pandemic

were forced into situations somewhere between Brazil and The Matrix, in which workspaces become the world. Also this evinced Paul Virilio’s notion of technological acceleration while confining to one spot (ZOOM!) undifferentiates the technologically enabled person without disabilities and the technologically au and the technologically augmented paraplegic (The Third interval).These existential effects led to my creation of a visualyl narratological immersive experience entitled Confinement Spaces, which consisted of 3D scans and renders of the UAE quotidian landscape, first of places immediately around me. But as I was able to expand my tr avels, more spaces were scanned in, creating a form of “narrative molecule” based on experience in the 1990’s with designer Roy Stringer’s Navihedron interface regime.In Confinement Spaces, six months of expanding explorations into iconic spaces of the United Arab Emirates as an allegory of confinement in space and the fracturing of reality as depicted by the glitches in the 3D scans.All of these elements (technological collapse of space and time, the freezing of existence into a timeless space, and all of these spaces collapsed in to a form of momentary narrative are consistent with my studies of spatial narratology and form as proposed by Joseph Frank. In this paper, I wish to discuss the spatiality of pandemic time, the similarities of Covid time to Joyce and Proust, and the modes in which Confinement spaces develop these ideas.

When the global pandemic spread in early 2020, we, as many others, wondered what was happening and what it all meant. Almost all cultural activity moved online and the electronic platforms took even stronger hold of our lives. We started gathering material about the impact of the Covid 19 on e-literature and digital creativity for a round table presented at the ELOrlando 2020, the first completely online ELO conference ever. This work led to the project Electronic Literature and Covid 19 (supported by DARIAH EU), which includes an exhibition at this year’s conference, a research collection at the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, other presentations and further research. 

Life under the pandemic is like living under a largely invisible threat that emerges as catastrophic and tragic when death rates go up. At other times the threat of the virus is barely visible and can mainly be traced as deserted streets. Sometimes the way it invades our shared, common imagination gets quickly normalized as yet another persuasive data visualization, digital map demonstrating a sudden upsurge in viral spread or simply another infographic with increasing numbers. It might be compared to how Svetlana Alexievich describes the Chernobyl disaster (in Chernobyl Prayer, (1997), Penguin 2016), as an unknown catastrophe that was and is difficult to understand for the many Belarusians and Ukrainians living in the disaster zone since it did not look like war or natural disaster. Chernobyl’s invisible radioactive cloud that in 1986 spread across Europe, functioned at the time much like invisible viral danger today, as a post-human, ecological crisis requiring a new understanding and politics. And, like Chernobyl, the pandemic has demonstrated the fractures in many societies’ foundations such as economic inequality, racism, inadequately equipped institutions and health services, and incompetent leaders (see also Latour, Hayles Taussig, Mbembe, Chun et al. in Critical Enquiry, vol. 47, number S2, Winther 2021). Luckily, the pandemic has also shown caring communities and societies, newfound interests in the domestic, the local, and the environmental, including the climate crisis (see e.g. Markham AN, Harris A, Luka ME. Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking During COVID-19 Times. Qualitative Inquiry. October 2020.). 

Besides its importance for health, society and the economy, the pandemic might be seen as a paradigmatic cultural change happening in a time with locked down cultural life, which can be seen from behind the global screens of platforms. Electronic literature plays an important role in exploring how people gets through daily life during the pandemic, how we see our homes, communities, cities, environments, institutions, how people become part of both progressive (BLM, Metoo, etc) and reactionary (QAnon, etc) movements. Digital platforms have played a large part in this, e.g. through the various #, through their ways of promoting extremism through profiling algorithms, through their transforming of institutions, etc. 

This panel will present early outcomes of the project, present a framework for the exhibition, and an analysis of the themes of the submitted works. We will also invite feedback from the ELO community of researchers, practitioners and artists.

In this panel moderated by Lai-Tze Fan, we examine Twine at ten, exploring the ongoing influence of this hypertext platform on pedagogy, play, and literature: 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Twine (Moulthrop) - Creating digital stories and games involves many cultural registers. Just as important is the unmapped, semi-formal culture that underlies communal, open-source software. In the case of Twine, this can involve distinctions among versions of the core software, associated scripting languages, and "story formats." Learning this buried lore can reveal a technologized "artworld," in Howard Becker's term, and raises questions of hierarchy, value, and the nature of creative work in what is essentially a gift economy – questions that may ultimately apply to any form of art. 

