Post-Digital Creativity in Underacknowledged Communities
Proposal Type
Panel
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
In a world marked by polarization and institutional censorship, what we pay attention to matters more than ever. We would almost forget that people, unsupervised, cannot help but be creative. Increasingly, this creativity takes the form of post-digital art and literature, often without awareness of “electronic literature” as a concept or the ELO as an institution. In this panel, we open up the conversation of researching post-digital creativity outside e-lit cultures to learn what role multimodality and participatory cultures (can) play inside e-lit cultures.
To encourage active participation in this online panel, we intend to split our session into two sections. After a short general intro, each panelist will briefly introduce their case study as a form of electronic literature. Our provocations during the presentations are the starting point for a short discussion (we will use break out rooms if the size of participants necessitates it). The second half of the panel is dedicated to the social and/or institutional distribution of works. Again, each panelist will give a brief presentation on the same case study, which then moves into another discussion section with prepared questions. We end with a short plenary outro. This interactive format supports participants in the session to not merely listen to the panel, but reflect upon the provocations to integrate them into their own research practice.
The panelists’ case studies cover a wide range of post-digital creativity to give participants multiple threads to pull on during the discussion, while remaining attached to the same themes. In doing so, we aim to showcase the entanglement of specificity and communality across these creative communities.
Panelist 1’s case study is on the little known digital-first form of ‘Sims stories’. Sims stories are multimodal texts that straddle e-lit and video game Let’s Play, using The Sims games as a story engine. Distributed for free using existing platforms and infrastructure, they’re at risk of disappearance due to technological obsolescence. The panelist is particularly interested in how these texts problematize the concept of literariness, while perpetuating neoliberal postfeminist and capitalist realist values.
Panelist 2’s case study is poetry in Norwegian Sign Language (NTS). Similar to e-lit, its distribution covers individual publications (of online video) that are collected in community-based databases as well as performance in events. The panelist examines how NTS-poetry functions as a tool for promoting NTS as a literary language with its own identity, while relying on digital technologies that have also caused the language to be more diffused.
Panelist 3’s case study is Kpop interactive Twitter/X stories. Stemming from “Choose Your Adventure” style playable stories on Twitter, this free interactive fiction format draws in participatory readership from Kpop fandoms and utilizes tweet threads, polls, linked multimedia, hashtags, replies and quote tweet functions to transform massively popular mystery and horror genres into mobile-friendly, fast-paced, bite-sized fandom-specific puzzle stories. This panelist examines this transformation and platformization, and their effect on ideas of authorship, adaptation, and fanfiction within the larger purview of social media fiction and participatory fandom culture.
Post-Digital Creativity in Underacknowledged Communities
Narratives & Worlds
In a world marked by polarization and institutional censorship, what we pay attention to matters more than ever. We would almost forget that people, unsupervised, cannot help but be creative. Increasingly, this creativity takes the form of post-digital art and literature, often without awareness of “electronic literature” as a concept or the ELO as an institution. In this panel, we open up the conversation of researching post-digital creativity outside e-lit cultures to learn what role multimodality and participatory cultures (can) play inside e-lit cultures.
To encourage active participation in this online panel, we intend to split our session into two sections. After a short general intro, each panelist will briefly introduce their case study as a form of electronic literature. Our provocations during the presentations are the starting point for a short discussion (we will use break out rooms if the size of participants necessitates it). The second half of the panel is dedicated to the social and/or institutional distribution of works. Again, each panelist will give a brief presentation on the same case study, which then moves into another discussion section with prepared questions. We end with a short plenary outro. This interactive format supports participants in the session to not merely listen to the panel, but reflect upon the provocations to integrate them into their own research practice.
The panelists’ case studies cover a wide range of post-digital creativity to give participants multiple threads to pull on during the discussion, while remaining attached to the same themes. In doing so, we aim to showcase the entanglement of specificity and communality across these creative communities.
Panelist 1’s case study is on the little known digital-first form of ‘Sims stories’. Sims stories are multimodal texts that straddle e-lit and video game Let’s Play, using The Sims games as a story engine. Distributed for free using existing platforms and infrastructure, they’re at risk of disappearance due to technological obsolescence. The panelist is particularly interested in how these texts problematize the concept of literariness, while perpetuating neoliberal postfeminist and capitalist realist values.
Panelist 2’s case study is poetry in Norwegian Sign Language (NTS). Similar to e-lit, its distribution covers individual publications (of online video) that are collected in community-based databases as well as performance in events. The panelist examines how NTS-poetry functions as a tool for promoting NTS as a literary language with its own identity, while relying on digital technologies that have also caused the language to be more diffused.
Panelist 3’s case study is Kpop interactive Twitter/X stories. Stemming from “Choose Your Adventure” style playable stories on Twitter, this free interactive fiction format draws in participatory readership from Kpop fandoms and utilizes tweet threads, polls, linked multimedia, hashtags, replies and quote tweet functions to transform massively popular mystery and horror genres into mobile-friendly, fast-paced, bite-sized fandom-specific puzzle stories. This panelist examines this transformation and platformization, and their effect on ideas of authorship, adaptation, and fanfiction within the larger purview of social media fiction and participatory fandom culture.
