The Digital Age Archives - Interdisciplinary Italy

A Girls’ Night Out with Dante and Virgil: Transforming the Divine Comedy in the Age of Fandom

Mattia Petricola — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 07:00:58 +0000

Since at least the time of Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories, every product of popular culture has had its fans (short for “fanatics”). Since at least the time of Star Trek’s first season, communities of fans (or fandoms, from “fan” + “kingdom”) have been reimagining the characters and stories they love through such practices as fan fiction and fan art, among many others. Because fandoms are usually associated with contemporary pop culture phenomena, it may come as a surprise to learn about the existence of a vast network of fans and fan activities revolving around none other than Dante and his Divine Comedy.

There is, of course, a long tradition of popular culture and media engaging with the Comedy and its creator through literature, film, the visual arts, comics, games, commercial brands, and more. So much so that the reception of Dante in popular culture has developed into a research field in itself within the wider domain of Dante studies. What is striking, however, about the Dante fandom – or, at least, what struck me enough to write about it in this book – is that it invites us to rethink Dante’s poem in radically original ways.

So what has the red-hatted Florentine got to do with online fandom?

There seem to be at least two sides to this question.

On the one hand, narratives that re-imagine the Comedy, its world, and its characters can be found on every major fan fiction online repository, from fanfiction.net to Wattpad through Archive of Our Own. They differ wildly in tone, style, and genre, from prose to poetry, from tragedy to comedy, from melodrama to pornography, from epic adventures in the Underworld to intimate love stories – particularly between Dante and Virgil. One of the most popular Comedy-themed fan fictions on Archive of Our Own imagines the adventures of the characters from the Harry Potter saga as they traverse the circles of Dante’s Hell. Another text casts Dante and Virgil as an ordinary couple falling asleep on the couch. Yet another narrates in tercets (!) a sexual encounter between Dante and Virgil on the shore at the base of Mount Purgatory. Circulating online is also a profusion of Comedy-related fan art and illustrations, hosted on platforms like Pinterest, DeviantArt, and tumblr. The latter, in particular, is home to a flourishing Dante-inspired fandom, whose activities range from humorous posts (fig. 1) to webcomics like those by the user binary-bird (fig. 2), who also created a series of illustrations entitled nel mezzo – a little trip through Dante’s Inferno.

On the other hand, the Comedy itself is re-interpreted – in both playful and serious tones – as a work of fan fiction. In October 2014, R.E. Parrish posted a comic on his tumblr blog (fig. 3) in which Dante is depicted as a dreamy fan fiction author who has fallen in love with Virgil. In April 2016, Vox published an article entitled Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, and 3 other pieces of classic literature that are also fan fiction. A month later, The Divine Comedy ranked n. 2 in the article 11 Classics That Are Secretly Fanfiction on Bustle magazine. Between September and October 2021, a post on Tapas Forums entitled Why can’t we call Dante’s Inferno a fanfiction [sic] developed into a 6,000-word debate.

The unfolding of the Comedy’s reception in the world of fandom could thus be summarized through the dichotomy “Dante’s poem and fan fiction” vs. “Dante’s poem as fan fiction”.

Dante’s fandom may very well be the community in which the most radical, playfully irreverent, and wildly creative transformations of Dante and the Comedy are currently taking place. The exploration of this intermedial realm requires interdisciplinary methods blending Dante studies, popular culture studies, and digital ethnography.

We have just begun to scratch the surface.

Fig. 1. A Comedy-themed post on tumblr. 2023. https://www.tumblr.com/kusurrone/721380854177431552/a-sentence-i-didnt-know-existed?source=share

Fig. 2. Webcomic by binary-bird. Dante and Virgil meet Zagreus, the protagonist of Hades, a videogame set in the underworld. 2021. https://binary-bird.tumblr.com/post/641474847486197760/a-hades-divine-comedy-crossover-on-my-dash

Fig. 3. Webcomic by R.E. Parrish. 2014. https://reparrishcomics.com/image/99437760558

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Catharsis In the Age of the Metaverse. A Workshop at Brown University, April 17-18, 2023

Massimo Riva — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 11:07:46 +0000

