Langlibabex is a multilingual collaboration that departs from our shared experience of reading and responding in constrained poetic forms to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel.” As collaborators who met at ELO 2014 and shared conversation in three languages, we are committed to working in French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and translating one another’s work across continents and media.
(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)
University of Bergen
Bergen
Norway
"The End(s) of Electronic Literature" Conference took place August 5-7, 2015, and was hosted by the BEL, the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen. Pre-conference workshops took place on August 4th. The call for papers and works resulted in more than 300 submissions and selections have been made for the conference, performances, and exhibitions. (Source: http://conference.eliterature.org/2015)
1965, Originally published in Something Else Newsletter 1, No. 1 (Something Else Press, 1966). Also published as a chapter in Dick Higgins, Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984).
Mark Hansen (2004) argues that the privilege of literature as a technology of communication lies not in its imitation of the flexibility of technical media, but rather in its relationship with the body. This is apparent in the processes by which we acquire alphabetic literacy (how we learn to read and write) and in the reproduction of writing through processes of inscription, dissemination and reception. Newer media technologies are tapping into this relation of intimacy with increasingly greater speed and accuracy (Kittler, Levy). The conversion of text into language calls not only on the cognitive capacities of writers and readers, nor simply on the sense of sight alone. Rather, it mobilises these capacities along with those of all the other sensory modalities, including affect. Language itself is a supramodal synaesthetic medium, as various theories of metaphor make clear. This view of language makes electronic forms a privileged site for understanding the relationship between language, the visual, and the sonic as they are channelled and processed by the senses and temporarily organised in a series of ‘central assemblies'. We take this latter term from the work of Silvan S. Tomkins in order to examine the processes of cross-modalisation as they feed into the production of meaning by the user-reader.
(Source: Author's abstract from 2008 ELO Conference)
New technologies-- whether used for artistic or scientific ends--require new shapes to speak their attributes. Feminist writers too have long sought a narrative shape that can exist both inside and outside of patriarchal systems. Where like-minded theorists have tried to define a gender-specific dimension for art, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics demonstrates that feminist artists have already built and are happily inhabiting this new technological room of their own. This dissertation is an exploration of the architectural shapes of mnemonic systems in women's narratives in the new media (focusing on Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, M.D. Coverley's Califia and Diana Reed Slattery's Glide and The Maze Game as exemplary models). Memory is key here, for, what gets stored or remembered has always been the domain of official histories, of the conqueror speaking his dominant cultural paradigm and body. I explore at length three spatial architectures of the new media: the matrix, the unfold and the knot.
Within quantum mechanics, the science of the body in motion, the intricacies of the interiorities of mnemonic time--no longer an arrow--are being realized in the (traditionally) feminized shape of the body of the matrix. This is the real time realm of cyberspace where the multiple trajectories of the virtual engender a new kind of looking: disorientation as an alternative to linear perspective. Where women have usually been objects to be looked at, hypermedia systems replace the gaze with the empowered look of the embodied browser in motion in archival space. Always in flux, the shape of time s transformation is a Möbius strip unfolding time into the dynamic space of the postmodern text, into the unfold. As quantum interference, the unfold is a gesture that is a sensory interval. In this in-between space, the transformance of the nomadic browser takes place; she performs the embodied knowledge acquired in her navigation of the world of the text. Quantum space in hypertexts is shaped as an irreducible knot, an entangled equation both in and out of space-time, spanning all dimensions as a node in a mnemonic system. Wanderlust is the engine driving the browser on her quest through the intricately knotted interplay of time and space in these electronic ecosystems. What the browser finds there is rapture--an emergent state of embodied transformation in the experiential realm. What she acquires is not mastery, but agency, and an aesthetic interval of her own.
Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Electronic Narrative & the Limits of Memory
Chapter 1. The Archive: Memory, Writing, Feminisms i. Mnemotechnics and Quantum Feminisms ii. The Arts of Memory: What Came Before iii. Writing As a Mnemonic Technology iv. Women s Writing and Feminisms
Chapter 2. The Matrix: Information Overload i. Temporal Perspectives on Information Culture ii. Feminist Dis/Orientations iii. Space-Time Architectures: The Aesthetics of Memory iv. Archival Structures and Fractal Subjectivities
Chapter 3. The Unfold: Immersion i. Unfoldings: Bodies of Memory ii. Transformance: The Body as Interface iii. Hierophanies and Choric Space
Chapter 4. The Knot: Disorientation i. Incrementals: Where Visual Time Meets Virtual Space ii. Knots in the Cosmos iii. The Tangled Trajectories of Nomadic Logic iv. Wanderlust
Chapter Five: Conclusion(s)
(Source: LABS: Leonardo ABstracts Service)