Sunday 12 June 2016

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