Technology is the mythology of our time and simulation is the pervasive cognitive mode of contemporary techno-culture. Like such mythological places as Xanadu or Guixu (the location in Chinese mythology where all water, including the milky way, flows into a bottomless void) technological constructs such as the Metaverse or Open AI often describe what does not (yet) exist but might one day be reached – what the technology might one day do, not what it can do at this very moment (for a pre-history of Virtual Reality, see my digital monograph, https://shadow-plays.supdigital.org/). This is what the “meta” in the Metaverse conveys: usually translated as “beyond,” as in metaphysics, or “about,” as in metadata (data about data), “meta” also serves as a prefix meaning self-referential, as in meta-theory, a theory about a theory, and other interesting conceptual constructs such as meta-cognition (cognition about cognition) and meta-emotion (emotion about emotion). Two recent workshops held at Brown University and the University of Edinburgh’s Futures Institute, last April, have focused on the transformation of the classical concepts of “mimesis” and “catharsis” in the age of the metaverse: “Rethinking Katharsis: VR Narratives and the Empathy Machine,” as the Brown workshop was entitled. The emergence of powerful “neuro-mimetic” technologies that increasingly infiltrate, regulate and saturate both our emotions and our cognitions provides the backdrop for this reconsideration of the category of catharsis, from its early formulations in Plato’s and Aristotle’s works to its transformations as an aesthetic and psychological or psychoanalytical concept. At the Brown workshop, artists-scholars presented different perspectives on “catharsis” as a neuro-mimetic concept, a meta-emotion for the digital age which also implies, and requires, a new kind of cybernetic meta-cognition. Here is a quick review (the reader can follow the links and get a better sense of the individual works).

Freely based on the Futurist Cookbook of 1932, Mattìa Casalegno’s Aerobanquets RMX – A Multisensory Journey presents a unique culinary experience, “VR as you never tasted before.” Diners wear visors and instead of seeing the actual food they taste, prepared by real chefs, see virtual shapes and colors: a synesthetic experience and a kind of “Blind Man’s Bluff game” (with food) designed to rewire our sense of taste and produce a virtual catharsis involving our taste buds and our imagination.
Virtual Virtual Reality 2 by Samantha Gorman and Tender Claws studio, is an example of game-driven storytelling – a witty meta-take about the dangerous allure of the Metaverse: “When a metaverse shuts down, what happens to the avatars left behind?” In this darkly funny action-adventure game, you can pilot your “mech body” through the chaos of a dying metaverse, rescuing abandoned avatars along the way. The escape from the Metaverse, back to the safety of “meatspace,” is the cathartic outcome wittily promised by VVR2.
Rod Coover’s “Altering Shores Cycle” makes the user “drift” on uncharted waters in a virtual kayak, in between the visible and the invisible, on to the “beyond-environment” that we must all learn to navigate because of climate change and algorithmic inscrutability. Catharsis here is a meta-cognition: to fathom the unfathomable, the scale, the complexity, and confront the rising fears of the all-too-real “metaverse” we already inhabit.
Finally, Elisa Giardina Papa’s Cleaning Emotional Data and Technologies of Care show the ways in which service and affective labor are outsourced via Internet platforms, exploring such topics as empathy and immaterial labor – “human-in-the-loop” companies that provide “clean” datasets to train AI algorithms to detect emotions. Worker 7 – Bot? Virtual Boyfriend/Girlfriend documents the artist’s three-month-long “affair” with an interactive chatbot, posing the question of catharsis as a “human-machinic” combination. (Another example of AI penetration into the affective sphere are the Chinese artist Chouwa Liang’s films, which explore Chinese contemporary intimate relationships with AI lovers from a female perspective).

Taste, Play, Fear, Love. From these diverse projects, a clear understanding begins to emerge that “catharsis” can indeed be reconsidered as a meta-emotion for the digital age: a neuro-mimetic experience that we increasingly share with our machinic Other. Do we have any choice but to embrace our hybrid futures? Our avatars? Our AI Shadow?

Mattia Casalegno, Aerobanquet RMX (https://www.mattiacasalegno.net/aerobanquet-rmx/#11)

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Henry Jenkins + Massimo Riva Online Public Lectures (Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School)

Interdisciplinary Italy — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 16:52:26 +0000

We are delighted to invite you to these free online public lectures:

Convergence Culture in the Age of Covid-19: A Fever Dream

by Professor HENRY JENKINS

(July 2, 17:30-18:30 GMT+1)

AND

Simulating the Past: From Analog to Digital (and Vice Versa)

by Professor MASSIMO RIVA

(July 3, 17:30-18:30 GMT+1)

The events are hosted by the Interdisciplinary Italy research team as part of the Second Summer School The digital turn: When, why, and how to embrace it (1-3 July 2021), organised by Prof Clodagh Brook (Trinity College Dublin) and Dr Eleonora Lima (Trinity College Dublin).

