Featured Speakers

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Joseph Tabbi (UIC)
John Cayley (Brown University)

GUEST SPEAKERS:

Fox Harrell (Georgia Tech)
Gregory Ulmer (UF)
Terry Harpold (UF)
Jane Yellowlees Douglas (UF)
Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems)
Craig Saper (UCF)
Aden Evens (Dartmouth College)
David J. Bolter (Georgia Tech)
Maria Engberg (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden)
John Johnston (Emory University)
Maureen Turim (UF)

More speakers TBA.
 

----
VIDEOCONFERENCE

Session 1: Beyond Literary
N. Katherine Hayles (Duke), Nick Montfort (MIT), Jerome McGann (UVA), Matthew Kirschenbaum (UM), Michael Joyce (Vassar College)

Session 2: Perspectives of Machinic Expression
Rita Raley (UC Santa Barbara), Arthur Kroker (U of Victoria), Luciano Floridi (Oxford, UK), Lev Manovich (UCSD), Janet H. Murray (Georgia Tech)

Speakers' Profiles

Mark Bernstein is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc. At Eastgate, he has guided the development of innovative hypertext writing tools, including Tinderbox and Storyspace, and has overseen the publication of a distinguished catalog of original hypertext fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He has been program chair of the ACM Hypertext Conference (twice) and of WikiSym. With Diane Greco, he recently published Reading Hypertext, an anthology of classic writing about hypertext reading. He is currently at work on Tinderbox 5 as well as a book entitled A Natural History of the Link.

Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  He is the author of Turing's Man:  Western Culture in the  Computer Age (1984); Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and  the History of Writing (1991; second edition 2001); Remediation (1999), with Richard Grusin; and Windows and Mirrors (2003), with Diane Gromala. In addition to writing about new media, Bolter collaborates in the construction of new digital media forms. With Michael Joyce, he created Storyspace, a hypertext authoring system. With Professor Blair MacIntyre and the AEL at Georgia Tech, he is helping to build Augmented Reality (AR) and mobile technology systems for games and to stage dramatic and narrative experiences for entertainment and informal education.

John Cayley writes digital media, and has practiced as a poet, translator, publisher, and bookdealer. Links to his writing in networked and programmable media are at http://programmatology.shadoof.net. Three recent and ongoing projects are imposition, riverIsland, and what we will ... His last printed book of poems, adaptations and translations was Ink Bamboo (Agenda & Belew, 1996). Cayley was the winner of the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Poetry 2001 (www.eliterature.org). He has taught and been associated with a number of universities in the United Kingdom, and was an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London. In the United States, he has taught or directed research at the University of California San Diego and Brown University, where, arriving in the Fall of 2007, he is now appointed as a five-year Visiting Professor of Literary Arts with a brief to teach and develop writing in digital media. His most recent work explores ambient poetics in programmable media and writing in immersive VR, with parallel theoretical interventions concerning the role of code and the temporal properties of textuality. (photo by: Douglas Cape, z360.com)

Jane Yellowlees Douglas is Associate Professor of Management Communication in the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. Her research interests have revolved around hypertext fiction and interactive fiction, focusing on the applicability of literary theory, narratology and aesthetics to hypertext environments. She is the author of the hypertext fiction I Have Said Nothing and of the book The End of Books or Books Without End.

Maria Engberg is Ass. Professor at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), Sweden, and Director of the Bachelor’s program in Literature, Culture, and Digital Media. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Uppsala University. Engberg’s research focuses on contemporary experimental literatures in English, visual culture, and the impact of digital technologies on literature and culture with particular focus on digital literature. She is currently working on a collaborative book project about contemporary multimedial literature. With researchers in Europe, Engberg is investigating the state of electronic literature in Europe and she is helping to build scholarly resources about European e-lit. Engberg is the author of several articles about digital poetry, among them “Morphing into New Modes of Writing: John Cayley’s riverIsland” in Leonardo Electronic Almanac (2006) and the forthcoming “Aesthetics of Visual Noise in Digital Literary Arts,” CyberText Yearbook Database. Engberg is a Fulbright alumnus (2003-2004) and during January 2009, she was resident researcher at the Centre Culture Suédois in Paris funded by a research grant from The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities. She is one of the editors of the Electronic Literature Directory (http://directory.eliterature.org/).

