International conference at the Cultural Studies Research Center “Media Upheavals”
University of Siegen, Germany, November 20-21, 2008
Organized by Professor Dr. Peter Gendolla and Dr. Jörgen Schäfer
Conference website: http://www.litnet.uni-siegen.de
Using electronic and networked media has resulted in such serious changes in the relationship between “author,” “work,” and “reader” that it seems necessary to make revisions in the tradi-tional models analyzing literary communication. The Siegen conference on “The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media” (Nov 25-27, 2004; book available at Transcript Publishers) had already made clear that this triad has to be extended into the technical aspects of media: Literary processes emerge from techno-social networks, i.e. they materialize in the interplay between human and electronic “actants.”
If in the past discussions centered mostly on those projects that were perceived by looking at the computer screen or that were controlled via keyboard and mouse, now man-machine interactions are organized by considerably more complex interfaces. The specific attention of this follow-up conference therefore will be focusing on the aesthetic processes of AI-controlled environments that occur in the physical realm between the interfaces of technical sensors or effectors and the human body. Electronic media take “body language” to a new level as well since more and more the whole body is involved in the media activity. Increasingly complex sensors (integrated into vehicles, clothes and environments) “realize”—hear, see, feel, in other words: measure—the movements of the body, its mimics and gestures. This “multimodal” body itself then also ex-changes information with the “products” of this kind of technology. Such medial couplings and framings enable the co-operation of non-symbolic activities, symbolic language activities and algorithmic processes of computer systems.
If it is true that semantics is always the result of intermedial transcriptions between media then this development affects all human behavior concerning linguistic signs and therefore also the aesthetic processes of perception and self-perception. In this context the contributions to this con-ference will refer to literary communication and strategies thereby interrogating how literary structures, interfaces and genres change regarding:
- Locative Narratives, i.e. environmental, neighborhood and city projects with GPS-based media following literary patterns (e.g. travel- and adventure-narratives or detective stories like Jean-Pierre Balpe’s “Fictions d'Issy”; Stefan Schemat’s Augmented Reality Fictions; “Inter Urban” by 34 North 118 West or Susanne Berkenheger/Gisela Müller’s “Worldwatchers”).
- Immersive Environments (Cave or interactive camera-projection systems) in which reception does not only take place through the eyes alone but rather in which the whole body is “reading” and thereby recomposing already saved meanings or those that still have to be constructed (e.g. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s “Screen”; John Cayley’s “Lens”; Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain”).
- Stagings of inner realms and environments in which real characters (from simple users to trained actors) and artificial ones (from avatars, software agents etc. to complex AI-programs) following quite classical dramatic patterns of activity are involved in dialogues (e.g. Michael Mateas/Andrew Stern et.al.: “AR Façade”).
Regarding the aesthetics of net literature therefore the question has to be asked whether we can continue talking of a specific migration of traditional literary forms into computer-based and net-worked media. Can we continue analyzing such examples as “literature”? In what way can the semantics of literary terminology, concepts and systems be retained or does it have to be revised? Can we still correlate the examples mentioned above with the three traditional genres?
Apart from this the performative projects mentioned above intensify the already difficult problem of the documentation/archiving of as well as the access to processes of electronic literature. Lastly, the conference also will address the problem of archiving and editing the rather transitory electronic literature, thereby attempting to advance the cooperation of current and planned data-bases, archives and editions.
Program
Thursday, November 20, 2008
9.30-10.00: Peter Gendolla & Jörgen Schäfer (Siegen): Welcoming Notes and Introduction
Panel I: Performance and the Emergence of Meaning
10.00-10.50: Roberto Simanowski (Providence, USA): Event and Meaning: Reading Interactive Installations in the Light of Art History
11.10-12.00: N. Katherine Hayles (Los Angeles, USA): Behind the Screen: Implications of Data-base Construction
12.00-12.50: Ludwig Jäger (Aachen, Germany): Epistemology of Disruptions: Thoughts on Some Principles of Cultural Semantics
Panel II: Literature between Virtual, Physical and Symbolic Space
14.30-15.20: John Cayley (Providence, USA): Surface Text: Text as Surface in Immersive 3D Environments
15.20-16.10: Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Santa Cruz, USA): What is Behind the Complex Surface?
16.30-17.20: Rita Raley (Los Angeles, USA): Locative Narrative: Figuring Urban Space in the Network Society
17.20-18.10: Anna Gibbs/Maria Angel (Sydney, Australia): Memory and Motion: The Body in Electronic Writing
Friday, November 21, 2008
Panel III: Beyond Genre: Transformations of Narrative, Poetic and Dramatic Structures
9.30-10.20: Francisco J. Ricardo (Boston, USA): Framing Locative Consciousness
10.20-11.10: Jochen Venus (Siegen, Germany): Beyond Game and Narration: A Morphological Approach to Computer Game Analysis
11.30-12.20: Friedrich Block (Kassel, Germany): How to Construct the Genre of Digital Poetry: A User Manual
Panel IV: Preservation, Archiving and Editing
14.30-15.20: Joseph Tabbi (Chicago, USA): On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature: Is There a Literary Mainstream in New Media?
15.20-16.10: Fotis Jannidis (Darmstadt, Germany): Scholarly Editing and the Net
16.30-17.20: Ravi Shankar (New Britain, CT, USA): Retrospective and Barometer: A Decade of “Drunken Boat”
Sponsored by: German Research Foundation (DFG), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and University of Siegen
Conference venue:
University of Siegen
Artur-Woll-Haus
Am Eichenhang 50
D-57076 Siegen
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Peter Gendolla, Dr. Jörgen Schäfer, Patricia Tomaszek, Fariborz Mansouri
University of Siegen
Cultural Studies Research Center 615 “Media Upheavals”
D-57068 Siegen
Germany
E-mail: {gendolla | schaefer | tomaszek | mansouri} (at) fk615.uni-siegen.de
