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Eric Zimmerman describes his interactive paper book as "an inverted exquisite corpse," and although a digital version of the book would be easy to produce, he argues that an electronic edition would not produce as meaningful an experience as the printed volume.

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Eric Zimmerman

This paper will start by exploring Platonic Formalism as Techne without instantiation. In a concurrently anti-aesthetic and morally rationalist manner, Plato's space for any artistic enactment requires a social engagement utilizing a logical method. This is mathematics without technology, or the semantics of the structured without any methodology for construction and preservation. Analytically speaking, we are given a dialogic picture of the ghost in the machine.

This phrase, used critically by Gilbert Ryle to take apart the mental dualism of Descartes, can contrast with Kierkegaard's appreciation of the thinker - that is, the personal reasoning of Descartes, Socrates debating himself (as he often does). Rationalism takes the form of logical structures that roam the imaginary and hypothetical, a sheerly literary game (Kierkegaard's first stage) in a manner described by absence. A negative machinic aesthetics.

Randy Adams, the Canadian digital poet, accumulated a body of work that grew up in the social blog heavy 2000s period of web history. Amidst a flurry of activity on different corporate American platforms like blogspot and wordpress, the collective blog took root and Adams' own Remixworx was exemplary of this. These projects are crucial as social works as well as platforms for some of the most reflective and relevant work being made at the time. Some artists, such as Carmen Racovitza and Matina Stamatakis, made their primary base in these blogs, and have a body of work that I think can't be properly appreciated without a valorization of these spaces. Others, such as Ted Warnell, have no extant work from such commercial platforms except scattered documents and references (https://warnell.com/blogs/codepo.txt).

Computers are born out of the pre-emptive strategizing of American imperialism, and their interconnected evolution has reified over time this military-commercial genealogy. The question for a work in a new medium is not simply how to technically use that medium but what is the social audience - of creators and readers. Much as the printing press and its reproduced codices represent a core method of European communication and political growth, so the computer wears the vestige of America's technical and territorial advance on the world stage.

Starting with an archeology of instrumental rationalism, my exploration will then bifurcate between the social media literature that proliferated through the later 2000s and 2010s, and the social infrastructure that made that possible. In contrast to the internet origin myth that starts free and gradually gets commercially corrupted, I will attempt to make the case that as social bodies settle into its media, the basic nature - both historical and technical - becomes culturally revealed over time. By following a series of creative authors I have found attuned to the computer network's economic and social structures, I hope to diagram the inherent corporate statism that undergirds internet space from its inception. Insofar as such a picture is accurate I argue that the role of the artist becomes one of reversing that overinstrumentalized rationalism, of discovering the platforms for its bias and engaging in a critical practice at once parasitic and analytical. It could be that that Cartesian Spectre, or Plato's Socratic Method, however heuristic, proves the personal rational key to a world whose logic has grown all too technological.

This paper represents a reflection on the process of designing an inclusive and accessible user interface for people with visual impairments. As a multimedia designer, I am involved in an on- going site-specific digital literature project, known as Byderhand (At hand). In 2017, a school for learners with visual barriers in the Western Cape Province of South Africa approached me and my project co-managers about the possibility of incorporating digital literature as part of a multi- sensory garden project at the school. This specific context implied that we had to reconsider the interface design of existing phases of our project. Interfaces for mobile screens are generally based on visual communication. Information is simplified and represented in the form of graphical icons, to improve navigation. However, such an approach fails when a user is unable to see what is displayed on screen. It is therefore imperative for designers to gain an understanding of blind and visually impaired users’ needs and requirements regarding their interaction with mobile technology.

The development of this project required collaboration with various people who are visually impaired and/or provide a service to people with visual impairment. Such a participatory approach proved to be especially relevant during the user research and evaluation phases of the interface designing process. The latter included experimentation with both braille signification and digital interface usage. We had to overcome two main obstacles to ensure the practicality of the Byderhand platform in this regard. The first was to enable users with visual impairments to gain access to the digital interface via QR codes. This required a unique solution, as the scanning of QR codes mainly relies on the user’s visual capabilities. The second goal was to design an inclusive navigational interface, in order to enable users with different visual capabilities to experience the texts published multi-modally on the platform.

