Workshops
ELO Conference 2023 offers a wide list of workshops. In order to attend these workshops, please register for the conference here.
Here you can register for your favorite workshops.
July 12
8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Session #01 @Aeminium room 1 [WORKSHOP]
Tags and maps: fragmented mirrors > Eugenio Tisselli (ojoVoz)
Session #02 @Aeminium room 2 [WORKSHOP - online]
A Collective AI Co-creation Workshop of a Site-Specific Immersive Experience > Michaela Pnacekova (York University), Sharon Musa (York University) and Hyjunju Park (York University)
Session #03 @Centro room [WORKSHOP]
Digital Literary Adaptation Workshop: Curatorial, Recombinant, and AR Reimagining. (i.e. VR --> AR) > David Thomas Henry Wright (Nagoya University), Karen Lowry (Curtin University) and Chris Arnold (University of Western Australia)
July 13
8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Session #12 @Aeminium room 1 [WORKSHOP]
Wikipedia Hackathon > Deena Larsen (Electronic Literature Addict Anonymous)
Session #13 @Aeminium room 2 [WORKSHOP]
Hacking João de Barros’ 16th century Diálogo [...] em modo de jogo, a combinatorial game about moral vices and virtues > Celeste Pedro (Instituto de Filosofia, University of Porto) and Terhi Marttila (Independent artist-researcher)
Session #14 @Centro room [WORKSHOP]
Gathering Teaching Materials for ELC4 > Kathi Inman Berens [online] (Portland State University), R. Lyle Skains (Bournemouth University), John T. Murray (University of Central Florida) and Mia Zamora [pending confirmation] (Kean University)
July 14
8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Session #23 @Aeminium room 1 [WORKSHOP]
Free (Libre) Software: Practices and Politics > Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Session #24 @Aeminium room 2 [WORKSHOP]
GEODES, A Workshop for creatives in Locative Media > David Lincoln (Independent Artist) and Sara Wallace (New York University)
Session #25 @Centro room [WORKSHOP]
Locative Treasure Hunts and Urban Walks as Storytelling, Gaming, and Educational Tools: The Cases of Locatify and ActionBound> Vasileios Delioglanis [online] (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
July 15
8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Session #40 @Aeminium room 2 [WORKSHOP]
Netprov for Personal Processing and Social Healing, a Playshop > Rob Wittig (Meanwhile Netprov Studio)
Session #41 @Centro room [WORKSHOP]
Mapping Branching Narrative > Jeremy Douglass (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Workshop Description
Eugenio Tisselli (ojoVoz). Tags and maps: fragmented mirrors.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Eugenio Tisselli is an independent programmer, artist and researcher. As a programmer-artist he has explored ways in which code influences our understanding of the world, and has attempted to write against meaning by focusing on the materiality of language. As a programmer-researcher he has engaged with diverse social and environmental issues, which have led him to develop digital platforms for the collaborative creation of community memories. He has presented his work in multiple conferences, festivals and exhibitions. His writing-related work can be read at http://motorhueso.net, and his platform-based research may be accessed at http://ojovoz.net.
ABSTRACT
How can collaborative writing and mapping help to amplify the voices and disseminate the stories of marginalized communities? What kinds of ethical principles may be designed and applied as guidelines for these processes? Throughout this in-person workshop we will explore these questions from both theoretical and practical perspectives, by examining relevant concepts such as disappropriation, translation or trans-epistemic dialogues, reflecting on the lessons learned during past case studies, and also by trying out digital tools for collaborative writing and mapping. The workshop will be divided into two sessions, a formal and an informal one. In the first session I will propose a set of concepts, ideas and examples as starting points for a group discussion, and will initiate a collective writing and mapping exercise with ojoVoz, a mobile and web-based tool I have developed and used to create community memories since 2011. In the second session, which will be held as an informal meeting so as not to disrupt the ELO 2023 conference schedule, we will reflect on the outcomes of the practical exercise, and will debate the ethical issues that need to be considered when working with groups at risk of social exclusion and potentially damaging technologies. The aim of this final discussion will be to explore how the potential risks that such collaborative projects may present, such as extractivism or other indirect and harmful outcomes, may be balanced with their possible benefits, such as fostering a wider empathy or positively affecting the public standing of a marginalized community. A first glimpse of these different issues will hopefully take shape in a tangible form, thanks to the experience of the hands-on exercise, which will take place throughout the city of Coimbra.
