The Department of Teledramatic Arts and Technology at California State University, Monterey Bay is hiring. Two tenure track positions are available at the Assistant/Associate Professor level: one emphasizing new media in general, the other focused on digital video. Both positions are within the Teledramatic Arts and Technology Department (TAT) of the College of Science, Media Arts and Technology (SMART). In both cases the successful candidate will be a forward thinking, transmedia educator and practitioner with emphasis in innovative production and theory and a strong background in application of new digital technologies to traditional storytelling practices.
Electronic Literature Panels at SLSA
This year’s conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, set for November 10-13 in Chicago, features numerous panels that focus on “etextuality and computation”. Many of the ELO’s board of directors will be presenting. See the conference program for details on the following panels:
+ Thursday, November 10:
“Narrative, Media and Technology”
“Viral and Distributed Narratives”
+ Friday, November 11:
“There is No Media?
“Narrative and Emergent Knowledge”
“Dirty Code”
“The Error Engine: Writing and Creative Evolutionary Systems”
+ Saturday, November 12
“Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, Literature”
“Digital Cognition”
“Text/Image/Structure: Literary Hypertext 2005”
+ Sunday, November 13:
“Rhetoric and Image in Science and Literature”
“Emergence and Convergence in New Media Narratives”
ELO members will receive a discount of US $40 off the regular registration rate of US $120. Download the registration form here, and add a note on the form indicating that you are a member of the ELO.
Digital Writing on Empyre
This month’s conversation on the empyre mailing list will be on the topic “Digital Writing.” The guests will include digital authors and commentators Bill Seaman (an ELO board member), Brigid McLeer, Friedrich Block, Giselle Beiguelman, and Sue Thomas.
Call for Participation: Creative Versioning Project
Matthew Kirschenbaum is looking for poets and fiction writers willing to participate in a project to archive versions of texts in progress. An electronic document repository (known as a Concurrent Versions System, or CVS) will be used to track revisions and changes to original fiction and poetry contributed by participating writers who will work by checking their drafts in and out of the repository system. The goal is to provide access to a work at each and every state of its composition and conceptual evolution ÂÂ- thereby capturing the text as a living, dynamic object-in-the-making rather than a finished end-product. A reader will be able to watch the composition process unfold as though s/he were looking over the writer’s shoulder.
Participating writers must agree to:
* Work with your text exclusively within the confines of the CVS, checking it in and out each and every time you wish to edit or compose.
* Give their consent to make all archived versions of the work publicly accessible.
The result will be a Web-accessible archive, with the full text of each and every version of a writer’s text available for reading and relations between the versions expressed by means of maps and visualizations.
To participate, please contact Kirschenbaum at mgk =at= umd =dot= edu . Please indicate your willingness to abide by the above constraints.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Assistant Professor of English
Acting Associate Director,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
301-405-8927 or 301-314-7111 (fax)
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/
[Note: At this point Kirschenbaum is recruiting interested writers. He is not sure when the project will actually get off the ground – hopefully this winter.]
Clues
“Clues” is an adaptive hypertext that presents poems and asks the reader to uncover clues, figuring out what to investigate and who to trust. This metaphysical whodunit, couched in the language of the mystery novel and questioning the concepts of detection and communication, was developed in the Connection Muse. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
Robert Coover Reading at UCLA Hammer Museum
Fiction writer and influential elit critic Robert Coover will read from recent works as part of the UCLA Hammer Museum’s fall “New American Writing” series on Sunday, October 16, at 6 pm. This series of readings of contemporary fiction and poetry is organized and hosted by author Benjamin Weissman. This event is free and open to the public. Visit the Hammer website for directions and parking information.
253
253: A Novel for the Internet about London Underground in Seven Cars and a Crash is a constrained composition depicting how all 253 people on a Tube train appear, what they they really like, and what they are doing or thinking. This early Web novel was published in a print remix in 1998. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
MACHINE Reading Series Gears Up for 2006
The MACHINE reading series, which takes place at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, has a new Web page. MACHINE is co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization, and the three events in the series so far have featured ELO board members Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland, and Nick Montfort along with several other electronic literature authors: Interactive fiction authors Emily Short, Dan Ravipinto, and Star Foster, and Unknown co-authors William Gillespie and Dirk Stratton. Past events have included Interactive Fiction Walkthroughs and Joint Work, a reading of literary collaborations with digital dimensions.
Two Spring 2006 events are being planned now; information about them will be added to the page and announced on the ELO site as soon as it is available.
The Minotaur Project
The Minotaur Project is a cluster of four poems fused with image, movement and sound. It is part of a hypermedia novel in verse that explores contemporary issues of identity using the framework of classical myth. Minotaur appears as a fragmented persona confined in the computer’s labyrinth. It attempts to understand self and others (specifically Kore, the main character in this verse novel) without that primary means of connection to the sensate world, the body. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
Elective Affinities
IAWIS/AIERTI 7th International Conference on Word & Image Studies:
Elective Affinities
Philadelphia, 23-27 September, 2005
[The conference includes four sessions dealing with electronic literature: Words on Screen: Hierarchies of Text and Picture in Cyberculture and VVV-on-line: Verbal-Visual-Vocal Poetries in Hyperspace I, II, and III. ELO directors Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Nick Montfort will be among those presenting in these sessions.]
The University of Pennsylvania hosts the 7th International Conference on Word & Image Studies. The conference title is borrowed from Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities. In the novel, the chemical term “elective affinities” extends to human relationships, both intimate and political. Like the alkalis and acids of which Goethe’s characters speak, words and images, though apparently opposed, may have a remarkable affinity for one another. At the same time, as one of the characters in the book objects, such affinities are problematic, and “are only really interesting when they bring about separations.
How words and images represent and whether they enjoy a harmonious kinship, engage in border skirmishes, or seek to annihilate one another, are not merely formal matters. The history of iconoclasm tells us about the ideological stakes of the debate. Contemporary discussions of memorialization seem to demand multi-media expression, and urban inscriptions such as graffiti and mural arts express political positions. New technologies for meshing words and images – such as medical imaging, virtual archives, the Internet – will also be discussed. Themes of the conference are: the arts of the book; early correspondences; political inscriptions; sacred words, sacred images; scientific imaging; spaces, places; photographic texts.
Professors Peter Stallybrass (Penn) and Yve-Alain Bois (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), and author Art Spiegelman will offer keynote lectures.
For more information, details about registration, and a list of speakers, panels, topics, times and locations, please visit: archive of: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/affinities/