination in a work of art provide endless opportunities for innovation, contemplation, and “fresh perspectives” (Kattenbelt), rendering the notion of an “end” impossible to reach, the goal of the panel is to engage the ELO community in a discussion about the shifting boundaries of electronic literature and its ongoing development as an art form.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

In this interview Michael J. Maguire also known as clevercelt writes about his development in the field of electronic literature both as creative writer and academic scholar. He gives some insights into the work of programming, his interest for computer games and the Phd thesis. The interview stands out for the many references to other authors.

Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.

In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel Vas: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. Jackson’s book, alluding to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about a monster composed of various bodies while the book itself is also a monstrous text: a nonlinear patchwork of links across networks of words and images. Tomasula’s Vas—alluding to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 satire, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions—is set in “Flatland” foregrounding the two-dimensional materiality of the page, all while the linear novel within the pages of Vas is under siege by supplementary information about the body in the form of collaged digital images, scientific facts, and historical citations that address such issues as body modification, in vitro fertilization, genetic code, and DNA. Both Vas and Patchwork Girl can be read as exemplary works in the late age of print because they foreground the materiality of the book, while radically transforming the conventions of the book. In so doing, both works utilize paratextual and extratextual elements that at once reflect on literatures past, while pointing toward a possible literary future.

This talk for the Archive & Innovate conference will present to the ELO community a new major research project and research network focused on electronic literature in Europe. ELMCIP is a 3-year collaborative research project that will run from Spring 2010-2013 and funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) theme: 'Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation.' ELMCIP involves seven European research partners (University of Bergen, Edinburgh College of Art, Blekinge Technical Institute, Univeristy College Falmouth, University of Jyväskylä, University of Amsterdam, and University of Ljubjlana) and one non-academic partner (New Media Scotland) who will investigate how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment.
The research goals of the project are to:
• Understand how creative communities form and interact through distributed media
• Document and evaluate various models and forces of creative communities in the field of electronic literature
• Examine how electronic literature communities benefit from current educational models and develop pedagogical tools
• Study how electronic literature manifests in conventional cultural contexts and evaluate the effects of distributing and exhibiting e-lit in such contexts.
The outcomes of the project will include:
• Series of case studies and research papers (for publications and conferences)
• Series of public seminars
• Online knowledge base (including materials from seminars, project information and an extensive bibliographic record of e-lit works)
• Pedagogy workshop and anthology (Resulting in extensive documentation, presented as an accessible website and DVD-ROM)
• International conference in 2013 in Edinburgh
• Public exhibition of electronic literature artworks and performances
• Openly distributed publications (conference proceedings, exhibition catalog, project documentation and a DVD anthology of e-lit works)
With a budget of just under €1,000,000 we can anticipate that the project will have a major impact on the field of electronic literature and present numerous opportunities to authors and scholars of electronic literature. In the presentation at the ELO conference in particular, my goal will be to identify opportunities for individual artists, writers and scholars of electronic literature to contribute to and to collaborate with ELMCIP, and also to identify some and discuss ways that we can develop mutually beneficial research collaborations between ELMCIP, the ELO, and other international organizations active in the field of electronic literature.

I am interested in the specific nature of POETIC insight and knowledge (Erkenntnis) in relation to other systemic spheres like, e.g., science or religion. As an approach to this subject my paper will discuss how poetic knowledge is addressed by the handling of ‘innovation’. Innovation will be observed as feature between reflexivity and potentiality in poetic experimentation. These poetological categories will be related to both practical and theoretical forms of technology driven language art. As exemplary forms I will focus on the radio play "Die Maschine" (The Machine, 1968) which simulates an Oulipo computer and was written and realized by George Perec and on its poetic comment by Florian Cramer (pleintekst.nl, 2004) as well as on the historical concept of ‘artificial poetry’ by Max Bense (in respect of his 100st anniversary) in the light of recent poetological concepts of innovation.

(Source: Author's abstract)