Cirrus@Austlit

'The acute phases of the Covid-19 pandemic precipitated, for many, an abrupt shift to digitally- mediated, fully-remote work and education; for others, remote work and education were already realities. As the pandemic dragged into its third year, there emerged increasing political and public appetite for a “return to normal” – which, for the many Australian institutions who offered few or no fully-digital classes before 2020, is figured as a return to pre-2020 on-campus operations. This goal is justified by a deficit framing of online education relative to in-person learning, eliding the strengths and affordances of learning in digital spaces. If we are to prepare students to write effectively, we need to take seriously the notion that writing is always in digital environments and harness the strengths of online writing instruction such as scalability and improved accessibility. In this article, we draw on a case study of a hybrid researched writing class to demonstrate how an online-first Writing About Writing pedagogy helped students build the confidence, flexibility and self-efficacy needed to establish distinctive writerly identities. This prepares students to write more effectively in novel and rapidly-changing contexts, and offers one approach for building a sustainable, effective, realistic culture of writing.' (Publication abstract) 

'In the 21st century, the demands of digital presence and the distractions of the internet simultaneously challenge writers wishing to represent contemporary life and threaten the attention readers are willing to give to literature. In this paper I argue that the short story cycle is a literary form that is capable of representing digital life and does so in a way that extends and expands the way that we read. I take Elizabeth Tan’s 2017 book Rubik as my case study and my analysis focuses on the way Tan uses two key features of the short story cycle form to represent and simulate life in the digital age. I begin with a discussion of how Tan uses the multiplicity of the cycle form to demonstrate the polymediation of life in the developed world and that the use of discrete, separate stories in the cycle allows for switches in voice and style which not only simulates the polyphony of digital life but also encourages us to contrast the different ways individuals use mobile technology to manage their lives. Following this, I demonstrate how Tan uses the connectedness of the cycle form to create hyperreal nested narratives in Rubik, highlighting the blurring of the boundaries between online and offline, between reality and simulation, and in doing so encourages active participation from the reader.' (Publication abstract) 

'This article will explore how hypertext technology in Twine might be used by writers to expand and augment creative nonfiction life writing about place and space. Twine is a digital storytelling platform for creating interactive, nonlinear choose-your-own-adventure type narratives. Using a case study of a personal essay on homesickness written by the author of this article using Twine, this paper argues that Twine’s functionalities can be employed to represent and explore associative networks of memories and multi-directional thought pathways. Drawing on place theory by Gaston Bachelard and Edward Casey, it responds to the questions: how might writers represent living and moving through the multi-directional and multi- temporal nature of place? And what new mediums could be employed to reflect the exploratory creative research process of life writing about place?' (Publication abstract)

'‘Dolphins in the Reservoir’ is an interactive recombinant work of moving images, text and sound. It confronts the many social challenges we face through the subjective, contradictory and often uncanny experiences of individuals. Thematically it passes through challenges to health, the environment, and fast-eroding democracy; our attempts to educate order out of chaos; philosophical and scientific ways of thinking about consciousness; and possible futures, including the rise of AI. Its recurrent dolphin theme transmutes many of these ideas.Saturated with media, the individual experiences a multimodal montage of the imaginal and mundane, the institutional and vernacular, the dystopian and utopian.. Juxtaposed and multilayered, the text, images and sound employ polysemy and synaesthesia while the interface evokes a murky, liminal realm. ‘Dolphins’ is structured in six distinct cycles, which repeat with variation. A single cycle of the work grows from isolated media fragments towards a dense plurality and diversity. V/users can drive the piece with clicks, and they can drag to rearrange elements. Three preformed musical sources juxtapose acoustic and digitally transformed sound, including sonified Covid-19 wave statistics. ‘Dolphins’ features trumpet by internationally renowned soloist John Wallace, our collaborator in (austra)LYSIS, the creative ensemble of which all three authors are part.' (Publication abstract)

'“How to Knit a Human – the Interactive Version” was created with choice-based digital storytelling, through the Twine platform. The pathways the reader can take represent the inconsistencies of memory(loss) from a severe episode of psychosis I experienced in 2011 and enforced electroconvulsive therapy treatments. The creative process for the interactive version began with my adaptation of my memoir manuscript. As I developed this piece of electronic literature, I incorporated the visual along with the text, creating my own animations, drawings, and scans for an immersive experience. The reader can engage in these parts of my story and actively participate in the losing and regaining of agency through my narrative perspective, to gain a better understanding of my experience. As a result, this work could also benefit mental health professionals as an important resource, to empathise with one example of a patient’s journey through the psychiatric hospital system. Through the digital form, I allowed my experience to travel beyond what a traditional text can do by utilising multiple choices that link to different alternatives and possibilities that exist in my memory. By taking power in my own valuable lived experience, I aim to reduce the stigma in wider society, and institutions.'  (Publication abstract)

