teenagers

My poster will be full of works of participants of the first Russian Laboratory of Mediapoetry 101 for teenagers (12-19 years old).It just turned out that the fate of the project is closely related to circumstances of pandemic that is why a search for new forms of creative cooperation, ways of communication and methods of creating new projects has become overarching issue of the work of the laboratory participants.

I am the curator of the Mediapoetry Laboratory 101. Although “curator” is poorly conclusive definition. An ideologist, a dreamer, an inspirer, the one who has got a grant (financial support) from the government for a genre of mediapoetry which is not recognized in Russia yet.The project got the grant in February, 2020. My gladness did not see any limits. Off-line sessions had to start from April, 2020, but everyone knows what prevented it to happen.

The terms of the project were extended for several times in accordance with a level of my optimism. Either to autumn or to winter. Due to formal limitations and restrictions of the grant I found myself among different restrictions: necessity to hold the Laboratory not later the spring 2021, to hold at least some meetings offline. But at the same moment the government makes new resolutions not in advance enough. All of us know about new rules approximately a day before the come into force. And for the audience of my laboratory the restrictions were the most severe ones.

However I believe that, such disempowerment is breeding ground for creators. Isn’t it allowed to gather in the room? We will prepare a media poetic walk&performance. Isn’t it allowed to come up to each other closer than 1,5 meter? We will make a performance about disengagement and invisible relations. Isn’t it allowed to go out? We are glad to remember about air mail and surface mail, about telegrams and helium balloons.

Students of the Laboratory have been already chosen and are on the point of starting the work. In April I will see different projects in mediapoetry genre: games, performances, chat-poetry, texting-games, locative narrative etc. I am sure that we are waited by interesting experience of creative work. The teenagers are very flexible they needed just a little time to get used to new communicative reality of the pandemic, switching over to distant studying was easier for them than for teachers.To my mind, adolescents have better skills of new media language. They are more organic in using it that means they have greater chances to leap forward from creative and semantic point of view.Together with this young audience we are going to discuss about culture of platforms, how they have changed visually and our feelings about communication with society, what we have known about ourselves during lockdown and how to create and keep creative collaborations.

Results of this breathtaking work will be presented by me at the conference as a poster which unites works of the Laboratory participants, their thoughts, discoveries and predictions.

Teenage heartache has become a public commodity. On social media, young people now broadcast the most intimate moments of their lives to a global audience. Context collapse has replaced the small, specific audiences we once opened our hearts to with a vast, undifferentiated swarm of humanity. Falling in and out of love, breaking up and reconciling, seeking solace or revenge – all are enacted in the midst of the data stream. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) explores this new, performative model for love and loss that is emerging in networked environments. Deploying what might be described as a “poetics of search”, the artwork sources relevant tweets from Twitter in real-time, performs string manipulation and anonymizes them, then assembles the fragments into a three-act dialogue that is projected onto the installation space. What results is an emergent narrative that reflects the new modes of online interaction unique to millennials – but also the timeless tropes, customs, dreams and anxieties experienced by every generation. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) was first presented in 2013 at the Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, Australia. (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

Initiated during the 2014 Erasmus intensive program in Digital Literatures, The Tower of Jezik is a hyperfiction intended for teenagers that primarily questions language and its possible inefficiency. Set in an imaginary world which calls medieval times to mind, the reader follows a young boy chasing his cat over the rooftops of his small village. Through a window, the boy sees an old man brewing something in a cauldron and believes he is in fact a wizard about to cast a spell. The old man sees him spying and the boy falls from the window, hits his head and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he can no longer understand what people are saying and, convinced that the villagers were indeed cursed by a powerful sorcerer, he sets out to find the mythical Tower of Jezik and bring language back to his people. The prototype for Tower of Jezik was originally developed in HTML to be read in web browsers. However, it is currently being remediated in ePub 3 by Émilie Barbier, as part of the Textualités Augmentées workshop at Paris 8 University. We were interested in this particular format because of its apparent similarities with HTML, but also - and mostly - because of the differences between them. Indeed, some of the strategies used in the prototype to thwart the reader's progression cannot be implemented in an ePub version. It is the case, for instance, with the invisible links scattered in the narrative which can only be seen when hovering over them. Such a process cannot work on a tablet or a smartphone because there is no cursor to move around. By remediating Tower of Jezik, we particularly wish to explore the constraints the ePub 3 format imposes on a work of digital literature. The project plays with the concepts of gamebooks and “choose your own adventure” books, where one has to make choices and find one's way through the story by solving riddles and performing actions. We wished to create a work that could fit in the standards of current publishing, all the while playing with various media and rhetorical devices specific to electronic literature, such as patterns of hyperlinks and text animation. More importantly, we tried to build a hyperfiction that still followed a storyline, yet resorted to other strategies to resist the reader.