Category Archives: News

One is a CROWD – Alexis Stamatis

Literature as a European mother tongue: In our series “One is a CROWD”, we introduce you to authors from all over Europe who will be involved in the CROWD omnibus reading tour, taking place from May to July 2016, featuring 100 authors who will be travelling through 15 European countries. We asked them three questions about text production, reception and mediation. In case you were wondering what a literary activist in Athens looks like, meet Alexis Stamatis!

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Partners in CROWD – Literaturhaus Schleswig-Holstein

The CROWD is on the move – please make yourself at home!
While others may get by with a little help from their friends, the CROWD Omnibus Reading Tour would not be taking place at all without them. In this portrait series, we would like to introduce you to those who have allowed us to fill in the gaps on the map and bring the whole of Europe together in the name of literature. From May to August 2016, our associated partners will be hosts, havens, and potential life savers for over 100 authors as they snake their way through 15 different European countries and over 40 cities. We asked our partners to tell us about their work in their respective regions; their vision for the CROWD network, and the significance of literature for them both within and beyond Europe’s borders. This is what they said:

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Speakers’ Profiles INTRE:FACE: Hannes Bajohr

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© Julia Pelta Feldman, 2014

Hannes Bajohr received his M.A. in philosophy from Humboldt University in Berlin, and is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, New York.

His research focuses on Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language, political philosophy, and digital literature. As a practitioner, Bajohr is part of the writers’ collective 0x0a.

His last works include Timidities (Berlin: Readux, 2015), a collection of corpus poetry, and Code and Concept (Berlin: Frohmann, 2016), an edited anthology on conceptual and digital literature.

About 0x0a:

0x0a is a writers’ collective for Digital Literature. At the moment, its members are Gregor Weichbrodt and Hannes Bajohr.

0x0a is the hex code for the line feed. It is a symbol that does not have an analogue in the analog. It cannot be pronounced and exists only as “control character.” It is thus the ideal symbol for the attempt to produce genuinely Digital Literature. 0x0a strives to be a workshop, a laboratory, a showcase and a focal point for digital conceptual literature. We want to start the discussion about this form of literature in Germany and beyond.

What is the Digital? A great promise: Everything is text. Images, sounds, movies are text. Even text is text. For it is not itself the last word, but only a wave on a submarine system of signs. Even the word “word” is, one level below, encoded as 57 6F 72 74 in hexadecimals, and lower again, as 01010111 01101111 01110010 01110100 in binary

Digital literature is not digitized literature. You can translate between the Digital and the analogue, but any such translation is both loss and gain, interpretation and distortion. Just as each medium creates its own reality, so does the Digital. The Digital has a different reality from the analog.

0x0a researches the possibilities of the Digital in text.

Create your “Automaten-Gedicht“:

Automatendgedicht

Speakers’ Profiles INTRE:FACE: Jürgen Neumann

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Foto: Jürgen Neumann

Jürgen Neumann started working with computers in 1984, and since then
has been looking for ways to deploy ICT in useful ways for organizations and society.

As a consultant for ICT strategy, he has worked for major German and international companies and NGOs. In 2002 he co-founded Freifunk, a not-for-profit community of free and open wireless network activists.

His recent activities include open source(d) hardware, the FLOSS based knowledge management tool DeepaMehta and lobbying for more open radio spectrum.

About DeepaMehta:

DeepaMehta is a software platform for knowledge workers. The special feature of DeepaMehta is the situation-centered user interface: information belonging to one working context is — together with its meaningful relationships — displayed and edited in a single window. Whether it is text, images, documents, emails, web pages, events or for example contacts.

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Speakers’ Profiles INTRE:FACE: Mika Lumi Tuomola

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Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola is professor in Design at Politecnico di Milano, Italia, and founder of Crucible Studio, the New Media Storytellingresearch group at Media Lab Helsinki, Department of Media, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland.

He researches and teaches generative/interactive storytelling and participatory drama.

As an internationally awarded writer, dramaturge and director, his artistic productions include the web drama “Daisy’s Amazing Discoveries” (Coronet Interactive 1996),  avatar and game world designs for “WorldsAway” (ICL-Fujitsu 2000), moving image installations “Myths for One” (Media Lab Helsinki 2002) and “Alan01” (Jaakko Pesonen & Crucible Studio 2008),  the dark musical comedy series “Accidental Lovers” for television and mobile devices (Yle 2006-7) and tactile poetry app “Antikythera” (Saila Susiluoto & Taiste 2015).

Antikythera

is tactile, game-like poetry application for iPad and other tablet devices. It is based on the Antikythera mechanism, the ancient analog computer from c. 100 BC Greece, found in the Aegean Sea in 1900.

Download to iPad from App Store: http://antikythera.taiste.fi/. (Available only in Finnish.)

More INFO in ENGLISH HERE

Kun pimeä havahtuu, on myöhäistä, joku lamppu on syttynyt jo.
    (When the dark wakes up, it is too late, a lamp is lit already.)

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The application is experimental and voluminous; it contains over 200 poems written for the mechanism. The artwork links together poetry, new technology, visual and sound art, and researches and explores new forms and possibilities of digital poetry: broken chronology, randomness and determined paths of reading, locked poems which open procedurally, games, visual and animated poems, temporality, disappearing and appearing poems, poems where verses change their places from one poem to another, words and lines which change their meanings and react to the reader’s physical actions, her/his touch and movement of the tablet.

The Antikythera collection of poems has six parts – or storyworlds, presented as the gears of the mechanism – each part containing 32 poems written for 32 different themes (e.g. love, transition, death etc.). Zeppelin Letters from The Hindenburg (Ilmalaivakirjeet Hindenburgilta) is about young Adele and Hindenburg’s last journey in 1937. Labrys, the feminist and feminine version of the story of Ariadne, is set on the Treblinka extermination camp. The Witch (Noita) tells about the 17th century witch-hunt in Finnmark, Vardo Island, Norway. In The Empress (Keisarinna), Elisabeth of Austria monologues about restlessness, rage and lack of freedom. Images of Artists (Taiteilijakuvia) is situated in pre-war Vienna and discusses poverty, art, love, sex and artist’s muses via two voices: Oskar Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler and Egon Schiele’s lover Valerie Neutzil. Town Stories (Kaupunkitarinoita) imagines a medieval European town with a whole new set of little ghost and horror stories between poetry and prose – it’s about poverty, evil and horror.

There is also an Oracle in Antikythera, divining mechanism based on the “free verses” of all the poems in the thematically organised database. The database also provides the reader with date, season and moon phase sensitive daily verses via the moon interface traveling in astronomical real-time unless interrupted: the cosmos goes on unless a reader pauses it.

Based on awarded poet Saila Susiluoto‘s overall idea and concept, Antikythera presents her latest collection, co-dramatised for new media by director Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola, visual art and interface design by Shakti Dash, sound art & design by Antti Nykyri, and system architecture by Rasmus Vuori. The work has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture (AVEK, Milla Moilanen & Elena Näsänen) and Kone Foundation, and has been technically finalised for the Finnish Apple App Store during Spring-Summer 2015 by the Taiste production company.