New book proposal, Games and Literary Theory (eds. Welsh & Goggin)

I've just agreed to contribute a chapter on Jason Nelson's poetry games to Timothy Welsh and Joyce Goggin's proposed collection, Games and Literary Theory - very exciting project, so fingers crossed it'll find a suitable publisher. My proposed chapter will be a version of my forthcoming talk at a Gothenburg-based Digital Poetry symposium in September, which will also feature the likes of H.C. Rustad and J. R. Carpenter.

My proposal:

“Can You Can Play?” Metaludicity and Surrealist Hyperattention in Jason Nelson’s Poetry Games

Astrid Ensslin, University of Alberta

Abstract

Literary gaming (Ensslin 2014a) happens at the creative interface between hyperattentive gameplay and deep-attentive close reading (Hayles 2007). Literary game designers experiment with the question of whether hyper and deep attention are indeed compatible, and they do so by juxtaposing creatively the readerly and playerly elements of a text/game. In this sense, literary games evoke a ludic metazone by foregrounding (poetic) language and other forms of semiotic expressivity, thus producing a variety of artefacts that inhabit various loci on the spectrum between ludic digital literature and literary computer game (Ensslin 2014b).

In this talk I’m going to focus on the poetry games of American digital poet and artist, Jason Nelson. In his ludic oeuvre he translates the clash between close reading and gameplay into an array of diversely surreal gaming interfaces that literally play with and undermine the rules of game design but also those of language and other semiotic modes. I will show that underlying his puzzling and often “annoying” (Alfredsson 2016) interfaces are concise techno-, socio- and ludocritical messages that emerge procedurally through kinetic, cognitive and curiously fun-oriented engagement with the ‘codes’ of his works.

References:

Alfredsson, J. (2016), Personal Correspondence, June 29^th, 2016.

Ensslin, A. (2014a) Literary Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ensslin, Astrid (2014b) ‘”Womping” the Metazone of Festival Dada: Jason Nelson’s Evidence of Everything Exploding’, in Marcel Cornis-Pope (ed.) New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres, pp. 221-231. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hayles, N. K. (2007) "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes." Profession 2007: 187-99.

ELO buzz

ELO 2016 at University of Victoria, BC, has just come to a close. It was a wonderful experience to see such a diversity of creative and scholarly projects. My favorite works on display (either in the gallery or in delegates' presentations) were Inanimate Alice, Episode 6 (more ludic and immersive tan ever - a real pleasure to play and read); Jason Nelson's Impossible Box (haptic fun with hardware); and SIS's / Nam Le's The Boat (both shocking and fascinating in its horrifying beauty). Following an inspiring discussion with Mark Marino, I've now set up a Facebook Group for Young People's elit - a platform for an informal SIG and curatorial / readerly community enjoying and wanting to share children's and teenage digital fiction and poetry. Academic sessions that particularly stood out for me were Kathi Inman Berens', Jessica Pressman's and Caitlin Fisher's panel on Feminist Horizons; Dave Ciccoricco's, Ilya Szilak's and Caitlin Fisher's panel on Narratives and Narrativity, and the keynotes by Anastasia Salter and Christine Wilks. I also massively enjoyed being on a panel on Literary Interventions with Kate Pullinger and Aaron Angello. I regret having to miss Sandy Baldwin's elit pedagogy session, but instead I enjoyed a refreshingly informed interview/discussion with James O'Sullivan. Thanks for the opportunity.
My own talk was a co-authored paper (with Alice Bell, Isabelle van der Bom and Jen Smith) on Dreaming Methods' WALLPAPER installation - an empirical reader response analysis on matters of immersion, site-specificity and multimodality.

The full slideshow is available here