Tweet Your Shared Adventure: An (Un)Continuous E-Lit Jam

ABOUT: For this virtual engagement session of ELOrlando, participants will create and play a collaborative work of e-lit on Twitter, modeled after Choose Your Own Adventure-style hypertext fiction. This e-lit jam will run the course of the conference, from Thursday July 16-July 19, on the hashtag #TYSA (T[weet] Y[our] S[hared] A[dventure]). All Twitter users in the ELO community are invited to join. HOW THIS JAM WILL JAM: On the first day of the conference, the session’s organizer (Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, @DrSarathena192 on both Twitter and Discord) will tweet out on #ELOrlando and #TYSA the beginning of an adventure story. This story will be accompanied by: A poll where players / readers may vote on the next course of action in the story, to collaboratively participate in narrative play (the majority choice will be followed); The Twitter handle of another member of the ELOrlando conference community, who, through this tag, is nominated to provide the next stage of the story. The nominated contributor, will then have two choices. They may (1) join the e-lit jam, and continue the story by REPLYing to the previous tweet with the next piece of the adventure, another poll of choices, and another nominee from the ELOrlando community to continue the story (and of course, the #TYSA tag); or (2) they may opt out, and REPLY instead by simply nominating another ELO community member to take on the narrative. The e-lit jam will continue in this way, with each tagged member contributing, through REPLYs, the next phase of the story and the next set of choice-based polls, so that by the end of the conference we will have a Twitter Thread containing the narrative. As an example of what this might look like when it is done, see Kelly Hayes’ (@MsKellyMHayes) Choose Your Own Adventure style Twitter thread, which begins here: (https://twitter.com/MsKellyMHayes/status/1088487963997192192). The key difference between Hayes’ and ours, is that ours will be collaboratively authored as well as collaboratively played over the course of the conference. SOME ADDITIONAL GUIDELINES: To keep this going smoothly, please be cognizant of the following: If you are nominated, please take care to REPLY to the previous tweet (the tweet containing your nomination) rather than Quote-Tweeting, in order to keep the Thread going. This will ensure that users who are nominated, but who may not have been following the story, will be able to “catch up” to the narrative easily and contribute accordingly. Though the original tweet to start the narrative jam will be in English, if you are nominated, you may continue the narrative in any language. Polls may run for any amount of time but 1-2 hours is generally recommended. Be aware of the time zones in which you are tagging / contributing, and any other events that may be going on in the ELOrlando conference program. While this narrative jam may run asynchronously through any time zone, keep in mind the official conference time zone is US Eastern Time (EDT), so there will likely be more participants and traffic around polls and nominees during EDT “business hours.” If you are nominated, please contribute or opt out in a timely manner so that the narrative game may go on. Please feel free to reach out to the organizer (@DrSarathena192 on Twitter and Discord) via tag or direct message, who will act as moderator over the course of the narrative jam, if anything goes wrong. Please note: like Orlando, she is located in the US Eastern Time Zone. Please remember to include the dedicated #TYSA hashtag on each contribution. Download the final story using the full text link

Pedagogies of E-literary Practice for (Un)continuous Times: Lightning Talks

In response to Debbie Chacra’s charge to “celebrate and foster education, maintenance, analysis, critique, and, above all, caregiving” in maker cultures, this roundtable imagines pedagogies of e-literary practice that combine creation and caregiving in ways restorative to the ongoing tradition(s) of e-lit (“Beyond Making”). E-lit regularly confronts theoretical, cultural, and material challenges endemic to the field, as genres of previously accessible work are being lost to technological obsolescence and new developments are moving increasingly off the screen and out of practical reach. One way to counter such challenges of these (un)continuous times is through an integrated, applied, practice-based model of e-lit pedagogy. Participants discuss ways of teaching electronic literature that incorporates hands-on work like critical-creative making and procedural performance as pedagogical responses to rapid technological changes that blot out e-literature’s past and blackbox its future

From Float to Flicker: Information Processing, Racial Semiotics, and Anti-Racist Protest, from “I Am a Man” to “Black Lives Matter”

This article engages the relationships between information systems, antiracist protest, and race today. Building on the body of work that describes the ways institutional racism has shifted from an overt system during the (pre-) civil rights era, to a covert, color-blind system today, this article argues, first, that this shift mirrors the cultural change in information processing from analog systems to digital systems and, second, that signs of race articulated as racial protest have similarly changed over this historical period. Using the Black Lives Matter movement as a contemporary frame, the article focuses on three cultural objects that recall and revise civil rights protests to articulate this change: Ernest Withers’s 1968 photograph of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, Glenn Ligon’s 1988 untitled painting (“I Am a Man”), and the 2000 condition report of Ligon’s painting. Forming a historical network of racial protest, these images perform the changing semiotics of race and racial protest from signs that float as in an analog system to those that flicker as in a digital system. It is as a “digital,” flickering signifier of protest that blackness is rematerialized as visible matter to operate against color-blind systems today

What Does it Mean? Berries and Cream!: Towards a Feminist Praxis in TikTok’s Memetic Cultures

In keeping with the theme “Reinvention” of this year’s Console-ing Passions conference, I propose a paper that examines the potentials for what I argue is an underlying feminist praxis in worldbuilding, remix cultures on TikTok. Part of a larger project on world-building through sonic memes on TikTok, I offer here a case study of the recent (as of this writing in early October 2021) “Berries and Cream” sound-meme, in which users cut audio clips from a 2008 Starburst commercial advertising the berries and cream flavor into popular songs and sounds on TikTok. While it is fair to say the user intent for this practice of world-building through sonic reinvention is likely no more than classic internet jokes “for the lulz,” within this practice I argue that there is evidence for a deeper feminist engagement with media and media cultures as such, and with the TikTok platform. In particular, I draw connections between this user practice of memetic remix to the technologies of semiotics, meta-ideologizing, deconstructions, democratics, and differential movement that Chela Sandoval argues comprise the methodology of the oppressed -- her term for the praxis of oppositional consciousness undergirding US third world feminism. By framing this trend through Sandoval’s theories of feminist praxis, I argue that “Berries and Cream Tok” -- and similar practices of sound-based memetic “worldbuilding” on TikTok -- articulate a more critical, feminist, oppositional praxis undergirding these easily and popularly dismissed user performances

Pedagogies of E-literary Practice for (Un)continuous Times: Live Recording

This is the full recording of the live panel: for the lightning talks, please see the other entry. In response to Debbie Chacra’s charge to “celebrate and foster education, maintenance, analysis, critique, and, above all, caregiving” in maker cultures, this roundtable imagines pedagogies of e-literary practice that combine creation and caregiving in ways restorative to the ongoing tradition(s) of e-lit (“Beyond Making”). E-lit regularly confronts theoretical, cultural, and material challenges endemic to the field, as genres of previously accessible work are being lost to technological obsolescence and new developments are moving increasingly off the screen and out of practical reach. One way to counter such challenges of these (un)continuous times is through an integrated, applied, practice-based model of e-lit pedagogy. Participants discuss ways of teaching electronic literature that incorporates hands-on work like critical-creative making and procedural performance as pedagogical responses to rapid technological changes that blot out e-literature’s past and blackbox its future