Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity in Practice (ELMCIP) Seminar.

Arnolfini Bristol, May 3rd/4th 2012

As part of the ELMCIP research project, (www.elmcip.net ) and under the aegis of University College Falmouth, a conference is being held at Arnolfini Bristol to investigate the relationship between e-literature/digital text and performance. Members of the ELMCIP project, international speakers and practitioners will discuss the function and understanding of performativity and its relationship to digital literature through a series of papers, presentations and practical engagements.

Although the field of e-literature is rife with references to performance, they have tended to remain relatively untheorised. In the main, analysis or investigation of performance is restricted to the relationship between the text output (on the interface or projected into a performance space) and the live body responding performatively to that text, or else generating text through performance. There has been little attempt to fold digital text performance into the wider context of the ‘turn to performance’ among the humanities in recent decades. It is against this background of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, the ethnography of ritual, performance of self and gender, performance writing, etc, that the conference will take place. While continuing the investigation of live performance, we will be seeking to broaden the scope to include; interactivity, the performative gesture of the hand and fingers (digital text) on the interface, the performativity of language itself on the screen, social performance or how digital texts ‘perform’ us, the performance of codes and scripting, and the performance of the machine itself, ie what does an engineer mean when s/he talks about performance. In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital environment (dispositif) and, in order to give a fuller account of this complex of performative modes, we will also be investigating how they interact and collaborate with each other.

Conference proceedings, along with artist’s pages, will be published in a dedicated issue of Performance Research Journal (2013)

Call for papers: If you are interested in taking part in this event, please send an abstract (250 words) for a paper of 20 mins plus 10 mins addressing aspects of the ideas outlined above, or a proposal for a digital text performance/workshop, to

Invited artists (thus far) : Annie Abrahams (Netherlands), Donna Leishman (UK), Cris Cheek (UK), J.R. Carpenter (Canada), Joerg Piringer (Austria).

Closing date for abstracts: Dec 30th.