transnational

Discussing the works of three digital creative practitioners working in Ireland, Anne Karhio situates Ireland itself as a case study for demonstrating the ways in which electronic literature as a seemingly global and transnational practice can confront the complexly situated realities of everyday embodiment, technological materiality, and politicization of national borders. She thus recommends electronic literature be seen as more crucial part of digital arts and humanities research in Ireland and elsewhere.

(ebr)

Walid Raad's The Atlas Group Archive (1989-2004) is a transmedial, fictional 'archive' which supposedly encompasses donated testimonies on the war in Lebanon (1974-1991), including diary logs, photographs (some of which contain notes), and videos, archived on theatlasgroup.org. In this case, the fictionality of the archive creates an archive where no real archive exists. The entire archive is transmedially constructed, in which the layering of content in each image becomes the key feature. There is, for example, a document named "Let's be honest the weather helped" (1998) contains a series of black-and-white images of buildings with colored dots on them, which supposedly signify various types of bullet hits (see fig. 1). The dots cover the whole area of bullet impact, so this media filter makes it impossible to verify if there were indeed bullet hits, and let alone which color the bullet tips were. The transmediality of the project is thus a means in conveying the impossibility of an archive and the unrepresentability of trauma. Medial borders are crossed through layering of content, reinforcing and destabilizing the truth value of testimony. Apart from being published on the website, Raad's project has been exhibited in different galleries around the world.

The Atlas Group Archive can be seen as an instance of 'traveling memory' (Erll), a term to describe the dynamics of commemoration in the current age of globalization. Analyzing The Atlas Group Archive as an instance of traveling memory, I argue that the internal and external institutional context of the archive largely influences its ability to become a traveling memory which "has brought forth global media cultures" (Erll). I compare the effects of the different interfaces in which this work has appeared. Apart from being published on a website, Raad's project has been exhibited in art galleries around the world. Academics have often pointed to the ways in which The Atlas Group Archive plays with the blurring of fact and fiction. I take this observation to the next level by reframing it as the engagement with decontextualisation and recontextualisation. In my analysis, each context becomes an integral part of the images, a layer of content providing meaning. In the online archive, the images function as an icon of the material notebook, and the black background of the images functions as an index, signifying that the images are uncropped and therefore authentic . In the context presentation of the exhibition, however, these images function as icons and index primarily to show that absence of their referentiality. The notebook does not exist and the black background is part of the artwork. I analyze the project's narrative function's using Manovich's criteria for narrativity in databases: the distinction between 'text', 'story', and 'fabula'. Though highly transmedial and fragmented, The Atlas Group Archive accommodates to this model, as it uses multimedia (a 'text' across media borders) to narrate the Lebanese war ('story'), colored by narration of events experienced by actors ('fabula'), and together these three elements form an archival format. According to Benjamin, the opposition between information and storytelling resides in the fact that "while the [storyteller] was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible" (101). In the case of The Atlas Group Archive, we might say that these two categories are combined. The fabula is miraculous, but the contextualisation of text and story into information makes the unity plausible. The Atlas Group Archive's narrative functions by the virtue of fragmentation, which becomes an integral part of the content: it fills gaps while at the same time creating them.

(source: author's abstract)

While discussion of the relationship of image and word has been prominent in the discourses surrounding new media writing, the role of sound is rarely addressed in this context, even though words are sounds and sounds are a major component of multimedia. This paper explores possibilities for new theoretical frameworks in this area, drawing on musico-literary discourse and cross-cultural theory, and using ideas about semiotic and cultural exchange as a basis. It argues that words and music in new media writing create emergent structures and meanings that can facilate ideas to do with boundary crossing, transnationalism and cross-cultural exchange.

The paper will examine the different types of sound in new media writing from voicescapes to soundscapes to musical composition. Building on my previous work on affective intensities in new media writing (Smith 2007 ; Smith 2009), and the manipulation of the voice to create cultural effects such as sonic cross-dressing (Smith 1999), I will discuss the ways in which sound plays a distinctive role in new media writing. I will draw up a typology of different kinds of conjunctions between sound and words in this area (e.g. parallelism, co-ordination, semiotic exchange, algorithmic synaesthesia and heterogeneity). I will also, constructing the term musico-literary miscegenation, explore the cultural effects of these word-sound blends, and how they can interrogate ideas about gender or ethnic identity.

