ELO_AI Arts Program Installations

In early June an international collection of e-lit was installed in a gallery setting in downtown Providence (Rhode Island, USA) for the Arts Program of the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference (ELO_AI), including my own piece, Underbelly. There were many wonderful works presented but I’d like to pick out a few that made me think about transliteracy in particular: Requiem, Ethereal Landscapes and Between Page And Screen.

The creators of these works augment their digital art and e-poetry with print, employing a delightful topsy-turvy kind of transliteracy, whereby the printed matter becomes a device for reading the digital, rather than the usual way remediation goes when texts originated for print are digitized. Reading these works, you wonder, where is the poem, where is the story? The poem, the art is powerfully and clearly present, but you’re aware that it doesn’t exist in the computer and it doesn’t exist on the page – it’s between these realms, slipping and sliding along the virtuality continuum – or perhaps it’s the reader who is transliterately sliding around in mixed reality?

It’s an experience that simultaneously displaces and enchants the human reader. It slides you into a magical zone where somehow your corporeal reading equipment – eyes (and reading glasses) – have been substituted by a black & white graphic and a webcam or barcode reader. It’s only when, and if, you allow yourself to be transformed like this that the poetry appears for you.

Have a look at the works, see where they take you…

Requiem by Charles Fisher and Caitlin Fisher

“Requiem is an augmented reality poem in which digital imagery and sound is superimposed on a physical object — in this case the card with the black and white marker. Simply hold the marker up to the webcam to begin experiencing the piece.”

Requiem and printed marker

Viewing Requiem - the image appears

Requiem, which incorporates a poem written by her father, is part of a larger, more fragmented work by Caitlin Fisher “about collections, hoarding and the things we save when people die” called Cardamom of the Dead. Download and print out a marker.

Ethereal Landscapes by Alexander Mouton and Christian Faur

“Ethereal Landscapes is an interactive electronic installation that immerses a viewer into a photographic artists’ book and generative video and audio data-base which a viewer can interact with in real-time through scanning the bar codes on the pages of an accompanying book….

“The concept comes from our love of the immersive quality of books (which can be held), of sound (which surrounds you), and of video (which engages your sense of temporality through its movement).”

Pages from the Ethereal Landscape printed book

Reading Ethereal Landscape with a barcode reader

Between Page And Screen written by Amaranth Borsuk and programmed by Brad Bouse

“…is an augmented-reality chapbook. Like a digital pop-up book, you hold the words in your hands…

“The poems—a series of cryptic letters between two lovers, P and S—do not exist on either page or screen, but in an augmented reality only accessible to the reader who has both the physical object and the device necessary to read it.”

Watch the video or print out the preview marker and try it for yourself (you’ll need a webcam).

The Electronic Literature Directory is a resource for readers and writers of born-digital literature. Created by the Electronic Literature Organization, it provides an extensive database listing electronic works, their authors, and their publishers. The descriptive entries are drafted by a community of e-lit authors who also tag each work and identify the techniques used in its creation. Discussions of entries are ongoing and offer a networked, peer-to-peer model for literary review.

This will be a great resource of e-literature, and already contains a substantial amount of work, but it’s just the beginning, there is much more to add! Anyone with an account can submit entries to the Directory (but authors may not write about their own works) and entries must be about e-literature (defined below) although e-lit antecedents, such as Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, are included.

Electronic Literature refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.

See also the lively debate here: Electronic Literature Directory Gets a Redesign, in response to the question posed, “What do you think about electronic literature? Has it lived up to the hype?”

On a personal note

Visiting the Directory the other day, I was delighted to see some of my early works entered – a surprise too! How odd it felt to read an interpretation of  Heights, that I hadn’t quite intended:

With an eerie sound of wind blowing, the poem describes a fall from the Heights. On its surface, the piece describes a journey to the top of a building and a near disastrous slip. Taken metaphorically, Heights tells a story of faith and doubt, as the writer struggles to hold on for fear of falling.

Certainly, it’s a valid interpretation and I sincerely appreciate it, but since I don’t personally subscribe to a faith, it surprised me. I was tempted to log in to add a qualifying note – my reflex reaction – but really, once a work is published and out there, it has a life of its own. Who am I to meddle? What authority do I have to privilege some interpretations over others? Indeed, thanks Tanci, for making me look at Heights afresh.

Performance Writing 2010 – PW10 festival 8 & 10 May

PW10 is a partnership event between Performance Writing and the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. It will be a two day gathering of many who have been associated with Performance Writing over its illustrious 15 year history. The weekend will comprise performances, talks, readings, exhibitions, interventions and a workshop.

Underbelly is part of an exhibition of digital textwork/e-literature curated by J. R. Carpenter for the festival. It’s being shown alongside these works by the following fantastic writers/artists:

• John Cayley and Daniel Howe Misspelt Landings, 2009
• Jason Nelson  WithinSpace; Textual
• Jerome Fletcher  …Reusement
• J. R. Carpenter Entre Ville 2006, and three new Python story generators.
• and the launch of _feralC_ a new web work by MEZ  2010, commissioned by Arnolfini

Before sending a CD of Underbelly to J.R. for the exhibition, I made some tweaks to it, which I’ve long been wanting to do but hadn’t found time lately due to the demands of my freelance work. So now I think I should accept – deep breath – that the piece is finally finished! I can move on to new work… Bliss!

