~ digital media ~

Martina Pfeiler on poetry film

On 2 November, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - interviews, theory

Martina Pfeiler is a German scholar of literature and American studies specializing in, among other things, the history of poetry and technology. She’s the author of the book Poetry Goes Intermedia: US-amerikanische Lyrik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts aus kultur- und medienwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. We spoke in the garden of the Pfefferbett Hostel in Berlin on October 19, 2014, during the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.

Reference is made to the following films:

The conversation was wide-ranging (and I’ve edited out more than half of it—please excuse all the jump cuts), covering such topics as how poetry film fits into the larger context of poets’ use of technology, how poetry films may be used in the classroom to introduce students to poetry as a whole, and how the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has changed (or not changed) over the years. My favorite thing that Dr. Pfeiler said was this:

I could see myself going to something like an international poetry museum, where you have different rooms where you can explore a poetry film, or poetry films, either theme-based or throughout the last century, and interact with it again—just me and the film. So that experience: like an installation, where you take time, you sit in your little installation box, it’s all black, maybe some other, four or five people are sitting on the floor but you don’t necessarily know where they sit.

Yes! I love watching videos in art museums. Someone needs to do this. Surely there’s a billionaire out there looking to put his or her name on a new, unique museum?

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Call for papers, presentations and works for exhibition: Writing Digital, 2-4 July 2015

On 27 October, 2014 by Lucy English with 0 Comments - conferences, related genres

After the success of the last two MIX DIGITAL conferences, Bath Spa University is hosting Writing Digital: MIX DIGITAL 3 in the newly completed Commons building at the Newton Park Campus, just outside of Bath. Bath Spa University’s School of Humanities and Creative Industries, with its stellar Creative Writing Department, is at the forefront of both research into and teaching of creative practice across many forms. MIX DIGITAL has established itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, attracting an international cohort of contributors from the UK, Australia, and Europe as well as North and South America. From 2015 the conference will be biennial and will become one of the flagship conferences for the university.

Writing Digital will take full advantage of our brand-new Commons building and its interactive spaces through hosting a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations, seminars, keynotes, discussions and workshops, as well as an exhibition of work by conference participants.

Our partners, The Writing Platform, will showcase the two winning projects from the competitive bursaries they will have awarded earlier in 2015 for new creative writing and technology projects. There will also be a separate call to digital artists for entries to an international competition to create work for our Media Wall.

Confirmed keynotes include Naomi Alderman talking about how and why a literary novelist came to be the imaginative power behind the hugely successful apps, Zombies! Run, and The Walk.

Papers/presentations and workshops are invited in relation to the on-going themes of creative writing and digital technology, the future of the book, new forms of publishing, and new forms of digital curation, and in any of the following areas:

  • Digital fiction and digital poetry
  • Digital art and text
  • Non-fiction and multi-platform publication (digital and print)
  • Digital and interactive scriptwriting (including theatre-making and film -making)
  • Transmedia practice
  • Collaborations between writers and technologists
  • Participatory media
  • Transnational creativity

In partnership with the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE there will be co-curated strand for which presentations on the following are sought around either the practice of interactive documentary and or the emergent field of ‘ambient literature’, including mobile, locative, and other site-specific storytelling forms.

In partnership with Bath Spa’s Media Futures Research Centre there will be co-curated strand on ‘Analogue Futures’ for which invitations on the following are sought: the digitalisation of writing practices and techniques; remediation associated with emerging digital technologies; slow media; concepts and cultures of vintage, heritage and authenticity; sustainability and materiality within the realm of digital media.

Workshops on creative practice and pedagogical papers in relation to any aspect of the above are welcome. Please note that works submitted for exhibition will not be considered unless the artist is attending the conference.

A selection of conference papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal of international standing.

There will also be a separate competitive international call to create a new artwork for our eight-metre high digital gallery space, MediaWall; this work will be launched during Writing Digital.

Abstracts of up to 300 words for a 20-minute paper/presentation or a 90-minute workshop should be sent to mixdigital2015@gmail.com by 31 January 2015. Conference booking will open in November. A limited number of rooms on campus will be available for delegates.

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Call for submissions to new print anthology of political poetry welcomes “audio/visual media”

On 4 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - related genres

In what may be a sign of the times, I noticed this in the widely subscribed Creative Writers Opportunities List (CWROPPS-B):

Sundress Publications is now accepting poetry submissions for a new anthology on the politics of identity, to showcase the substantial amount of political writing that is being done today. This print anthology, edited by Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith, will include multimedia features: we are open to submissions in audio/visual media (e.g., video files of ASL poetry, audio files of spoken word poetry, etc).

I guess this must mean that the publishers are contemplating a complementary digital edition of some sort — a website, app, and/or ebook — which itself is good to see, given the challenges that coding poetry can present. Sundress Publications is “a (mostly) woman-run, woman-friendly publication group founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of online journals and publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats.”

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MIX conference to explore “transmedia writing and digital creativity”

On 16 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - conferences, related genres, theory

Videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves is a featured speaker at an intriguing-sounding conference slated for July 16-18 at Bath Spa University in Britain. Registration is open for the MIX conference, which has its own website.

The conference will take place at Bath Spa University’s postgraduate centre at Corsham Court from 16th-18th July 2012. Its aim is to bring together practitioners and theorists working with writing in digital media. The purpose is to create a core of research knowledge both practical and theoretical. The conference will present academic papers as well as presentations and workshops by current digital practitioners. There will also be a public exhibition of digital work created for this conference.

The questions we will be addressing are: How can new media be used for serious artistic purposes and how can we create a suitable critical vocabulary for this? What is the relationship between digital writers and the commercial world of ‘gaming’. Who are the audiences for digital writing and how can they be accessed? There will be submissions from those who work in digital media, concrete poetry, text art, poetry and performance, poetry and film, film poems, digital poetics, poetry and art, poetry and music, digital narratives, game writing, intermedia poetry, transmedia writing, language art, visual writing and installations.

Though the deadline has passed to propose a paper, there’s an open call for video narratives to be exhibited at the conference — deadline June 1st.

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