• Literary text-generation via Markov chains & grammars
• Integration with WordNet via RiTa.WordNet [available here]
• Analysis of Syllables, Phonemes, Stress, Part-of-Speech, etc.
• Support for verb conjugation, pluralization, and stemming
• Support for statistical tagging, chunking, and parsing
• Text-to-speech, image, and audio support for applets
• Concordances and Key-Word-In-Context (KWIC) models
• A customized behavior model for events/animations etc.
• Optional client/server mode for object persistence
• Real-time unigram, bigram & weighted-bigram measures
• Web/text-mining capabilities & a user-customizable Lexicon
• 13 Varieties of ‘easing’ for animation & textual effects

Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) presents an evening of multimedia, interactive, performative readings highlighting a broad range of born-digital literary forms, including game-inspired, collaborative, database, film/video, generative, and kinetic image work. The evening’s presentations showcase five projects selected from the second Electronic Literature Collection, published in February 2011, and created by Oni Buchanan, Jhave Johnston, Illya Szilak, Sandy Baldwin, and collaborators — Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan.

Literature programs at The Kitchen are made possible with generous support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation and with public funds from The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Image Design: Pelin Kirca and Illya Szilak

ELO 2012 Media Arts Show :: June 18-30, 2012 :: Monongalia Arts Center, Morgantown + online :: Call for Works — Deadline: November 30, 2011.

Electronic Literature: Where is It? — Even if nobody could define print literature, everyone knew where to look for it - in libraries and bookshops, at readings, in class, or on the Masterpiece channel. We have not yet created, however, a consensus about where to find electronic literature, or (for that matter) the location of the literary in an emerging digital aesthetic.

Though we do have, in digital media, works that identify themselves as “locative,” we don’t really know where to look for e-lit, how it should be tagged and distributed, and whether or how it should be taught. Is born digital writing likely to reside, for example, in conventional literature programs? in Rhetoric? Comp? Creative Writing? Can new media literature be remediated? How should its conditions of creation be described? Do those descriptions become our primary texts when the works themselves become unavailable through technological obsolescence?

To forward our thinking about the institutional and technological location of current literary writing, the Electronic Literature Organization and West Virginia University’s Center for Literary Computing invite submissions to the ELO 2012 Conference to be held from June 20-23, 2012, in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Bearing in mind the changing locations of new media literature and literary cultures, the conference organizers welcome unconventional presentations, whether in print or digital media. The point is not to reject the conventional conference ‘paper’ or bullet point presentation but to encourage thoughtful exploration and justification of any format employed. All elements of literary description and presentation are up for reconsideration. The modest mechanisms of course descriptions, syllabus construction, genre identification, and the composition of author bios, could well offer maps toward the location of the literary in digital media. So can an annotated bibliography of works falling under a given genre or within a certain technological context. We welcome surveys of the use of tags and keywords, and how these can be recognized (or not) by readers, libraries, or other necessary nodes in an emerging literary network Also of interest is the current proliferation of directories of electronic literature in multiple media, languages, and geographical locations.

Proposals

We invite titles and proposals of no more than 500 words, including a brief description of the content and format of the presentation, and contact information for the presenter(s). Send proposals to elit2012 [at] gmail.com, using plain text format in the email, or attached as Word or PDF. All proposals will receive peer-to-peer review by the ELO and will be considered on their own terms. Non-traditional and traditional formats will be subject to the same peer-to-peer review process.

The cost of the conference is $150; graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100. The cost covers receptions, meals, and other conference events. All participants must be members of the Electronic Literature Organization. All events are within walking distance of the conference hotels. Morgantown is a classic college town, located in the scenic hills of north central West Virginia, about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, PA. Local hotel and travel information will be available on the conference website starting October 1, 2011.

