Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Breathe The Machine, Matt S. Roberts, Terri Witek, Teresa Carmody, Dengke Chen

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Breathe the Machine

interspecies morph edition featuring a video conference and solo or synched blow-ins

Teresa Carmody Dengke Chen Matt Roberts Terri Witek

The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be?

A collaborative group composed of a prose writer, new media artist, 3-D animator, and poet enter your personal computers and suggest that in this particularly viral moment, individual breaths + machines may be the closest we get to community touch. An animated video conference offers the project's conceptual framework, including questions about invasive species and intimacy in this new world …

Landscapes Of Light And Text And Layer: A Projection Poetry Performance, Jason Nelson Dr.

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

A digital poetry performance in seven locations. This online performance mixes pre-recorded video of projection poetry in seven places/landscapes around SE Queensland, Australia with a live digital poetry reading.

The theme of this performance is landscapes of change, exploring places in SE Queensland impacted by bushfires, deviated by floods, altered by drought, damaged by weapon testing, trees thousands of years old, home of non-human creatures and the revealed geology that roads carve.

Using pico/portable projectors, digital poet Jason Nelson, will add a poetic light-based skin to these landscapes, recording the results, replaying them during the performance. As the projection videos …

Pedagogies Of E-Literary Practice For (Un)Continuous Times: Lightning Talks, Caleb Andrew Milligan, Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, Erin Kathleen Bahl, Élika Ortega

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In response to Debbie Chacra’s charge to “celebrate and foster education, maintenance, analysis, critique, and, above all, caregiving” in maker cultures, this roundtable imagines pedagogies of e-literary practice that combine creation and caregiving in ways restorative to the ongoing tradition(s) of e-lit (“Beyond Making”). E-lit regularly confronts theoretical, cultural, and material challenges endemic to the field, as genres of previously accessible work are being lost to technological obsolescence and new developments are moving increasingly off the screen and out of practical reach. One way to counter such challenges of these "(un)continuous" times is through an integrated, applied, practice-based model of …

Memorias | Electronic Literature + Live Coding Performance, Jessica A. Rodriguez Miss, Rolando Rodriguez, Alejandro Brianza, Luis M. Guzman

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Memorias is a web-based artistic project by Jessica Rodríguez developed through the Estuary platform —an online platform to host live coding languages. It is based in six autobiographical writings connected to the way she “hears”, “writes”, “watches”, “reads”, “sees” and “listens” to the word. Through these texts, six code works were designed and programmed, hybridizing natural and computing languages by parsing three existing live coding languages: Tidal Cycles, Punctual, and CineCer0.

Together, Memorias’ languages collide different materialities as well as visual and sonic approaches, going from voices in English, Spanish, Cello and Paetzold samples, audio and visual synthesis, and pre-recorded …

The Tenders: Embrasures In The Fort’S Collapse, Judd Morrissey, Abraham Avnisan, Mark Jeffery

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

The Tenders: Embrasures in the Fort's collapse (zoom edition) is an simultaneous multi-channel mixed reality performance that engages with structures of the fort and the home, combining remote live performance and augmented reality poetics with 3d scans of the site of Fort Dearborn, an early American garrison out of which the city of Chicago was incorporated. Juxtaposing excavations of urban monuments with scans of the bedazzled home of self-taught artist, Loy Bowlin, who embodied the persona of "the original rhinestone cowboy", The Tenders seeks to invert and queer colonial narratives lodged deep within the American imaginary.

Phone Down Magic On (An Augmented Reality Performance/Reading), Laura Zaylea

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Phone Down Magic On is designed as a chapter book for children, grades 3-5, and each chapter begins with augmented reality content. The story follows three young friends who text each other before bed. By holding a phone above the physical chapter book, readers see the characters’ texting session as if it were happening on their own phones… and when a parent says to put the phone down, the texting stops and the “magic” begins. The screen interface dissolves into a dream scene, and clues to a mystery are presented in floating text presented within animated sequences supported by sound …

Tweet Your Shared Adventure: An (Un)Continuous E-Lit Jam, Sarah Whitcomb Laiola

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

ABOUT:

For this virtual engagement session of ELOrlando, participants will create and play a collaborative work of e-lit on Twitter, modeled after Choose Your Own Adventure-style hypertext fiction. This e-lit jam will run the course of the conference, from Thursday July 16-July 19, on the hashtag #TYSA (T[weet] Y[our] S[hared] A[dventure]). All Twitter users in the ELO community are invited to join.