This workshop is aimed at artists, writers and the public in general. No previous technical skills are required, but participants will need to bring an Android smartphone in order to take part in the collective exercise. Ideally, the first session of the workshop should take place in a classroom with Internet access, computer, projector and loudspeakers. The writing and mapping exercise will take place outside the classroom, and will be carried out independently by the participants during their free time. The second session will be optional, and will be held at a time and place agreed by the participants.
The workshop will be in English.
REFERENCES
Rivera Garza, Cristina (2013): “Los muertos indóciles: necroescrituras y desapropiación”. Tusquets, México.
Tuhiwai Smith, Linda (2016): “Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples”. Zed Books, UK.
Tisselli, Eugenio: “La comunidad extendida: arte e implicación social en el Antropoceno”. Ecología Política n.57 (2019).
Tisselli, Eugenio: “The heaviness of light”, MATLIT: Materialities of Literature [Online], 6.2 (2018): 11-25. https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/article/view/2182-8830_6-2_1
Megafone.net: http://megafone.net
Sauti ya wakulima: http://sautiyawakulima.net
Los ojos de la milpa: http://ojosdelamilpa.net
Santos, Bárbara et al. (2021): “Bosquesinas campesinas”, Putumayo, Colombia.
Nadia Cortés et al. (2023): “Reescrituras tecnológicas”. ACT-Cátedra Max Aub-Casa del Lago, UNAM, México.
Michaela Pnacekova (York University), Sharon Musa (York University) and Hyjunju Park (York University). A Collective AI Co-creation Workshop of a Site-Specific Immersive Experience.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Michaela Pnacekova is a PhD candidate and ELIA scholar at Cinema and Media Arts at York University, Toronto. Graduate assistant and a creative technologist at the Immersive Storytelling Lab headed by Dr. Caitlin Fisher (experienced in 3D modeling software, game engines, webXR platforms (8th Wall, MozillaHubs) and different AI processes (GANs, NLP). She is the co-producer of the VR piece Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter (Sundance Film Festival 2020) and co-creator of Pre-Crime Calculator App (Hamburg Film Festival 2017). Her piece Symphony of Noise VR has been exhibited worldwide (IDFA Doc Lab Competition), LEV Madrid, International Film Festival Geneva, Reeperbahn Music Festival, VRHham!, with exhibitions in Berlin and Bratislava). FIVARS Award for Excellence in Sound Design 2020, VRNow Awards 2021 Nominee and participant of the R&D Program between IDFA and MIT. Forbes Magazine listed the VR experience among the best XR installations of 2019.
Sharon Musa is a Computer Engineering student at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University with an avid interest in XR. She currently works at the Immersive Storytelling Lab creating immersive virtual and augmented reality projects and is passionate about the intersection of art and technology.
Joo Park is a current Digital Media Arts student who is very passionate about human-centered design systems and emerging XR technologies. She currently works at the Social and Technological Systems lab where she creates accessible XR experiences, as well as the immersive Storytelling lab where she provides technical and creative support for on-going XR storytelling projects.
ABSTRACT
This is a hands-on participatory workshop with the outcome of a public, site-specific WebXR experience in the city of Coimbra. During the first hour of the workshop, the participants will be split into three groups. The first group will co-create visuals with an image-based AI (e.g.Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, Midjourney), the second group will work with an NLP-based AI (e.g. GPT, CharacterAI, CharismaAI, FakeYou), and the third group will focus on sound-generation AI system (e.g. AmadeusCode, MuseNet, Amper Music). The only common denominator is: Coimbra. The mission is to co-create an image, a (multi-lingual) text and a sound that relates to a specific place (historically, in the future or in the present) and which has to have both, human and artificial co-creative input.
In the second hour of the workshop, participants will go through each others' pieces (artifacts) and decide how to place them on the city map (using Miro board as a collaborative tool) to create an experience and a certain narrative. The goal of the workshop is to co-create with AI in an agentive and critical manner. How do artificial systems depict a place? How much human (creative) intervention is needed? The workshop interrogates the question of creativity as a “solely human” and “individual” experience, as well as the question of collective co-creation and agency. The approach to interactive storytelling and immersive media stems from Pnacek's positioning in the field of technology studies (Haraway 1990, Crawford 2021), new materialism (Barad 2007), and co-creation (Cizek & Uricchio 2022).
