Writing New Bodies

In her keynote lecture “‘These Waves …’: Writing New Bodies for Applied E-literature Studies”, Prof. Astrid Ensslin called Ne me touchez pas / Don’t touch me” (2003) a work of Agency Art- yess! thanks!

ELO2019, University College Cork, July 17, 2019.

https://youtu.be/nobZYl3NwRY (17:50 – 20:20)

She also humoristically pointed to e-lit’s tendency to create overlapping, opposing, confusing generation categories and talked about gazes – male, white, colonial, medical, thin-bodied, female, voyeuristic, ergodic: “a … forcefully enacted gaze which”…”physically enacts the gaze of the beholder” to end up presenting the Writing New Bodies project.

In her talk Prof Ensslin reassesed the social and psychological possibilities of e-lit research and practice by riding a new wave of applied, interventionist e-lit scholarship. She reports on the methods and early findings of the “Writing New Bodies” project, which aims to develop a digital fiction for a new form of contemporary, digital-born bibliotherapy. In following the principles of critical community codesign and feminist participatory action research, WNB engages young women ages 18-25 in envisioning worlds where they feel at home in their bodies.

Filed under: Of interest, Agency Art, Astrid Ennslin, bodies, Don't touch me, e-lit, e-literature, ergodic gaze, feminism

The Machinic Author

Our article The machinic author has been published in the Journal of Creative Writing Studies in a special Issue: Creative Making As Creative Writing.

… an artists’ statement that situates the work in feminist materiality (Barad) Kathi Berens.

“The author is this intra-action itself. The author is not “dead” as such. He has just changed his nature. The machinic author reveals herself as queer.“

Abrahams, Annie and Guez, Emmanuel (2019) ““The machinic author” Artist’s Statement: The Reading Club”, Journal of Creative Writing Studies: Vol. 4: Iss.1, Article 8. ISSN: 2474-2937.
Available at: https://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/vol4/iss1/8

“We take the Reading Club as an example for how nowadays reading and writing is entangled with machines and software. A real-time language game with a humorously competitive character becomes, through a public act of constructing and deconstructing sense, a creative apparatus. This literary “machine” does not write itself, but makes authors write text in a conversational space full of meanings and emotions. It is a kind of human text generator that challenges the idea of creation and where the authors are, at best, co-creators. Appearing in the 1960s, the “death of the author,” who is not really one, is actually the awareness of the emergence of the machinic author.”

Filed under: Articles / Texts, e-literature, e-literature, JCWS, Reading Club, ReadingClub

Italian “translation” of Separation / Séparation

Mauro Carassai and Renata Morresi made an Italian powerpoint and javascript translation (2012) of Separation/Séparation (2002). They didn’t have the flash source codes and so imagined how translation of this piece of E-lit could be done from its experience alone.

Translation, Mutation, Decay.

The powerpoint version is hilarious (after clicking through 184 slides it stops – the poem can’t be read completely).
The javascript version doesn’t work in all browsers and lacks some features, but does give an impression. ( View source: https://bram.org/separation/Javascript_Translation.html )

That’s what time can, will do with a piece of electronic art, I thought.
E-lit also is like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.

Carassi and Morresi wrote an article about their adventure which appreared as Verbal Disengagements: Translating Language Games in Annie Abrahams’s Separation/Séparation in Translating E-Literature (2015). Eds. Regnauld, Arnaud and Abrioux, Yves. Bibliothèque de l’Université Paris 8 (Saint-Denis, France).

Filed under: Articles / Texts, e-literature, Net art, decay, e-literature, flash, Mauro Carassai, Renata Morresi, Séparation, separation, translation

Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two

Separation / Séparation (2002) included in
The Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two.

“The game and dialogue among artist, machine, and reader facilitates a general reflection on the role of the body in processes of reading and writing.”

February 2011,  College Park, Maryland: Electronic Literature Organization
ISSN: 1932-2011
Editors : Laura Borràs, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley and Brian Kim Stefans

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two has been published (with identical contents) on the web and on DVD-ROM. This dual publication is intended to allow the volume to reach the broadest audience possible and to provide for reading, classroom use, sharing, and reference on and off the network. Anyone can request a free DVD-ROM from: Electronic Literature Organization / Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) / B0131 McKeldin Library / University of Maryland / College Park, MD 20742.

Filed under: Net art, e-lit, e-literature, Electronic Literature Collection, ELO, Séparation