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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2011
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2011
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2011
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Finding a third space for electronic literature: Creative community, authorship, publishing, and institutional environments
More LessThe article addresses topics including creativity as a social ontology, reformulations of the idea of authorship in digital environments, the economics of electronic literature publishing, and the institutional challenges involved in developing academic environments for the teaching of digital writing.
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Following Paths of Electronic Literature
More LessEasy manipulation, playfulness, creative and active participation in the progress of society and culture by the development of various (art) projects are essential for the ideal of contemporary culture and society. The aim of the article is to look at the phenomena that play an important role in the field of electronic literature – interaction, materiality, performativity and the dynamics of hic et nunc, playfulness, ludification and the innovative use of platforms. The article follows contemporary trends in the field of electronic literature and simultaneously tries to outline some possible directions that electronic literature could take in the near future.
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Connected memories: Contextualizing creative research practice
By María MencíaOne of my intentions in putting together the roundtable discussion From the Page to the Screen to Augmented Reality: New Modes of Language-Driven Technology-Mediated Research at Kingston University in July 2010 was to give the opportunity to research practitioners to perform their projects or present their work, with the aim of stimulating discussion on practice-led research in this field and instigating possibilities for further collaborations. I performed Connected Memories, an interactive generative narrative, which I produced especially after the proposal had been selected to be presented at the panel in Interactive Storytelling and Memory Building in Post-conflict Society for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2009). I invited José Carlos Silvestre to develop the technical side of the work. Silvestre is a New Media artist and writer, interested in ‘how code can signify by means of its native strategies’. It was a very rewarding collaboration, and he needs to be acknowledged for his knowledgeable programming input. The project was performed later in the same year at Landmark, Kunsthall Bergen, Norway as part of the event ‘Network as Space and Medium for collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice’ organized by the Linguistic Literary and Aesthetics Studies (LLE) Digital Culture group at the University of Bergen. I chose to present it again at the roundtable discussion to question, through practice as research; notions of meaning production in digital textuality; the double view of linguistic signifiers and visual-language abstract landscapes; the use of technology as a device to collect and share stories; the programming of non-linear interactive narrative structures and storytelling through the performance of the work; and the use of code to perform generative textualities. These themes will be reviewed in this article by presenting the motivations behind the work, concepts, context, research process and technological concerns. My overall research draws from concrete, visual and experimental poetics, art, linguistics and new media art, as does this work.
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…ha perdut la veu: Some reflections on the composition of e-literature as a minor literature
More LessThis article has two objectives. One is to give a clear example of the way in which practice and theory, or rather practice-as-research, can exist in a symbiotic relationship – each benefiting and illuminating the other. The second aim is to propose and map out an area of potential further research into the discursive positioning of e-literature. It draws on some of the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari around language and literature, in particular as it is articulated through a reading of them by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. In this respect it should be seen as a point of departure, not a presentation of findings. The article is an extended version of one I gave at Kingston University as part of the From Page to Screen to Augmented Reality Conference. The original article was designed to be delivered in conjunction with a video of a digital text work in performance. For this context I have taken some screenshots of that video and added them to the article. They will at least provide some sense of how the digital text work is displayed and how it functions.
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Digital literature and the Digital
More LessIn this article, the approach to the Digital is based on the distinction between three levels: a theoretical level, an applicative level and an interpretative level. Now digital literary works play on the tensions between the three levels and allow these tensions to be highlighted. Studying the conjunction of the Digital and of literary creation – by analysing digital literary works – thus proves to be relevant. Looking into the specific properties of the Digital can throw light on the potentialities of digital literature; in the same way, digital literature can act as a revealer for the Digital.
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Writing the ephemeral […] and re-enchanting the remnants: The lability of the digital device in literary practice
More LessWhenever the program of a work is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, it may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the artist is given four options when dealing with the lability of the electronic device: (1) she demands the ‘right’context of reception for his work – a requirement which, over time, will be confronted with the impossibility to preserve obsolete machines, software and operating systems; (2) she ‘re-enchants’ the lability of the electronic device and ascribes a ‘technological sublime’ to it; (3) she simply ignores the lability of the digital device and creates at once, as if the digital framework was immutable; (4) she is fully aware of the instable environment in which his digital creation will be updated; he even considers the ephemeral and uncontrollable nature of his work as its fundamental aesthetic principle. This most radical approach would then consist in letting the work slowly decompose, as well as in accepting his changing forms and updates and in taking up the possibility of incidents and unexpected events. In Tramway, one of my experimental poetic works that I present and analyse in this article, the instability of the device is metaphorized on the surface of the screen; it is thematized in the relationship between the figures of ‘manipulation’ and the manipulable textual context; it is also theorized in a critical paratext which is based, for example, on the actual presentation of the work in this journal issue. A second work, Pond, is located on the border between the aesthetics of the ephemeral, in which the author accepts the slow decay of his/her work, and the aesthetics of re-enchantment, in which the author ascribes the digital device with a hope of survival, with a spectral characteristic linked to the materiality of the programmed matter and which remains despite the changes it undergoes on the electronic device.
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Codework: Phenomenology of an anti-genre
More Less‘Codework: Phenomenology of an anti-genre’ is concerned with the disciplinary, historical and genre positioning of the writing practice called codework. Looking at the work of Australian network artist Mez, and the obfuscated code practice of Carl Banks, this article asks: What are the critical conditions that allow codework to be defined as a literary genre? In many cases the term codework seems less a specific genre than a taxonomic convenience that allows for a literary historicization, or mythologization, of the form. Thinking outside of the literary, codework is presented here as a phenomenology of computer-based inscription rather than a genre of electronic literature or a specific writing practice.
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From ‘words, words, words’ to ‘birds, birds, birds’. Literature between the representation and the presentation: where imagination and refl ection still
More LessThe famous quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet makes a literal reference to the materiality of words. I would like to start from this canonical point to make a leap to the immateriality of digital literature or art. Nowadays there is something about digital literature that, despite being one of the most contemporary of forms in literature, could still be considered very close to the art of interpreting omens from the flight or songs of birds. It seems interesting to me that this activity of the ancient augury, the main function of which was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds, occurred in a place called a templum. According to Markovsky, the Latin templum would be equivalent to the Greek τέμενος, from τέμνω, which means ‘to cut off’. The technical terms used to name this act were liberare (to liberate) and effari (to utter), and thus the temple was a ‘locus liberatus et effatus’, or a place liberated through a special kind of speech. Could we talk about digital literature in terms of a new sort of speech? The phonetic similarity between ‘words’ and ‘birds’ as well as the aesthetic formulations considered in such pieces as Maria Mencía’s Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs or ‘The Language of Birds’ by Belén Gache allow us to discuss the transfer that has been made from the page to the screen in the field of literature. This is a process that could be analysed as a re-citation of the text or as an artistic construction in dynamic interaction in which critics have a decisive role to play and act as mediums, i.e. as interpreters of the ‘birdsong’ to mediate between creators and readers.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 17 (2024)
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Volume 16 (2023)
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Volume 15 (2022)
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Volume 14 (2021)
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Volume 13 (2020)
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Volume 12 (2019)
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Volume 11 (2018)
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Volume 10 (2017 - 2018)
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Volume 9 (2016)
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Volume 8 (2015)
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Volume 7 (2014)
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Volume 6 (2013)
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Volume 5 (2012)
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Volume 4 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 3 (2010)
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Volume 2 (2009)
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Volume 1 (2007 - 2008)