The article argues that recent claims made by studies in the cognitive neurosciences regarding a beneficial effect of violent action games, including ego-shooters, on human attention and other cognitive abilities have to be critically questioned. Weiterlesen ...
The article provides a perspective on digital games and gaming situations that is orientated towards theatre and performance studies. It applies classic theatre and performance theories to the field of gaming by focusing on the participants that are involved. It takes the bridging of digital and physical spaces through digital gaming activities into account and conceptualizes digital gaming as form of Hybrid Reality Theatre. By that, the paper looks at the intra-ludic communication and discusses the player as active producer of meaning for three different gaming situations: the work with innovative input methods like natural user interfaces and virtual reality technologies, the field of location based mobile gaming and the area of urban gaming. Weiterlesen ...
This article explores the question how linguistics has reacted to the new media and how our field of study has turned them into an object of study. We first explain what linguists explore in general and how they can study language use within the new media, using the methodological possibilities for linguistics that the digital humanities provide. The second section will illustrate three areas of research that have characterized the field over the last two decades: Is there a particular language on the Internet, how is interaction managed through language in particular online contexts, and how can we explore the ecology of practices of people interacting in physical and virtual contexts. Weiterlesen ...
David Meurer considers the challenges that collaborative network-based prose narratives pose for traditional normative notions of authorship. Meurer considers the place of these collaborative works of electronic literature within a contemporary media ecology. Meurer contemplates a number of works of electronic literature, such as Steve Tomasula et al.’s TOC, Kate Pullinger et al.’s Flight Paths, and Katerina Cizek’s Out My Window, within the context of larger shifts in digital textuality and cultural practice, suggesting that “there is a need to develop network narratives that incorporate the additive participation and normative communication practices widely employed within the digital mediascape today, and that such a move is necessary in order to eventually realize the place of multimedia literature within the global cultural system.” Weiterlesen ...
In his contribution Loss Pequeño Glazier historicizes the defining conditions for the literary actions that for him marked “a beginning“. While Glazier points to other possible beginnings of the e-lit field, he describes the perspective from Buffalo, thus presenting an exposition of one route through the rhizome of intertwined literary communities that constitutes e-literature at large. His timeline starts with the foundation of the Electronic Poetry Center in 1994, just a year after the Poetics List was launched. The setting: Buffalo. The article revives original visions and activities from this defining time and critically engages with institutional mechanisms, not omitting the launch and role of the E-Poetry festival to the community. Weiterlesen ...
Contemplating the impact of the e-lit community on his creative work for this paper, Ottar Ormstad’s contribution takes its starting point at a stark conclusion: without community, no work. At least not digitally. But did the turn from concrete to digital poetry entail a discontinuity in his artistic practice?
He answers his guiding question and elaborates on his first encounters of the community at the 2007 e-poetry festival in Paris. Ormstad thereby presents his personal beginning within the community and traces the paths from his first artistic works to the present, concluding that “my video productions would not have been created at that time and in these dimensions without motivation from the community.”
Weiterlesen ...
Andrew Michael Roberts, Lisa Otty, Martin H. Fischer and Anna Katharina Schaffner provide a discussion of their interdisciplinary investigations which took place under the aegis of the 2009-11 research project Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition. The project brought together literary critics, psychologists and creative artists for multidisciplinary study of poetry and poetic artifacts, such as concrete poetry, visual poetry, artist’s books, poetry photography, and electronic poetry. Applying both literary-historical approaches and methods of cognitive psychology, the project examined reading as a physical and cognitive. The project further resulted in artworks based on these ideas, some of which involved collaborations between artists and psychologists. John Cayley’s Lens and Tower, by Simon Biggs and Mark Shovman are examined in the context of this framing investigation. Weiterlesen ...
Laura Borràs Castanyer presents how the Catalan e-lit community was raised by the efforts of a network that offered authors a platform to produce and publish electronic literature. Before tracing the communities emergence over the last ten years, Borràs sets out to relate literary creativity to the historical forces that affected literary production in Catalonia on a political, economical, cultural, and particularly linguistic level. Over the course of her article, Borràs elaborates on how teaching practices and educational programs on the university level, inter-and remediations, translations, as well as a competition for electronic literature (The Ciutat de Vinaròs Prize) served as a platform for the production and publication electronic literature. Last but not least, the role of research activities of the international network Hermeneia (since 1999) are put in scope. All in all, the article presents a brief showcase of digital literary productions by an e-lit community writing in Spanish and Catalan. Weiterlesen ...
