[drha - digital resources in the humanities and art conference]

I've been in beautiful devon four days already and am only finally getting 'round to blogging about it. That is mainly because I'm been tweaking my presentation which has now been done. YIPPY! It was a really good panel actually. It was entitled "Fresh Perspectives on Texts" and began with Kate Pullinger talking about her collaboration with babel, Inanimate Alice. The best point Kate made, important to both writers AND readers, is that CONTENT COMES FIRST! Exactly. We all like a good story and I think we (as in the people who are theorising and critiquing and engaging with digital literatures) have had enough of it being all about the technology. We need to see some content emerging, content other than that of the technology. I'm fascinated with the different kinds of narratives online technology will be bringing us. Will Web 2.0 and user generated content help different ideas of narrative evolve? Anyway, after Kate's talk, Simon and I present my theory of multi-mimesis. I talked a bit about the theory and then applied it to Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls which Simon then applied my theory to his own artistic creation, Let Us Turn. The final speaker on the panel was Jerome Fletcher. He presented us with his narrative endeavour which picks up on the idea of pentimento. Instead of painting over, we were able to uncover and recover parts of words and images within his screen. Slowly we would build up a picture, image, and narrative. This kind of narrative unfolds and emerges very slowly and only through sustained readerly interaction and memory of previous words and images. Jerome asked us if we thought it was a tool or a performace, or was it overlay or erasure, or was it reading or writing? I think we need to take away the "either/or" binary and see it as all of these ideas working together and highly dependent on the reader and how she or he comes to the piece.





This is (from left) Professor Sue Thomas, Kate Pullinger, and moi, hard at work enjoying the creative side of the Nintendo DS Lite's pictochat. It's all for research of course...