visual arts

Description (in English)

In 2018, TOPO is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and its 20th anniversary of involvement in creation and dissemination of digital art. The Montreal artist-run centre TOPO is a laboratory for digital writings and creations for web, performance, and installation spaces. Its mandate is to incubate, produce, and circulate original multimedia artworks that explore interdisciplinary and intercultural hybridizations in the digital arts.It was through exploration of interactive narrative that the founders of TOPO – artists Michel Lefebvre and Eva Quintas – introduced TOPO to new-media circles in January 1998. A memorable ice storm had just ravaged Montréal when the FM network of Radio-Canada broadcasted a web-radio version of the three episodes of the photo-novel Liquidation, a first in Québec. This major pluri-media project, finalized in 2001 in the form of random fiction on CD-ROM, gave a foretaste of the organization’s orientations: collective creation, a multidisciplinary focus, exploration of various supports and narrative forms for new media, and extension of practices on the network into the public space and vice versa. TOPO presents a journey through 20 years of experimentation with the narrative potentials of interactive media through a selection of collective web artworks produced by more than 100 artists from the visual and media arts, theatre, audio, and literature. To this body of work have gradually been added performances and installations highlighting different disciplines, along with various staging processes and technological devices. The goal is to explore the dynamics of the back-and-forth between what is on screen and what is off screen.

(source: ELO 2018 website)

Event type
Date
-
Individual Organizers
Address

Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória
Porto
Portugal

Short description

This  exhibit  acknowledges  the  wide  range  of  community  practices  converging  and  sharing  reflections,  tools  and  processes  with  electronic  literature,  as  they challenge  its  ontological  status.  Implying  an  existing  set  of  relationships,  communities, such as those represented in this exhibit - the Artists’ Books, ASCII Art, net  Art,  Hacktivism/Activism,  Performance  Art,  Copy  Art,  Experimental  Poetry,  Electronic Music, Sound Art, Gaming, and Visual Arts communities - share a common aesthetic standpoint and methods; but they are also part of the extremely multiple  and  large  community  of  electronic  literature.  Our  aim  is  to  figure  out  the nature and purposes of this dialogue, apprehending, at the same time, their fundamental contributions to electronic literature itself.

Communities: Signs, Actions, Codes is articulated in three nuclei: Visual and Graphic Communities; Performing Communities; and Coding Communities. Each nucleus is porous, given that some works could be featured in several nuclei. Because it is necessary to negotiate the time-frame, locations, situations and genealogies of electronic literature, this collection of works expands the field’s approaches by proposing a critical use of language and code — either understood as computational codes, bibliographical signs, or performative actions. Therefore, the exhibit adopts both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, presenting works from the 1980s  onwards,  and  showing  the  diversity  of  art  communities  working  in  nearby  fields  which,  at  close-range,  enrich  the  community/ies  of  electronic(s)  literature(s),  either  in  predictable  or  unexpected  ways.  Distributed  authorship  and co-participant audience are key in this exhibit.

(Source: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

Record Status
By Hannah Ackermans, 29 October, 2015
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Abstract (in English)

Mixed-media artists Joellyn Rock and Alison Aune offer a hands-on visual art workshop on collage, paper-cutting, silhouettes and digital compositing. What does this have to do with electronic literature you ask? Well... In Rock and Aune's multimedia installation, Fish Net Stockings, which will be exhibited at the Hybridity Exhibition at ELO 2015, the little mermaid story unfolds with multivalent versions echoing folk art patterns and digital iterations. Bifurcating imagery, like that made by folding and cutting, plays a role in the aesthetics of the work. Hans Christian Andersen was known for his live scissor writing. His version of scherenschnitte was an improvised performance art with paper cut imagery, integrating the haptic visual experience into his storytelling. Andersen’s cut paper collages anticipate the collage art of dadaism and surrealism, and some e-lit experiments can trace their roots back to these very methods of assemblage. Join us for a playful workshop generating mixed-media collages, paper cuts, silhouettes, and testing their use in digital compositing for video projection. Investigate how to combine imagery in layers in Photoshop and video in final cut for rich digital composites and short animations.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

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Description (in English)

The Pornomorphs is a suite of poems and images about a virtual band of entities (heavy on the 'tities' part of 'entities'). Some of them are bots, but others, such as Hippasos, are humans who have been mainlined into the machine by Pythagoras who, surprise, is still alive after all this time.

The images of the Pornomorphs are all made of smaller images of eyeballs, penises, and vaginas.

(Source: Author's Description)

Description in original language
Pull Quotes

She's a bad bot,
among the ten most wanted
by the Web police.
She wants to be wanted.

Screen shots
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Technical notes

Images made with Corel PhotoPaint and the 'image sprayer' tool.

By Alvaro Seica, 26 September, 2014
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Abstract (in English)

The coordinates are deceptive! Doesn’t matter the position of the point, but the force that it produces, the space that it opens in the landscape of the real. This issue zero aims to contribute to a non-cartesian idea of point. Thinking its meaning from four anti-geometrical hypotheses. The point as a beginning (a space opening); the point as force and disturb (maybe creative); the point as network (points that aggregate other points), but most of all, the point as something that takes place, that supervenes in the unquiet landscape of the real, a singularity.

The contributions presented here, depart from those coordinates and destroy them:

// They reflect on the creative nature that the point represents/identifies in the architectonic/artistic production landscape: Álvaro Seiça Neves, Pedro Bismarck.

// They identify strategies of thought/construction that evolve the connective and communicative singularity of the point: Pedro Oliveria, André Sier,

// They understand the role of the critic as (re)production and (re)cognition of creative points: André Tavares, Bernardo Amaral.

In 1921, in L’Esprit Nouveau, we too had gone back to zero in order to try to see things clearly. But if we did go back to zero, it was with the intent not to stay there, but only in order to reestablish our footing. -- Le Corbusier

(Source: punkto 0)

By Scott Rettberg, 13 December, 2012
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ISBN
978-0-8122-1677-6
Pages
xv, 169
License
All Rights reserved
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Approved by librarian
Abstract (in English)

It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject—the self—is unstable, fragmented, and decentered. One useful way to examine this principle is to look at how the subject has been treated in various media in the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. Silvio Gaggi pursues this strategy in From Text to Hypertext, analyzing the issue of subject construction and deconstruction in selected examples of visual art, literature, film, and electronic media. Gaggi concentrates on a few paradigmatic works in each chapter; he contrasts van Eyck's Wedding of Arnolfini with the photography of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger; examines fiction that centers on an elusive subject in works by Conrad, Faulkner, and Calvino; and explores the ability of such films as Coppola's One from the Heart and Altman's The Player to emancipate the subject through cinematography and editing.In considering electronic media, Gaggi takes his argument to an entirely new level. He focuses on computer-controlled media, specifically examples of hypertextual fiction by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop. Besides recognizing how the computer has enabled artists to create works of fiction in which readers themselves become decentered, Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.

(Source: Publisher's blurb)

Paperback ed.: 1998 E-book ed.: 2015

Creative Works referenced