To attend the lectures, please register via Eventbrite at these links:

Prof Henry Jenkins’s public lecture: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prof-henry-jenkins-public-lecture-interdisciplinary-italy-summer-school-registration-158891642179?keep_tld=1

Prof Massimo Riva’s public lecture:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prof-massimo-riva-public-lecture-interdisciplinary-italy-summer-school-registration-159551682377

Lectures Summer School

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Convergence Culture in the Age of Covid 19: A Fever Dream

Henry Jenkins — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 07:30:37 +0000

“I am Kino-Eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, who I’ve created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just now when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls shot by me in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of walls and details, I’ve managed to arrange them in an order that is pleasing and to construct with intervals, correctly, a film-phase which is the room.”

(Dziga Vertov, Kynoks: A Revolution, 1923)*

Zoe Bell – Hollywood stunt coordinator and sometimes actress – grew restless during her self- isolation and brought together her celebrity friends (Halle Berry, Drew Barrymore, Zoe Saldana, Juliette Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Thandie Newton, among them) to stage a slobberknocker of a video, where each self-isolated participant kicks, punches, headbutts, tickles, or hurles stuff at the person in the next segment, who receives the blow and then passes it along as a challenge to the next creative person to respond. Think of it as the action movie equivalent of the old surrealist game, exquisite corpse. Soviet montage theorist and filmmaker Dziga Vertov would have recognized the principals that enable Instagram audiences to construct a continuous chain of action across these fragments, each shot at different times and different locations, but all seeming to unfold before our eyes as continuous action.

Vertov talks above about constructing a room – an imagined space built from elements of twelve rooms. I feel like I’ve spent the past three months in that room, no longer brought together under the control of the man with the movie camera, algorithmic rather than cinematic. We all live in that imagined space today as we shuttle between zoom meetings, as we construct reality across the borders of our neighbor’s spaces, and as we stage ourselves against backdrops appropriated from the world’s greatest art or the best Hollywood movies. The Soviet montage artists created new perspectives through juxtapositions across shots (montage) and juxtapositions within layered images (superimposition) and so do we. We form relationships where the shots join; we express identity through our ability to reshape our backgrounds, and I have been in some Zoom meetings, where increasingly restless participants start to form patterns by coordinating their backdrops.

In such a world-weary time, juxtaposition itself becomes entertainment, much as motion was in the early cinema. Last weekend, I spent five hours watching a game, Sequester, modelled partially on Survivor, partially on Big Brother, and being staged on

Twitch. In this case, the game is played with former Survivor contestants but more often, it’s teams of hardcore fans of those same programs. The players, logging in from their own home and in their own screen, negotiate with each other, inside five virtual “rooms” and vote someone out of the game every twenty minutes or so. The contestants move fluidly between imaginary “rooms,” though part of the game mechanic limits how many players can be “in” a room at any given time. And spectators can watch across any of the five streams or play them all at once. And if this is not enough, there’s another room full of color commentaries sharing what they saw and what they think will happen next. And fans on various social media channels are offering their own commentary, responding to surveys, and otherwise, playing along. All of this pushes against the limits of our capacities for attention (mine certainly) and against the constraints of contemporary technological infrastructure as images freeze or sputter. Too many viewers, too much going on.

How does this relate to the confrontation of old and new media, mass commercial media and participatory culture, which I mapped in Convergence Culture (2007)? The movie theaters are locked and no blockbusters are being released for at least another month or more. Television networks are running out of new content and for the moment, the sound stages are empty. Some television series are producing episodes from the cast’s homes, playing scenes, even singing Stephen Sondheim songs, together, from hastily constructed sets or simply in their own kitchens, dens, or bedrooms. And some performers (see the fight scene mentioned above) are making home movies and sharing them with the world, much as many ordinary people are. They do so with greater resources. They are able to push to the front of the cue and demand more public attention yet these amateur videos by media professionals are only one element in a churn of content which tugs at our sleeves for attention in the midst of the pandemic. Videos shot with cellphone cameras of people without masks in shops confronting harried Walmart clerks or being escorted out by other masked patrons. Live streams of protestors demanding to reopen the economy. Home videos of families re-staging Disneyland attractions. Influencers doing public service announcements or modelling new hair-dos. Political figures tweeting increasingly rancid messages. Zoom sessions of university classes. Religious ceremonies performed across fragmented spaces. Final desperate messages to the bedside of dying relatives. It’s all taking place in the same room.