REQUIREMENTS
No previous knowledge is needed. Licences for AI generation software, the webXR platform (e.g. XRplus, 8thWall) are required, plus 3 x PC/Mac for the participants to work on during the workshop (with a 3D modelling software if possible, e.g. Blender or Maya). The leads will support the participants in storytelling techniques and export and launch of experience on a webXR platform.
LINK
https://isl.8thwall.app/coimbra/
David Thomas Henry Wright (Nagoya University), Karen Lowry (Curtin University) and Chris Arnold (University of Western Australia). Digital Literary Adaptation Workshop: Curatorial, Recombinant, and AR Reimagining. (i.e. VR --> AR).
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
David Thomas Henry Wright has won multiple prizes, been published in various journals, and received various research grants and fellowships. He has a PhD from Murdoch and a Masters from The University of Edinburgh. He is currently co-editor of The Digital Review and Associate Professor at Nagoya University.
Karen Lowry received her PhD in electronic literature from Curtin University. She is a speculative fiction writer, currently working on her first novel. She works as a sessional academic at Curtin University and Murdoch University. Karen is currently writing and researching around the influences of governmentality on world building in speculative fiction. Her research focuses on how trauma defines both physical and political spaces. Karen has been published extensively; her latest short story appears in Growing up in Country Australia published by Black Inc, and her digital essay on fake news appeared in the inaugural edition of The Digital Review. Her non-fiction articles and reviews have been published in The Guardian, Fringefeed, ArtsHub, X-Press Magazine, and The Conversation.
Chris Arnold is a software engineer and poet working in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia) on Whadjuk Noongar country, where he earned a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Western Australia. Chris was the joint recipient of a Queensland Literary Award in 2018 for Little Emperor Syndrome, a collaboration with David Thomas Henry Wright, and he was shortlisted for Australian Book Review's Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2022 and 2023.
ABSTRACT
This workshop seeks to explore digital literary adaptation by interrogating the creative process utilised in the creative process used in the collaborative creative project A Recombinant History of Australian Camels. It will explore this in a number of modes: chronological, recombinant and via AR. First, it will address the notion of digital literary adaptation, as proposed by the adaptation of print to digital in the print work by David Wright. Second, it will explore Neatline, a software that allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps, images and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, this software opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation. This aspect of the workshop, led by Karen Lowry, will explore the adaptation of print text to a chronological mode via Neatline. Next, this chronological adaptation will be ‘shattered’ through recombinant adaptation, a process that uses randomness to reimagine historical circumstance, as proposed by digital poet Chris Arnold. Finally, it will hint at AR adaptation by exploring the processes in development by digital 3D artist Louis Pratt. This work is regarded as an example of practice-led research as defined Smith and Dean (2009) as an activity which can appear in a variety of guises across the spectrum of practice and research. It can be basic research carried out independent of creative work (though it may be subsequently applied to it); research conducted in the process of shaping an artwork; or research which is the documentation, theorisation and contextualisation of an artwork – and the process of making it – by its creator. (3)
This work is an example of practice-led research as it attempts to shape an artwork using multiple forms of reimagination. Through this workshop, we hope to emulate this practice-led process so that other cans apply it to their own processes and look at adapting print to digital works in multiple ways. Some technical knowledge and a device (e.g. laptop) would be preferred but not requisite. Workshop will be in person.
REFERENCES
Neatline, https://neatline.org
Seaman, B. (2001) ‘OULIPO vs Recombinant Poetics’, Leonardo vol.34, no.5, pp.423–430.
Smith, H. and Dean, R.T. (2009) Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deena Larsen (Electronic Literature Addict Anonymous). Wikipedia Hackathon--workshop.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Deena Larsen has been to many conferences, listened to many a great idea, collaborated on and celebrated many a volume of forgotten lore in this field for over three decades. She confesses to knowing many of these culprits personally.
ABSTRACT
Wikipedia articles are usually the first to appear in a Google search. However, electronic literature articles are woefully underrepresented and not well developed. Wikipedia lists electronic literature as a level-5 (lowest importance) and rated as C-Cass (lower than A or B) with missing gaps and needed information. We truly need to up our game as a community! Further, only 20% of wikipedia editors are women, and this implicit bias has prevented women electronic literature writers from being recognized.
