Titled «Electronic Literature: Affiliations, Communities, Translations», ELO’17 will welcome dialogues and untold histories of electronic literature, providing a space for discussion about what exchanges, negotiations, and movements we can track in the field of electronic literature. The conference will take place from July 18-22, 2017 and is hosted by University Fernando Pessoa, Porto, and the Festival and Exhibits will be held in the center of the historic city of Porto, Portugal.
The three threads (Affiliations, Communities, Translations) will weave through the Conference, Festival and Exhibits, structuring dialogue, debate, performances, presentations, and exhibits. The threads are meant as provocations, enabling constraints, and aim at forming a diagram of electronic literature today and expanding awareness of the history and diversity of the field.
Our goal is to contribute to displacing and re-situating accepted views and histories of electronic literature, in order to construct a larger and more expansive field, to map discontinuous textual relations across histories and forms, and to create productive and poetic apparatuses from unexpected combinations.
Odile Farge with her talk entitled “Communities, hacking, and open-source software: when elit meets digital humanism” will be stressing out the fact that the two fields of investigation, literature and humanism, question our way of “being-in-the-world” according to Martin Heidegger’s concept. Digital humanism places man at the center of philosophical, social, economic and legal preoccupations. How to draw on the wall the face of a humanism in the digital age? One of the response would be to study the program, software tools, and communities where members recognize each other, and to face the cultural, political and industrial challenges of a rapidly changing world. One of the issue of digital, whether it is literature, creation or humanism lies in the need to escape from consensual formatting and the ability to grasp a digital environment, learning ways of doing things, and developing critical thinking.
To learn more, please visit ELO2017 website.