Aden Evens is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, offering courses in digital studies, European philosophy, and composition. Following a doctorate in Deleuze Studies at McGill University he authored a book, Sound Ideas (U of Minnesota 2005), which examines technologies of music and sound. A particular attention to digital technologies motivates chapters on the audiophile preference for LPs over CDs, the Fourier transform as the chief technology of digital sound analysis and production, and the comparative phenomenology of digital and acoustic instruments with a focus on improvisation. Aden's current book project is Ontology of the Digital, locating the discrete code made of 0s and 1s at the center of the digital. The binary code provides the digital's unprecedented powers but also establishes its limits, and Ontology of the Digital is principally concerned with those moments when the digital surpasses the hard limit of the binary, to serve creativity. Aden has released two albums of electro-acoustic music on the Montréal-based Constellation label under the project name re:. 

Luciano Floridi currently holds the Research Chair in philosophy of information and the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics, both at the University of Hertfordshire, Department of Philosophy. He is also Fellow by Special Election of St Cross College, Oxford University, Senior Member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy at OUCL (the Department of Computer Science), University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford  and of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB). He is best known for his pioneering work on two new areas of philosophical research, which he has contributed to establish: the philosophy of information and information ethics. In 2006, he was elected President of IACAP (International Association for Computing And Philosophy). In 2009 he was awarded the Barwise Prize by the American Philosophical Association and became the first philosopher to be elected Gauss Professor by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

Terry Harpold (Phd, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Florida. His research interests and teaching include narrative and material operations of digital and print media; psychoanalytic theory; science and literature; and the scientific romance (primarily Jules Verne). His book Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2008. Recent essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne, Game Studies, ImageTexT, IRIS, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Revue Jules Verne, Science Fiction Studies, South Atlantic Review, and Verniana; and in edited collections such as Prepare for Pictopia! (Pictoplasma Publishing, 2009), Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008) and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Routledge, 2005).

Fox Harrell is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. His primary research interests include computational (interactive and generative) narrative, cognitive semantics, imaginative fiction for social critique and empowerment, experimental and cross-cultural narrative and social aspects of user-interface design. He is especially interested in the intersections of the above concerns, for example how cognitive science accounts of imagination (such as conceptual blending and metaphor) can inform design of expressive computational artifacts. He has presented his work internationally; sites of his publications and presentations include the MIT Press, the University of Toronto Press, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, CTheory and other book chapters, journals and conferences. He has also worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer.

N. Katherine Hayles Professor of Literature and English in  the English Department at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries.  Her book How We Became Posthuman:  Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998-99, and Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship.  Recent publications include My Mother Was a Computer:  Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, and Electronic Literature:  New Horizons for the Literary.  She is currently at work on a book entitled How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.

John Johnston is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Emory University.  The author of Carnival of Repetition, Information Multiplicity, and The Allure of Machinic Life, and editor of literature, media, information systems, a collection of essays by media theorist Friedrich Kittler, he is currently working on a book about networks, technics, and new vitalisms.

Michael Joyce lives along the Hudson River and teaches at Vassar College. He wrote afternoon, a story (1987) and thereafter published a number of other hypertext fictions on the web and on disk. His most recent print novel, Was: Annales Nomadique, a novel of internet, was published by Fiction Collective 2. Recently he has been collaborating in multimedia work with LA visual artist Alexandra Grant and has taken more and more to poetry, with poems appearing in various literary journals.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities), and Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity, a new “living/learning” program in the Honors College. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Kirschenbaum’s first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in early 2008. Currently he is co-authoring a report on Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and to be published by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Arthur Kroker is writer and lecturer in the areas of technology and contemporary culture. He is the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria.
Dr. Kroker's research interests include: contemporary French and German political theory; Canadian political and social thought; Technology, culture and theory; ethics and biotechnology. He teaches courses on technology and theory, and contemporary political thought. He is co-editor with Marilouise Kroker of the Digital Futures Book Series (UTP Press), and of CTheory, an international peer-reviewed electronic-journal of theory, technology, and culture. He recently co-edited with Marilouise Kroker Critical Digital Studies: A Reader (UTP Press 2008).

Lev Manovich is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California - San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and a Visiting Research Professor at Godsmith College (University of London), De Montfort University (UK) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is much in demand to lecture around the world, having delivered 300+ lectures, seminars and workshops during the last 10 years. His books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001). He has written 90+ articles which have been reprinted over 300 times in 30+ countries.