The paper will refer to word and sound relationships in classic electronic literature works such as John Cayley’s Translation, Young Hae Chang Heavy industries Operation Nukorea and MD Coverley’s Afterimage. It will also discuss the exploration of different types of synergies between word and sound by the Australian sound and multimedia group austraLYSIS — of which I am a member. In particular it will feature some of my own work with composer Roger Dean, and our recent collaborations with video artist Will Luers.

The paper will take the form of a talk and powerpoint presentation.

(Author's introduction)

This talk for the Archive & Innovate conference will present to the ELO community a new major research project and research network focused on electronic literature in Europe. ELMCIP is a 3-year collaborative research project that will run from Spring 2010-2013 and funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) theme: 'Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation.' ELMCIP involves seven European research partners (University of Bergen, Edinburgh College of Art, Blekinge Technical Institute, Univeristy College Falmouth, University of Jyväskylä, University of Amsterdam, and University of Ljubjlana) and one non-academic partner (New Media Scotland) who will investigate how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment.
The research goals of the project are to:
• Understand how creative communities form and interact through distributed media
• Document and evaluate various models and forces of creative communities in the field of electronic literature
• Examine how electronic literature communities benefit from current educational models and develop pedagogical tools
• Study how electronic literature manifests in conventional cultural contexts and evaluate the effects of distributing and exhibiting e-lit in such contexts.
The outcomes of the project will include:
• Series of case studies and research papers (for publications and conferences)
• Series of public seminars
• Online knowledge base (including materials from seminars, project information and an extensive bibliographic record of e-lit works)
• Pedagogy workshop and anthology (Resulting in extensive documentation, presented as an accessible website and DVD-ROM)
• International conference in 2013 in Edinburgh
• Public exhibition of electronic literature artworks and performances
• Openly distributed publications (conference proceedings, exhibition catalog, project documentation and a DVD anthology of e-lit works)
With a budget of just under €1,000,000 we can anticipate that the project will have a major impact on the field of electronic literature and present numerous opportunities to authors and scholars of electronic literature. In the presentation at the ELO conference in particular, my goal will be to identify opportunities for individual artists, writers and scholars of electronic literature to contribute to and to collaborate with ELMCIP, and also to identify some and discuss ways that we can develop mutually beneficial research collaborations between ELMCIP, the ELO, and other international organizations active in the field of electronic literature.

This paper presents the ethnographic study, part of the HERA-funded project “Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP), which asks how creative communities form within transnational and transcultural contexts and a globalised and distributed communications environment. 

In an increasingly monolingual, globalized world, the second volume of theElectronic Literature Collection may just offer a map of the territory. The question the reviewer, John Zuern, poses is how do we navigate this terrain going forward?
(Source: ebr.)

from the publisher: What happens to literature in an age of digital technology? Regards Croisés: Perspectives on Digital Literature provides an answer, with a collection of cutting-edge critical essays on literature gone digital. Regards Croisés is an important addition to existing research on digital literature, and will appeal to scholars of electronic writing, digital art, humanities computing, media and communication, and others interested in the field. It offers a significant advance in the field through its wide-angle perspective that globalizes digital literature and diversifies the current critical paradigms. Regards Croisés shows how digital literature connects with traditions and future directions of reading and writing communities all over the world. With contributions by authors from eight countries and three continents, the collection presents points of view on a transcontinental practice of digital literature. Regards Croisés also opens dialogues with expanded critical paradigms of digital literature, beyond earlier critical concern with the aesthetics of the screen as a space of hypertext links. Many of the essays recognize a rich history and ongoing literary practice engaged with the basic fact of the computer as a programmable device. Other essays explore the latest developments in social media and Web 2.0 as venues for digital literature. Regards Croisés shows the vibrant engagement of writers and readers with literary practice in a digital world.

(Source: Publisher's catalog)