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Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen
Online Seminar: Sunday, 15th December 2002
Time: 1 pm Los Angeles : 4 pm New York : 9 pm London : 10 pm
Rome : 8 am (Monday) Sydney
Place: trAce Forum Chat
Kate Pullinger chairs an online seminar with
Deena Larsen, Rita Raley and
Rob Wittig to discuss the following questions:
- Can we identify common key moments of change for writers moving
to writing online?
- Is it possible to identify common key skills which must be
acquired for this to occur and what kind of support is required
to facilitate it?
- Are the opportunities for collaboration provided by the web
causing a significant move away from the single-authored text?
- How can writers using the medium as distributive and communicative
tool be brought to work with writers and artists using it as
new form of artistic expression?
Kate
Pullinger's introduction and pre-seminar statements by the speakers
Dedicated
discussion area
The seminar will take place in the trAce
Forum Chatroom. The conversation will be logged and the log
added to this page in due course. If you are new to chatting we
recommend you try accessing the chatroom before the event. Please
contact Helen Whitehead
if you require further assistance.
Deena
Larsen has been fascinated by computers since they
were tape drives attached to tv sets. She has explored the possibilities
in an 1992 MA thesis (hypertexts and hyperpossibilities), several
works from Eastgate, and a panoply of works on the web. She works
as a technical writer for the U.S. government, cohosts trAce/ELO
chats, sets up hypertext and new media workshops, and hikes in
her spare time.
Rita
Raley is Assistant Professor of English at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses in the
digital humanities and global literary studies. She is currently
working on a book about digital textuality and has published relevant
articles in Postmodern Culture, Electronic Book Review, and Leonardo
Electronic Almanac. She presented a paper on the practice of codework
at Incubation 2002. In 2002-2003, she is co-director of the undergraduate
Literature and Culture of Information specialization at UCSB.
Rob Wittig
is an electronic author. His background includes a 1987 Fulbright
Scholarship to Paris to study technical, artistic, and theoretical
aspects of creating visual/verbal literary works with online publishing
technologies, on the invitation of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, and the Centre Georges Pompidou. In the early 1980s Rob
co-founded IN.S.OMNIA, an literary electronic bulletin board system
deemed 'legendary' by cyber-chronicler Howard Rheingold. Rob's
book, "Invisible Rendezvous, Connection and Collaboration
in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing", Wesleyan University
Press, 1994, is an analysis of these spirited projects. Rob now
directs TANK20_language_arts, an electronic literature publisher,
and teaches in both literature and graphic design programs.
Kate
Pullinger has been working as a print-based writer
since 1988. Her books include the novels The Last Time I Saw Jane,
Where Does Kissing End?, and, most recently, Weird Sister, as
well as the short story collection, My Life as a Girl in a Men's
Prison. She co-wrote the novel of the film 'The Piano' with director
Jane Campion. Kate Pullinger also writes for film and television;
her feature-length screenplay 'Lily' is currently in development
with Box TV. She has lectured and taught widely. In 1995/96 she
was Judith E Wilson Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge;
she currently teaches at Birkbeck College, is an advisor for the
University of Middlesex Creative Writing MA, and is visiting Writing
Fellow at The Women's Library, London Metropolitan University.
She is a Research Fellow at trAce, looking at forms of online
narrative and new media writing.
Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen
This seminar is part of the project Mapping
the Transition from Page to Screen, funded by the UK Arts
and Humanities Research Board and managed by the trAce
Online Writing Centre at Nottingham
Trent University. The project facilitates examination and
analysis of a unique body of material alongside a programme of
experiential research involving a collaboration between Kate Pullinger,
a print-based author keen to investigate the potential of electronic
literature; Sue Thomas, originally a print-based author but now
working in both media, and the trAce team of specialists. Pullinger's
engagement with the project is a combination of training and support
as she learns how to read and create works in the digital medium.
This is a snapshot of a very specific evolutionary moment in
the history of literature which could be compared to the moment
when painters first began to make use of the camera. Although
the camera did not come to replace painting, it altered the nature
of artistic visual experience. Online writing is poised in a very
transitory moment in its own development. It currently stands
outside most English Studies and at this point it is not yet known
what contribution, if any, it will make to English Literature.
Nor is it known how New Media Writing will affect the way writers
approach the making of texts, or the way they are read. Our area
of practice is new, experimental and largely unrecorded. We hope
that this research project will help promote understanding and
appreciation of New Media Writing.
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