Any piece of this mediated “content” can be amplified by television and surface on our newsfeed. It is not that distinctions between old and new media, commercial and grassroots producers, no longer exist, but they matter less and less right now. Once we thought social media was isolating, cutting us off from the people around us. Now, it seems the only connection we have left as we stare with increasing boredom at the walls of our own apartments, not able to go out, barely able to stand staying inside. Our media takes us where we ourselves cannot go. We live on the interstices.

I know this is too simple – that we should be worrying about who owns the data from all those Zoom calls and what’s being done with it, that we should acknowledge that most of us most of the time are still watching what’s on Netflix and Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime. But for the moment, in this kind of fever dream, I am fascinated by the blurring boundaries between different modes of media production.

This is convergence culture in the age of Covid-19.

* In Michelson, Annette, and Kevin O’Brien (eds). Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2008: 17.

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. Among his books are Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Participatory Culture, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists, and most recently, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff. He blogs regularly at henryjenkins.org and cohosts the podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?

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Opera Aperta: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Literature

Emanuela Patti — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 08:30:03 +0000

When Umberto Eco published his seminal essay Opera aperta [The Open Work] in 1962, a number of experiments across literature and computer machines had set the ground of what we call today “electronic literature”. In 1952, Christopher Strachey had designed a literary computing text generator, Love letters (1952) which selected words from a list sorted by parts of speech, first creating an address, then five randomly chosen sentences, and finally a salutation of “Yours – (adv.)” M.U.C. (i.e. Manchester University Computer). The experiment revolved around the repetition of a rhetorical formula, namely the love letter, which, in this case, produced a parodistic effect due to the random combination of words. A few years later, in 1959, Theodore Lutz developed Stochastic Texts [Stochastische Texte] on a Zuse Z22 computer – a program that produced random short sentences based on a corpus of chapter titles and subjects from Franz Kafka’s The Castle. In 1960, the English poet and painter Brion Gysin, expelled from the Surrealists and close friend of some Beat writers, created the first “permutation poem” I am that I am with a Honeywell computer. This poem was performed as part of a series of sound poems on BBC radio, so that different stresses and inflections contributed to the perception and potential significance of each verse. Last but not least, in 1961 the Italian poet and writer Nanni Balestrini created the first computer poem, Tape Mark I using an IBM 7070, followed by another remarkable experiment in 1966, the novel Tristano (1966).

By intercepting the spirit of his time, Eco’s Opera aperta looked at the work of art as an “open system of interactions”. What Eco meant by “opera aperta” was: a) a collaboration between the author and other agencies, whether these are readers, performers, viewers, audiences, or indeed machines; b) a potential convergence of different arts and media; and, significantly, c) the uncertainty involved in the value of randomness – what in information theory was called “entropy”. At the time, computer technologies were not adequate to meet fully Eco’s ambitious goals for artistic creativity. The human brain was still much better at processing the human experience through written language, taking inspiration from the literary and artistic tradition, and reconfiguring it in original and meaningful stories or poetic images for the present. In his well-known intervention Cybernetics and Ghosts (1967), Calvino questioned whether a machine would ever be capable of replacing the poet and the author, ultimately reassuring his readers that literature is not â€˜merely the permutation of a restricted number of elements and functions. Certainly, it is not.

In the age of deep learning, big data, speech recognition and quantum computing, AI is rapidly evolving into something different from the mere permutation of limited components. The vast amount of digitalised literary works, audiobooks, and data on readers’ habits and preferences, as well as the advanced connectivity of 5G and the incredible speed offered by the latest generation of quantum computers (such as the IBM System Q One) constitute a valuable resource for the future of literature. In recent years, AI has not only assisted readers’ consumption of literature with a number of new devices and platforms which can also recommend content tailored to a specific user – see, for example, Audible, Kindle, and, of course, Amazon. AI has also lent itself to exploring new possibilities in terms of content, interactive design, and software development patterns. One of the latest inventions is spoken interfaces, such as Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google now, which have paved the way for new interactive forms of storytelling, as demonstrated in the BBC project Talking with Machines. One of the most recent experiments, developed in collaboration with Rosina Sound, is the BBC program The Inspection Chamber, a comedy/science fiction story in which listeners get to be part of the story when it streams through your Amazon Echo or Google Home and cues you to insert your very own lines into the story. Although it has some similarities with the choose-your-own-adventure tales, The Inspection Chamber instead ultimately emulates the immersive experiences of video games – these being one of the most popular hybrid genres blending fiction, cinema and digital platforms. This is just a first step toward the achievements that AI is expected to reach in the creative economy. According to a survey of over 350 experts published in 2017, by 2049 AI is expected to write a novel or short story that will make it to the New York Times best-seller list.

