Hauntings and Imaginaries: Foregrounding the Relational in Electronic Literature: Hauntology and Relational Aesthetics Panel

This multimodal paper will be structurally experimental, using creative marginalia, page structure and typographic choices to present and play with my own personal ELO journey. The discussion will be grounded in my longitudinal perspective as an ‘itinerant’ Electronic Literature researcher, media artist and designer who has engaged with the community on and off since 1999. Relational meaning making is a complex process involving multiple levels of engagement with oneself, others, and the world. My critical practice is interdisciplinary and relational; often navigating digital configurations, image, gender and power, responding to cultural narratives and or texts. I will share and unravel what I see as the relational cross discipline threads that bind my body of work (RedRidinghood, Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, Front, Borderline, To Have & To Hold), drawing in the seismic shifts in social and visual culture between 1999 to present, both as a piece of ethnographic reflection but also as a portent towards what might emerge to be important vistas for the Electronic Literature community. The discussion will be structured as a look back (Hauntings), part spectral memoir, I will rechart the formative stumbling in my early works, revisit my doctoral archive, share notes from key conferences and remembered voices. Through these ‘Hauntings’ I aim to reanimate the aspirations of early born digital creative communities (Net-Art, Digital Media/ Flash, Elit etc.). This look back will be complimented by a survey of current concerns (entropic visual culture, beyond context collapse, algorithmic based social injustice) and will concludes with some speculation forward (the Imaginary), outlining possibilities around what valuable, situated digital literary practices might come to mean, the potential active (disruptive) fronts for the future avant-gardes and where we risk disconnection and being trapped by the ghosts of both the future and the past.