CultureNet: A Collection of Digital Curiosities: Electronic Literature Conference

Electronic Literature Conference

Andrew Klobucar and I have just come back from the Electronic Literature Organization
conference in Vancouver WA this past weekend where 120 artists and
scholars met to present and talk about electronic literature. Hosted by

Of course, we are not wondering why that plunger is on Jon's face; more to the point, our surprise actually derives from our wondering why we are not wondering why that plunger is on Jon's face, and in that question lies the particular anxiety currently inscribing our interactions, both on-screen and off-screen, today.

From: garfield minus garfield

NEGATION RELATED TO ALTERITY IN CYBERSPACE AND MATERIAL LIFE

THAT “there’s no other to cyberspace, no air anywhere”

THAT “the body appears to breath, its organs duplicated everywhere, laminated across the constructed world”

THAT “the invisible as the defined excluded, ‘excluded’ from the field of visibility and ‘defined’ as excluded”

THAT “there’s a mass psychosis underway, as if being offline meant you’re somehow deficient, in education, worldliness, style, income, and geographic location”

the animals already know by instinct we’re not comfortably at home in our translated world. Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy    For a dip in a new streaming digital project, go to Tributaries at TCR.

Do new modes of literary and cultural production require new methods of analysis and assessment? With this question in mind, the following monthly column aims to present and discuss important changes in the practice of literary criticism and research derived from developments in digital technology in the Humanities. The practices and theories examined will be assessed in the interest of designing new research paradigms for literary studies that are:

• more information-centred, as they work at a higher level of abstraction
• interactive with the scholar, using proactive software with respect to the literary work
• multifunctional and integrated

To read an object digitally or in an information-centred manner means more than recognising its format as binary encrypted pixels. The digital text demonstrates an entirely transformed relationship between texts. Where traditional print archives present networked information as a more or less centralised system composed of independent sources of content, the digital text suggests a more dynamic, inconsistent arrangement, where the meaning of any single “node” of content literally depends upon the connections informing it. Hence, interpreting a text digitally becomes at a fundamental level an exercise in data placement or mapping, where various formatted components of information within texts can be configured and reconfigured according to pre-determined frameworks of meaning – for example, cultural, semantic, grammatical, etc.

progress_2 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

progress on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

"Artifice & Intelligence"
guest edited by Andrew Klobucar

with a panel discussion on Technology and Aesthetics featuring

Jim Andrews, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston,
Laura Marks, Sandra Seekins, and Darren Wershler-Henry

Behold the Lexicographer: "slave of science, the pioneer of literature" | Jargon of Eden

The emergence of lexicography as a formal practice and discipline in the mid-18th century helps us interpret two interrelated issues in modern epistemology: 1. the evolution of applied analysis and aesthetic modelling as modes of knowledge, and 2. the growing dependence of knowledge upon media and communication technologies.

Fishing for Further SuggestionsCultureNet faculty are always bending the spines of books and scrolling through online publications - new and old - that speak to our shared interest in the ways that technology gets around to shaping us and us technology. A few titles recently traded between CNET faculty include:Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, Steel (1997)Andrew Feenberg's Transforming Technology