Dear colleagues,
Joe Milutis (University of Washington Bothel) will give a talk on » Myths of Attention: What Online Cooking Tutorials Can Tell Us About Experimental PDF Literature » as part of the Digital Materialities seminar series hosted by Ariane Fennetaux (Larca, Paris-Cité) and in collaboration with Frontières du littéraire, this Tuesday (May 16) at 5.30pm, online.
Please register on the seminar’s webpage: https://digitalmaterialities.wordpress.com/the-2022-2023-programme/
Chloé Thomas
Abstract:
One relatively unexamined aspect of experimental literature in the 21st century has been the emergence of the PDF format as a venue for expanded image-text books. Far from being simply etexts, these online-only books tend to strain the hospitality of the book. They are pretexts for providing experiences that challenge typical forms of reading attention.
Much of literary culture seems to privilege the culture of the “slow” and immersive aspects of reading, however these PDFs explode dichotomies between a “slow” (and more beneficial) literary culture and a “fast” (and distracted) internet image culture. Using a thumbnail history of the “cooking show” as a parallel example, I will discuss the ways in which these myths of readerly attention are perhaps incomplete without taking into account the various medium-specific affordances that PDF and online literary experimentalism exploit.
Bio:
Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington-Bothell. Work has appeared in Fence, Triple Canopy, Cabinet, PennSound Authors, Jacket2, Tagvverk, Gauss PDF, as well as a variety of performance and gallery venues. He is the author of Failure, A Writer’s Life (Zer0 Books: 2013), Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (University of Minnesota Press: 2006), and Bright Arrogance, a column on experimental translation in Jacket2. His translation of Roland Barthes’ all except you is forthcoming from Punctum Books. Numerous chapbooks, media-literary hybrid works, videos and sound pieces can also be found at <www.joemilutis.com>