The plan
was simple: contact four competent and young (or youngish)
scholars in each of the four Nordic countries (Denmark,
Finland, Norway and Sweden), eight women and eight men, pray
shamelessly on their dissertations and other
works-in-progress, and most importantly give them complete
freedom to present the highlights of their work that I was
already to some degree familiar with or curious about. The
cynical point being that it seems to me that the relatively
well-funded doctoral students are among the luckiest
employees in the seriously mismanaged academic sweatshops or
at least among the scholarly and creatively most
unpredictable, as they presumably have enough time to focus
on what used to be important.
From the very beginning I
had a couple of additional rules of carefully calculated
non-interference such as "offer your editorship or opinions
only if asked to", "don't set up artificial limits to the
length of the contributions" and "try to avoid simplifying
when proofreading". That was pretty much what I did and
here's the result I'm happy to present as an editor-compiler
of it: The Scandinavian Special Issue of Dichtung Digital.
I won't even pretend that
this collection of three ladies, three gentlemen, and three
Finns gives anything more than an educated glimpse of what
goes on in digital literature, media and game studies in the
Nordic countries. I know I ought to give you an overview,
but I won't, as I'm not a great believer in exotic ghetto
concepts even if they were designed to circumference the
supposed state of art IT-heaven with its globally recognized
brands and trademarks like Nokia, Ericson or Linux to name
but a few. I'm prepared to give you four unguided tours of
Skaldignavigation though.
If you happen to be somewhat
literary minded I recommend you begin with Teemu Ikonen's
treatment of kinetic textuality, continue by revisiting the
golden age of Swedish literary experiments with Jonas
Ingvarsson and Jesper Olsson both offering a cybernetic
hindsight to the matter, and conclude the session by
wondering with Raine Koskimaa if there's a place for digital
literature in the information society. Should you be more
game-oriented instead then I suggest you'd read Aki
Järvinen, Torill Mortensen and Ragnhild Tronstad's
articles on games and simulations, multi-user non-places,
and tubmud ludology in any order you see fit. In case you
want to get the big concepts like media and convergence
right, or right out of the way, Anders Fagerjord's paper is
your favorite point of departure, and if you still believe
the concept of interactivity is or must be useful, Lisbeth
Klastrup's paper may or may not confirm that final fantasy.
On the other hand, and
especially if you're a spoiled rotten impatient theory
parasite like me, you might want to play first with
heuristic models (Fagerjord, Ikonen, Järvinen and
Tronstad) and then fine-tune the fun with careful close
readings (Ingvarsson, Olsson, Mortensen) in order to be
finally able to confront your possible doubts (Klastrup,
Koskimaa). But that's already your non-trivial work, dear
user.
Helsinki, October 14,
2003
Markku Eskelinen
dichtung-digital