Call for Papers: E-Literature and New Media Art
E-Literature and New Media Art
A seminar within the framework of the Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice research project, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 22 and 23, 2011.
Understanding that "electronic literature" integrates text, image, sound, performance and computation with creative practices disseminated through contemporary global networks, producing narrative and poetic experiences particular to the digital environment, the ELMCIP research project seeks to expand the definition of e-literature. Hyperfiction, hyperpoetry and other key genre of the 1980's and 1990's are subsumed within current diverse text based practices, engaging programmable and networked media, new media based narrative, interactive installations, augmented performance, virtual architectures, generative and code art, mobile art, net art, VJing, hactivism and other experimental artistic practices. We find a motile experimental field, which involves artwork consciously produced as E-literature, shaped through text-based installation, networked art, performance and other media. These are works that engage digital textuality as an expanded concept of writing, fashioning novel artistic effects and qualities. As precursor examples of this striking movement in the (new) media arts we can cite Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1988-1991), Bill Seaman's Passage Sets / One Pulls Pivots At The Tip Of The Tongue (1995), Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Simon Biggs' The Great Wall of China (1996), Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv's Text Rain (1999), and Natalie Bookchin's The Intruder (1999).
The turn in considering e-literature, from an isolated literary phenomenon to a broader context at the intersection of (new) media art, also implies a significant shift in terms of appropriate analytical methods. Hypertext theory, founded in literature studies and heavily referencing French post-structuralist precursors (e.g. Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva, Genette, Riffaterre, Derrida), gives way to the interdisciplinary approaches of media art theory, software and internet studies, anthropology, cultural studies, film theory, gender and queer studies, psychoanalytic theory and sociology. The idea that e-literature, contextualized within the new media arts and techno-culture, is a broader and important social and cultural issue comes to the fore. E-literary texts demonstrate the manner in which internet culture is embodied, reproduced and repeated through individual and social bodies and their often erotized interfaces.
The Ljubljana seminar therefore seeks to engage and stimulate scholars from the ELMCIP project and from around the world to reconsider and discuss the nature of artistic and literary textual practices integrated within (new) media art genres and introduce diverse innovative approaches to language within the condition of (new) media culture. We welcome papers that address the relationship and intertwining of e-literature, media art and social formation, suggesting new approaches to the scholarship of poetics and narrative embedded in the (new) mediascape.
The presented papers will be published online in the ELMCIP knowledge database and in a special section of the Slovenian journal Maska.
Authors are invited to send their abstracts (300-400 words) in English by March 31, 2011 to:
Dr. Janez Strehovec, ELMCIP Principal Investigator
Janez.Strehovec@guest.arnes.si
(Papers, using MLA style and of 4500-6000 words in length, including abstract and bibliography, are to be submitted by June 30, 2011)
Proposals will be peer reviewed.
Abstract submission Deadline: March 31, 2011
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2011
Full paper submission Deadline: June 30, 2011
Submissions to: Janez.Strehovec@guest.arnes.si
Co-Chairs:
Simon Biggs and Jerome Fletcher
ELMCIP Project Leader:
Scott Rettberg
Peer review committee:
Simon Biggs, Edinburgh College of Art
Yra Van Dijk, University of Amsterdam
Maria Engberg, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Jerome Fletcher, University College Falmouth
Raine Koskimaa, University of Jyväskylä
Scott Rettberg, University of Bergen
Janez Strehovec, University of Ljubljana
Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen
Supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.