HOW THIS JAM WILL JAM:

On the first day of the conference, the session’s organizer (Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, @DrSarathena192 on both Twitter and Discord) will tweet out on #ELOrlando and #TYSA the beginning of an adventure story. …

Savage Words, Lee Tusman

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Savage Words is a realtime massive multiplayer online text space as well as a collaborative poem and asynchronous chatroom. It is a corner of the internet built on the platform Your World of Text, an infinite grid of text editable by visitors.

Throughout the conference period, participants can join in a communal writing, a textual table of simultaneous and asynchronous shared writing. ASCII images, freewheeling conversations, 'Poetry', and other forms of experimental text will be woven together into a freewheeling shared work.

Screenshots of the unfolding text will be saved at regular intervals, to be published after the conclusion of …

Bury Me, My Love: (Non)Choosing Reading Paths, Eleonora Acerra

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

This contribution falls within the domain of children’s and young adults’ digital literature and, in particular, in that segment of the field aimed at exploring both the potential and the limits of reading digital literary works at school. In order to describe the actual reception process (and eventually to accompany the formal introduction of e-lit creations in the French literature school programs), a selection of literary apps was presented to eight groups of young readers, across different school levels: two adaptations of contemporary picturebooks were read in four primary school classes (I can’t wait [France Télévision, 2013] and With …

(Un) Continuity In E-Lit In Portuguese And Spanish, Vinicius Carvalho Pereira, Tina Escaja

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

The creation of digital literature in Portuguese and Spanish has shown a constant engagement with fluidity and change. Whereas the topics developed in e-lit in Portuguese and Spanish have shown a continuum as manifested by the use of metaphors to represent popular culture, high culture and gender issues, the media used to express those concepts has shown (un)continuity by relying in new digital means that open up new possibilities of expression, representation and dissemination. The two papers in this panel explore how e-lit provides a new medium to present the myth of the labyrinth in digital poems that challenge our …

Lulling Waters: A Poetry Reading For Real-Time Music Generation Through Emotion Mapping, Ashley Muniz, Toshihisa Tsuruoka

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Through a poetic narrative, “Lulling Waters” tells the story of a whale overcoming the loss of his mother, who passed away from ingesting plastic, as he attempts to escape from the polluted oceanic world. The live performance of this poem utilizes a software system called Soundwriter, which was developed with the goal of enriching the oral storytelling experience through music. This video demonstrates how Soundwriter’s real-time hybrid system was able to analyze “Lulling Waters” through its lexical and auditory features. Emotionally salient words were given ratings based on arousal, valence, and dominance while the emotionally charged prosodic features of the …

Poetry For Seers Or The Peruvian Visual Poetic Tradition In Front Of New Media, Michael Hurtado, Pamela Medina, Enrique García, Michael Prado

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Since the first decades of the twentieth century, Peruvian poetic tradition has been characterized by experimental uses of language. Among these possibilities, some records tensioned this medium from the link with the plastic arts, as in the case of the poetry of José María Eguren, while others opted for the playing with the spatiality and visuality of the blank sheet, such as in the case of the work of Carlos Oquendo de Amat. However, it is not until the appearance of the poetry of César Vallejo, specifically with a poems like Trilce in 1922, that these breakages force us to …

Falproject, Mohsen Hazrati

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

"A fāl or Bibliomancy is good or bad, the profit or the loss whose occurrence is predicted by hearing a word or a voice, seeing the movement or the expression, opening or reading a book, or observing a specific motif or image." Mohammad Vojdani

FAL Project is a VR-AR Prediction Machine based on an Old Iranian Bibliomancy tradition.

This project is about generating a virtual environment of a prediction using unlimited online data based on the Persian Mysticism and tradition into a VR artwork. As there are so many people who get matched results based on their niyats(Intent of prediction) …

Glitch Reading: [Re]Mediation And The Protocols Of Reading, Jacob Reber

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In this paper, I outline a methodology for reading poetic works that operate between media environments, noting the subtle shifts and failures that mark the material changes. The space between mediums and processes of remediation produce residue from the various material substrates and protocols of reading that adhere to works moving through networks. The attention to the residue can be understood as glitches, which proliferate the possibilities of reading and reveal the construction of imbricated reading environments. This is a practice I want to consider through the framework of glitch reading. Drawing on Rosa Menkman's theorization of glitches and Tan …

Digital Orihon (デジタル折り本): The (Un)Continuous Shape Of The Novel., David T.H. Wright

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In ‘The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-first Century Literature’, Jessica Pressman (2009) proposes that the aesthetic of ‘bookishness’ is as old as the book form. The Tale of Genji (源氏物語) by Murasaki Shikibu is often considered the world’s first modern novel. The text is presented as an ‘orihon’ (折本): a ‘long strip of paper that is pleated into a stack, with a cover pasted at each end of the stack’ (Atwood, 10). ‘Orihon’ is a combination of the Japanese word for ‘fold’ (折) and ‘book’ or ‘source’ (本). The orihon is often also referred to as an ‘accordion’ book.