This Hackathon is in a series of research and hackathon and grindathons sponsored by Wikpedia Project:Women electronic literature writers (WP:WELW in Wikipedia). We compile research and draft articles on a draft google doc (https://tinyurl.com/welwwrite). (See this for an ever-expanding bibliography). These articles focus on women electronic literature writer bios, but men’s bios, particular works, journals, etc. (If you come across a Wikipedia worthy bit of info on elit, put it here!) We then do an internal review to ensure adherence to the Wikipedia guidance for notability and standards for biographies. Then we submit these drafts for Wikipedia review and potential acceptance.
AGENDA
In this two-hour hackathon, we will spend 10 minutes on an introduction to Wikipedia and our process, 10 minutes on participant introductions and stated To-Do- list interests (research, writing, identifying gaps). Then we will break out into groups based on these interests and edit for 80 minutes. Then we will regroup, ask for feedback, and plan further editing actions.
REQUIREMENTS
We hope to have this both online and in person. These two events do not have to be synchronous. The in-person group will use the internet provided in the room and people will use their own computers, phones, etc. We will also have paper books and pens and paper for people to do hard copy research that we can transfer later.
The online group will use an zoom connection or the conference connection (whichever works best for conference organizers). The zoom group would use zoom breakout groups to work within small groups.
REFERENCES
Bear, J.B., Collier, B. Where are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia. Sex Roles 74, 254–265 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0573-y
Halton, M. 2020. You can help fix Wikipedia’s gender imbalance — here’s how to do it. Ideas. Ted.Com. May 9, 2020.
Knape, E. Lack of Women in Wikipedia. Reporter. November 3, 2022. Lack of Women in Wikipedia (rit.edu).
Torras, N. 2016. Why do so Few Women Edit Wikipedia? Harvard Business Review, June 02, 2016. Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia? (hbr.org).
Celeste Pedro (Instituto de Filosofia, University of Porto) and Terhi Marttila (Independent artist-researcher). Hacking João de Barros’ 16th century Dialogo [...] em modo de jogo, a combinatorial game about moral vices and virtues.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Celeste Pedro is a communication designer graduated from the Fine Arts Faculty in Porto, Portugal. Her main focuses have since been typography and editorial design. She holds a master’s in Design and Intermedia from the University of Barcelona. In recent years, she specialised in early printed books and palaeography while conducting her PhD research on the History of Portuguese Print Culture in the Sixteenth Century, funded by FCT. Recently he was a post-doc researcher for the project “From Data to Wisdom - Philosophizing Data Visualizations in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity (13th-17th c.)” at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto, where she now continues her research on medieval and early modern authors and diagrams.
Terhi Marttila is an artist-researcher and a postdoctoral fellow at the eGames Lab (ITI/LARSyS). Terhi creates playful interactive works that orbit notions of digital literature, often working with recordings of her own voice or with the voices of others, including machines. In her practice-based research, she explores topics such as attitudes towards refugees, migration inequality, her own relationship to place and migration, gendered beauty ideals, our relationship to technology and lately, our relationship with the natural environment and speculation on the effects of climate change. Her works have been published in The New River Journal, raum.pt, nokturno.fi, in the Electronic Literature Collection 4 and shared at various conferences, including ELO, ACM SIGGRAPH SPARKS, Consciousness Reframed, Videojogos, Art of Research, among others. Visit her website at: https://terhimarttila.com
ABSTRACT
In this workshop, led by Celeste Pedro and assisted by Terhi Marttila, we’ll take a hands-on approach to a sixteenth-century board game that teaches Aristotle’s Ethics. This workshop aims to introduce the electronic literature community to a historical game and its diagrammatic visual tradition while also challenging participants to get acquainted with a simple computational platform and to adapt it to address contemporary social and moral issues.
The Dialogo [...] em modo de jogo (1540), by João de Barros, is a book and a game created as a tool to teach moral theory to the youth of the Portuguese court. The game is of interest because it takes an algorithmic and game-based approach to philosophy and education, striving to translate theory into practice. Furthermore, Barros’ game concept is part of a broader lineage of medieval diagrams, known as volvelles, in which concentric rotating circles are used to engage with complex concepts and multifactor data, such as astronomical motions, calendrical calculations or prognostics. We challenge participants to compose their own digital literary works for the rotating volvelles interface specially developed for ELO2023. Moreover, we will provide participants with access to the yet unpublished, first-ever English translation of Barros´ book. More information available at: https://historicaltype.eu/hacking
REFERENCES
ClutchFumble (2022) Aristotelian Development & Deduction. Digital game submitted to the Critical-Creative Philosophy game jam. https://itch.io/jam/critical-creative-philosophy/rate/1771488
Crupi, G. (2019). Volvelles of knowledge: Origin and Development of an instrument of scientific imagination (13th-17th centuries). Volvelles of knowledge: origin and development of an instrument of scientific imagination (13th-17th centuries), 1-27.