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De-code Gender: A Knitted Perspective

Irene Albino — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 12:46:59 +0000

During the International Conference, Interart/Intermedia Experimentation in Italy Through the Ages, Royal Holloway 12-13^th April 2019, I had the honour of presenting the collaborative and cross-disciplinary project which I have worked on together with Ellen Jonsson. I looked especially at the research behind our work, and the creative process of making it.

In our practices, Ellen and I are both interested in the technical and conceptual crossings between design, art and craft in relation to data visualization (in this case text and textiles), often working through social design issues, sexuality and gender-challenging themes.

is a performance of the making of a 25-meter knitted manifesto which unravels ideas and preconceptions of binarisms: craft and design, analog and digital, female and male, zeroes and ones. Through the hacking of binary systems, we challenged the notion of gender binary tout court.

The performative design piece was presented during Degree Show 2: Design, at Central Saint Martins, London. For this final collaboration, we found there was no better way to talk about binarisms than by using the binary system par excellence: weaving and the Jacquard loom is the first form of programming. The process took two months of researching, experimenting and prototyping. During this time, we learned how to set up a knitting machine, we hacked the Brother 950i, worked out on how to knit type and wrote an essay on gender binaries.

Perfectly summed up in the word textus, text and textiles are deeply linked and interconnected with coding. Language and knitting are coded systems themselves: a set of rules and functions. In this process of interlacing yarns and ideas, the medium becomes the message. The project was based on thorough research about the links between the binary language of weaving-knitting and that of computing, as well as about the stereotypes around gender and technology: our focus was the contrast between the male-dominated computer hacking, and the domestic female ‘quick and easy’ hobby of knitting.

Fig 1 Vintage domestic knitting machine, Brother series (source:web)
Fig 2 The Jacquard Loom, invented in 1800 (source:web)
Fig 3 A punch-card used to create patterns in the Jacquard loom (source:web)
Fig 4, 5 Vintage posters advertising domestic knitting machines (source: web)

extract1

The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wires, synthetic fibres, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fibre-optic cables, pixels screens, telecom lines, the Net, and matrices, the World Wide Web to come.

(from: Zeros + Ones. Digital Women and The New Technoculture, Sadie Plant, 1991, knitted text for Issue 1)

The 25-meter long knitted essay produced during the Degree Show includes a title, 4 chapters and a bibliography, and it is a collection of extracts and quotes by authors that inspire us in our practices: Margaret Atwood, Sadie Plant, Marshall McLuhan, Monique Wittig, Donna Haraway, Anni Albers, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, just to name a few.

The project also explores the communal spirit of a craft; a space in which people can share thoughts and opinions. Craft as a vehicle for political change.

For our second iteration, specially commissioned for our participation in the London Design Festival 2018 within the Creative Unions Exhibition (Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins), we produced Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times, we knitted a 25-meter long fairy tale, challenging gender stereotypes in the fine line that divides History from a Tale.

The point is that we have not formed that
ancient world—it has formed us. We ingested
it as children whole, had its values and
consciousness imprinted on our minds as
cultural absolutes long before we were in fact
men and women. We have taken the fairy tales
of childhood with us into maturity, chewed
but still lying in the stomach, as real identity.

(from: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, A. Dworkin,1974, knitted text in Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times )

According to Joseph Campbell “myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” Folk tales and folk art (craft) are both parts of an inseparable interwoven net. They contain the spirit of the collective unconscious. We asked ourselves: what is the impact of those stories in shaping our perspective on gender? Our research focused on the dangerous promotion of gender stereotypes through fairy tales and the authors and thinkers that challenged those representations. With this project we wanted to write a different tale, in an optimistic attempt to imagine a more inclusive and queer future.

Each day for the duration of the performance we knitted one chapter of this tale, each told from the perspective of a new narrator. The structure of the written piece was, this time, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron framed narrative structure – a literary technique of a story within a story. In The Decameron, ten characters/narrators shelter in a secluded villa outside Florence to escape the Great Plague, and each one tells a story every night.

And on day the first
the first narrator
sat by the spinning yarn
and thus begun:

(beginning of each chapter, inspired by The Decameron)

In our story, all voices are one and multiple at the same time. The narrator is an archetype, made out of an indefinite plurality of narrators. The story is a combination of perspectives, that we ambitiously put together inspired by Vladimir Propp’s formulas for creating stories.

