Panel #11 Session 3
Friday 1 December - 13:00
Building 25, Main Room
​
Chair: Kimberly Williams
Dolphins in the Reservoir: Care, Consciousness, Affect and Electronic Literature
- Hazel Smith
Western Sydney University
​
In this paper I argue that electronic literature can interweave issues to do with care, consciousness and affect in unique ways. I focus on two very different works: John Cayley’s The Listeners and my collaboration as a writer with video artist Will Luers and musician Roger Dean, Dolphins in the Reservoir, published in The New River (US) and in Text.
For The Listeners Cayley customised the Amazon Echo, which embodies a domestic robot, Alexa. Cayley’s performances in ‘The Listeners’ consist of questions to which Alexa responds. Ironically, Alexa enacts caring, empathetic attitudes and diverse emotional states, though she is a non-human agent who lacks human consciousness and cannot experience affect. The Listeners takes up a central tenet of caring, the need to listen to and empathise with each other, and comments satirically on the lack of cultivated listening in the contemporary world.
Dolphins in the Reservoir is an interactive, recombinant and multimedia work that changes with every viewing. It confronts the personal and social responsibilities we face in caring for ourselves and the planet. Structured in six varying cycles, it moves through challenges to health, the environment and democracy; coaxing order out of chaos; philosophical and scientific ways of thinking about consciousness; and possible futures, including the rise of AI. The affective aspect of the verbal text is embodied in the work and amplified by its multimedia aspect: an acoustic and digitally transformed soundtrack and a dense montage of visual images.
Hazel Smith is a poet, performer, new media artist and academic. She is an Emeritus Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. She has authored and co-authored several academic books, including The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship, Routledge, 2016. Hazel has published five volumes of poetry including Word Migrants, Giramondo, 2016 and Ecliptical, ES-Press, Spineless Wonders, 2022. She has published numerous performance and multimedia works. In 2018, with Will Luers and Roger Dean, she was awarded first place in the Electronic Literature Organisation’s Robert Coover prize. In 2003 her collaboration with Luers and Dean, Dolphins in the Reservoir was shortlisted for the UK New Media Writing award. Her website is at www.australysis.com
Who’s Afraid of the Deep Dark Woods: Challenging traditional fictional representations of woods and the wild.
- Shannon Horsfall
University of the Sunshine Coast
How can reimagining fairy tales through a post-anthropocentric lens disentangle and reconfigure human-more-than-human relations in the real world?
Fairy tales have long positioned the woods and the wild as a place where beasts and strange creatures lurk, where strange happenings and the unknown abound. A scene of unimagined horror. And as the centuries have passed, humans have increasingly dislocated and disassociated from the forest, evolving from, as Appleton suggests, ‘forest-dwellers to ‘apartment-house-dwellers’ (1996: 29). Enduring tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ revolve around human-wildlife encounters in the woods where the wolf is anthropomorphised and portrayed as a bad man in animal clothing. However, it can also be interpreted as a story of multispecies entanglement. In examining how modern adaptations of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ use various visual strategies to foreground different species’ voices and worldviews embedded in the tale, fairy-tale enchantment can serve as a means of critical anthropomorphism, inviting both children and adults to imagine the needs, pleasures and pains of more-than-human species without erasing their differences, and to reconfigure human-more-than-human relations in the real world.
​
Shannon Horsfall is a children’s author-illustrator published by HarperCollins, Scholastic, Hachette and State Library of Queensland. Shannon was shortlisted for the Speech Pathology Book of the Year Award in 2017 for her picture book Was Not Me and was a CBCA Notable in 2018 for Nomax. She has been a presenter with Queensland Writers Centre at various literary festivals, including Voices on the Coast and Burdekin Readers and Writers Festival. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing, after completing Honours First Class A (Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast where she was awarded the University Medal of Academic Excellence.