Digital …

The Aesthetics Of Multicoding Esolangs, Daniel J. Temkin

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In the influential 2005 paper "A Box, Darkly," Michael Mateas and Nick Montfort introduced the idea of multicoding: when one text holds multiple meanings, depending on context. Examples include polyglots, programs that can run successfully in two different languages, as well as sentences that can be read in French or English. Esoteric programming has a history of explicit multicoding languages. The best known are Piet, whose programs are images, and commands are the change in color from one pixel to the next; Shakespeare, with code written as plays, and Chef, whose programs are recipes that work in the kitchen. While …

Twine And The Challenge To Reading, Stuart Moulthrop

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

The article considers the Twine story-game platform in relation to important critiques of earlier forms of electronic literature (specifically hypertext) from which it descends. Arguments for the significance of Twine are made based on aesthetic approaches (the fusion of literature and game culture) and the refinement of writing itself.

Play this paper in Twine

From Wordsworth’S Poetic Problem To Puzzleless Interactive Fiction, Timothy Wilcox

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Steve Meretzky’s 1985 A Mind Forever Voyaging functions as the first major text-adventure which does not structure its interactions around challenging, often cryptic, puzzles. Instead, the work allows readers to observe and record social change leisurely, requiring one to match wits with one’s imagination more so than the computer. This development of puzzleless interactive fiction has had forward-leaning influence. Chris Klimas’ development of Twine traces back in design philosophy to Meretzky’s innovations here, and autobiographic explorations in the medium develop then from this shift away from puzzles toward more subjective experiences. In addition to this forward influence, however, I trace …

Electronic Writing As Hypermaterial Playground, Michael B. Heidt

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

The text examines e-lit’s potentials for reframing the question of digital materiality through playful poetic practice. To this end, the discussion reconstructs the genealogy between concrete poetry and electronic writing:
Digital structures, such as source code, programmable logic devices, neural networks, databases, and sensor readouts, accompany us continuously, yet remain annoyingly hard to fathom. Although we ceaselessly interact with them, it is hard for humans to relate to these materials, to shape or see them. However, as long as we allow the material reality of these structures to slip through the cracks of the collective imaginary, it remains easy for …

From Ai With Love: Reading Big Data Poetry Through Gilbert Simondon’S Theory Of Transduction, Andrew Klobucar

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Computation initiated a far-reaching re-imagination of language, not just as an information tool, but as a social, bio-physical activity in general. Modern lexicology provides an important overview of the ongoing development of textual documentation and its applications in relation to language and linguistics. At the same time, the evolution of lexical tools from the first dictionaries and graphs to algorithmically generated scatter plots of live online interaction patterns has been surprisingly swift. Modern communication and information studies from Norbert Weiner to the present-day support direct parallels between coding and linguistic systems. However, most theories of computation as a model of …

Procedural Montage: A Design Trace Of Reflection And Refraction, Jasmine T. Otto, Angus G. Forbes

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Narrative media may vary the adjacency of fixed textual passages to drive rhizomatic readings through a montage procedure. We present the design of “exul mater”, a hypertext fiction which locates perlocutionary acts in virtual spaces and resonant gaps. We reflect on sculptural fiction, the (de)formance of complex systems, and tarot reading as methods of layering metaphorical blends into polysemous juxtapositional elements. "exul mater" consists of one set of such elements and their pairwise juxtapositions, as presented through an interface which supports higher-order ‘gap-filling’ reading(s). We draw on peer feedback to address challenges to readability arising from the narrative application of …

Why Are We Like This?: Exploring Writing Mechanics For An Ai-Augmented Storytelling Game, Max Kreminski, Melanie Dickinson, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT) is a playful, co-creative, AI-augmented, improvisational storytelling game in which one or more players explore and influence an ongoing simulation which they then glean for narrative material. It uses the recently developed simulation technology of story sifting (the recognition of microstories in a chronicle of simulation events), via the Felt library, to afford a new kind of playful, social, and creative writing experience. In this paper, we discuss our primary design goals: (1) using computation and interaction design to support casual player creativity, and (2) foregrounding character subjectivity as a driver for …

“Decolonize” E-Literature? On Weeding The E-Lit Garden (A Riposte To Anna Nacher's "Gardening E-Literature"), Kathi Berens

