A Human Was Here: Occult Poetics, Hypertext Ritual, and the (Un)Supervised Web
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
This craft talk braids personal mythology, surrealist occult practice, ecological ritual, and digital poetics into an argument for electronic literature as an affectively empathetic, politically awake praxis—one that tends to emotional complexity while staying vigilant to power, injustice, and ecological urgency. The digital occult art object is not an escapist curio nor a spectacle of superficial connection. Rather, it is a tool for emotional literacy, imaginative risk, and communal grieving in a time of ecological and social emergency.
I ground this argument in two interactive, browser-native hypertext works: Snow Angel’s Wheel of Fortune and Triple Kiss of the Sun. Snow Angel’s Wheel of Fortune is a digital remix engine and ritual instrument organized around a spinning wheel of archetypes, sending users into miniature archives of rituals, recipes, and essay-ettes that invite unsupervised wandering and spiritual inquiry. Triple Kiss of the Sunis a psychic switchboard and digital altar built from slow-motion grief footage, Mary Ruefle’s poem “Kiss of the Sun,” and clickable “kisses” that open onto essay-ettes foraging into questions of joy, rage, ancestry, and mortality. Together, these works stage two different modes of (un)supervision—chance-based play and moondrunk mourning—that ask what it means to navigate a digital interface without being managed or affirmed by it.
As an artist who spent her formative years offline and prefers to write by typewriter or by hand, I’m interested in how digital occult art objects like Triple Kiss of the Sun and Snow Angel’s Wheel of Fortune might model a new kind of “infrastructure” for electronic literature and online connection—one rooted in citation, care, and cross-temporal conversation while still using the web as its primary venue for access, archivism, and community-building. As a love poet and an eco-feminist teacher, I’m also interested in exploring how occult digital spaces might promote emotional literacy and imaginative risk. As an artist whose foray into occult poetics and digital art-making is incidental and/or accidental, I’m invested in creating interactive art objects that alchemize the sensory and the virtual, the embodied and the ethereal, the ancient and the modern, physical touch and digital interaction, the old-fashioned and the new—so as to explore the kinds of consciousness, the spiritualities, the poetries that we haven’t imagined yet.
This talk engages E-Lit Access, Anthologies + Archivism, Theories, Aesthetics + Praxes of Resistance, and Anti-Racist, Feminist + Queer Edu-Labor by framing occult poetics as community care and small-scale resistance to extractive computational imaginaries.
A Human Was Here: Occult Poetics, Hypertext Ritual, and the (Un)Supervised Web
Hypertexts & Fictions
This craft talk braids personal mythology, surrealist occult practice, ecological ritual, and digital poetics into an argument for electronic literature as an affectively empathetic, politically awake praxis—one that tends to emotional complexity while staying vigilant to power, injustice, and ecological urgency. The digital occult art object is not an escapist curio nor a spectacle of superficial connection. Rather, it is a tool for emotional literacy, imaginative risk, and communal grieving in a time of ecological and social emergency.
I ground this argument in two interactive, browser-native hypertext works: Snow Angel’s Wheel of Fortune and Triple Kiss of the Sun. Snow Angel’s Wheel of Fortune is a digital remix engine and ritual instrument organized around a spinning wheel of archetypes, sending users into miniature archives of rituals, recipes, and essay-ettes that invite unsupervised wandering and spiritual inquiry. Triple Kiss of the Sunis a psychic switchboard and digital altar built from slow-motion grief footage, Mary Ruefle’s poem “Kiss of the Sun,” and clickable “kisses” that open onto essay-ettes foraging into questions of joy, rage, ancestry, and mortality. Together, these works stage two different modes of (un)supervision—chance-based play and moondrunk mourning—that ask what it means to navigate a digital interface without being managed or affirmed by it.
As an artist who spent her formative years offline and prefers to write by typewriter or by hand, I’m interested in how digital occult art objects like Triple Kiss of the Sun and Snow Angel’s Wheel of Fortune might model a new kind of “infrastructure” for electronic literature and online connection—one rooted in citation, care, and cross-temporal conversation while still using the web as its primary venue for access, archivism, and community-building. As a love poet and an eco-feminist teacher, I’m also interested in exploring how occult digital spaces might promote emotional literacy and imaginative risk. As an artist whose foray into occult poetics and digital art-making is incidental and/or accidental, I’m invested in creating interactive art objects that alchemize the sensory and the virtual, the embodied and the ethereal, the ancient and the modern, physical touch and digital interaction, the old-fashioned and the new—so as to explore the kinds of consciousness, the spiritualities, the poetries that we haven’t imagined yet.
This talk engages E-Lit Access, Anthologies + Archivism, Theories, Aesthetics + Praxes of Resistance, and Anti-Racist, Feminist + Queer Edu-Labor by framing occult poetics as community care and small-scale resistance to extractive computational imaginaries.
Bio
Emily Carr writes and teaches in Gulf Coast Florida. She founded the Low-Residency MFA at Oregon State University – Cascades and the BA in Creative Writing at the New College of Florida. Emily is the author of four books of poetry and the creator of Dr. Carr’s Word Forage: a poetry boardgame and Carrie Do Wrong’s Wheel of Fortune: the World’s Best Advice. Her McSweeney’s collection, whosoever has let a minotaur enter them, or a sonnet— inspired a beer of the same name, sporadically available at the Ale Apothecary in Bend, Oregon.