Friedlein, R. (2007) L’atzar en la filosofia moral. Un joc de tauler lul.lista de João de Barros: Diálogo sobre Preceitos Morais (1540), Studia Lulliana, 47, pp.117-139.
Higuera Rubio, J. (2014) Física y teología (atomismo y movimiento en el Arte luliano). Madrid: Círculo Rojo.
Pedro, C. (2022) A Sixteenth-Century Board Game by João de Barros. In Illustration and Ornamentation in the Iberian Book World, 1450–1800, edited by Alexander S. Wilkinson. Brill.
Simões, P. (2022) Circular diagrams of combinatorial art and poetry. Website of Pedro Simões. https://www.behance.net/gallery/143486181/Diagramas-circulares-de-arte-combinatoria
Kathi Inman Berens (Portland State University), R. Lyle Skains (Bournemouth U.), John Murray (U. Central Florida) and Mia Zamora (Kean University). Gathering Teaching Materials for ELC4.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Kathi Inman Berens is co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4. Her articles and talks have appeared in many scholarly and popular venues; see https://works.bepress.com/kathi-berens/. She is associate professor of digital humanities and book publishing in the English department of Portland State University (USA).
John T. Murray, PhD, (jtm.io) is an Assistant Professor of Games and Interactive Media at the University of Central Florida, USA. He is co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT Press, 2014) and Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 4 and author of “Salt Immortal Sea” with Mark Marino, Joellyn Rock, and Ken Joseph. His research focuses on interactive digital narratives and reality media (augmented, virtual and mixed reality), with a focus on computational media platforms, authoring tools and studying interactions using machine learning and physiological signals
Mia Zamora is Professor of English, the Director of the MA in Writing Studies, the Director of the Kean University Writing Project, and the former Coordinator of the World Literature Program at Kean University in Union, NJ. She received the Kean University “Professor of the Year” Award in June 2019.
ABSTRACT
The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4 [ELC4] consists of 132 literary works from 42 author nationalities in 31 languages. The five ELC4 editors centered Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), sharing a conviction to revise the tradition of Electronic Literature Collections, unbinding expectations of modernist difficulty and rethinking authorship to include writing in participatory cultures where there’s no one “author.”
We propose a workshop to build an open access teaching resource about the ELC4. The workshop’s goals:
1) Design co-learning experiences that make the Collection come alive, and lead us to a deeper sense of humanistic inquiry;
2) Build a repository of teaching materials from workshop participants that also includes their questions and barriers to teaching elit;
3) Harness the Conference’s built-in audience to collect international approaches to pedagogy.
We propose a 2-hour online workshop Gathering Teaching Materials for ELC4. Main activities during the two hours include:
- Discuss pedagogical strategies for sharing the ELC4 with different student populations;
- Listen to participants, and identify barriers to teaching eliterature at their universities (such as difficulty getting courses through curriculum committees) and possible solutions;
- Build sub-collections using ELC4’s custom filtering tool;
- Connect ELC4 featured works to university strategic goals, including:
- Digital literacy
- EDI
- Migration
- Climate change
- COVID, mental health and trauma
- AI and the growing role of automation
This workshop will make a Miro Board (collaborative whiteboard) to document the workshop’s discussion and build a collection of ELC4-specific teaching materials such as syllabi, assignments, essay prompts, group activities, exhibitions, and classroom exercises. All workshop participants will be empowered to add materials to the Miro Board. ELC4 editors are well versed in Miro, having used it as a key repository during our three-year review process.
The Gathering Teaching Materials for ELC4 Miro Board will be a persistent resource for the Teaching Electronic Literature page hosted by ELO. A Miro Board fulfills ELO’s EDI goals by being non-hierarchical, horizontal, accessible through browser and quick to skim.
Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Free (Libre) Software: Practices and Politics.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Nick Montfort is a poet and artist who uses computation. His computer-generated books range from #! to Golem. His digital projects include the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between. Montfort studies creative computing as well; MIT Press has published The New Media Reader (which he co-edited) and his Twisty Little Passages, The Future, and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. He directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank. He is professor of digital media at MIT and principal investigator in the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. He lives in New York City.