Conference Planning Committee

Sandy Baldwin, West Virginia University (Chair)
Philippe Bootz, University of Paris 8
Dene Grigar, Washington State University Vancouver
Margie Luesebrink, Irvine Valley College
Mark Marino, University of Southern California
Talan Memmott, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois, Chicago

Check http://el.eliterature.org and http://conference.eliterature.org for updates. For more information, email elit2012 [at] gmail.com.

Seeing and Writing: Russian Multimedia Poetry by Natalia Fedorova :: October 24, 2011; 5:30 pm :: 14E-310 — Natalia Fedorova’s work includes an interactive novel, Madame Ebaressa and a Butterfly, co-written with Sergeij Kitov; 7, a  hyper fiction piece with three possible endings; Dialogue Between a Policeman and a Ballerina, a video installation with the Factory of Found Clothes; and two poetry films, Snow Queen and Just do not not do it. She is also the founder and curator of VIDE0.txt, a poetry film festival in St-Petersburg, Russia and the co-curator of SELF-ID.com, a digital publishing portal.

Beyond Zork: Games & Interactive Fiction by Brian Moriarty :: November 28, 2011; 5:30 pm :: 6-120 — Brian Moriarty built his first computer in the fifth grade. He began publishing games in the early 1980s and in 1984 joined legendary text adventure company Infocom, where he authored three award-winning interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986) and Beyond Zork (1987). His first graphic adventure game, Loom, was published in 1990 by Lucasfilm Games to wide critical acclaim.

Penumbra: Rich Media & Gestural Text by Samantha Gorman :: December 5, 2011; 5:30 pm :: 6-120 — Samantha Gorman is a writer and media artist who composes for the intersection of text, dance, performance, and digital culture. She holds an MFA and BA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where she studied poetry and writing for digital media. Penumbra, a hybrid art/literature app for the iPad created with Danny Cannizzaro, challenges the notion of a static “ebook” by carefully integrating short film, rich animation, illustration and fiction.

Daniel C. Howe, like joerg piringer and Erik Loyer, can be described as both an artist and a researcher. His homepage lists a number of projects, many in progress, some merely sketches, bu he doesn’t make any clear division between research and art, not surprising given his array of degrees and residencies. An early project involved developing a series of 3D fonts, which puts him in a tradition of experimental font makers including the previously mentioned Paul Chan, who replaced individual letters with words, scribbles, or abstract shapes, Peter Cho with his Letterscapes, and Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland, who created the first “RandomFonts,” which resemble conventional letters but with visual variations — added noise, slight warps in the lines and points — with each click of the key.” More >>

Six Sided Strange is a net-artwork series built from unsolvable Rubik’s cubes and hidden narratives, from pixilated game character collages to abstract streams of color and lines. The cube is central to how we organize and understand. It is a puzzle of unsolvable junctures, a humanistic shape created to order and organize. Six Sided Strange disrupts the cube, wandering inside/around the recombinatory playground of Rubik’s 56 squares, exploring how images and designs relate to narrative. These are interactive/dynamic sculptures, brief storylands, and all manner of wonderments. There is nothing to win, but then again there never was.

BIOGRAPHY

Born from the Oklahoma flatlands of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives, building confounding art games and all manner of curious digital creatures. Currently he professes Net Art and Electronic Literature at Australia’s Griffith University in the Gold Coast’s contradictory shores. He exhibits widely with work featured around globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, ACM, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list, boards he frequents, and other accolades, but in the web-based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal http://www.secrettechnology.com attracts each year.

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Transmediation as Betrayal: The Case of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Editorial by Lanfranco Aceti: When inheriting the history of a publication like the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) it is difficult to stay faithful to historical traditions and at the same time catch up with the evolution of contemporary online media and social networks.

