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Call for Papers – Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) 2018, Montréal – deadline extended to midnight 8th January 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS – ELO 2018
Mind the Gap!
Thinking Electronic Literature in a Digital Culture:
Explorations and Interventions
http://elo2018.org/

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce its 2018 Conference and Festival, hosted by the Université du Québec à Montréal. The Conference, the Festival and Exhibits will be held August 13th to 17th in downtown Montréal, Québec, Canada. Mind the Gap! will be bilingual, with both English and French tracks, showcasing Montreal’s important and dynamic local Québécois e-lit/digital arts community and extending a special welcome to e-lit’s global francophonie.

The aim of this conference is to think about e-lit in a digital culture. What is its relationship to current cultural practices and trends? Two directions are proposed: explorations and interventions. The first direction features e-lit’s exploratory nature, its formal aspects, its use of technology, its renewal of narrative conventions, and at the same time its impact on literary theories and methodologies to renew themselves. The second direction considers e-lit’s place in the public sphere, its relationship to digital and urban culture, to forms of conservation and presentation, and also to performance.

TOPICS

Possible topics for presentations, performances and exhibits are:

– Gaps in the field
– Translation gaps: code, natural language, media
– Narrative theory, temporal gaps and the imaginative space of the in-between
– Understanding e-lit: towards digital methodologies and/or pedagogies
– Mobile technologies’ effect on writing and reading habits
– Perceptual gaps: AR, VR, and Linking Structures
– Politics of e-lit: gaps between reception communities
– Gaps and Bridges between e-lit and digital humanities
– Gender gaps in e-lit
– Spoken screens: the gap between performance and presence
– Linguistic and cultural specificities to E-lit
– Electronic literature and urban culture
– Mind the gap! E-lit and humour
– Gaps between datasets and interfaces
– Archiving differences between libraries and museums
– Exhibition differences: ephemeral and permanent installations
– What is different about e-lit for children?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

For the Conference (peer-reviewed):

– Paper (15 min – a presentation of a single paper by one or more authors – 500 word abstract).
Lightning talk (5 min – a short paper for a focused presentation – 250 word abstract).
– Poster (1 page poster). n.b. A poster can be combined with a lightning talk.
– Panel (90 min – a proposal for a complete panel including 3 or 4 separate papers on the same general topic – 250 word overview plus 500 word individual abstracts).
– Pre-conference Workshop (Action sessions, focused on hands-on group work on a given project or topic – 500 word abstract).

For the Festival (peer-reviewed):

– Performance and screening (10 min – readings, actions, interventions – 250 word abstract; provide links to images, videos, etc.)
– Gallery exhibit (provide description of installation, as well as technical needs)

Submissions open: October 16th, 2017 to December 15th, 2017 8th January 2018.

Acceptances sent out: January 30th, 2018.

You must attend the conference to appear on the program. You may submit as many proposals as you want, but participants may present a maximum of two pieces/papers.

Registration: Early registration will close April 30st, 2018. There will be a registration fee for the Conference (to be determined), which will include ELO Membership, invitations to all sessions of the Conference, the Festival, and the Exhibits. Lunch and coffee-breaks will be served. Conference banquet requires an additional fee.

The conference will be hosted by the University du Québec à Montréal, at the Berri-UQAM subway station. The campus is fully wheelchair accessible. ELO 2018 is committed to making its conference accessible and will provide a simple accessibility guide to all venues.

Some of the sessions will be streamed via the Conference website.

For more information, contact Bertrand Gervais, ELO 2018 Chair, elo2018mtl (at) gmail.com