Join us for a Traversal of Digital Vitalism
featuring its author Michael Maguire
Led by Dene Grigar, Stuart Moulthrop, John Barber, and David Alonzo at the Electronic Literature Organization 2019 Conference and Media Art Festival
17 July 2019
1:30-3:00 p.m.
University Cork College
DH Learning Space, Food Science Building 4.58
Digital Vitalism: A Life in Electronic Poetry can be found at http://digitalvitalism.com/index.html.
About Dr. Michael J. Maguire. (@clevercelt)
Dr. Michael J. Maguire is a writer, educator, entrepreneur, technologist, pioneering digital media artist, game developer, and theorist. He created, produced, and toured, live multimedia stage shows in the early 90s. He founded Ireland’s first SCEE licensed game developer for PS2 in 1996, worked on Xbox launch and flagship PC titles for Microsoft in the noughties. Having been a senior lecturer in business and law, Michael currently holds the position of ‘Course Director for Marketing Programs’ in Dublin Business School. Michael’s educational undergrad background is in IMP engineering, theatre, and electronics. He holds an M.A. in creative writing and new media from DMU in the UK, and a PhD from University College Dublin and additional PG qualifications in Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Michael has written, directed and produced extensively for live stage, screen and small screen, his creative work has been exhibited across Europe and the world. He brought transmedia projects to Cannes MIPTV in 2006 and an Irish Terrorist Goose PS2 game to Tokyo in 1999.. He currently divides his time between Dublin, the Border area and Limerick city.
About Digital Vitalism
From “Digitalvitalism.com and John Pat McNamara,” by Michael Maguire:
“The 72-year-old Irish Digital Poet John Pat McNamara is a real flesh and blood person, as evidenced by his video appearances, works of poetry, audio and video interviews and his presence across social media. His life (perhaps à la Kittler) and works have been heavily influenced, if not shaped, by technology. His creative evolution and emergence as a Digital Poet is presented and traced across the website digitalvitalism.com, and viewers or users can read and play his work there, alongside the opportunity to view his interview responses that chart and detail his creative life. From his childhood on Achill Sound on the west coast of Mayo, to scribbling poems in the back of a van while en route to working as a labourer on the motorways in England in the 1960s, forward through his use of early electronic recording equipment, his experiments in video or film poems, to his contemporary use of the computer as his tool for personal creative expression of his personal applied poetics, John Pat’s poetic soul is laid bare for others to view and perhaps recognise.
Digitalvitalism.com provides a frame narrative for the exploration of some of the potential meaning(s) and expression(s) of Irish “born digital” Digital poetry in the 21st century. The proposed paper is a short exploration of that manufactured identity, since John Pat McNamara in the guise of Digital Poet is actually an entirely fictional construct. The concept of digital vitalism is proposed as one (of many) ways to conceptualise or characterise creatively the essentially cybernetic processes that may be occurring during the making of such work. This paper further proposes to introduce and contextualise the concept of Digital Vitalism with reference to the theoretical work of Katharine N. Hayles, Roberto Simanowski, Byron Hawkes and Talan Memmot. The paper will be in a form of a presentation (with accompanying script text available for download) that will seek to theoretically locate the work in a broader history of interpretation.
As a poet John Pat emanates from a cultural tradition that privileges the pastoral and spiritual above technical or the purely empirical poetic purview, thus this paper is also an attempt to explore the tensions and the challenges associated with finding a mode of expression that respects these two seemingly disparate areas of endeavour.”
About the Traversal
Devised by Moulthrop and Grigar, the Traversal is a reflective encounter with a digital text in which the possibilities of that text are explored in a way that indicates its key features, capabilities, and themes. These are performances by the author and/or read that take place on equipment configured as closely as possible to the system used to create the work or on which the work might have been expected to reach its initial audience (Moulthrop and Grigar’s Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing, 7).
The video captured from this event will be included in Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 3, produced by the Electronic Literature Lab, forthcoming summer 2020.
Credits
Traversal Team:
- Interviewers: Dene Grigar & Stuart Moulthrop
- Sound: John Barber
- Video: David Alonzo
Book Production: Dene Grigar, Nicholas Schiller, Holly Slocum, Kathleen Zoller, Mariah Gwin, Andrew Nevue, and Moneca Roath