Welcome to the Gallery of Works for the Digital Arts and Culture 2009 Literary Arts Extravaganza. For a list of the presenters, please see the line-up!
Serge Bouchardon graduated in literature from La Sorbonne University. After working as a project manager in the educational software industry for six years, he wrote his dissertation on interactive literary narrative and is currently associate professor in Communication Sciences at the University of Technology of Compiegne (France). His research focuses on digital creation, in particular electronic literature. As an author ("Artistico-literary games", www.sergebouchardon.com), he is interested in the unveiling of interactivity.
The Metroblogging syndicate hosts over 60 worldwide city blogs, where rosters of writers blog about life in their city. For this project, they built a blog for the fictional city of Spoon River. The meta-stories and all of the characters from the original have been updated to modern contexts and conflicts. The poems were published in small batches over several months in 2008. Each blog post is written in a syllabic prose that contains coded messages that lead to hidden parts of the story.
Spoon River Metblog - a group blog adaptation of Spoon River Anthology was featured in this year's Juried Exhibition at Int'l Symposium of Electronic Art. http://www.slideshare.net/jaybushman/spoon-river-metblog-for-isea2009-slideshow
Jay Bushman produces The Loose-Fish Project, an experiment in using web media as a storytelling platform for re-imagining classic works of literature. Loose-Fish Project has created ?The Good Captain,? a twitter-based sci-fi adaptation of Herman Melville?s Benito Cereno, and ?The Spoon River Metblog,? a contemporary re-telling of the E.L. Masters poetry cycle Spoon River Anthology in the guise of a hyperlocal new blog. In 2009, Loose-Fish will be producing a modernization of Pride and Prejudice using multiple social networking platforms. Other Loose-Fish stories in development include web versions of Dracula and Moby-Dick. As a part of Alchemy Storytelling, Jay produces new media experiences for corporate and media clients. He also organizes twitter-based re-enactments of classic sci-fi movie scenes, such as the #SXStarWars event at the 2009 SXSW festival, where a group of 20 people replayed the attack on the Death Star via Twitter.)
In "Unknown Territories" users navigate virtual environments dotted with interactive materials to explore evolving imagined landscapes of the western American deserts. Users discover narratives written from differing perspectives that raise questions about how the natural world has been imagined and used. The series begins with John Wesley Powell's navigation of the Colorado River in 1869 at a time when much of the vast arid West was marked on maps as an "unknown territory" and a "sandy wasteland." Users revisit these territories a 100 years later follow paths marked by the writings of Edward Abbey. The works have been featured internationally with the Electronic Literature Organization, Subito, Kipp Gallery, and elsewhere.
On May 25, 1869, you join the crew of one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell along with eight other fellow veterans, hunters and trappers, in an attempt to be the first to navigate the Colorado River through the vast unmapped maze of canyons in the heart of the Great American Desert. You are well aware that no European-American has boated the formidable Colorado River ? not, at least, and written about it. Turning inward... this is, perhaps, the final American frontier, a terra incognita. Will you, Mr. Bradley, be among the first of the new Americans to see it?
Arrive in the Utah desert in the late 1950s when a small group of literary renegades and activists confront industrialization, development and the destruction of the Great American Desert. This is a new kind of documentary film -- a cinemascape -- in whihc users navigate through a landscape of videos and supporting materials. A primary path offers visitors one possible route through the materials -- approximately a 60 minute documentary....You may also take your own paths.
Lady Applicant: The Lazarus is a multimedia installation and experiment in new media poetics that frees the poetry of renowned confessional poet Sylvia Plath from her autobiographical identity. The installation consists of audio cutups that resist the primacy of text. Plath is known for her personal life as much as her confessional poetry. Almost all of her writing depicts her struggle with depression and mental illness before she notably committed suicide by placing her head in the oven to inhale gas.
The installation questions the nature of authorship in general and autobiographical authorial intention in particular. The audio presents phonetic fragments of Plath?s voice from the BBC recordings of her poems Lady Lazarus and The Applicant. These fragments extracted from individual words produce a seamless collage of poetry that walks a tightrope between cadence, communication and semiotic meaning.
The resulting six-part poem through the method and constraint of a strict anagrammatic collage was completed during the course of an independent study taken with noted poet, lecturer and Hitchcock Poetry Fund recipient Gary Young. The next step is to follow the new poem as a voiceover script and cut the audio of each utterance from her readings and rearrange them with Soundtrack Pro. The bank of individual words is currently being carefully stitched together to achieve a seamless collage that intentionally sounds fragmented by the cadence of varying utterances. The evolution of the sound not only represents how poems could be recreated, but also how the inflection of a disembodied voice reinterprets the poem when random words are emphasized. Thus, Plath?s canonical readings are stripped and transformed into.
Christoph Girard is interested in how the evolution of embodied language can transform into disembodied poetic artifice. He completed an MFA in Writing from Otis College of Art & Design is currently a graduate student in the Digital Arts and New Media program at University of California, Santa Cruz.
The narrator relates his life's downward spiral and miraculous rebound from severe foot problems using animated bullet points, images, charts, and graphs. "Custom Orthotics Changed My Life" is a work of presentation fiction, or slideshow fiction, in the form of a video with an original soundtrack. The music was composed by David Kettler (mailto:[email protected]), a Stanford undergraduate in the Symbolic Systems Program and the Program in Music, Science, and Technology. "Custom Orthotics" will be published in Kairos (http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/) in January, 2010, and has previously been exhibited or performed at HASTAC III (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Computers and Writing 2009 (University of California, Davis).
Richard Holeton is Director of Academic Computing Services at Stanford University, where he formerly taught in the writing program and English Department for 12 years, coordinated the computers and writing project, and served as faculty Resident Fellow in a freshman dorm. He is author of the hypertext novel _Figurski at Findhorn on Acid_ (Eastgate Systems, 2001) and other electronic literature; print fiction in many journals including the Indiana Review, Mississippi Review, and ZYZZYVA; and scholarship and college textbooks including Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community, and Knowledge in the Electronic Age.
Scott Rettberg is associate professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of works of electronic literature including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, and Implementation. Rettberg is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. Rettberg is a contributor to the collaborative digital culture weblog Grand Text Auto. He is currently working on a book about contemporary electronic literature in the context of the twentieth century avant-garde, and is leading an effort to establish a European electronic literature research network.
Clown Reading Tokyo Garage: This is a Machinimatic clown reading a few minutes of Tokyo Garage from the Olympic Stadium in Beijing. Embed in a webpage:J.P. Sipil? is a finnish videopoet whos works has been seen around the world from Argentina to Canada and to Russia. At the moment he is working with a videopoemdvd to be published later on this year.
"This might be is a videopoem from the "see when it seems I am ok" -videopoemcollection. The videopoem just might be about growing up in a world that already is there to tell us how to be. But also about how one can make a difference if they want to... well as it says at the end: this is for the child."
b) "You Knew It Already"
videopoem
If, as poststructural theory suggests, meaning emerges through the differences within language, then this project explores that concept from the perspective of materiality. "Binarisms" is a digital video installation that explores common binaries within the English language. The dual projections within the installation create a space to contemplate the typographic intersections that emerge from these dualistic pairs. The anaglyph, or 3D glasses, allow viewers to focus on one of the two words, and its typographic intersections.
Joel Swanson is an artist and writer who is currently the Director of the Technology, Arts & Media Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He teaches courses on digital art, media theory, and the history of design. Joel received his MFA in digital art at the University of California, San Diego. His work is motivated by literary theory and exists as a series of installations, both real and virtual, that explore the nature of language and its methods of embodiments.