Stickers as a Literature-Distribution Platform

Contemporary experimental writing often directs its attention to its writing space, its medium, the material on which it is presented. Very often this medium is meaningful and becomes part of the work – the printed text transfered to another media context (for instance, into a traditional book) would become incomprehensible. Literature distributed on stickers is a form of writing that is divided into small fragments of texts (a type of constrained writing), physically scattered in different locations. One of the newest challenges in literature are books with augmented reality, AR, which examine the relation between the physical (the medium) and the virtual interaction. Sticker literature is a rather simple analog form of augmented reality literature. The stickers have QR codes or web addresses printed on them, so the viewer who reads/sees a random sticker in the public space can further explore the text online. The viewer can read other parts of the text on photographs (the photograph being another medium) of other stickers placed in different locations. The author will discuss the use of stickers throughout literary history, beginning with 20th century French Situationists, through different textual strategies applied by visual artists and ending with literary forms such as the sticker novel Implementation (2004) by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg or Stoberskiade (2013). The author shall try to explain why writers decide to use this form, how the text is distributed and received and how the city space is used in such projects

Textual Demoscene

The demoscene is a mainly European subculture of computer programmers, whose programs generate computer art in real time. The aim of this report is to attempt a description of the textual dimension of the demoscene. The report is the effect of efforts to perform an ethnographic exploration of the Polish computer scene; it quotes interviews with participants of demo parties, where text plays a significant role: in demos, real-time texts, IF, mags or digital adaptations. Media archeology focusing on the textual aspect of the demoscene is important to understanding the beginnings of digital literature and genres of digital-born texts

Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja.

In 1989, Janusz Pelc wrote the game Robbo on an 8-bit Atari, one of the first personal computers, which enjoyed a cult-like status in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Robbo, a small robot, collects screws and has to get through 56 planets. The game has achieved cult status, spawning hundreds of remixes and modifications. Beginning in the 1980s, fans (once mainly young boys, today adult men) played this game, collecting screws and running away from enemies such as bats, flying eyes, devils etc., while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps and telling jokes. One of the places where you play Robbo are the so-called demoparties, which gather computer geeks, technology nerds and fans of old computers. They are the heroes of Robbo. Walkthrough (2018), the first computer generated book published in Polish as Robbo. Solucja. The game’s basis is a text generator with soundtrack, made using technology original to the Atari. The concept and text was created by Piotr Marecki. The project was presented as part of the wild compo during the demoparty Silly Venture 2017 in Gdańsk. The program lasts 56 minutes and generates walkthrough for the 56 individual planets. However, it is looped, so it generates an inexhaustible amount of solutions, one of which contains a published book. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – were created by Polish Atari enthusiasts. It premiered at the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among retro computers enthusiasts. While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also comments critically and playfully on computational obsolescence. The practice of returning to the discarded and dead (or “zombie”) media, in this case the Atari computer, is one challenge to the seeming inevitability of technological acceleration. This essay describes the history and making of Robbo. Walkthrough and provides a critical commentary on the value of “zombie” computing

Textual caves : expanding the literary writing space

Marecki discusses three textual caves created by Polish concrete poets: Stanisław Dróżdż's Między (1977); Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka's Krótka historia przypadku (1997); and Dróżdż's Żyłki (2002). The medium of all three works was a white cubicle placed in a gallery. Each piece played with the corporeality of the viewer and their experience of networked space, expanding the concept of writing space in literature. Między is an original work of international importance, whereas the two later caves are re-mediations, recycled variations of the original subject. The true innovation of Między is the idea to place text in a space beyond the page, picture or gallery wall. Dróżdż's break with tradition created a networked piece; the body of the viewer is physically inscribed on the work when he or she enters it. Dawidek's installation, created two decades later, has been called a hypertext in space. Therein, the artist incorporated new physical solutions, including links to the lexias, which were written by hand and glued to the walls. Dawidek thus nuanced the use of corporeality in her work, which was designed for a particular space (the viewer moves through the book by following physical links; for instance, when the text mentions exiting, the viewer actually follows a link towards the door). Finally, Dróżdż's 2002 work Żyłki constitutes another step forward. In a similar manner to Dawidek, the artist used physical links. By placing the work in the space that was occupied by Między back in 1977, he thus recycled his initial medium. Marecki utilizes tools for describing the nature of the writing space developed by thinkers like J. D. Bolter and applies Zenon Fajfer's concept of "Liberatura" to develop a media-specific analysis of these three textual caves, as well as the intertextual relations between them

