transmediality

Shelley Jackson’s Snow does not easily conform to established literary categories or interpretative strategies – words written on snow are evanescent and fragile, vanishing as soon as the surface on which they had been inscribed melts away. The text in progress is offered to the audience only as the documentation of the artist’s own acts of inscription, made available through the accounts on Flickr and Instagram dedicated to the project. Additionally, reading the story in a traditional way on Instagram is possible only in reverse order of the photostream. In my presentation I would like to broaden the notion of a literary text taking into consideration the very materiality of this project’s affordances – especially the specificity of the inscription surface, evoked to the audience with photos regularly uploaded to Instagram (which itself can be seen as a domain of fluidity with its constantly changing visual stream). What I am particularly interested in is the specific mode of meaning distribution – in this case performed between the evaporating substance, photographic documentation and networked media.

(Source: Author's Abstract, ICDMT 2016)

In this roundtable we propose to present and discuss those aspects and goals of the project NAR_TRANS (University of Granada, website under construction) that are most relevant to ELO and the conference. Nar_Trans aims to build an active and relevant research core in the Spanish I+D+i system, able to become part of the international research network on transmedial narratives & intermediality.

This academic network also aims to become a gathering place for fellow researchers, students and creative artists through different events, such as meetings, seminars and workshops, or the mapping of the Spanish transmedial productions through a web critical catalogue, with a view to the most outstanding works in Latin America. The project holds also the first university prize for young transmedia creatives as well as the publication of an e-book with a selection of essays on transmediality at the crossroads of Literary, Cultural and Media Studies.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The dissertation’s main point of departure is the clash between explicit and implicit presuppositions, conceptualisations and generalisations in print-oriented literary theoretical paradigms and a plenitude of empirically verifiable anomalies and counter-examples to them found in digital and ergodic works of literature. The behaviour of these counter-examples is explained by cybertext theory that addresses the often neglected issue of the variety of literary media. Both the empirical counter-examples and the empirically verifiable differences in the behaviour of literary media allow us to expand and modify literary theories to suit not just one traditionally privileged media position but all of them. Therefore, in the first half of the dissertation, literary theory and narratology are viewed and modified from the perspective of slightly revised cybertext theory. In this process theories of ergodic and non-ergodic literature are integrated more closely and several so far non-theorized ways of manipulating narrative time, regulating narrative information, and generating narrative instances are located and theorized. In the second half of the dissertation, the role of cybertext theory and the position of ergodic literature are reversed as they are viewed from the perspectives provided by ludology and game ontology. This is necessary to better situate ergodic literature in the continuum of other ergodic phenomena and between interpretative and dominantly configurative practices. To this end a provisional and formal paradigm of ludology is first constructed and synthesized from previous ludological research and then applied to newer forms and genres of ergodic literature such as textual instruments.

(Source: University of Jyväskylä)

Through the analysis of three case-studies, I investigate what happens to blogs when they are transposed outside the web, in media such as printed books or ebooks. Starting from Walker-Rettberg's definition of blog (2008), three orders of change are identified: blog's life and function; author's life and role; blog's structure and content. These three levels open the discussion to gender and genre issues with reference to digital texts and to the possibility that, far from sealing the death of the author or the onnipotence of the reader, the web opens texts to emancipation. 

Digital poet and researcher Chris Funkhouser attends E-Poetry 2009 in Barcelona and files a report on what he heard and saw.

Roberto Simanowski demonstrates in a close reading of two interactive in- stallations that they do not simply create an event as “a period of time to be lived through” (Bourriaud 15). Looking at Still Standing by Bruno Nadeau and Jason Lewis and Zachary Booth Simpson’s Mondrian, Simanowski maintains that these pieces do not only offer two different concepts of the interactors’ actions and hence body experiences; they also engage in a very difficult way with the issues of inter- and transmediality and thereby refer to the history of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.

(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)