professionalism

Complimenting a broader international research paradigm shift, Electronic Literature scholars and practitioners alike have expressed a desire to expand the field to include deep collaborations with other disciplines. In achieving such a goal any original indigenous ideologies and aesthetics may be challenged. This dialectical tension between striving to be niche/identifiable/original in a mixed discipline economy faced with contemporary descriptors of ‘human experience’ such as Baumanr’s Liquid Modernity (2000), Antonelli’s Elasticity (2008) or even Turkle’s "life mix" (2011) remains key to facing this challenge.

Using new interviews, emergent theories and archival resources this paper argues that the Flash community has already faced the issue of contemporary homogeneity driven by our on-going context of rapid technological change, and can be regarded as an exemplar of post-conceptual experimentalism. After a comparative analysis between the Flash Community and Electronic Literature the paper goes on to explore other new insights and considers the implications of being post-conceptual as a future opportunity and/or risk for Electronic Literature.

(Source: Author's abstract)

An interview with the self-described digital poet Jason Nelson on the semiotic pleasures of playing and creating "art-games," indie works produced outside corporate game studios, which, Nelson predicts, will eventually be recognized as the most significant art movement of the 21st century. While explaining how he came to be a digital author, Nelson addresses topics such as his continued love of Flash as a production tool, despite its likely obsolesence, his appreciation for gamescapes that allow for aimless wandering, and the intense reactions his art-games provoke in players. Alluding to the fact that Digital Poet is not the most lucrative of professions, Nelson signals his desire to design "big budget console games," provided he could do so on his terms. 

(Source: Eric Dean Rasmussen)