Creative forms of collaboration are common in electronic literature. Yra van Dijk explores institutionalized and planned collaboration and its effects on the production, the presentation, and the content of digital literature. Autonomy and questions on authorship are two keywords critically addressed throughout the article that discusses three projects by way of paratextual readings. Weiterlesen ...
Fletcher and Somma describe plans for the establishment and development of an Academy of New Media and Digital Arts on the Italian island of Procida, one of the three islands that sit in the Bay of Naples. They use this context as framework for discussing electronic literature community through the metaphor of spatiality, considering how a new community situated on an island might offer an apt correspondence to a network that itself is composed of islands of activity operating within a common stream. Weiterlesen ...
How can one build a literary community that engages with an online platform to foster public contributions for locative literature? Anders Sundnes Løvlie developed both the ”textopia system” and the concept behind a literary game: flâneur. It encourages creative exploration of the textual urban environment by recombining found texts for new literary creations. Løvlie presents the various configurations the project has undergone and frames his article around what Rettberg describes as ”architectures of participation” along with e-lit scholarship devoted to collaborative writing. Weiterlesen ...
Mark Marino and Rob Wittig provide a dialogic introduction to a playful new genre of networked literature they have been engaged in developing and experimenting with: netprov. Netprov (networked improv literature) “uses multiple vernacular media simultaneously in a transmedia storytelling approach.” Pulling together threads from theater, fiction, games, social networking, and mass media, netprov provides a method for large groups of collaborators to tell network stories together with a participatory audience. Marino and Wittig provide both a discussion of the origins of this form and discussion of some of the netprov projects the have created, among others including Marino’s WorkStudySeth and Wittig’s Grace, Wit & Charm. Weiterlesen ...
In this paper, I first retrace the filiations and the history of digital literature in France, emphasizing the various literary and aesthetic tendencies and the corresponding structures (groups, reviews). Then I focus on French digital literature communities. I notably give an account of a study that I did in 2004-2007 for the Centre Pompidou in Paris: I analyzed a socio-technical device (discussion list and website) called e-critures, dedicated to digital literature, with the hypothesis of the co-construction of a socio-technical device, a field and a community. I conclude on the possible characteristics of digital literature in France. Weiterlesen ...
The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was founded as a literary nonprofit organization in 1999 after the Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature conference at Brown University. Along with Jeff Ballowe and Robert Coover, I was a co-founder of the ELO, and served as its first Executive Director from 1999-2001, and have served on its board of directors in the years since then. Today it is one of the most active organizations in the field of electronic literature, central to the practice of e-lit in the United States and its establishment as an academic discipline. This essay briefly outlines the early history of the organization, the ways that the mission, profile, and the focus of the organization evolved and changed in its first decade, and offers some tentative insights into the ways that an institutionally structured community can facilitate network-mediated art practice. Weiterlesen ...
In this paper I look at some often-overlooked aspects of creative collaboration, drawing on my experiences in a series of group projects in which I participated over a span of almost 30 years. The infrastructural and interpersonal details of creative collaboration—the architectural space and seating arrangements, food and drink, public and private meeting spaces, meeting management, social conventions—I argue to be important factors in the quantity and quality of the work produced. These elements are often excluded from certain types of scholarly discourse and I make a parallel argument for the importance of their inclusion in literary history and criticism. Weiterlesen ...
Moulthrop unveils a scandal he observes in the community of electronic literature. In his "post-serious" scholarly "arcade essay", he raises and discusses the pertaining questions virulent in the community itself, all of which center around the cultural status of electronic literature in relation to other practices. Once Moulthrop notices that, "as a whole, electronic writing raises more questions than it answers." As we pong our way through the discourse of these historical scandals in new media, we might find ourselves encountering a new kind of criticism, "an argument that is as much in new media—or the domain of the Universal Turing Machine—as it may be from anywhere else."
Weiterlesen ...