Talan Memmott

“Dislocution/Translocation/Electracy: The Pro[blem|mise](s) of Electronic Writing” (paper)

Digital media and information technologies are changing the way we read, write, and communicate. This is not only important to creative practice but also has a profound affect upon the ways in which we construct identity. If weobserve the underlying technologies that allow for communications through the network we can recognize almost immediately that the conditions of being online are conditions of writing. Through a sort of trasnmissive agency that passes through a thick variety of protocols and codebases the message is transmitted and received, deposited into and retrieved from the elsewhere of cyberspace. This is true not only of superficially text-based communications such as email, mailing lists, MOOs, etc. but also in the most heavily mediated forms of technology-based communication and expression. In essence, it is not entirely incorrect to say that the conditions of being online are instantiated through a poetic or rhetorical relationship - technology to technology, media to media, and human interactor to apparatus. This presentation will look at phenomenological aspects of media orientation as these relate to digital poetics and distributed identity.

Biography

Talan Memmott is a hypermedia artist/writer/editor from San Francisco, California. He is the Creative Director and Editor of the online hypermedia literary journal BeeHive. His hypermedia work has appeared widely on the Internet. In 2001 he was awarded the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award for his work “Lexia to Perplexia”, which also received honorable mention for the Electronic Literature Organization's award in fiction. He is a tutor for the trAce Online Writing School, and has been a speaker, panelist, reader and performer at various Conferences and Universities.

Memmott is currently a graduate fellow at Brown University and will be teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design in spring of 2004.

“Powering Up/Powering Down” is sponsored in part by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the UC San Diego Department of Music in connection with the departments of Visual Arts, Music, and Literature at UCSD along with the UC Riverside and Los Angeles campuses.