[I need to turn in my stuff for my tenure case next week (!!), so here I am procrastinating by writing a blog post about a cool e-lit project I am involved with:]
Thanks to a grant from the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study at UC Berkeley (2017-18), my colleague Prof. Scott Rettberg from the University of Bergen and I were able to establish a research cooperation within both our universities, in order to explore the relationships between creative practice, digital method based literary research in e-lit, and the use of e-lit in a DH curriculum. During the Fall semester, Scott visited Berkeley and delivered a couple of amazing talks (like this one on combinatory poetics), and together in the Spring (April 6, 2018), we convened a workshop that brought to UC Berkeley scholars and graduate students from different Californian Universities: Prof. Jessica Pressman (San Diego State University), Prof. Jeremy Douglas (UC Santa Barbara), Prof. Mark Marino (University of South California), Prof. Noah Wardrip-Fruin (UC Santa Cruz), Prof. Stephanie Boluk (UC Davis), and Prof. Patrick Lemieux (UC Davis); as well as from Bergen: Prof. Jill Walker Rettberg, Prof. Scott Rettberg, Prof. Mia Zamora and grad student Alvaro Seiça; the University of Galway in Ireland: Prof. Anne Karhio; and, finally, UC Berkeley: grad students Ryan Ikeda and Justin Berner, DH program director Dr. Claudia Von Vacano, and myself.
The workshop was a fabulous opportunity to learn about the work of all these folks around this topic, and as a result Scott and I are editing a volume (stay tuned because it’s going to be awesome).
Apart from this workshop, while still at Berkeley, we had an electronic literature reading/performance at the Worth Ryder Gallery (April 5, 2018) where Mark Marino, Scott Rettberg, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick Lemieux and I presented some of our creative work. I showed some #selfiepoetry and some of my new work on #youtubers&me (I’ll write a new post about this; it deserves it’s own entry).
A few weeks later (May 2-5, 2018), it was Berkeley’s turn to travel East, and my BCNM colleague and data artist Greg Niemeyer and I went to Norway. Greg gave a talk on how to understand the academy as a network, and also presented his work Ice Core Walk, part of the show, Hyperobjects. Instead of walking around a lake (the Ice Core Walk took us around the Store Lungegårdsvann), I gave two sit-down talks at the University of Bergen (although, to be fair, I was standing the whole time). I presented my new book #Postweb! (I’ll also write a full entry on this, don’t worry) and presented some interesting e-lit in Spanish by some artists I admire suck as Eugenio Tiselli, Benjamín Moreno, Belén Gache, Milton Laüfer, Horacio Warpola, and the guys behind Broken English.
Here is a video of this talk
Literatura electrónica en español / Electronic Literature in Spanish (1 of 2) from ELMCIP on Vimeo.
Literatura electrónica en español / Electronic Literature in Spanish (2 of 2) from ELMCIP on Vimeo.
And here are the slides!
The Berkeley-Bergen e-lit project is still going on strong, so I’ll keep you updated on what’s to come. Enjoy this for now.
