The Digital Imaginary

Leading creators and scholars raise provocative questions about emerging and hybrid narrative forms of digital arts and what these say about the creative imagination

Interview: The Metamorphoses of Front as a Narrative Told through Social Media Interface: A Conversation with Donna Leishman

Front is an exciting departure for Donna Leishman. Best known for allegorical, often wordless, Flash-based narratives, in Front she tells a contemporary and text-based story. Front unfolds using a faux-Facebook page along with Twitter, SoundCloud, and other apps. Like many of her other works, Front continues a concern with female experience and agency as well as elements of fairy tale and myth but does so in a very different way. Through its pointed concern with our immersion and investment in social media, it speaks to the creation of virtual identities and personas as well as to concealed narratives of need, longing, or trauma. The work envisions narrative possibilities for these platforms

The Poetics of Combinatory Cinema: David Jhave Johnston interviews Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg

For the past several years filmmaker Roderick Coover and fiction writer Scott Rettberg have collaborated on a series of film and digital media projects that address climate change, environmental catastrophe, cross-cultural communication and combinatory poetics. Working between Philadelphia, USA, where Coover directs the graduate programme in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and Bergen, Norway, where Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. Their projects, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, Three Rails Live (with Nick Montfort) and Toxi•City, deal thematically with contemporary and past moments of environmental change and human loss, and formally with interdisciplinary practice and combinatory poetics. Coover and Rettberg were interviewed by digital poet and experimental filmmaker David Jhave Johnston, Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong

un(distance)

What does it meant to be together apart? How can we create and share ideas from an (un)distance? Please join us in this experimental panel in a talk show format. The panel will be moderated in channels: A zoom moderator (Anna Nacher and Annie Abrahams), a framapad moderator (Deena Larsen),a twitter moderator (Johannah Rodgers) and panel participants: Eugenio Tisselli, Kirill Azernyy, Renee Carmichael, and Roderick Coover will weave their experiences and works into a panoply of insights into what it means to practice undistancing, or b(e/r)ing us together to share ideas, potential collaborations, and partnerships over various (di)stances and (di)scourse: Eugenio--(un)distance to the material sources of electronic technologies Renee--(un)distancing between the function and the feeling Kyrill--(un)distance to artifacts Anna - inhabiting various degrees of (un)distancing Deena-(un)distance to collaborate with those who can not be present physically (disability, travel, funding) Annie-(un)distance as a life-long practice This panel was originally envisioned as an experiment to provide a talk show format discussion between online participants and in person participants in Orlando. As the ELO conference moves online, this Undistance panel will experiment with the potential for completely online networking and exchanging ideas at this and future ELO conferences. As this discussion will center around long-distance writing practices, and will self-reflexively discuss how effective on-line community discussion works, this experimental venue will demonstrate that more in-depth online exchanges are possible. ELO members will engage online in an exchange about their practice, weaving in an array of video extracts and demos together in a real-time e-lit fabric that also includes unexpected interruptions, time lapses, and glitches as part of the expected process. The online audience will participate via videoconferencing (Zoom or conference online venue), hashtag discussion via live tweeting (#ELO#UnDistance), and collaborative annotating via Framapad, thus usingopen access communication tools and incorporating as many live online channels as possible. Panelists will employ short provocations to the other panelists (ranging from scholarly observations to theoretical manifestos to pointed questions to silence) in an interrupt/collaborate collage of ideas. The final 15 minutes of the panel will be transferred to an open Framapad where panelists and audience will continue the discussion. Before: The Framapad will be open before the panel with a series of questions on distance collaborations--please add your insights. During The panel will be moderated during the videoconferencing portion of the panel in channels (Zoom, Twitter, YouTube, and Framapad) concentrating on audience questions during the last portion of the panel. After We will transcribe and record the Zoom and leave the Framapad open for afterthoughts and further discussion for a week at the end of the conference. The Framapad will then be archived at that point as a seed crystal for articles, scholarly observations, and historic record of thoughts on distance collaboration. Archives of the framapad are available here: https://annuel2.framapad.org/p/(un)distance/timeslider https://annuel2.framapad.org/p/(un)distanceBIS/timeslider And the PDFs can be downloaded below