ABSTRACT
Free software is “libre” in the sense of freedom, not price. It’s used on servers (providing essential computing infrastructure) and for creative production. Free software, as a political movement, originated among the technically adept in the United States, but has become global. Michael Kwet argues “the development and dispersion of the Free Software philosophy across the world resembles the development of socialism within Europe as a reaction to land enclosure and industrial exploitation … Software is a central component of freedom in the twenty-first century.” Participants will learn about the movement and its principles, including the “four freedoms” that free software preserves. After a survey of the philosophy and politics that motivates free software, we will turn to more practical and immediate questions. Participants will discuss how to adopt free software incrementally to improve their computing practices. We will identify cases where we workshop participants — e-lit authors, media artists, and scholars — are subject to proprietary lock-in, which can prevent us from accessing and preserving our own work. We will analyze our everyday software use and identify ways to begin substituting free software for proprietary software in the cases where it matters most. The workshop will not require laptops. Software installation and trying out particular pieces software is easily done later after we have each identified where we wish to start. Ideally, outcomes of the workshop will include adoption of free software, understanding the basics of the free software philosophy, and a willingness to promote of free software in order to advance social justice worldwide.
REFERENCES
Stallman, Richard. “The GNU Manifesto.” Dr. Dobb's Journal 10 (3). March 1985. Updated version at https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
Kwet, Michael “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South.” Race & Class 60 (4). 2019. http://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172
Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Acid-free Bits: Recommendations for Long-lasting Electronic Literature from the ELO's Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) Project. College Park, Maryland: Electronic Literature Organization. June 14, 2004. https://www.eliterature.org/pad/afb.html
David Lincoln (Independent Artist) and Sara Wallace (New York University). GEODES, A Workshop for creatives in Locative Media
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
David R. Lincoln is a novelist, poet, and coder who developed the app for StoryCorps, an audio interview format with over 500,000 interviews in the (U.S.) Library of Congress. He also recently ran the website for The New Republic, the legendary magazine of culture and politics; and started what has evolved into GEODES in 2011 by placing “strokes” around Brooklyn and New York City. He has published a novel, Mobility Lounge, two poetry chapbooks, The Interloper and By The Way, and won the Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, among other writing awards. While publishing short fiction, non-fiction and poetry in a variety of journals and newspapers, and occasionally performing at festivals and conferences in the U.S. and Europe, he received a number of writing fellowships, including from Virginia Center for The Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, Breadloaf, and Moulin a Nef in France. He currently resides in Queens, New York, with his wife, son, and a Cat.
Sara Wallace is the author of The Rival (selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize) and the chapbook Edge (selected for The Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Competition). Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Agni, Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Yale Review and others. A recent participant in the Festival Internacional de Poesia, (Santiago, Chile) and a finalist for a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, she is a recipient of a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and fellowships from the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She currently teaches at New York University and lives in Queens.
ABSTRACT
Where does Locative Media take you?
With the widespread adoption of interactive maps, psycho-geographies and spatial storytelling are now an important vehicle for the individual to express themselves in diegetic space.
Whether the need to tell stories, advocate for social change, assert alternative identities, or simply to experiment and play, mapping your thoughts provides for a generative experience, and a dance along the liminal edge of reality. Designed for the imaginative person, this workshop introduces GEODES, a web app that makes creating and sharing text, images, sound-scapes, ambient textures, and iframe-enabled content a snap.
With a special focus on the here and now, GEODES preserves where and when inspirations happen, automatically creating an archival version of the moment, and provides the means for disseminating and sharing at the level that you find comfortable.
Artists, writers, poets, archivists, or anyone who happens to see what is in front of them as noteworthy and deserving of a future beyond the curve of technological acceleration and environmental change, will find GEODES easy to use and a helpful resource for mapping lived experiences, or imagined spaces in a neurologically inspired network of transmissions that can scale up to the global level.
In this workshop you will create your own locative experiences directly at the Convento São Francisco. After registering on the platform and learning the ins (adding and editing) and the outs (privatizing, collectivizing and sharing) from the app creators, there are options to geo-fence, share publicly or in stealth mode, to manage your profile and to gather your inner thoughts in collections or themes – the geode structure. You will be exposed to examples of geodes that have been created across various media to date. This is a new web app but the workshop organizers have been working with earlier versions for 10+ years, and are excited to see what you will make with the platform!
