ebr is back after a summer break. We hope that your summers were fruitful, and that we may have had the pleasure of seeing some of you—in person, or as a virtual self–at the ELO 2022 conference in Como, Italy.
ebr is delighted—and I am personally delighted—to introduce the launch of the newest issue of The Digital Review, Issue 02: (digital) performance. Edited by the incredible artist Laura Hyunjhee Kim, and co-edited by Kevin Sweet, Brad Gallagher, and Darija Medić, this issue features eight new multimodal and interactive works on (digital) performance as well as a “rediscovery” piece on Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden.
Thinking through a user’s human-computer interaction as the first level of performance of a digital work, Kim captures the interactive dance of “clicking on and off, scrolling up and down, zooming in and out, [through which] we perform choreographed movements, gestures, and actions prescribed by creative modalities of expression and their computational environment.”
Click. Swipe. Scroll. Zoom. Tap.
The “living research” as described by Kim is one that is on the move! Works in issue 2 of TDR actively renegotiate what it means to design interactive works, thinking four-fold in the shifting positions of the designer, the performer of works, the works that are performed, and the potential users who experience and engage. How uniquely nuanced, then, is performance that is digitally mediated! And in what ways can digital mediations help us think through elements of technology that we often lose sight of?: through our performed interactions only can these works unfold, inviting the tangible, the tangle, the self-conscious, the provokation for connection and exchange. Through these interactive works we may forget the digital too, remembering, vitally, our bodies and others’ bodies in tandem.
CFP for TDR Issue 03: Counter-Works: https://thedigitalreview.com/submissions.html
Editors are Carlota Salvador Megias and Ian Hatcher
New in ebr:
To kick off September’s issue, ebr Managing Editor Will Luers interviews Mark Amerika on his latest book, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence. Luers, an award-winning artist whose working medium ranges from the filmic to the computational, also highlights the trajectory of Amerika’s work across various types of digital technologies, identifying remix as his corporal throughline. What changes—as both Amerika and Luers explore through topics of art-creation, pedagogy, and notions of “talent” and “genius”–is the expansion of collaborative practice, from working with other artists to working with computers through generative and automated methods of creation. Amerika continues to see working with the AI language models GPT-2 and GPT-3 as a “meta-remix gam session,” where the jam session itself produces new considerations of self and collaborative others—the rich stuff of his book.
–Lai-Tze Fan
Editor and Director of Communications
contact@electronicbookreview.com