Electronic Literature Organization

SWITCH, the new media arts journal of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media of the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University has just published SWITCH_20: Transvergence. This is the first of a number of issues dedicated to themes of the ZeroOne Festival: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge and ISEA 2006 , August 5-13, 2006, in San Jose, California. SWITCH_20 features new writings, interviews, and works by Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, Steve Dietz, Mark Finnern, Peter Haley, Sally Jane Norman, Nikki Stott, Dr. Roula Svorou, and the SWITCH Editorial Team.

The Generator.x project, to be held in Oslo, Norway, September 23-24, 2005, will bring together artists, writers, and designers who are embracing the “new literacy” represented by reading and writing in digital media. The project aims to examine the role of software and “generative strategies” in current digital art and design. Confirmed speakers include Erich Berger, Pablo Miranda Carranza, Gisle Froysland, Hans Christian Gilje, Susanne Jaschko, Golan Levin, Sebastian Oschatz, Casey Reas, Amanda Steggell and Marius Watz. The conference is being hosted by Atelier Nord, and will be accompanied by the opening of the Generator.x exhibition at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. For more information, visit the Generator.x website, or email info@generatorx.no .

The National Popular Culture and American Culture Associations are planning a joint conference on the theme of “internet culture.” The organizers invite proposals for themed sessions, special panels, and individual papers. Proposals or abstracts are due October 15, 2005 to George Lewis. The conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 12-15, 2006. Visit PCA/ACA for more information about the conference.

The 2nd Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium opened June 21 and continues through July 11 in Beijing. Hosted by Tsinghua University and co-presented by numerous new media organizations around the world, the event theme, “In the Line of Flight: Transcending Urbanscapes,” takes on the rapid changes, anxieties, exhilarations, and disjunctions that modernization and new media are bringing to Chinese culture.

The MIT Press has just published on DVD the first collection of work by the The Soft Cinema Project, headed by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky. Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database includes three narratives, “Mission to Earth,” “Absences,” and “Texas,” that explore the storytelling possibilities of “(soft)ware cinema.” This first release drew on numerous talents, including DJ Spooky, Scanner, servo, Andreas Angelidakis, Schoenerwissen/Office for Computational Design, and Ross Cooper Studios.

Cultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media will take place in Hoani Waititi Auckland/Tamaki Makaurau, December 1-5, 2005. This event, affiliated with the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA 2006), will include a symposium, exhibitions, and workshops aimed at developing international awareness of local work in new media arts, and to link international practices in new media arts to dialogues in Aotearoa’s cultural identity. The organizers invite submissions of new media texts in any genre of less than 1,500 words/2 MB. A book or themed journal issue is also under consideration. The deadline for submissions is August 30, 2005. For more information, visit the Cultural Futures website or send inquiries to the the organizers.

One of the ideas that emerged out of the Blogtalk 2.0 conference in July 2004 was Blogwalking. Blogwalks are face-to-face conversations that provide smaller-scale opportunities for weblog researchers and practitioners to meet and talk on a more informal basis. So far, there have been eight Blogwalks in cities around the world. Blogwalk 9.0 will take place in Innsbruck, Austria, and two more Blogwalks are tentatively planned in coming months for Dresden, Germany and Salzburg, Austria. Participation is by invitation only. If you are interested in joining upcoming Blogwalks in Dresden or Salzburg, or would like to propose other cities for future Blogwalks, visit the Blogwalk site.

&NOW / Lake Forest Literary Festival
April 5-7, 2006, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL.
Proposal Deadline, October 15, 2005
andnow@lfc.edu

The second iteration of &NOW: A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art, merged with the second annual Lake Forest Literary Festival (LFLF), will be held on April 5-7, 2006 at Lake Forest College, 30 miles north of Chicago.

This three-day festival will celebrate contemporary aesthetic practice in its most inventive forms: writing, visual, and multimedia art that is aware of its own institutional and extra-institutional history, that is as much about its form and materials-about language-as about subject matter.

&NOW/LFLF will bring together a range of writers and artists interested in exploring the possibilities of form and the limits of expression; writers and artists working to emphasize text as a medium and as an influence.
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The folks over at if:book are blogging live from the Transliteracies conference. The first post includes a discussion by Alan Liu, laying the purpose of the project and some of the questions it intends to explore.

I’ve started a project (combining humanists, social scientists, and computer scientists) called Transliteracies to look into “online reading.” It’s my hypothesis that there are hidden complexities and intelligences in low-attention modes of browsing/surfing that we don’t yet know how to chart. Google, after all, is making a fortune for algorithms enacting this hypothesis. Or to cite a historical googler: Dr. Johnson, sage of the Age of Reason, was famous for “devouring” books just by browsing them instead of reading “cover to cover.”

Today in Trópico — the Brazilian online magazine of Art, New Technologies, Cinema, and Culture — there’s an interview with ELO board member Noah Wardrip-Fruin by Cícero Inácio da Silva. A broad range of perspectives on digital media (literary, ludic, and simulation-oriented perhaps chief among them) are employed for discussing computer games.