The development period, which lasted twelve months, entailed extensive user research, prototyping, evaluation and improvement of the physical and digital interfaces. The multi- sensory garden was unveiled on 30 August 2018. Learners can now interact and experience themulti-modally mediated, site-specific digital literature on their school grounds. Extended facets of the project were made available to the general public, namely in the local coffee shop at the Innovation for the Blind Centre and in the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden as part of a Braille Trail development. The most recent Byderhand project phase was well received and is also used as an educative tool to stimulate learners at the said school, exposing them to new experiences of literary presentation. With more exploration, the design solutions developed in this project phase could offer new possibilities of literature publication for people with visual impairments in accessible spaces.

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1986 is a digital work produced by the Labyrinth Project Research Center of the University of Southern California. Part paper, part DVD-ROM, part real, part fiction, it is based on an unsolved mystery, and unfolds the story of Molly, an Irish immigrant who moved to Los Angeles in 1920. She was at the heart of an investigation in the late 50’s early 60’s as she was the main suspect in the death of her second husband Walt. The project gathers hundreds of different data types like maps, pictures, texts, newspaper articles, books and movies, through which the user navigates in order to ultimately, resolve the crime. But how does the user build an interpretable narrative through this hypermedial database?

Far from pretending to be an analysis based on reception theories, this proposal seeks to understand the mechanisms of language that enable interpretation in a hypermedial digital work by exploring the relational dynamics between the different media representions in Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 - 1986. Literature, Cinema and Computer language rely on very different semiotic systems that somehow collide in Bleeding Through. Frames are visible; the project shows the different media types, and each one is used for its specificity. What can’t be read is shown; what can’t be seen is written, but at the end, it may just be programmed…

The hypermedial nature of the work calls for an intermedial interpretation. Between literature, cinema, geography, journalism lies an unraveled plot (real or fake), a possible storyline that still needs to be imagined, and which relies on literary imaginary. It’s Molly’s story, and maybe that’s exactly where literature starts and ends. As the user is scrolling through the maps, articles, and photographs the elements are presented and or confronted to one another. Along with the user’s reading, gaps are revealed between the significant units leaving a space where narratives are created, where facts and fiction merge into a unified and coherent virtual assemblage; it’s the figural space.

In Reading the Figural, David Norman Rodowick considers what has become of reading, of interpretation in art through intermedial practices. As he says, “contemporary electronic media [are] giving rise to hybrid and mutant forms that semiology [is] ill equipped to understand. […] New media [are] emerging from a new logic of sense – the figural – and they could not be understood within the reigning norms of a linguistic or aesthetic philosophy.” (Rodowick. 2001. p.ix-x).

By exploring the intermedial relations between the significant elements in Bleeding Through, the boundaries and frontiers of these same units fuse into a blur, and are at the same time reflected on the content of the work itself, until facts and fiction become undistinguishable and the narrative takes over.

***

“It is now time to unravel or commit literary murder. I am now convinced that Molly had Walt murdered in 1959. He hasn’t been heard of or seen since. […] Have I hit a motive that is convincing yet? It is daunting prospect to give up all those newspaper clippings in order to make this story legible. […] I promise to murder him off as much as the evidence will allow. I have about a thousand photographs and newspaper articles, over two hundred relevant movies on file, and over twenty interviews, along with hours of interviews with Norman Klein; and hundreds of pages of text. With all of these elegantly assembled in a DVD-ROM, I can […] make an entertainment, a tristful paideia, a mocking of the truth.” (Klein, Norman. 2002. Bleeding Though: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1986. p. 27)

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Over the past decade, installations of the CAVE have compelled participants to explore how immersive text spaces create playful literary sandboxes in which to experiment with various forms of appropriated writing. Although the fusion of virtual reality and literature has continuously been flirted with, the interactive digital creative space has yet to be realized with comparable impact. So far we have been invited by composers such Rui Torres, Stuart Moulthrop, and Jörg Piringer to participate in the ludic engagement with textual instruments; with “New World Order: Basra,” Sandy Baldwin demonstrated how gamespace provides a compelling environment for textual manipulation. However, to my knowledge, we have yet to develop the space that places these a combination of these capabilities within a single compositional environment.

With the upcoming commercial release of both the Oculus Rift and Google Glass headsets, the arrival of virtual reality’s now decades-old promise of embodiment within the digital appears to be more imminent than ever before. My paper will articulate the foundation of an ongoing project that will attempt to mitigate these revolutionary output devices with combinatorial input sources already in use to create a creative virtual realm. As my presentation will introduce, my Text(ual) Renderer Project will combine VR technology, speech-to-text software and motion-sensing devices to create a unique composition environment. Within this virtual space, the user will input speech which will then be displayed in the 360-degree VR space provided by the Oculus Rift. This text will then be manipulated and arranged through motion input of the user.

