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Beyond the Screen

Retrospective and Barometer: A Decade of Drunken Boat

16.30-17.20: Ravi Shankar (New Britain, CT, USA)

Abstract: In 2009, Drunken Boat, international online journal for the arts, will release its special tenth anniversary issue, celebrating a decade in existence. In that time, the journal has charted the incipient field of electronic literature emerge and branch into multifarious shapes. Some early work, such as Yael Kanerak’s World of Awe or Liz Miller’s Moles, both works published in our second issue, still retain a true sense of what creating online can do, constitutively, to create a new paradigm of genre, one that uses the materiality of the web as part of its compositional strategy. Other works, such as Emma Braslavsky’s Visual Aphorisms, published in issue five, are explorations of cognition that extend our inborn notions of narrativity and experience. Outside the textual genres, web art and hypertext coexist in a space with sound, photo and video art and the frame such exhibition posits becomes part of the meaning a reader can derive from navigating the work. Because all our old issues are archived online, Drunken Boat intends to supplement its curatorial faculty with an archival model of preservation, one that is quite different than the notion of temporality on the blogosphere or on listservs. This panel will look back on and forward from a decade.

 

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