Academic Vanitas: Michael Aurbach and Critical Theory by Dorothy Joiner: In a satiric series of sculptures, Michael Aurbach uses laughter to lampoon the excesses of the contemporary scholarship known as critical theory. Spun from psychology, linguistic hermeneutics, and philosophy, critical theory, in Aurbach’s view, tends to deemphasize art objects, substituting fatuous speculations for straightforward analysis. The Critical Theorist (2003) is a fantastical contraption on a metal table, each element of which is a visual joke. Reliquary for a Critical Theorist (2005) parodies the tradition of containers for relics. Two Plexiglas “books,” C’est Nothing and Deux Nothing (2009), continue the notion of vacuity. And Critical Theory’s Secret (2010) imitates a safe. It’s empty, however, mocking the notion of an underlying meaning.

Some Thoughts Connecting Deterministic Chaos, Neuronal Dynamics and Aesthetic Experience by Andrea Ackerman: The apparent randomness of deterministic chaos is differentiated from stochastic randomness and linked to natural processes, time’s irreversibility and the creation of meaning. Current neuroscience research strongly suggests that chaotic dynamics govern the physiological functioning of the brain/mind. The brain/mind is conceived as a multi-attractor system functioning at a far from equilibrium state poised for instantaneous state changes and transitions. Chaotic itinerancy has been suggested as a process by which chaotic transitions among attractors may be made and dynamically integrated in a multi-attractor chaotic system such as the brain. The article outlines a theory suggesting that the general characteristics of aesthetic experience are determined by the chaotic dynamics of the brain/mind and by the dynamics of chaotic itinerancy. Two examples, a novel by W.G. Sebald and the installation art of Jenny Holzer are described in terms of this new aesthetic theory.

Hacking the Codes of Self-representation: An Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson by Tatiana Bazzichelli: This interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson reflects on the meaning and impact of her artistic activity since the Seventies, an important resource for understanding the socio-cultural transformation in the fields of art, technology and body-politics of our present. Today more then ever, we are experiencing the mixing and crossing of virtual and real worlds; dynamics of social networking and net-based participation are influencing not only a small group of experts, but everyone with access to technology. Through the art of Lynn Hershman Leeson, it becomes possible to access a critical space-in-between, a liminal state of performativity, in which to redefine powers and hierarchies, to question the meaning of identity, and to hack the codes of self-representation. As a “cultural infiltrator”, Lynn Hershman Leeson opens up a critical interstice in the everyday life to a constant redefinition of ourselves.

Electronic Literature as a Sword of Lightning by Davin Heckman: This essay analyzes the humanistic potential of digital poetry in the age of new media. By way of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” theories of the posthuman, and the tradition of Marxist critique, this essay aims to identify an occasion for hope within the new media arts. Reading electronic literature through Shelley’s metaphor of poetry as a “sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it,” Heckman analyzes the ethical dimensions of literature against the backdrop of technocapitalism and instrumental theories of the human. The essay concludes with a discussion of intersubjectivity, politics, and love.

Profile: Darko Fritz - An Interview with Darko Fritz by Lanfranco Aceti: Darko Fritz’s work through its personal and social aesthetics obliges us to analyze both the technological determinism of contemporary times as well as the contradictions of contemporary aesthetics trapped in the conflict of real versus virtual.

Profile: Darko Fritz - Reflections on Archives in Progress by Darko Fritz by Sasa Vojkovic: Without really dovetailing to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, in his Archives in Progress, Darko Fritz examines the technical mechanisms for archivization and for reproduction. Taking into account the multiplicity of regions in the psychic apparatus, this model also integrates the necessity, inside the psyche itself, of a certain outside, of certain borders between insides and outsides. This outside can also…

Profile: Darko Fritz - Error to Mistake > Notes on the Aesthetics of Failure by Vesna Madzoski: Two dominant scenarios of the future of humanity have marked the (post)modern century behind us. According to the first, optimistic one, we will reach unimaginable evolutionary peaks due to technological perfection; this disciplined and orderly functioning of machines will bring humans to the final state of evolution where the body never leaves the coziness of the pre-natal state of fullness and happiness. The other scenario gives a more concerned view on the technological advancement and supremacy, haunted with the images of Earth’s exhausted natural resources that will put humans a few evolutionary steps back – to their animal, ‘pre-civilized’ state.

