This seminar seeks to broaden the conceptual space of media-shaped electronic literature through a ground-up conceptualisation that draws inspiration from various textual practices based on an experimental account with cyber-language at the intersection of various fields and disciplines. The seminar is structured as an event of peer-reviewed theory panels, demonstrations (including artistic performances by practitioners) and individual presentations.
A goal of the Ljubljana seminar will be to discuss the challenges posed by new media and to situate electronic literature within a history of new media. Topics that might be addressed include:
• Discussing and interrogating the key concepts, devices, methods and approaches within the field of electronic literature.• Questioning the literary nature of often hybrid and mixed-media digital texts within the constraints of electronic literature.• Defining innovation in the field through considering it as a deviation from print-based literature and applying the concept of de-familiarization.• Querying the social implications of new media textual practices and how they relate to issues of gender, the digital divide, new media literacy and social networking.• Defining the reading of digital texts which, in terms of their interruptive and nervous nature, demand the tactile motor activity of “mouse reading”.• Analyzing electronic literature through relating it to textual practices and performance within the (European) avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.• Evaluating the audience of electronic literature, asking how such novel textualities produce new audiences sometimes closer in character to DJ and VJ culture.• Questioning the aesthetics of electronic literature, taking into account the hybrid modalities of new-media affected perception, such as "not-just-reading" and "not-just-seeing", by addressing the roles of proprioception and tactility in reading.• Exploring electronic literature and the language of the Internet within the expanded field of 'post-print' text, as found in email, SMS texting, chat forums and other popular textual communication media.• Analyzing and defining the ontological specificity of an E-Literary art articulated as process, software and performance that disrupts the expectations of readership.• Evaluating digital creative communities as temporary social and artistic structures embedded in present social realities in relation to concepts such as post-Fordism, hactivism, "playbour", the attention economy and P2P initiatives.
(Source: CFPs)