Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age
Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age
The Division for 20th-century German Studies at the MLA 2014 presents a series of three panels on digital practice, organized by Deniz Göktürk (University of California, Berkeley).
You can view abstracts and, even more importantly, provide feedback for each of the papers by clicking on their titles.
Digital Practice (1): Literary Remediations
Moderator: Leslie Morris
Respondent: Richard Langston
- Lutz Koepnick, “Digital Reading and the Post-Forensic Imagination”
- Rolf J. Goebel, “The Fate of Literary Studies in the Age of Digital Hyperculturality” (unable to attend the conference)
- Patrizia C. McBride, “Mimicking the Avant-Garde: Intellectual and Artistic Activism in the Digital Age”
- Kurt Beals, “Computer Poems and Critical Coding: Redefining Subjectivity for the Digital Age”
Digital Practice (2): Moving Images
Moderator: Deniz Göktürk
Respondent: Eric Ames
- Carsten Strathausen, “The Nature of Digital Images”
- Tara Hottman, “Remixing Werner Herzog: The Auteur in the Digital Age”
- Verena Kick, “The Documentary Tradition in the Digital Age”
Digital Practice (3): Social Networks Across Borders
Moderator: Stefanie Harris
Respondent: Yasemin Yildiz
- Bonnie Ruberg, “Kafka and the Kafkaesques: Close Reading Online Fan Fiction”
- Isabelle Hesse, “Aesthetics and Politics in Representing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Germany: Markus Flohr’s Wo samstags immer Sonntag ist” (unable to attend the conference)
- Erik Born, “Network Politics, Wireless Protocols, and Public Space”
- Ela Gezen, “Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media: Bandista”
In the digital era, academic and artistic work is recalibrating the interplay of aesthetics, science, and politics. Art entails research, and research draws inspiration from art in seeking new forms of interactive presentation, public participation, and multilocal collaboration. Geopolitical categories such as center and periphery are dissolving, and institutionally guarded boundaries between media, genres, and disciplines call for transgression.
The Internet opens for search boundless archives of data, but how do artists and scholars use the abundance of accessible documents? What is lost and found in the process? What is the critical purchase of terms like fiction and nonfiction, authorship and audience? What are political interventions in the uneven terrains of circulation?
While the first panel on literary studies maps out theoretical foundations and the second is devoted to a discussion of moving images in the digital era, the last panel will turn to popular forms of digital practice, circulation, and participation with a focus on online communities as social networks across borders.