'‘SYSTEM_ERROR’ is an interactive generative poem which explores the fracture of digital selfhood in a time of global crisis. With the aid of generative text software library Tracery, the speaker is presented as an unstable AI speaking to the reader via dialogue boxes reminiscent of operating system pop-ups, which invoke ongoing existential threats or “system errors” for humanity including pandemic disease, media propaganda, technocapitalism and the collapse of global ecological systems. The generative and interactive components of ‘SYSTEM_ERROR’ seek to complicate notions of a divide between the real and digital worlds. While the traditional action with a dialogue box is to close it, each attempt to dismiss the speaker produces more laments, questions and accusations. The subversion of expected agency over pop-ups recalls the struggle to escape reminders of real-world crises within digital media environments. Blending first and second person pronouns in the fragments also suggest a growing entanglement between the digital world of the artificial speaker and the physical world of the reader. Readers are trapped in an endless loop of existential terror – if left unattended the speaker eventually acts without prompt, deteriorating into an incomprehensible stream of text.'

(Publication abstract)

'Red Sonnet, Country Song was created by taking text from twelve iconic poems – selected by compiling online lists of “most famous poems” – and using software to shuffle the words into a random order. Phrases were selected for rhyme and iambic pentameter to create a sonnet, a form chosen for its respected place in the Western literary canon. The concept was inspired by poets such as Nick Montford, who writes algorithms to generate poetry, and Toby Fitch, who uses existing texts to generate new meanings. Their work questions how poetry is delineated from other artforms, and asks “who is the ‘real’ author?” We often read poetry in search of meaning, but what feels profound for one person may be meaningless to another. Red Sonnet, Country Song is intentionally arbitrary: the words were written across continents and centuries; algorithms have no poetic intent, and phrases were chosen for their syllable structure. Nonetheless, the words create imagery; meaning is instinctively derived through the act of reading. The poem draws attention to this human instinct and the ongoing influence of iconic poems in contemporary poetry. It intertwines texts and methodologies to reflect contemporary reality: technology both distorting and facilitating human emotion.' (Publication abstract) 

'This creative and eisegetical piece describes the birth of two Twitter bots whose voices emerge from the author’s late mother’s literary archive. Because the archive is locked in a storage cube overseas, the archival approach is speculative, experimental and under constraint. Performing a stocktake of physical artefacts that the author has access to in Melbourne, and drawing on memory as living archive, the author constructs a website around these archival objects by way of a clickable image map, inspired by Shelley Jackson’s (2006) hypertextual work my body – a Wunderkammer, and using techniques common to écriture féminine and écriture matière (Eades, 2015). When this does not satisfy the author’s archive fever (Derrida, 1995) she builds a poetry bot that tweets pseudorandomly generated poetry, and a second Twitter bot that responds to these poetics using lines from her mother’s unpublished manuscript. The author anthropomorphises her Mother Bots, explains how the Tracery library powers the bots’ code through expanding grammars, considers the ethics of posthumous tweeting, and concludes with an exploration of the chatbot field, including American Artist’s Sandy Speaks (2016) and Maartje Smits’s The Artist Is Not Present (2019), and considers the ephemerality of digital works.' (Publication abstract)

'Keyboard performance is a form of visual poetry tracing the invisibilia of a text as it is typed. Specifically, the texts are others’ poems and, to date, mine have all been written by women. Surfacing the poem’s marks through keyboard input returns an abstract gaze of both the poem and the keys. Just as Winkler’s (2021) spelled-forms use process to visually represent words, clues for keyboard performances are in their design. A keyboard interface is the framework to atomise poems into individual keystrokes, and choices are made regarding title, colour scheme and keystroke style. Where letters repeat, layered keystrokes suggest density, which is reminiscent of Winkler imagining repetition in spelled-forms as three-dimensional (p. 39). In contemplating how Emerson (2014) relates the procedural capabilities of digital media to labour, keyboard performance transforms a labour-oriented task like word-processing into a literary subject experimenting with form. The inclination to perform poems written by women challenges the presumption that feminised work is necessarily obedient, subservient or invisible. These visual poems contribute to the field of poetry by expanding notions of simulacra and translation-as-concept. Additionally, they draw attention to how “elusive keystrokes can be captured and reused” (University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 1).' (Publication abstract)