jill/txt

I’m off to Digital Arts and Culture 2005 today! I’m presenting my paper about our fascination with representing ourselves online, both in photographic self-portraits and, say, in blogs. We’ve been asked not to publish our papers online until after the conference, so I’ll hold off on that until I get home.

There are lots of interesting papers, and if I can get online I’m likely to post from there. Actually, maybe I’ll contribute to the conference Wiki instead.

AfsnitP.dk has published an interesting discussion by Anna Hallberg (in Danish) of the visual poem Al-Jazeera by Lars Mikael Raattamaa (a facsimile of the first page is to the left; bigger images are in Hallberg’s article). Hallberg’s greater aim is to find a new, more independent literary criticism, but in her exploration of this, she also discusses the resistance of critics to such a text as Raattamaa’s. She discusses specific ways in which critics have rejected this piece, among them these:

1. It’s simply trying to provoke the reader, it’s nonsense, the reader is well-schooled and sees through this lack of meaning.
2. It’s not literature. It may be charming and original, but the only way it is interesting in literary terms is as a demonstration of the limits of literature.
3. Fear is a third response. The reader is frightened by the text, which baffles the reader and makes the reader feel stupid, and causes her/him to long instead for a cup of tea and a good book.
4. The text lacks a clear voice, it lacks basic literary qualities. It shouldn’t pretend to be high literature, it should declare its status as part of some obscure little “ism”.

There’s a lot more in this article, but I’m hungry and will have to return to it later…. Let me simply note that these rejection strategies are often used about electronic literature too. And that I really don’t know how to read a poem like Al Jazeera - but I would love to find out. I wonder which category of reader that puts me in?

You know all those studies showing that men are better than woman at spatial tasks like rotation of objects and thinking out how objects could fit together? Well, a recent study shows no difference in this respect between boys and girls in poor families. It seems the kids in these families had equally poor access to toys and activities that encourage spatial skills, whereas in middle and upper class families, boys have a far higher access to such toys and activities, and they’re more encouraged to excel in them than girls are.

While we’re at it, did you know that boys on average have their own computer by age 15, whereas young women on average have to wait until they’re in their twenties?
We can start talking about biological differences when the social differences are a little less extreme.

Here’s a great post describing the kind of work you need to do to find conference speakers who aren’t just like you. Say, women, if you’re a man, or conservatives, if you’re left wing yourself. Academic conferences are maybe a little different, since most speakers aren’t invited but selected from the submissions. There are still often keynotes and it can be important to work at getting the call for papers out to as diverse a group as possible.

The nominations for Gullbloggen are out, and now the final decisions are up to you. One IP, one vote.

Politics:
VamPus Verden
Dagens Onde Kvinner
Bjørn Stærk blog

Technology:
Jo Christian Oterhals’ søkeblogg
eirikso
Tversover

Under 20:
Bærturen
Grumsy One:42
Morgenutgaven

Open class:
Hjorthen uttaler seg om ting han ikke har greie på
Oslo Foodie
tenke.no

It was really hard selecting just three blogs from each category. There are lots and lots of great blogs out there - and there are lots and lots of blogs that would be great for people interested in a particular topic. I tagged some of my other favourites over at del.icio.us, if you want to see.

Two PhD fellowships (stipendiatstillinger) in participatory media have just been advertised at the University of Oslo. One’s in MMOGs (or more specifically multi-user games with a strong degree of visual realism), the other is about new political arenas such as blogs. Here’s the full text of the advertisement. You need an MA or equivalent and a good idea to apply.

That was fun! I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoy showing people the basics of blogging :)

Today I’ve been invited to talk with high school teachers about blogs at a seminar held by Aschehoug. These are links and notes.
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My friend Lars has a poem in the next issue of Ice Floe. I had never heard of Ice Floe, so of course I clicked the link and found, to my surprise, a journal for poets living north of the 60th latitude. The most beautiful thing about it seems to be the diversity: the last issue has poems from Alaska, Iceland, the Shetlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and the ones not in English are all presented both in the original and with an English translation. Bergen is actually just north of 60?, though we don’t really think of ourselves as Northern here. We’re southerners, ignorant of true midnight sun, more likely to go to Rome than to Nordkapp. Rome is closer, actually.

One day I’ll go north.

About to catch a taxi to the airport, I saw a familiar face in the lobby of the hotel - the familiar face of a person I’ve never met but knew exactly who was: Clancy! We both had to run about two minutes after meeting, but she blogged a photo! And I’m rather impressed that we recognised each other so easily :)

Ran out after Kate Hayles and dashed into another panel on artificial intelligence and chatbots, which is turning out to be really good. (more…)

OK; I’ll try and blog at least one talk. Kate Hayles “The Storyteller, the INtelligent Machine, and the Manager: Complex Somethings of something and data.” (such a long title, and changed from the program, so I didn’t get it all. Hayles has a new book out this month: My Mother Was a Computer
Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (more…)

Astonishingly I’ve been struck my the desire to sit and listen and not insta-blog every conference presentation. I am intending to blog our panel last night, but in case I don’t get around to it, it was great! I mean, my presentation could have been a little, you know, less messy and all, but our three topics worked out really, really well together, and we had a full half hour of lively discussion afterwards. I think it was one of the best discussions after a panel I’ve ever heard, and really useful! You should probably go read Jess’s summary since I need a nap before going to listen to the plenary…

I’m in Chicago attending SLSA 2005, the conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. There’s a whole track devoted to electronic literature, so I’m pretty excited.
In a couple of hours I’m talking in a panel about distributed narration, where I’m going to try to look more specifically at how fragments of narrative connect to each other when they’re not explicitly linked. Scott Rettberg and Jessica Henig are my fellow panelists. Scott will be talking about situationism, fluxus art and sticker literature, and Jess will be talking about emergent narrative. I haven’t actually met Jess yet. I bet she’s in this room listening to the talk before our panel, but I’m not sure which face is hers.

Right now, Dave Ciccoricco, who’s an expat American living in New Zealand, is talking about repetition as the main trope of network fiction. Rob Kendall’s next: he’s talking about the kind of reading that requires divination, such as reading tarot cards, lines on the palm of a hand or tea leaves, and leads from there into a presentation of his most recent literary work, Soothcircuit, a literary divination system. Lori Emerson is next, speaking about print-published computer-generated poetry. She’s surprised to have only found a single woman poet working in this form, Canadian Erin Mouré, and her book Pillage Laud, “computer-generated lesbian sex-poems”. Here, apparently, are some extracts. Rob Swigart is last. Mentions an article about how of the idea of a linear future was invented in [some past period].

I’m often amused to hear how interviewees experienced their encounters with journalists. Here’s one from a person who’s moved back to New Orleans and whose art program for at-risk youths is doing just fine - unfortunately that’s really not what the journalist wanted to hear.