poetics of digital text - Poetologie digitaler Texte

This website documents a symposion which took place from September 27th to 30th, 2001 at the University of Erfurt. It was the second "p0es1s"- symposium, the first was hosted by the University of Kassel in 2000. "p0es1s" has been created as a series. This second symposium took place under participation of international guests and was being kindly sponsored by the German Research Council, the University of Erfurt, the Stiftung Brückner-Kühner and the literaturWERKstatt Berlin.

The symposiums to the poetics of digital texts would like to explore and discuss the specific performances and functions of a literature, which is conceptualized or conceived particularly for digital media. As a literature form, those in the field of electronics between innovation (the changed conditions of digital and intertwined writing as well as multimediality) and tradition (resorting to the tradition of the literary avant-gardes) operate, ask themselves even for scientific work the question about the classification and handling of this literature in a media-theory and literature-theory perspective.

On this website the participant's abstracts, biographies and partly the full papers are available as well as video- (or audio-)samples of the presentations and the discussions. To view the videos the latest version of Real Player One is needed - as well as a fast internet-connection (at least DSL).

The documentation has been kindly supported by the University of Erfurt and the Department of Comparative Literary Studies/Media (Prof. Dr. Michael Giesecke). Its purpose is to mirror especially the creative contribution of every participant and the fruitful discussions which were the core of this conference.

This website is still under construction - so please excuse some still missing information.

The symposium pursued questions like:

How can digital literature be placed in the literature system in regard to historical and synchronous aspects?

How do the specific character and media-theoretical qualities present digital literature?

How they differ from conventional production methods, how do differences appear?

How are the classical action roles of production, distribution, reception and processing formed within the area of poetic digitization?

Which aesthetic values can be determined - are orientations from modern and postmodern trends valid or do unknown, uncommon ways emerge?

The form of the symposium stresses the collective discussions in relation to extended single lectures - most of the articles were therefore first published on the Internet. A bilingual (German/English) publication containing updated versions of most of the contributions has recently appeard: Block, Friedrich W./Heibach, Christiane/Wenz, Karin (eds.): p0es1s - Ästhetik digitaler Texte/Aesthetics of Digital Text, Ostfildern 2004.

We'd like to thank all participants for their engagement which made this conference so special!

Friedrich W. Block, Christiane Heibach, Karin Wenz