You can find the texts and the bibliographies in the project’s website: www.projectunravel.com

Fig 6, 7, 8, 9. . Performance during Degree Show 2: Design, 2018
Fig 10. Knit detail
Fig 11. Prototyping sessions
Fig 12. Second installation for London Design Festival ’18, Creative Unions exhibition
Fig 13, 14, 15. The title for Issue 2 was inspired by one of the first collections of fairytales, Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals, 1697, written by Charles Perrault

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When Literature and Technology Fail to Align

Eleonora Lima — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 07:00:09 +0000

What is peculiar to interdisciplinary projects that bring together literature and digital tools? Technological instability, I would suggest. This immediately raises issues concerning fruition and accessibility. But is this instability a failure? Not quite, I believe. This perpetual threat of falling out of synch – or worse, failing to ever harmonise – allows for a constantly renewed discussion of intermediality. Let me briefly present two instances of this difficult techno-literary alignment so better to understand its potential.

Between 1973 and 1977, Italo Calvino worked on creating a computer-generated novel based on his L’incendio della casa abominevole, a short story about a computer programmer tasked with solving a series of twelve crimes that led to the burning of the house in which the four tenants died. Calvino contacted two computer scientists, Paul Braffort from the Oulipo, the Parisian literary group of writers and mathematicians, and William Skyvington from IBM, and asked them to write an algorithm capable of producing all the possible combinations between the four characters and the twelve criminal acts[1]. He planned to choose the the most satisfying narrations for his novel. The project was unsuccessful as the programmers were unable to give Calvino what he envisioned. Moreover, Skyvington accused him of not understanding how computers worked and therefore asking for the impossible. Literature and technology failed to align; but is this a statement about Calvino’s incompetence or of his visionary mind? If we consider, for instance, what the Artificial Intelligence text generator recently designed by the research institute OpenAI is able to accomplish – namely to produce well-written and believable pieces of literature – it seems like Calvino’s thought experiment was in fact alerting authors about what was coming.

The second instance of failure is more recent. In 2017, the publishing house Rubettino released an unusual edition of Gianni Toti’s video-poems first published in the 1980s. Originally meant to be broadcast on television and by now barely accessible, the video-poems were made available by Rubettino through a free augmented reality App: the users scan the cards provided in the edition and watch the video animations of Toti’s poems on their phone. This commendable remediation project raises nevertheless two problematic issues. First, it changes the nature of the artistic experience: Toti’s video-poems were meant to pop-up unexpectedly on TV screens and challenge its commercial and dull aesthetics. Transported onto a smartphone, the videos lose their contextual meaning and serendipitous nature. Secondly, and more significantly, the augmented reality App has already stopped working, as its developers stopped updating the software, rendering the videos inaccessible.

We have two instances of failed alignment: Calvino did not quite understand the real potential of the computer programming applied to literature, and the technological update of Toti’s video-poems did not survive for long; it also appeared to betray the author’s original intention. However, they both succeed in showing intermediality as a practice more than a product, an opera aperta in constant dialogue with past and future: Calvino anticipated creative issues posed today by AI text generators; the augmented reality edition prompts us to consider the specificity of TV as a medium, therefore inviting us to reflect on the past. Their value is not in harmonising literary and electronic language, but rather in problematising the boundaries between the two and questioning the limits of media representation. I dare say that is when literature and technology do not align that the most stimulating issues are raised.

[1] Cfr. Susie Cronin (2017). ‘Cybernetic Collaborations, Literature Machines and Italo Calvino’s L’incendio della casa abominevole,’ The Italianist, 37:1, 69-85.

From William Skyvington, ‘Machina sapiens: essai sur l’intelligence artificielle’ (1976)

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Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages: Theories, Methodologies and Future Perspectives

Emanuela Patti — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 19:51:36 +0000

The ‘digital turn in the humanities’ has inevitably raised a number of questions about how digital technologies have transformed research, teaching and dissemination in Modern Languages. While hybridity still tends to dominate our teaching and research methods and objects of study – we mix traditional/analogue and new/digital practices to acquire knowledge and develop skills -, digital technologies are significantly changing the way we understand literacies and pedagogy; publishing, research materials, our objects of study, and the notion of ‘culture’.