Jerome McGann is John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the author of many books including Fiery Dust (1968), The Romantic Ideology (1983), The Beauty of Inflections (1985), Social Values and Poetic Acts (1988),Towards a Literature of Knowledge (1989), The Textual Condition (1991), Black Riders (1993), and Poetics of Sensibility (1996). His volumes of poetry include Air Heart Sermons (1976), Writing Home (1978), Nerves in Patterns (with James Kahn; 1979) and Four Last Poems (1996). McGann is editor of the multivolume The Complete Poetical Works of Byron (1980– ), The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993), and the on-line The Rossetti Archive. He has been at the forefront of the digital revolution in the humanities. His pioneering critical projects on the World Wide Web have redefined traditional notions about interpreting literature. McGann was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Lowell Prize for best literary study for his 2001 book, Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies after the World Wide Web.

Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

Janet H. Murray is Dean’s Recognition Professor , and the director of Georgia Tech's Graduate Program in Digital Media. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) and Inventing the Medium: A Principled Approach to Interactive Design (forthcoming, MIT Press), as well as several works in Victorian Studies. Her recent interactive design projects at include a digital edition of the Warner Brothers classic, Casablanca, funded by NEH, in collaboration with the American Film Institute, and the InTEL Engineering Education Project, funded by NSF, as well as numerous prototypes of interactive television. Murray holds a PhD in English from Harvard University.

Rita Raley is Associate Professor of English at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, where she researches and teaches courses in
the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of new media. She is the author
of Tactical Media (University of Minnesota Press) and articles
on such topics as locative narrative, code art & poetry, literary
uses of mobile media, hypertext, machine translation, and text-based
media arts installations. She is currently working on an article on
dataveillance and an ongoing book project on Global English.

Craig Saper's The Readies  and Words both with Rice University Press, 2009, and http://www.readies.org focus on digital reading machines. With Freeman & Garrett-Petts he edited Imaging Place. Also relevant to digital studies: his books on Networked Art and Artificial Mythologies. Recent chapters and articles appear in "Applicants and Captions: A Surrealist (ethnography of) academia?" "Testing Artistic Genius in the Age of Networked Arts," "Book Type Machine: From Bob Brown's Reading Machine to Electronic Simulations, 1930-2010,""Sublimation as Media," "Materiality of a Simulation: Scratch Reading Machine, 1931" "Toward A Visceral Scholarship Online: Folkvine.org and Hypermedia Ethnography," and more. See http://www.readies.org/saper

Joseph Tabbi is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is the author of Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota 2002) and Postmodern Sublime (Cornell 1995), books that examine the effects of new technologies on contemporary American fiction. He edits the electronic book review, and has edited and introduced William Gaddis’s last fiction and collected non-fiction (Viking/Penguin). His essay on Mark Amerika appeared at the Walker Art Center’s phon:e:me site, a 2000 Webby Award nominee. Also online (the Iowa Review Web) is an essay-narrative, titled “Overwriting,” an interview, and a review of his recent work. He is founder and editor of the electronic book review (www.altx.com/ebr).

Maureen Turim is professor and director of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Professor Turim is author of Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press), Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge), and The Films of Oshima: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (Berkeley: University of California Press) and over 80 essays in journals on theoretical, historical and aesthetic issues in cinema and video, art, cultural studies, feminist and psychoanalyst theory, and comparative literature. Of particular relevance her "Artisanal Prefigurations of the Digital: Animating Realities, Collage Effects and Theories of Image Manipulation," Wideangle, special issue on Digital Technology ed. Timothy Murray. vol. 21 no.1. 2000. 48-62 and “Postmodern Metaphors and the Images of Thought”, Polygraph. An International Journal of Culture and Politics, no.13. 2002. 113-120.

Gregory L. Ulmer is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida, where he teaches courses in Hypermedia, E-Lit, and Heuretics. He is Joseph Bueys Chair in the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches a summer seminar on electracy and heuretics; and coordinator of the Florida Research Ensemble, a creative arts research group first formed in the late 1980s, focusing on choragraphy through “Imaging Place” since the mid 1990s. Ulmer’s books include: a grammatology trilogy — Applied Grammatology, 1985; Teletheory, 1989; Heuretics, 1994; and a second trilogy on the virtual consultancy known as the EmerAgency which applies grammatology and heuretics to the invention of electracy, especially concerning the practices of aesthetics, ethics and politics in the conditions of dimension pollution that Paul Virilio describes as the dromosphere (society of the spectacle). The published works are Internet Invention (2003) and Electronic Monuments (2005). The final installment in progress is Avatar Emergency.