Nexus of Art and Science: The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at University of Sussex by Christina Aicardi: The author explores the relationships between science and art that have developed at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) of the University of Sussex, which harbours an internationally renowned, leading research group in Artificial Life, Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Robotics. The aim is to establish whether and how interdisciplinary art-science practices at CCNR may lead to novel forms of knowledge production. Using fieldwork material as well as bibliographic and web resources, it showcases a number of initiatives and realizations. It also examines how individual researchers may understand, conceptualize, and justify, their experience and practice at the art-science junction in Artificial Life. This paper derives from the author’s PhD research project, of which a main focus has been to investigate interdisciplinary practices in the field of Artificial Life, which cross over the ‘two cultures’ divide. Artificial Life art is a predominant case of such interdisciplinarity crossover in the field of Artificial Life in general, and in the Sussex research group in particular.

Mish/Mash by Paul Catanese: There is a gulf between the implications of chaos and a haphazard undertaking; one implies cosmology, the other: untidiness. The complexity of mixing things together can be grand in scale, mesmerizing, protean – but also painful, rife with dead-ends, and uneven: wildly swinging between the startlingly rapid and agonizingly slow, a syncopated staccato so jarring, forwards and backwards are often indistinguishable without further examination or inquiry. Of mishmash, one can ascribe seemingly paradoxical traits: a mode of forming questions, a lens for meta-cognition, a gambler’s dilemma, a rehash of monkeys and typewriters, a ludic blossoming of multimodality, or perhaps the most devastating: an arbitrary wheel-spinning.

Sipping Espresso with Salmon by Carey Bagdassarian: Complex systems require, for their full description, a language commensurate in complexity. The application of mathematical language to systems such as ecosystems or ritual systems demands a psychological distancing in order to apply the math in the first place. The resulting sensorial disembodiment precipitates yet another flavor of the mind-body separation.

The Making of Empty Stages by Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning by Gabriella Giannachi: In this interview to acclaimed theatre photographer Hugo Glendinning, Gabriella Giannachi discusses with him the making of his latest work, Empty Stages (2003–11), a documentation about empty stages, touching on his collaboration with UK theatre company Forced Entertainment and Tim Etchells, who co-authored some of the images,as well as photographic methodologies and relfections about emptiness, absence, presence and performance.

Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, and Cultural History of Human/Machine Assemblages by Ayhan Aytes: In November 2005, Amazon Web Services started a web-based labor market where workers from across the world can choose and complete human intelligence tasks (HITS) designed by corporate developers. Labor required for fulfilling HITS varies: finding and matching information and images, translating text, transcribing audio, tagging images, answering surveys or visiting a blog. The amount of pay for each HIT ranges from one cent to several US dollars.

Inverse Embodiment: An Interview with Stelarc by Lanfranco Aceti: What is left of cyborgology today when we are actually looking at an artworld that is in total flux with bio-art, nano-art, data art and an infinite recombinatory matrix of disciplines in which art is the definition of human creativity?

Order in Complexity by Frieder Nake: Order in complexity. Yes, of course, when confronted with a complex situation, we usually search for order. Otherwise we have no chance to make sense out of the situation. We make sense, and it seems we always want to make it. Sense is not there to discover. It requires our activity. It is a construction.

Teaching Video Production in Virtual Reality by Joseph Farbrook: Teaching video production using video game technology and a method of live manipulation of digital puppets and props offers new possibilities for narrative, without shifting focus away from storyline and dramatic content, due to technical hurdles. This production technique known as Machinima has been steadily gaining in popularity and prominence due to the relative ease and speed in which small production teams can learn to use video game software in this new way and quickly create professional quality animated movies.

Atomism: Residual Images within Silver by Paul Thomas: In this short article I want to present the thinking, processes and references that I am currently researching in my practice. This research connects to my early work that stems from an interest in residual spaces, subconscious meanings and the objectification of the world via perspectival space.