While too many commercial interests already exploit and compromise the persistence of individual memory and co-opt the precious objects with which we define our consciousness and our lives, GEODES is a social-media adjacent platform that is committed to free expression and the non-exploitation of all people. We will never data mine or otherwise exploit content – you are in control, you own what you do, and you decide who sees what. GEODES is free to use.
REQUIREMENTS
Participants will need an internet-enabled device, a smart phone or tablet or laptop, running a recent browser (no old versions of IE).
You will be asked to enable Access to your location in the workshop.
Vasileios Delioglanis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens). Locative Treasure Hunts and Urban Walks as Storytelling, Gaming, and Educational Tools: The Cases of Locatify and ActionBound.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Vasileios (Vassilis) N. Delioglanis has taught as an adjunct lecturer in Greek universities, while also teaching English at Primary State School Education in Greece. He holds a Ph.D. in Locative Media and North American Literature and Culture (from the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), funded by the Board of Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.). He also holds an M.A. in American Literature and Culture, and a B.A. in English from the School of English, AUTh, Greece. He is the webmaster of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS), a Board Member of the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), and a member of the Multimodal Research and Reading Group of the School of English, AUTh. His research focuses on contemporary American literature and culture, locative media and games, and the fusion of literary practice with new media technologies. His monograph, entitled Narrating Locative Media, is going to be out in 2023 by Palgrave Macmillan. Some of his published articles appear in Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media (HELAAS), and GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: The Cultural Politics of Space (AUTh).
ABSTRACT
This online workshop will concentrate on the ways in which locative media can change our perception of the urban space through the creation of storytelling and gaming experiences that are both digital and physical. In the first part, a survey of specific locative media works of literary, educational, and touristic significance will be provided, and participants will be acquainted with the function and role of locative and mobile media in contemporary social life. The popularization of the GPS in the early 2000s triggered a number of socio-cultural and technological changes, as it marked the introduction of locative media, a term that refers to location-aware and mobile technologies, and more specifically “to mobile media works which attach themselves to real located places and communities and their geographical coordinates” (Ladly 80). GPS technology has played a significant role in the production of locative media projects and led to new modes of understanding space, since the main principle lying behind such projects is that the physical (urban) space is digitally augmented through the use of GPS technology.
In the second part, attention will be paid to the relationship between locative media and storytelling / gaming practices. Participants will be familiarized with the computer-based platforms Locatify and ActionBound, which are open-source locative gaming and storytelling tools granting users the opportunity to create their own treasure hunts and urban walks by attaching multimodal content (text, videos, images) to specific locations on the map. Participants will use computers to create their own locative experiences, which they will be able to test afterwards through certain mobile applications ⸺ TurfHunt and ActionBound ⸺ that are connected with the aforementioned platforms.
The workshop aims to underline the ways in which locative media promote social change by exposing their literary, educational and touristic impact. In fact, these technologies shed light on lesser-known aspects of specific locations and acquaint the public with the cultural diversity of urban communities as well as foster civic engagement through their collaborative and participatory dimension. The locative apps / platforms to be explored are accessible to a wider audience and function as authoring and educational tools that can be adapted to different situations and localities.
No previous knowledge and technical expertise is required.
Equipment needed: Participants are advised to bring their Internet-enabled and GPS-enabled laptops and mobile devices (phones/tablets).
REFERENCES
de Souza e Silva, Adriana. “Mobile Narratives: Reading and Writing Urban Space with Location-based Tehnologies.” Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, edited by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, U of Minnesota P, 2013, pp. 33-52.
de Souza e Silva and D. M. Sutko, ed. Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces. New York: Peter Lang. 2009.
Farman, Jason. The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, edited by Jason Farman, Routledge, 2014, pp. 53-67.
Leorke, D. Location-based gaming: Play in Public Space. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018.
Ladly, Martha. “Narrative in Hybrid Mobile Environments.” Mobile Network Culture in Placemaking, special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac Re.Play, edited by Lanfranco Aceti et al., vol. 21, no. 2, 2016, pp. 76-95.
Wilken, Rowan, and Gerard Goggin. “Locative Media—Definitions, Histories, Theories.” Locative Media, edited by Wilken and Goggin, Routledge, 2015, pp. 1-19.