Stickers as a literature : distribution platform

Contemporary experimental writing often directs its attention to its writing space, its medium, the material on which it is presented. Very often this medium is meaningful and becomes part of the work – the printed text transfered to another media context (for instance, into a traditional book) would become incomprehensible. Literature distributed on stickers is a form of writing that is divided into small fragments of texts (a type of constrained writing), physically scattered in different locations. One of the newest challenges in literature are books with augmented reality, AR, which examine the relation between the physical (the medium) and the virtual interaction. Sticker literature is a rather simple analog form of augmented reality literature. The stickers have QR codes or web addresses printed on them, so the viewer who reads/sees a random sticker in the public space can further explore the text online. The viewer can read other parts of the text on photographs (the photograph being another medium) of other stickers placed in different locations. The author will discuss the use of stickers throughout literary history, beginning with 20th century French Situationists, through different textual strategies applied by visual artists and ending with literary forms such as the sticker novel Implementation (2004) by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg or Stoberskiade (2013). The author shall try to explain why writers decide to use this form, how the text is distributed and received and how the city space is used in such projects

AS - "C()n Du It" by Katarzyna Giełżyńska : a case of a total translation of an electronic literature work

Translation, or adaptation, of film poems, animated or kinetic poetry and other multimedia works, poses a number of questions for translation theory and practice. Dealing with such pieces involves bringing into the target language and culture multiple formal layers of the work, not only text, but also sound, image and motion. The interplay of signifiers between the various media layers of the work amplifies the constraints to be addressed by the translator, making the concept the basic unit of translation. The English translation by Aleksandra Małecka of the 2013 online collection of 29 video poems by Katarzyna Giełżyńska was premiered at the ELO Media Arts Show in June 2014. This paper is an attempt to analyze the strategies for translating multimedia work, taking up the example of C()n Du It as a case study. One of the points of departure for the analysis of the poetics of the artist's clips, which draws from the logic of logotypes, ads, and minimalist digital works. It attempts to place the new challenge within established paradigms and strategies for the translation of conceptual works of literature. Special attention is devoted to the political question of untranslatability and possible means of addressing it in the translation and curating of such projects. Even if through tackling sound, text and image, the wordplay, puns and multiple meanings are presented to the English-speaking audience, there remains the question of the context, which is particularly important in minimalist, conceptual works. The translator/curator must address the question of whether the work should be presented visibly and markedly as a translation, alongside the original and with curatorial comments on the underlying cultural tradition, or as an independent whole. An extreme response to the cultural impossibility of translation is abusive subtitling. The “abusive translations” added to the collection by Piotr Marecki constitute a performance that strongly comments on these issues. The review of possible approaches to equivalence in translating multimedia works is followed by a discussion of what this type of task entails for the description of the craft of translation and how it challenges conventional perceptions of the role of the translator. Multimedia translation often requires the collaborative effort of a number of specialists, posing questions about the status of the author and the translator, arguably redefining their relationship, as well as that between the original and the translated work

Renderings: Translating Literary Works in the Digital Age

The point of departure for this paper is the Renderings project (http://trope-tank.mit.edu/renderings/) established in 2014 and developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a lab called the Trope Tank. The goal of the project is to translate highly computational and otherwise unusual digital literature into English. Translating digital works that are implemented as computer programs presents new challenges that go beyond the already difficult ones tackled by translators of more typical forms of literature. It is a type of translation akin to the translation of experimental, conceptual, or constrained works. It is not unusual for this task to require the translator or translators to reinvent the work in a new linguistic and cultural context, and sometimes also to port the original program to another programming language. This paper describes an undertaking related to the broadly understood discipline of creative computing and studies the work of the translator as taking place both in code and language, drawing from the methodologies developed by the fields of code studies, platform studies and expressive processing