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

This essay, a RiPOSTe to Anna Nacher's forthcoming "Gardening E-Literature" in Electronic Book Review (5 July 2020), asks: Should the e-literature community include third-generation works in collections, syllabi, databases, prizes? A related question: do third-gen makers have a role in “decolonizing” e-literature? Who or what “colonizes” e-lit? E-literature began as a coterie and has become a scholarly field. Using the comparison of a field versus a walled garden, the essay examines critiques of e-literature and variations on field definitions. It ends with two ideas about how to "decolonize" e-literature; about how equity and inclusion work in tandem with decolonization; and …

(Un)Continuity In African Literature: Facebook Memoir And Suicide As Excape In Akachi's Sixteen Notes On How To End A Life, Onyekachi Peter Onuoha Mr

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Facebook nonfictional creative of Chukwuemeka Akachidiscontinues and continues our perception of autobiography in the twenty first century. Depression is a clinical condition if not diagnosed on time, could lead to suicide. This paper, through application of Psychoanalytic and Trauma theories, observes that suicide is a product ofaccumulated memories that find meaning in individual memory, resulting in self-help. This paper observes that, mental illness is influenced by self-perception of Akachi’smemory in relation to his identity: economic, cultural and socio-political being as received by others and self. It submits that suicide is a burden of memory, which either makes the individual or …

Exhibiting, Disseminating, Teaching: Digital Literature In Danish Public Libraries, Malthe Stavning Erslev

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Danish public libraries have since 2010 exhibited, disseminated, and taught digital literature. This paper lays out the general trajectory of their work, and introduces the notion of a post-digital literacy: a theoretical lens through which to conceptualize and articulate the importance of teaching digital literature in K-12.

In fruitful dialogue with a variety of other parties and institutions, including Aarhus University and the ELO, a handful of public libraries have developed considerable and impressive expertise, grounded in practice-based experimentation. Their efforts, which have taken place in the course of six projects, are the case into which this paper inquires. …

Autopia And The Truelist: Language Combined In Two Computer-Generated Books, Nick Montfort

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Autopia (Troll Thread, 2016) and The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017) are computer-generated literary books. I reported at ELO 2014 on two of my text-generating “novel machines” (Montfort 2014). The two projects discussed in this paper are about novel-size, but are different sorts of projects. Autopia’s text consists of headline-style sentences made entirely of the singular and plural names of cars. This project manifests not only as a print-on-demand book from a post-digital publisher, but also as a web project and a gallery installation. The Truelist’s 140 pages of verse are available in offset printed book form and also as a …

Translating A Work Of Digital Literature Into Several Languages: A Case Study, Serge Bouchardon, Nohelia Meza

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In 2010, the digital literature piece Déprise was published online (http://deprise.fr). Progressively, it has been translated from French into English (Loss of Grasp, 2010), Italian (Perdersi, 2011), Spanish (Perderse, 2013), and Portuguese (Perda de controlo, 2016). Every translation required changes to the original version in French but also to the other versions, leading to an intercultural and multilingual dialogue between the translators and the author.

What are the specificities of the translation of digital literature in comparison to the translation of literature in general? What does translation teach us …

The Borders Between Linear Narrative And Interactive Forms, Eric S. Miller

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

This paper traces the boundaries between linear narrative forms and interactive forms. The paper starts with a glossary of relevant terms and then attempts to untangle issues that tie these forms together and separate them. It attempts to answer questions such as:

1. Where are there major overlaps between these forms?

2. What are the specific affordances of interactive forms?

3. What are the specific affordances of linear forms?

The paper draws from multiple sources, such as Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel, Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan and Half-Real by Jesper Juul. Agency is the core attribute of interaction, though …

Productive Misreading In Intermedia Art: Four Approaches By A Musician, Jeff Morris, Elisabeth Blair

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

This discussion examines the evolution and lessons of four artistic performance works that engage with text and imagery with the mindset of a composer, rather than as an author or visual artist. The works involve computer music, improvisation, video art, generative art techniques, and challenging aesthetics. An analytical discussion reveals that different forms and mechanisms of reading are manifest in the artworks, and reflections upon these elucidate the intermedial nature of reading and the productive, expressive potential of interfering with these processes.

Non Infinite Stories: How Digital Allow To Create Infinite Reconformations Of A Text?, David Núñez

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Last year I presented at ELO, in Ireland, the Artistic piece "Bastard" a digital fiction that combine a fragmented novel to create 10x149 differents texts and optimized in 4 billions coherent stories with narrative structures. In Orlando we want to explain how the system works, theory and functioning, and invited all the members to produce they personal "infinite" fiction.

Non Infinite Stories is an electronic publishing house that creates a dynamic hyperliterature system to give each reader a unique book by using a digital combinatorial processes, specific narrative rules and optimization of fragmented works in chapters of short narrative blocks, …