Extreme TrackingOn Literary Encoded Objects: CFP: ELO AI (6/3-6/6/10)
Ξ November 9th, 2009 | → 2 Comments | ∇ conferences, codework |
CCS scholars should send their abstracts and proposals to the Electronic Literature Organizations 2010 conference at brown. ELO AI, June 3-6, 2010 at Brown, will offer an opportunity for readings of software art and code object of the literary kind.
While CCS can speak to any encoded object, these digital-born literary objects in many ways make the interpretive work easy. Or perhaps that goes too far. Literary code objects, such as codework, are written to be read in a way that typical encoded objects are not. The critic might discuss the Bonaventure Hotel or Motel 6, but she has a very different project when she considers Motel Motel Motel.
Literary encoded objects offer easier entry on two grounds. First of all the work has been created by those talented in layering significance and the possibility of meaning-making upon objects. The second way these objects become easier to approach is the significantly larger body of critical works that take up digital literary works — written by many of the people who will attend the ELO AI conference.
This is not to say, of course, that the artistic code project is the only object that can be adequately studied. However, as literary studies are to the study of textual objects, readings of literary code works are to the studies of encoded objects in general.
However, in my experience, the literary encoded objects offer the tools for critiquing the general software objects, their use of code provides the tools and methods of interrogation of code objects. Literary encoded objects help critics read source code in productive ways. But we must make sure we do not remain in the comfortable, soft-lit rooms of the art museum. That is no good for the our growing understanding of the implications of encoded objects in our world, nor is it good for these literary code objects.