June 3-6, 2010 | Brown University | Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Organized by Writing Digital Media in the Literary Arts Program
THE CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
The Electronic Literature Organization and Brown University's Literary Arts Program invite submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference to be held from June 3-6, 2010 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
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electronic literature . writing digital media .
language-driven digital poesis . literal art . literary hypermedia
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We welcome papers and presentations on a broad range of topics. The conference will focus on the theory, criticism, close-reading, practice and archiving of language-driven digital art and poetics. Our gathering will also embrace all the related cultural practices that continue to be addressed by scholars and artists in our growing field:
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expressive processing, computational art, artificial cognition and intelligence, aesthetic gaming, information art, codework, digitally mediated performance, network & media art & activism.
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In addition we will give a special welcome to papers that engage with the contribution that Robert Coover has made to our field. A festschrift comprised of papers from the conference is proposed and Professor Coover will be our chief featured (e)Writer. (Other featured speakers to be announced shortly.)
In conjunction with the three-day conference, there will be a juried Program of Language-Driven Digital Art, concentrating on but not confined to installation works. We plan to show the selected work in gallery spaces close to the conference venue in downtown Providence over a two week period. Subject to funding restrictions, selected artists will be awarded bursaries to assist with attending the conference. Submission guidelines will be posted on the conference website by mid November.
If you want to give a paper, or form a panel, at this point, please submit a maximum 500-word abstract, with title and brief bio (indicating affiliation, if any).
If you are proposing an installation, or an artistic presentation, or an alternative (innovative) proposal please also describe this in 500 words or less, with title, and bio(s). If you send illustrative, digitized AV materials, either keep these (byte-wise) small and short, or send us links.
Deadline for Submissions: December 15, 2009
- Send to: elo.ai (a) eliterature (.) org.
Notification of Acceptance: January 25, 2010
PLEASE NOTE: Deadline for full papers will be May 1, 2010
to allow for reflection and exchange on the papers prior to the conference and to get a head-start in the publication process.
The basic cost of the conference is $150;
graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100.
Conference registration covers access to all events, the reception, some meals, and shuttle transportation.
All conference attendees are also expected to join the ELO before the conference and this can be done at registration.
We are planning to implement online submission and registration.
Please watch this space.
After consulting the website, for further queries and
all email correspondence contact:
elo.ai (a) eliterature (.) org
SPONSORS AND SUPPORTERS
MORE INFORMATION ON
THE PROPOSED CONTENT OF
THE CONFERENCE
two overarching themes :
Archive
We are concerned with archive - although not primarily, in the context of this particular gathering, with preservation. (Preservation has been the focus of ELO attention in other contexts and fora.) Here and now we ask: what are the electronic literary, digital poetic works that are worth putting into any institutional archive, and why? What archives exist and how do we use them? What has been done to build the new archive and where is it?
We will also be asking our host institution to address these questions. Brown University's Literary Arts Program offers the only 'terminal' - teaching-qualified - degree in Electronic Literature, a creative writing MFA. Where is its current archive and where will it be in five or ten years time? Thanks to Robert Coover, Andries van Dam, George Landow, momentarily Ted Nelson, and others, Brown was the pioneering institution at the center of a hypertextual, metafictional perfect storm. Where is the archive? Brown's Library is now building an innovative, flexible Digital Repository at the university level. We will be asking the institution to rediscover our archive in this repository and aim to provide - by the time of our gathering - accessible openings into what will be a rich resource for both scholarship and poesis: for writing and its futures.
Innovate
We have not renounced the obligation to produce literary innovation that is specific to our media. Why do we innovate? Why must we innovate? Do we, indeed, innovate? What has happened to those forms in our media that were, once - and not long ago - new? Was it the requirement to innovate that caused us to disregard these forms and stifle their brief lives? Are we right to disregard them thus? If so, what will be the ultimate effect of innovation? Other than to ensure: the ever-swifter onslaught of breaking media, reducing today's novelties to this evening's broken media? The mutually assured - by readers and writers - obsolescence of digital literary practices?
It seems clear, in today's media culture, that we must be, we are, driven to innovate. How can we inflect this drive and make it critically, aesthetically productive? Make it generative of significant culture practice - of writing - that will, even if paradoxically, persist and continue to demand our attention and affection.
one celebration :
Festschrift Coover
Robert Coover has been a major champion of literature in new media since the typewriter began to pass. He has done more than any other significant literary figure to promote the field, all but single-handedly adding a 'genre' to 'creative writing' in the world of institutionally-recognized and professed literary arts. It's time to address, honor, and celebrate Coover's contribution and its potential and potentially problematic legacy.
MORE INFORMATION ON THE FORM OF THE CONFERENCE
This gathering will strive for a degree of formal innovation.
Featured speakers will be explicitly invited to dialogue and debate.
Plenary panel sessions will be structured in terms of the 'interrupt,' as successfully instituted at Interrupt 2008.
But there will also be due regard to the demands of academic authority and certification.
Artistic contributions will be solicited on the basis that they may be subject to constructive critique in the context of our gathering.
Installation and gallery venues will be sought for work that is accepted and that we have resources to display.
PUBLICATION
We will plan to publish all accepted papers and the documentation for all accepted artistic contributions online before the conference. We would like participants to have written and published something that we all have the opportunity to consider in advance and then discuss in the formal context set out above.
With this material we will plan to put together the proposal for a book, one part proceedings and one part festschrift for Robert Coover, accommodating, of course, the inevitable overlap.
FURTHER SPONSORSHIP SOLICITED
Any organization or individual in receipt of this call who would like to sponsor and support this major international conference, please get in touch.
External sponsors are being sought and will be appropriately acknowledged.