In order to discuss these transformations in our subject, on 15th February 2019, the Centre for Visual Culture at Royal Holloway hosted a one-day international symposium titled ‘Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages’ (see programme below), co-organised by Emanuela Patti and Giuliana Pieri as part of the Humanities and Arts Research Institute programme of events (HARI) on ‘Digital Culture & Creativity’. This symposium aimed to explore theories, methodologies and future perspectives in the field of digital culture and creativity in Modern Languages, by bringing together scholars in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities, as well as artists, Media Arts historians and curators. We had the honour and pleasure to discuss these questionsÂ with a wonderful line-up of speakers, including the two keynote Claire Taylor (Liverpool) and Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), together with Paul Spence (King’s College), Erika Fülöp (Lancaster), Valentino Catricalà (Media Arts Festival), María Mencía (Kingston), and our chairs James Williams (Royal Holloway), Sarah Wright (Royal Holloway), Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester).

The overarching question of the symposium, as Emanuela Patti highlighted, was how to address the new wave of interdisciplinarity in Modern Languages which has been rapidly triggered by digital convergence. Arguably, Modern Languages, Digital Humanities and Digital Culture & Creativity intersect in new forms. What are already very ‘interdisciplinary disciplines’ such as digital humanities, electronic literature, media/digital arts, post-cinema collide and merge in different ways. As scholars and teachers of modern languages, cultures and societies, we are in fact increasingly exposed to texts and ‘signifying practices’ which are digitally-born or mix media, as it typically happens in the era of convergence culture. What forms of collaboration could we envisage between DH, ML and Digital Culture and Creativity?

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Programme

Friday, 15 February 2019

10.30 Arrival, Refreshments

11.00-11.10 Emanuela Patti (Royal Holloway), Introduction

Modern languages and the digital: theories, methodologies, case studies

11.10-12.00 (chair: Sarah Wright, Royal Holloway)

Keynote Lecture 1: Claire Taylor (University of Liverpool), ‘Digital Humanities, digital culture, and Modern Languages’

12.00-13.00 (chair: Guyda Armstrong, University of Manchester)

Paul Spence (King’s College), ‘Key elements of a critical Digital Humanities-Modern Languages (DHML) research agenda’

Erika Fülöp (Lancaster), ‘Digital culture in French Studies in the UK’

13.00-14.00 Lunch

Modern Languages and digital arts: national and transnational perspectives

14.10-15.00 (chair: James Williams, Royal Holloway)

Keynote Lecture 2: Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), ‘Telegraph, Airmail, Satellite: The Visual Imaginary of Global Media’

15.00-16.00 (chair: Emanuela Patti, Royal Holloway)

Valentino Catricalà (Media Arts Festival, Rome), ‘Rethinking the medium through media art. The Italian case’

María Mencía (Kingston), ‘The Winnipeg: the poem that crossed the Atlantic’

16.00-16.30 Coffee break

16.30-17.00 (chair: Emanuela Patti)

Closing discussion, ‘The interdisciplinary challenges of Digital Culture Studies: what forms of collaboration between Modern Languages, Media Arts and Digital Humanities?’

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Gianni Toti’s Poetronics in Augmented Reality

Aron Greco — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 10:50:25 +0000

Gianni Toti (Rome, 24Â June 1924 – 8Â January 2007) was the Italian poet, author, journalist, photographer and filmmaker who created ‘Poetronica’, a fusion of poetry and electronics. The poet demonstrated the potential of electronic language by writing, filming and mixing videopoetry. The vast range of material produced by Toti has been catalogued and made publicly available by La Casa Totiana. In accordance with Totiâ€s own principles, his works have also recently been translated into augmented reality. Inspired by Totiâ€s â€œAlice nel Paese delle Cartaviglieâ€ – in Totiâ€s own words, â€œa mid-length film that launched a campaign about the crisis of paper and wonderâ€, digital startup Poetronicart and publisher Rubbettino have created a series of â€˜cartaviglieâ€, texts with a related augmented reality experience accessed via an app. As a whole, the poetronic object resulting from this collaboration, La parola poesia Ã¨ la prima poesia. Pensieri e immagini di Gianni Toti sulla poesia, comprises 6 â€˜cartaviglieâ€, 11 infographic cards and 1 symbol. When used with the Layar app, the infographics enable augmented reality access to new multimedia content: they are animated onscreen with unpublished video interviews and extracts from poetronic works. Through the written words, we hear the echo of the poetâ€s words, we can read his poetry and access a digitized archive.