Rob Wittig (Meanwhile Netprov Studio). Netprov for Personal Processing and Social Healing, a Playshop.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Rob Wittig plays at the crossroads of literature, graphic design and digital culture. He co-founded the legendary, pre-web IN.S.OMNIA electronic bulletin board with the Surrealist-style literary and art group Invisible Seattle. From this came a Fulbright grant to study the writing and graphic design of electronic literature with philosopher Jacques Derrida in Paris. Rob's book based on that work, Invisible Rendezvous, was published Wesleyan University Press. He then embarked on a series of illustrated and designed email and web fictions. Alongside his creative projects, Rob has worked in major publishing and graphic design firms in Chicago, leading R&D teams. In 2011 Rob earned a Master’s in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is currently developing high-design, collaborative fiction in a form called netprov, networked improv narrative. Rob just retired from decades as Assistant professor in the Art & Design and Writing Studies departments of the University of Minnesota Duluth to do creative work full time. His new book, Netprov, Networked Improvised Literature for the Classroom and Beyond, appeared in December 2021 from Amherst College Press and is available via Open Access: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12387128
ABSTRACT
What is netprov?
Netprov is networked improv: networked, improvised literature. Netprov is collaborative fiction-making in available media, usually the social media of the moment. Netprov is role-playing in writing and images. Netprov is storytelling in real time. Netprov is a great game for students and friends. Netprov is an emerging art form of the digital age. And netprov is fun!
This workshop session, led by an experienced netprov player, creator, and scholar, will provide hands-on experiences of collaborative digital storytelling. For the past ten years, Rob Wittig has been helping develop the netprov form for use in everyday life via Meanwhile Netprov Studio, and in the classroom during his decades at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
Netprov offers an opportunity for synchronous or asynchronous writing and critical thinking by small or large groups of authors in digital media. The principles discussed in this workshop apply across many social media platforms and can be used for narratives that are variously: comic, dramatic, or activist. Topics will include successful character creation, playing multiple characters, narrative development, and successful collaborative authorship. Specific techniques covered include how to support other netprov players: by quoting, by voting, by using emojis, stage directions and other phatic communication, by imitating, and by extending. The workshop also offers advice and support for those who wish to stage netprovs of their own. Bring a digital device and come build characters and stories with us!
Netprov for Personal Processing and Social Healing
Because they are improvised and written in real time, netprovs are always shaped by current events — both events of the world and the inner, psychological states of the netprov players. Using methods developed by my writing partner Mark Marino and myself for our students during the COVID lockdown, I will share some ways playful, fictional premises and netprov play can help players process psychological struggle, insight and growth. I will also discuss strategies to use Netprov to nourish dialogue between and within divided communities.
Jeremy Douglass (UC Santa Barbara). Workshop on Mapping Branching Narrative.
ABSTRACT
In this workshop participants will have a hands-on experience learning how to quickly map works of hypertext fiction and branching narrative using freely available online tools, producing both data and images showing the structure of an interactive narrative, including annotation of map elements and exploratory layout design. In the second half, participants will be able to select a work of their own choosing for mapping and engage with the full process. The workshop will use freely available web-based tools, and share its pedagogical materials for reuse by participants. While there will be some material addressing interactive cinema and visual novels, the main focus will be on hypertext fiction and Twine, with primary tools being EdgeToGraph (about.jeremydouglass.com/edgetograph/), Twine, and yEd.
Technical requirements:
All workshop tools are web-based, and require no plugins or software installation -- just a personal computer (Mac/PC/Linux) with web browser. Tablets (chromebook, iOS) may work with some restrictions. Workshop participants will work with three freely available web-based tools: the EdgeToGraph mapping tool (about.jeremydouglass.com/edgetograph/), Twine online (twinery.org), and yEd Live (www.yworks.com/yed-live/). To get the most out of the workshop, participants should be familiar with reading works of hypertext fiction and/or works in Twine, however no special technical skills are required or expected.
Participants will:
- Produce a map of their own.
- Become familiar with common creative and scholarly use cases for mapping complex interactive works
- Learn to quickly map works “from the interface” in the EdgeToGraph tool, then export to image or data
- Encounter common problems in mapping and explore ways to overcome them
- Learn to automatically analyze a complex work (example in Twine) then edit the resulting map in EdgeToGraph
- Learn to export EdgeToGraph data to yEd for layout exploration or professional formatting of a finished map
- Experience pedagogical techniques the mapping of electronic literary works and take away methods for incorporating similar mapping exercises into creative writing or critical analysis workshop and classrooms.
Special Considerations:
Electronic literature is an international community, and works written in Twine in particular are freely available in many languages. While the workshop will be conducted in English, during the second half of the workshop participants will be encouraged to work with a personally selected Twine work of their choice in any language.