Literary narrative genres develop from personal narrative practices. The first novels were based on letters and diaries, though the genre developed into something independent in time. This presentation discusses contemporary personal media and narrative practices, such as those we see in social media. Some of these practices are constrained by corporations such as Facebook or Twitter, which steer our expression in specific ways. Others appear free, yet are heavily influenced by cultural templates, copying and voluntary rules. Often, corporations or organisations provide systems to automate some of these voluntary rules. We're also beginning to see some examples of social media sites that take our contributions and create their own visualisations and representations of an aspect of our life. For instance, Dopplr.com generates reports on your travel, Flickr.com shows you your photos on a map or as a calendar, Trixietracker.com graphs your baby's sleep patterns and Google Web History visualises your search activity in time. What happens, then, when our personal narratives and self-documentations aren’t hand-crafted as with diaries and scrapbooks, but are automatically generated? What would literary narratives following these personal but computationally assisted practices look like?

The talk builds upon and extends an essay to be published in the European Journal of Communications in December this year (Preprint available), and the slides I used for the talk are available as well.

Electronic literature is not just a “thing” or a “medium” or even a body of “works” in various “genres.” It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, gaming, code work, or some new admixture of all these practices. E-Literature is, arguably, an emerging cultural form, as much a collective creation of new terms, keywords, genres, structures, and institutions as it is the production of new literary objects. The ideas of cybervisionaries Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Ted Nelson,
foundational to the electronic storage, recovery, and processing of texts, go beyond practical insights and can be seen to participate in a long-standing ambition to construct a world literature in the sense put forward by Damrosh (What is World Literature, 2003): “not an
infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading...that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material” (5). The model for such constructions may be not the global literary commerce envisioned by Goethe and adopted by Karl Marx, not the romantic tradition of poets as world legislators, and not the current model of a “world republic of letters” (Casanova 2004). The model adopted in this presentation, rather, is the literary practice of writing under constraint, developed long before the
Internet but suited to its computational impositions and game-like literary presentations. Instead of a canon of works preserved solely by the power of institutions, the essay presents a free-standing network of authors as precursors to, and models for, this potential world literature: namely, the Oulipo.

What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers?
Maybe not its artistic and literary value, but rather its heuristic value.
Indeed electronic literature not only permits to reexamine previous media (paper for instance), but also to question several well-established notions such as :
- narrative in narratology;
- text in linguistics and semiotics;
- figure in rhetorics;
- materiality in aesthetics;
- grasp in anthroplogy;
- literarity in literary studies…

Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences:
- an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves;
- a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.

Advance location-based technologies in cities have given rise to an emergent form of physical terrain called hybrid space, creating new ways of looking at the city. In this presentation, YouTube and Google Earth is used to explore the relation between digital information and physical place, where the social and cultural conditions influencing the production of media also start to become visible.

Augusto de Campos has explained that the Ritual anthropophagy (cannibalism) initially cultivated in writing by Oswald de Andrade eighty years ago is a branch of cannibalism in which the cannibal eats its enemy not for greed or for anger but to inherit its qualities. In previous papers on the subject, I explain how anthropophagic textuality bears relevance to digital poetry as many author(s) engage with multiple languages or idioms, devour other texts, icons, and freely remix discrepant methods and philosophical approaches to expression to achieve noteworthy ends. Discovery and re-discovery of meaning is reached through the process, through which alternative cultural or personal perspectives emerge through a type of engineered textual composting. Through anthropophagy, artists reshape external influences in an open acknowledgment of plurality. This discussion examines the contemporary outlook on digital poetry as a cannibalistic practice, both from critical and creative points of view. In addition to reviewing ways creative cannibalism was reflected in contents of presentations made at E-Poetry 2009, I will discuss its influence on my own practice as an artist.

Enter interactive panoramic environments and cinemascapes of texts photos and videos in the Unknown Territories. Join John Wesley Powell on the 1869 exploring expedition of the unchartered waters of the Colorado River. Return 80 years later following the footsteps of anarchist-environmentalist Edward Abbey and discover a very different American West -- on shaped by industrialization, mining, dam-building. That paths would you take in the unknown territory? At www.unknownterritories.org.

To begin with – the discipline of interdisciplinary practice ... toward an introduction to the eventual plushware outcome of the kludge ... Intentional and Iterational Marks ... byproducts of playability – instrumentality and mutability.
Exhibit A. [(s)Pacing]; Exhibit B. [molly(departed) movie]; followed by a brief discussion of capricious and conjunctive inventories, invention, embodiment, and impulse – then a conkludging apology, in conclusion.

Kate Pullinger will discuss the work-in-progress, 'Flight Paths', and the many creative challenges it raises.

In this presentation, I will discuss the creative use of live and collaboratively generated data in digital poetics, narrativity and performance. Rather than attempt an exhaustive approach that considers the different ways in which electronic writers inhabit networks and cannibalize, channel, and remix data sources, I will take a localized approach, writing from my own current practice while citing examples of data-driven work in related and less-related creative fields. The presentation of my own work will be mainly concerned with The Last Performance [dot org], an interdisciplinary collaborative writing and text visualization project that exists on the web but was also instantiated as a series of performances and installations between 2007 and 2009.

I'm working on a series of digital portraits in which I want to reveal the underlying network between my "sitters". I'm also working on a multitouch interface so that other people can interact with the portraits and make different visualizations of the networks, in this way contributing to shape and transform it. This presentation discusses the project in two ways: 1) how this project has been made possible through asynchronous collaboration via the web and 2) how can the project itself be read within the social media phenomenon.

Poetic writing for programmable and network media seems to have been captivated by the affordances of new media and questions of whether or not and, if so, how novel properties of literary objects require us to reassess or reconfigure the literary itself. What if we shift our attention decidedly to practices, processes, procedures - towards ways of writing rather than textual artifacts (even time-based literary objects) or the concepts underpinning object-as-artifact? What else can we do, given that we must now write on, for, and with the net (which is itself no object but a seething manifold process)? I will present a brief analysis of very recent experiments in 'writing to be found' (by Google, in this specific case), making some claim that such writing may be exemplary, that its aesthetic and conceptual engagements are distinct, and that there is something at stake here for 'the literary' or rather for literary art practice.