Through augmented reality technology, the infographics literally animate Gianni Totiâ€s thoughts and the words come to life: a dream come true. Augmented reality makes it possible for visual perception to cross scattered worlds which are finally brought together onscreen. The infographics grant access to the artistic reconstruction of an imagination which envisaged a technology that had not yet been invented; a technology that today allows us finally to read and relive the poems and the poetic world of one of the greatest digital poets of the twentieth century. Poetry returns through a new technological medium – the smartphone or tablet that we carry around every day. The most significant innovation of the cartaviglie is that we have a new way to access poetry. When presenting this project last November Pia Abelli Toti, president of the Casa Totiana association, recalled Gianniâ€s words, â€œYou must learn to see what your eyes do not seeâ€. These words seem to best encapsulate the inspiration behind this latest elaboration of Totiâ€s work, which encourages us to broaden our sensory perceptions and underlines the parallel work of art and technological science as both possible, and necessary, for us to develop new lines of thinking. Such new modes of thought can allow us to live poetry – today more than ever abandoned in a temporal abyss – and through it, to reflect more broadly on language and its continual re-evolution. New languages have the potential to transform reality, as Toti has already taught us with electronics.

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REWINDItalia. Early Video Art in Italy

Laura Leuzzi — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 09:44:22 +0000

In the 70s and 80s, Italy was a fertile ground for the experimentation of video as art practice. At the time, the most relevant Italian video art centres – which included art/tapes/22, Centro Video Arte in Ferrara, Videoteca Giaccari in Varese and Galleria del Cavallino in Venice – produced andÂ exhibited fundamental early video artworks by Italian, European and American pioneers. The Italian video art centres attracted internationally renowned artists from all over the world.

In 2011 the British video pioneer and researcher Stephen Partridge was awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to develop the research project REWINDItaliaÂ (2011-2014) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, following the successful AHRC funded research project REWIND (2004 – ongoing), led by Partridge himself, which since its beginning has recovered more than 500 British early video artworks. REWINDItalia aimed to investigate: why and how Italy provided such a key platform for the experimentation of video that at the time was a new medium for the arts; whether it was possible to identify any particularly â€œItalianâ€ aspect in that activity and the circumstances in which it took place; the reasons why in the late 70s/early 80s this experimentation became more marginalised and early video in Italy has been always kept to the margins in the mainstream cultural sector; the legacy of this analogue experimentation on digital contemporary artistsâ€ video.

REWINDItalia did not aim to migrate to digital analogue videos but focused on the emergence and exceptional development of early video art in Italy and aimed to trace the many histories video art practice and theory in Italy in the 70s and 80s and bring them back under the international spotlight.

A key issue investigated by REWINDItalia was how Italian artists – coming from different experiences, contexts and backgrounds (including traditional visual art forms, poetry, music, and film) approached video and how they viewed the possibilities it presented as a new medium. It emerged that video art in Italy played as a fundamental platform to experiment different mediums and practices connected to technology, interactivity and â€˜intermedialityâ€ and how video co-concurred to the development of different arts and their hybridisation and ultimately to media arts.

The investigation of medium specificity – which was particularly relevant for Cavallino artists in the same way it had been in other countries, including the UK – stimulated for example a cross-fertilisation of music and visual arts in the work of artists as Michele Sambin and the composer Claudio Ambrosini, and video poetry in that of Luigi Viola.

An exceptional example of â€˜intermedialâ€ and interdisciplinary approach to the medium and media convergence in Italy are Luca Maria Patellaâ€s early videos that were uncovered and reassessed by REWINDItalia after more than thirty years of oblivion. This group of videos – which includedÂ Grammatica dissolvente – GazzÃ¹ff! Avventure & culturaÂ – showed how Patella employed video as a multimedia platform to incorporate film, prints, artistsâ€ books, photography, performance and slides. These media – as video itself -were what Patella defined mediaÂ â€œwithout weightâ€. These media using non-traditional techniques escaped the pitfalls of a â€˜physical, moralistic, artistic weightâ€ (but also cultural and political), typical of traditional techniques.

Patellaâ€s videos are also a rare visual documentation of the machine – invented by the artist himself and now dismembered – for â€˜manual and musical varied fadingâ€, that was composed of two projectors and allowed to alternate and merge images and text in a balanced and modulated sequence that could be closely controlled by the artist, anticipating many effects later produced with the digital.

Cover of REWINDItalia. Early Video Art in Italy/ I primi anni della videoarte in Italia, edited by Laura Leuzzi and Stephen Partridge (John Libbey Publishing, New Barnet 2015)

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