Screenshot of Underbelly

Underbelly ‘beta version’ launched today!

UPDATE: new version uploaded 26 March 2010

Underbelly is my latest playable media fiction that I created in Flash. I call it a playable fiction because you need to explore it with your mouse to find and play the many voices of the narrator. It’s about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, now landscaped into a country park. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, along with her ticking biological clock, and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of the artist’s repressed fears and desires mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal.

Yesterday I performed Underbelly at the stimulating and wonderfully amplified Transliteracy Conference in Leicester at the new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The conference was a rich mix of practitioners’ talks, academic papers and artists’ presentations. I was delighted to share an artists’ panel, classed as Transliterate Practice, with Michael J Maguire, who performed his experimental piece, cameltext, and Steve Gibson, who talked about his game-installation, Grand Theft Bicycle. (Later in the day I took a joy ride on his eponymous bicycle and caused a bit of havoc in game-art shooter land;) To get a flavour of our panel session, see the liveblog: Practice in Transliteracy – parallel session 2

Calling for Underbelly user testers

Taking my cue from another Transliteracy presentation, Kirsty McGill on Remote Audiences, I’d like to engage some remote user testing of Underbelly. As discussed in my panel’s session, one kind of transliterate practice is where an individual artist takes on a number of roles to create a multimedia digital work across what are traditionally considered different disciplines. This is certainly how I made Underbelly – I devised, wrote, designed, programmed, animated, image-edited, sound recorded/mixed and even performed the voices. One thing I didn’t do was carve the sculptures – that’s the work of my sister, Melanie Wilks. I relish working in multiple media on my own, independently, but one of the downsides is that I hardly have anyone around me to grab and say, ‘Hey, have a go at this, does it work for you?’ (other than my hard-pressed partner, Dane Gould, whom I can’t thank enough) and usability testing is essential for interactive pieces.

So I would be very grateful if, after playing with Underbelly, you would leave comments for me here about any bugs or issues you might find, or any improvements you’d like to see to the user interface. Comments on any other aspect of the work would be most welcome too. Cheers.

Here’s how Lisa Baraitser and Sigal Spigel describe the work in their editorial:

Christine Wilks’ wonderfully quirky interactive digital media work: Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter… is a memoir about her mother, a skilled dressmaker, whom Christine grew up with in Leeds. Christine makes use of biographical minutiae at their intersection with cultural representations for exploring the emergence of subjectivities within mother-daughter relations. The work invites the reader/viewer to take part in the exploration and mediated construction of perplexed yet intimate mother-daughter relationship.

About Studies in the Maternal

Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social location, political and scientific practice, economic and ethical challenge, a theoretical question, and a structural dimension in human relations, politics and ethics.

The e-journal publishes “articles, essays and reviews from academics, writers, artists and clinical and cultural practitioners who engage with the maternal from diverse perspectives,” including multimedia work that “falls outside of the textual tradition.”

Here are the contents of the current issue:

Conference of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network, 11-12 Sept 2009, at University of Oxford

A couple of days ago I presented, Underbelly, my most recent work of digital fiction (an almost finished work-in-progress) at the Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies conference in Oxford. Underbelly is about a woman sculptor carving a figure on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery now landscaped into a country park, but it also includes stories of the women miners who used to work underground in the 19th Century. As I said in my introduction, there’s a long association of the female body with the land, e.g. Mother Earth, but it’s perhaps little known that women used to work underground, hauling coal like beasts of burden. This history is largely forgotten, almost erased apart from a few websites (see below), and now the colliery sites themselves have been erased from the landscape too.

National Coal Board Collection: Portrait of a Miner 2 disc set from BFI

So it’s with great interest that, on my return from the Writing Bodies conference, I read in the Guardian that the British Film Institute is launching a ‘major restrospective of its extraordinary archive of mining films.’ In his article, Pitmen at the pictures, playwright Lee Hall makes a similar point about the effacement of our working class history:

As soon as the pits started closing all evidence of their existence was erased. I remember driving around the Durham coalfield trying to find locations for the movie of Billy Elliot, desperate to get a glimpse of an archetypal winding gear, and shocked to find they’d all been knocked down. Similarly the industry seems to have been Photoshopped out of the national imagination as if the working classes didn’t exist any more – as if all that labour history was an embarrassment to the consensus of all the major parties, who now see us as consumers rather than producers.

Thankfully Photoshop is just as good for montage as it is for airbrushing out and I have used it for Underbelly to put women miners back into the picture in an interactive collage of imagery and voices from my imagination and historical sources. I’ll be publishing the piece, created in Flash, on crissxross.net fairly soon.

