Abstract of Kate Eichhorn's paper

Late Print Culture’s ‘Social Media’ Revolution: 

Authorship, Collaboration and Copy Machines

Dr. Kate Eichhorn 

Culture and Media Studies 

The New School University 

New York City

In the mid 1960s, Marshall McLuhan observed that “Xerox has brought a kind of revolution into the publishing world that is only being felt slowly” but one that “will be felt more and more.” Today, it’s difficult to imagine the conditions under which McLuhan could have constructed the copy machine as “revolutionary.” After all, for most of us, the copy machine is more likely to conjure up thoughts of tedious labor than technological transformation. In fact, this may explain why so few scholars in the fields of media studies, book history and publishing studies have seriously considered the impacts of this ubiquitous late twentieth-century technology of print reproduction. In this paper, part of a book-length study on the copy machine’s impact on late twentieth-century aesthetic and social movements, I argue that the copy machine—a relatively new “old technology”—did have widespread and transformative impacts on the writing, production and dissemination of texts and on the development and role of textual communities in the decades preceding the arrival of the web. More specifically, this paper locates the copy machine as a precursor to contemporary “social media.” Following McLuhan who maintained that copy machines “enable the reader to become a publisher” and further enact a “total invasion of copyright,” thereby bringing about many “reversals in the relation of publics and writers,” I argue that copy machines played an essential but hitherto under appreciated role in promoting collaborative forms of authorship and cultural production in the 1960s to early 1990s, thereby paving the way for the types of user-generated content and social interaction now associated with Web 2.0 environments.

Abstract of Jim Barrett's paper

Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home:

Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin

Jim Barrett

Language Studies/HUMlab

Umeå University

Sweden

“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.

“One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”

Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry. However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as the present situation in the education sector of most Western democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of culture.  There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works. Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual, sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism, iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of the digital works.  These works are

Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995)

Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2004)

Façade By Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2006)

Second Life http://youtu.be/9g-kYvK3P-Q

CONSTRUCT by salevy_oh (2011)

The Celebration by Iris Piers (2011)

Speakers at Remix in Retrospect

I am happy to announce that the following speakers have agreed to take part in the symposium:

Professor Adriaan van der Weel, Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University
Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Modern Dutch Book History and lecturer in Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University. His research interests include the digitisation of textual transmission and popular reading and publishing. Van der Weel is member of the editorial board of Logos, Forum of the World Book Community. His most recent book project is Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge, which will appear with Manchester University Press in August 2011. 

Dr Kate Eichhorn, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, New York
Kate Eichhorn's research is broadly concerned with the aesthetic and political efficacy of our everyday practices in those places where literature, art and social activism meet. One of her current book-length projects is Adjusted Margin: The Copy Machine as a Co-Agent of Social Change (a media history investigating how copy machines supported the rise of feminist and queer counter-publics in the late twentieth century). In addition to her research in the fields of book and publishing history, cultural studies and media studies, she is a writer and literary editor. 

Dr Adam Smyth, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Smyth's research explores the literature and culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His research interests include the circulation and evolution of texts between different readers, writers, and forms of publication, and the cultures of manuscript and print. He published on textual fragmentation in seventeenth century England, on printed anthologies and on life-writing. He is currently working on a book titled Literature and Laughter in England, 1485-1660,and a book on the 1630s Anglican religious community of Little Gidding.

Dr Jenna Ng, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge
Jenna Ng is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research at CRASSH explores the intersections between image, presence and mobility in digital media technologies, particularly on how the kinesthestic in digital media images challenge screen engagements in digital culture today. She researches primarily on the cultural, technological and critical dimensions of images in digital media, with particular interests in mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems. Her other research interests include digital cinema, cinephilia and Asian cinema (Chinese, Japanese, Singaporean). 

James Barrett MA, HUMlab, Umeå University Sweden
Jim Barrett is a doctoral candidate at Umeå University in Sweden in English Literature and works as a teacher and researcher in HUMlab. He researches on narrative in transcultural and digital media contexts, with a particular interest in the concepts of reading and performance. He also works with digital art, virtual worlds, pedagogy that involves digital media, and digital culture. He teaches cultural studies, literature, and narrative design in 2D and 3D media. 

Feike Dietz MA, Department of Early Modern Dutch Literature and Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University
Feike Dietz' PhD-project 'Emblematic Dynamics in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Word, Image, Religion' is part of an international research project and focuses on the reception of the Counter Reformational emblem book Pia desideria (Antwerp, 1624) in the early modern Northern Netherlands. Her publications include an article on manuscript rewritings of printed emblem books in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. 

Remix in Retrospect: The Symposium

The annual Re-Mix symposium is organised within the framework of the English-language interdisciplinary minor program ‘Re-Mix: Creativity, Participation and Ownership in a Digital Age’, which is hosted by the Department of Arts and Culture at VU University Amsterdam. This year, the symposium is more specifically connected to the course ‘From Commonplace to Copy-Paste: Readers Using Texts’, focusing on a diachronic point of view. 

How may knowledge of historical developments in manuscript and print culture feed the current debate on authorship, reading, copy-right, and creativity in the digital age? And how may a contemporary point of view help us understand and evaluate past practices?

Six internationally renowned speakers will discuss the changing roles of authors and readers in different stages of media history (from manuscript to print and digital textuality) and the implications of these changes for the creation of texts and the status of authorship. 

A round table discussion involving all speakers as well as the audience will conclude the afternoon.

Date: 21 October 2011
Time: 1 PM-6 PM
Location: VU University Amsterdam