December 4, 2005
DAC 2005 ELINOR reading
I really enjoyed the ELINOR reading Friday night at the Copenhagen LiteraturHaus. I get so used to seeing the same crowd of folks presenting work in electronic literature, that it’s always a wonderful and pleasant shock to see people from other parts of the world than the one I’m accustomed to exploring ways of working with literary texts in digital environments in their own ways, in their own language. Performing artists included poet Christian Yde Frostholm from Denmark, Johannes Helden from Sweden, Marko Niemi from Finland & Noah Wardrip-Fruin from Northern California and elsewhere. Helden read his poem to an accompanying digital animation and soundtrack. Frosthelm’s work was a fascinating version of what from the perspective of a non-Swedish-speaker seemed to be a Beckettian story adapted in Flash making use of patterns and repetitions, words clumping and clustering and rearranging themselves on the screen. Of the Scandanavian authors I was most impressed with Marko Niemi‘s work, a variety of simple but distinctive and thoughtfully language experiments in flash and html. Niemi writes both in Finnish and English, and presented English language work at the reading. Jill Walker was the emcee, and the host of the Literaturhaus kept the bar open late, as the DAC attendees clustered round tables with old friends and new. Noah’s reading of Talking Cure and video demo of Screen were also highlights of the evening. Torill posted a great photo of Noah’s reading from the portable Talking Cure intallation on Flirckr. Jill also posted several photos of the reading.