I offer the lecture here as a kind of sneak preview of the forthcoming Creative Writing and New Media Archive of Online Guest Lectures, which is a project of the new Transliteracy Research Group based at DMU. But more on that later.
This movie requires Flash Player 8
In the meantime, I was thrilled to learn recently that Rita Raley, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, is teaching Fitting the Pattern in her course on Electronic Literature in the section on Cybertext: interactivity & playable texts. It’s quite an honour to be included amongst “some of the most technically and intellectually compelling works on the web”, to quote the Course Overview. I’d love to hear what the students make of it.
Indeed, I’d love to hear any feedback about my creative work so please feel free to email me (crissxross at crissxross dot net) or leave a comment.
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
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
Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications, unpicking the past – an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother.
Life’s mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions… haphazardly, in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. Fitting the Pattern attempts to replicate this experience, hence it’s a memoir in pieces for you to explore…
Earlier this year I gave a lecture for the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University (DMU) about:
