Jonah is working at a shelter for asylum seekers in Austin, Texas. Zander is a filmmaker and dancer based in New York City.
bedbugs is a video version of a talk presented at a couple different WordHack events. Talk presented circa 2014, video finished circa 2017.
In this presentation, the author argues that we should “mind the gap” between screen and skin, especially where it eclipses the precarious identities vulnerable within our hegemonic cultures. The contact zone where users interface with electronic media is actually constructed out of far more political scaffolding than people often recognize. Though “user friendly” assumptions reinforce the invisible logic of idealized interfaces open to all, the realities of social conditions which contextualize those technologies should make us rethink who the “user” really is. How has the threshold of the interface become a barrier for them? The presentation investigates how precarious identities, such as the indigenous and the queer, must navigate the contested boundaries of language and embodiment through electronic literature as haptic media. Caleb Andrew Milligan begins by considering how Jason Edward Lewis plays out politics upon the surface of the touchscreen. With help from Lori Emerson’s critique of the iPad, he argues that Lewis’s Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media is furthermore Poetry for Ephemeral [Maintainable] Media, as it relies upon digital technology vulnerable to what Terry Harpold terms the “upgrade path” and its movements toward eventual inoperability. He argues that this feature is an intentional subversion on Lewis’s part (himself part Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan) as an aboriginal design practice which explores through the medium’s ephemerality an aesthetic of materialized erasure—the erasure, that is, of aboriginal cultures in the face of forced assimilation into Canadian cultures. As Lewis poetically performs the precarity of identity-through-language upon precarious platforms that kill more electronic literature than they preserve now, we are left with only the fleeting sense of touch that connects (soon to be only connected) us to his appoems. He then considers the just as ephemeral haptics of Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive. As a beautifully brutal examination of escape from toxic cultures, Porpentine’s Twine game literally escapes the confines of the screen as it encourages players to draw symbols upon their skin that correspond with the narrative beats. Beyond just the quick clicks of hypertextual interaction, players actually have to feel the physical prick of inscripting themselves, and join in the game’s cycle of pain. Combining the work of Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett on toxic geekdom with Jaishree K. Odin’s on feminist hypertext, he considers Porpentine’s precarious identity as a trans woman game developer in artistic opposition to a digital climate of “Gamergaters.” Her work reaches outside of norms and touches where other texts flatly cannot go. He draw in Diogo Marques’s claim that our skin is just as much interface as screen to finally consider the ephemerality of Porpentine’s text as well, once the hand-drawn markings are washed away. The embodied art fades, and the Twine game’s intoxicatingly violent world of language remains. The presentation ends to question how we are similarly just as ephemeral as the gestures and drawings of these electronic literary texts. The “touchy” subjects between screen and skin that these works explore highlight the precarious identities that cultures often aim to erase. Electronic literature as haptic media helps us to get in touch with these overlooked lives, and to not only mind the gap, but to stick our fingers in it.
Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1124/Betw…
This is a speech by Ted Fordyce concerning the Scott McCloud’s "Understanding Comics" book.
The book is about symbolic and iconic representation, the relationship between word and image and the illustration of time. Ted Fordyce thinks it is really helpful for the digital works' interpretation.
The main point is the McCloud’s discussion of the gutter to link-oriented electronic literature: his thought is that the gutter is the result of the author + reader collaboration. There are six different transitions: in each of them, the author determines the type and the reader is the one who provides interpretations.
In conclusion, Ted Fordyce thinks that the McCloud’s discussion «provides us with a useful set of tools as both creators and readers of interactive fiction».
Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/items/1214
A talk-performance delivered at the University of Coimbra on Torres's praxis. The talk was scripted with a constraint with the letter P. Bruno Ministro assisted by changing 'slides.'
Flocks of books open and close, winging their way web-ward. A reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by lines of longitude, of latitude, of graph, of paper. The horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean paragraphs. These fluid texts are continuously recomposed by JavaScript files calling upon variable strings containing words and phrases collected from a vast literary corpus – Deleuze’s Desert Islands (2004), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Bishop’s Crusoe in England (1971), Coetzee’s Foe (1966), Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973), Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries (1598–1600), Darwin’s Voyages of the Beagle (1838), and many other lesser-known sources including an out-of-date guidebook to the Scottish Isles, and an amalgam of accounts of the classical and quite possibly fictional island of Thule. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts a reader will never wash ashore on the same island twice… and by islands, I really do mean paragraphs.
(Source: Author's description)
[‘I was a bottle bobbing on the waves with a scrap of writing inside’, ‘I was carried by the waves’, ‘Through the hours of despair on the waves’, ‘The the roar of the waves’, ‘The wind and wave-roar’, ‘The waves picked me up and cast me ashore’]. I am [‘cast away’, ‘a castaway’, ‘indeed cast away’, ‘not a bird of passage’, ‘not a prisoner’, ‘not a story’, ‘not persuaded’, ‘unknown to myself’, ‘wondering how I come to be here’, ‘saved’, ‘on an island yet’, ‘alone on the waves’, ‘alone’, ‘all alone’, ‘a woman alone’, ‘a woman cast ashore’, ‘a woman washed ashore’, ‘a free woman’, ‘now a madwoman’, ‘waiting for the book to be written that will set me free’].