Collaborating with the Enemy by Shane Mecklenburger: Cost of Opportunity is a project that creates a series of diamonds as artworks. The Gunpowder Diamond will be produced entirely from carbon found in .223 Caliber assault rile ammunition.The gunpowder is safely neutralized in a laboratory and the carbon it contains is isolated. Future proposed art-diamonds include the Road-kill Diamond from Nine-Banded Armadillos killed on Texas thoroughfares and the Superman Diamond from a 1983 cellulose acetate film print of Superman III (wherein Superman crushes a lump of coal into a diamond). A monetary value for each diamond is to be determined at a live auction, generating funds for future diamonds in an ongoing series of stones made from various culturally charged materials. The project explores personal and cultural valuation, materiality, and the way market pressures have altered the definition and function of art. Multiple attempts to secure research funding reveal the limits of interdisciplinarity and institutional aesthetics, inspiring the artist, Shane Mecklenburger, to steal the diamond once exhibited, a plan he has yet to reveal to his collaborator.

Notes on Demonstration Exhibition: The Ammonite Order, or, Objectiles for an (Un)Natural History by Vince Dziekan: The demonstration exhibition, The Ammonite Order, Or, Objectiles for an (Un) Natural History (2008–09) explores a non-deterministic relation between digital mediation and spatial practice that supplants the primacy of real objects present in gallery space. The outcome of a research residency in London, the theme for this work evolved out of imaginatively projecting a ictive ‘correspondence’ between two local personages: the architect George Dance (the Younger) and naturalist Charles Darwin. Drawing implicitly upon a creative curatorial impulse in order to pursue this narrative fabula, the exhibition space unfolds as a multidimensional installation that combines physical elements with an accompanying set of media content. The exhibition promotes a model for a different type of aesthetic experience through defamiliarising how the art object is modulated at the intersection of the exhibition.

The Contemporary Becomes Digital by Bruce Wands: In 2003, I wrote an essay that was published in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery catalog titled “The Digital Becomes Contemporary.” A lot has happened in the digital art Field in the past eight years, and this essay will examine some of those changes as they relate to the relationship between digital and contemporary art.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Historical Perspective by Craig Harris: As Leonardo Electronic Almanac “rekindles” I can’t help but be both nostalgic about the past and hopeful about the future. In looking back to when Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) was founded I think of the challenges that the ield faced in terms of communication, networking, and collaboration. So much was happening at the intersection of art, science and technology in the early 1990s, yet much of it was taking place in isolation, disconnected from other relevant and related activities. There was a clear need to raise the profile of work on a global scale, and to identify ways to improve interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. The leadership at Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) set on a path to play an important role in addressing these issues for its community.

Ars Electronica 2010: Sidetrack or Crossroads? by Erkki Huhtamo: After the Ars Electronica 2010 festival was over, the press office triumphantly touted in its communiqué: “90,227 visitors at the greatest Ars Electronica Festival since 1979.” For someone who has visited the festival every year since 1989 (with only two exceptions), it is easy to simply reverse the statement, and claim that this was the poorest – or to put it more nicely: the most mediocre – Ars Electronica of the past twenty years.

“Jason Nelson’s huge body of electronic literature, most of it done in Flash, might at first seem the work of an obsessive outsider; the fact that he is an American living in Australia might only confirm this assumption. Each of his pieces is replete with text, images (and often video), strange sounds, and most importantly, unusual interfaces that encourage as much play by the user as it must have taken the creator to design it. Rotating cubes, infinitely regressing images, rainbow-colored compasses, genetic code, Tron-like 3-D boxes (with a nod to Rez), and slot machines have provided inspiration for his variations on the GUI (graphical user interface), all in the service of exploring the varieties of recombination possible with digital text, not to mention images and sounds.” More >>

Andreas Maria Jacobs lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Walkenried, Germany with Judith V. and their 3 children. He has been the publishing editor of Nictoglobe magazine online since 1986. His work is included in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2.