My proposal for ELO’s gathering consists of both a paper and a demonstration to be presented simultaneously. My paper will first review the relationship between VR, performance, and language manipulation. After this summary, I will then propose the next iteration of this embrace, an environment that, like the CAVE project, provides the user with a textually creative and interactive experience. I will then provide an exploratory first stage of ongoing research in the modification of an existing gamespace, Mojang’s sandbox world generator Minecraft, which will render the Text(ured) environment into a viable compositional space. Through the creation and manipulation capabilities provided with Minecraft, I will then illustrate the numerous potentials for text creation and manipulation in the virtual landscape.

Finally, my paper will posit several subsequent projects that depart from Minecraft mods to renegotiate the user’s relationship to the textual environment within virtual and augmented realities. These include the development of a VR Processing compiler that allows users to manipulate the code structures and modules through sensory input, the potential benefit for accessibility, as well as the possible opportunities provided by augmented reality (AR) devices. (Source: Author`s abstract)

This paper presentation will be based on a 6­month long exploration of electronic literature
designed for children or that may appeal to children. This survey of the field will be conducted
publicly using I ♥ E­Poetry as a platform and structure for publication of weekly reviews of works,
which will result in a dataset of 15­20 works.
As a father of two children­­ a 4 year old boy and a 6 year old girl­­ I will have an ideal test
audience for the works. In addition to reading and critically appraising the works myself, I will also
invite my children to play, read, and interact with the works so I can observe their reactions and
receive their input when writing my reviews. The platforms I will be focusing on will be iOS (we
own iPhones, iPod Touch, and an iPad), Android (I own a Nexus 7), and the LeapPad Ultra
system of tablets designed for children. The affordances and constraints of these systems will
be of interest for my analysis.
For this exploration, I will define e­literature broadly and may include video games, interactive
e­books, apps, and more, as long as there is a significant engagement with language in digital
media. I will also present a selection of e­lit works, such as iOS apps created by Jody Zellen and
Jörg Piringer, to my children and observe their response to the works.
The resulting series of entries will draw attention to the topic and lead to insights on the current
state of e­literature for children. The paper and presentation will organize those thoughts into a
clear hypothesis, discuss a selection of e­lit works, and draw conclusions from the data. (Source: Authors abstract)

This twenty-minute paper builds toward the following provocation: it is no longer possible for a text not to be digital. Considering both existing and invented definitions of digital textuality, this paper frames (again!) various discussions of the nature of digital (and "electronic) texts, examining in digital texts their materialities and temporalities, their associated modes of composition and reception, their most evident differences from traditional texts, and their claims to both digital-ness and to textuality. Selecting key features from this analysis, I conclude that the digitalness of a text relates to the way in which it opens (and closes) certain possibilities of reading and other actions. Google's Book project, numerous digital library efforts, and even devices for digitizing business cards attest to the drive to make all texts digital. But, I suggest, even beyond these current events, we have come to understand the very idea of a text already in terms of its possibilities and thus as already digital or potentially digital. What room is left for another, non-digital notion of textuality to present itself?

(Source: Author's introduction)

An exploration of bookishness (book fetishism, book porn, books as physical aesthetic objects that we adore) and in particular the way in which paper arts and bookishness, and the "cute", are used in a feminist and thereby political aesthetics.

Electronic literature is awash with paper. In particular, the paper arts of scrapbooking, paper dress-up dolls, paper-doll theater, postcards, and stitch patterns have found a resurgence in recent works of electronic literature by women writers. In very different ways but with meaningful connections, Caitlin Fisher, Travis Alber, J.R. Carpenter, and Juliet Davis all purposefully remediate these paper arts associated with female domestic crafts in ways that both archive and reinvigorate them. Moreover, as I will argue in this talk, these writers use digital poetics to reconsider these feminized forms from a feminist perspective. They insist on the significance of materiality, both the materiality of bodies of humans and of texts, in ways that subtly transform and update older feminist discourses and artistic practices for a new medium and moment.

(Source: Author's Description)

Digital literature emphasizes its own medium, and it brings to the foreground the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avant-garde. This article aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.

The analysis of three works that remediate paper, the voice, the writing hand, or the physical presence of the author, leads to the conclusion that an ‘absent presence’ is given prominence. This paradoxical merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist ambivalent stance regarding representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

(Source: Author's abstract)