For more about the history of pitwomen see A Web of English History: The Peel Web or A Modern History Sourcebook: Women Miners in the English Coal Pits or Women in World History Curriculum: The Coal Mines, Industrial Revolution

Encapsulating E-Poetry 2009: Some views on contemporary digital poetry

This was the first time I’d attended this biennial festival where I presented a selection of remixes from R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX. Here’s what Funkhouser had to say about it in the section on the May 26 Panel of works:

Wilks (whose comments on the presentation—as well as links to several works she showed—are posted at http://crissxross.net/wilx/2009/06/07/remixing-at-epoetry-barcelona-2009/) showed a series of works that have been presented on a collaborative blog titled remixworx. Members of the group have done roughly 500 multimedia remixes since 2006 (Wilks usually uses Flash). She presented “trails” of posts to the site—which is set up as a blog and artistic responses are posted in comment fields—that reflected how the works evolved, and also read a couple of text pieces from the site. Beyond the high quality of the works presented, the collaborative axis of remixworx is more than respectable, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically)—kinetic visual poems often combining text/animation/sound—appearing on the site is marvelous.

Kate Pullinger's 'Line of Influence' at Binary Katwalk

Binarykatwalk is an online exhibition space for experimental digital work, curated by locative media/new media artist and writer, Jeremy Hight, and this month sees the launch of the Kate Pullinger section of The Line of Influence, which is:

…a series of a few artists selected to show their work alongside who influenced them and those they see as kindred spirits coming up. This is not an ordinary exhibition, but instead a chance to show how ideas and works progress over time and how no artist is a solitary force out there.

I’m honoured that Kate has chosen to include my own piece, Fitting the Pattern, alongside Flight Paths, the networked novel she co-creates with Chris Joseph, These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher and Renee Turner’s She….

Fitting the Pattern in the Binary Katwalk open-gallery-network

Christine Wilks Demonstrating “The Dressmaker’s Daughter” at the Electronic Literature in Europe Conference from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

There’s also video documentation of readings/performances by Renee Turner; Maria Mencia; Noah Wardrip-Fruin; Talon Memmott; Judd Morrissey, Mark Jeffery and Fanny Holmin; Ian Hatcher; and also Robert Coover’s keynote speech.

This was a great conference organised by Scott, who in his report says:

In putting together the conference, I had a few specific goals in mind. The first was to bring together the critical, theoretical, pedagogical, and infra-structural thinking that might typify an academic conference with the creative writers who are actually producing the works on which the field is based. I think that in electronic literature we are really privileged in that the scholars and creative writers are not divided into two separate communities, but are part of one coevolving community. To this end, I thought it would be important to present both academic papers, and to do so within the framework of a peer review structure, but also to present readings of electronic literature, in environments suited to performance of digital works.

The majority of the stimulating academic papers that were presented are available on the conference site here: elitineurope.net

Above are thumbnails of the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX set I presented at ePoetry 2009 in Barcelona. A combination of still images and animations accompanied by a playlist (see below) of music, ambient sound and spoken word pieces from the remix, plus a live reading of two poems from reVamp to end reUser.

I was on a great panel with Brian Kim Stefans, Serge Bouchardon and Jody Zellen, who all gave impressive presentations – very enjoyable too! Chris Funkhouser chaired the session, which was particularly fitting as far as I was concerned because later he presented a stimulating paper about ‘Creative Cannibalism’ – the way many electronic poems, remixes and mash-ups eat other texts and/or digital data. This kind of cultural anthropophagy (cannibalism) was first practiced by Brazilian artists nearly a century ago and for 50 years has been a feature of much computer-generated poetry. Funkhouser maintains that:

in recent years the potential content and media of such cannibalistic approaches to creativity has expanded wildly with the growth and capabilities of the Web.

Since R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a particularly cannibalistic beast, I hunted down his paper from the previous ePoetry 2007 symposium, where he first put forward these ideas, Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry (download). Here’s a brief section from it:

Transformative expression appropriates given data then warps or reconfigures it to new ends. Such a method certainly corresponds, or perhaps responds, to Dadaist techniques of appropriation, and also corresponds to the type of cannibalism seen in examples of digital poetry. An anthropophagic text, in which the author or authors engage with multiple languages or idioms, devours other texts, icons, and is free to remix discrepant methods and philosophical approaches. Discovery and re-discovery of meaning is reached through the cannibalization of texts, which may then establish alternative perspectives on cultural or personal subjects taken up by authors in textual composition, re-composition, and composting. Through anthropophagy, artists are free to reshape external influences. This open acknowledgment of plurality is what makes the concept still relevant today, as an active principle for the creation of “difference.”

That certainly gives me a lot of food for remixing thought! As I said a year ago in my article about the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX experience:

the remix machine, of which we are all part, devours whatever is given and regurgitates it in wonderfully unexpected ways.

ePoetry remix audio playlist:
verb
codecs mash
screw
GlassOnBotReverb
Falling
Look Inside
outpost msg
binnorie_babel_beetle
IntraMusicPulse
ambientDigestion
dragonbath2
SwirlBotXXclips
dragobaC-1