Twine at 10: Reflections on Pandemic Storytelling (Salter) - Hypertext and games platform Twine recently marked its ten year anniversary, complete with a celebratory game jam. Twine’s affordances as a web-driven, open source tool drive its renewed significance as a platform for rapid response storytelling, enabling users to build playful, poignant responses to the many challenges of 2020 as exemplified by Mark Sample’s 10 Lost Boys; Cait Kirby’s September 7, 2020; and Adi Robbertson’s You Have to Ban the President. 

Twine, The EpistoLab (Laiola) - A frustrating element of teaching with Twine is the platform’s limitations with real-time collaboration across devices. Before COVID, when the classroom could operate as a lab, this limitation could be solved by students gathering around a single machine. But when shared machinery and gathering becomes impossible, Twine offers another model--“the epistolab.” The epistolab follows an epistolary model of collaborative work, dispersing colLABoration across times and spaces, and prompting a reevaluation of the roles that simultaneity and liveness play in collaboratory, pedagogical work. 

Twine as Literature, Not Literacy, in the Program(ming) Era (Milligan) - In the 21st century digital humanities, “digital literacy” has seemingly become the humanistic endgame for how we conceptualize, rationalize, and advertise the skillsets we impart; In e-lit, Twine as well is often presented to students in these terms. As the potential shortcomings of literacy as sole pedagogical outcome, however, become increasingly clearer (for instance -- as we reckon with its limitations to prevent insurgency-through-misinformation in the US), I propose another way to teach Twine and its promise of digital storytelling differently: through a model, based on the creative writing workshop, that highlights the literature and literary possibilities of Twine. 

The panel will conclude with an open discussion of Twine’s future as a platform

Even before worldwide quarantines added impetus, material gaming had already become increasingly enacted in virtual spaces. Rather than virtual play replacing the material, as some speculated in the early days of videogames, material play has become increasingly entangled with virtuality. These increasingly complementary modes of play offer a rich space for exploring the multifaceted embodied and conceptual activity of play, the blending of material and virtual that in many ways defines games.The three panelists encompass a wide range of perspectives, including the perspective of a game maker translating material play into the digital realm, that of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholar who researched how players interact differently with the Catan boardgame and its digital implementations, and that of a theorist reflecting on how virtual spaces remediate material affects. Together, these diverse perspectives aim to explore the paradoxical yet generative spaces where materiality and virtuality intersect in gaming.The theoretical approach looks at analog games as capable of producing the specific circumstances that foreground the affective relationships between the players and the other pieces of the assemblage. Because of the procedural nature that necessitates specific types of interactions between parts of the play assemblage, analog games amplify the social interactions between players and differently produce affective orientations as a consequence of their systems. Then examines the ways that these games are remediated and adapted to digital platforms highlighting the things that are lost or changed in the move to digital, uncovering the types of experiences that are important for each type of adaptation.

The HCI approach presents Association Mapping (AM) in HCI; called so because the formation of a network is due to objects making associations in context. By recording the associations that form a network, it is possible to understand what objects are most central within that network. . This research contributes to the next paradigm of HCI by providing a new tool to understand use that is fragmented, distributed, and invisible. AM incorporates association as its measurement. This results in passive measures of attention, hybridity, and influence in network formation of any kind. It does this by making the systemic nature of use visible and capable of evaluation at any level.And finally the design approach applies design strategies for incorporating three main types of play: Screenplay, Gameplay, and Roleplay, seeking to answer questions about how to bridge the narrative and performance aspects of digital and analog play. This is particularly applicable to classic games that are associated with transmedia narratives and characters, such as the Clue board game, where there are established cinematic traditions and character roles.During the COVID-19 pandemic, board games have become a useful medium for examining our changing relationship with physical and digital interaction. In addition to presenting our own findings, this panel also offers several methodologies for furthering research into the intersections of the analog, digital, physical, and virtual.