THE DOT AWARD & IF:BOOK NEW MEDIA WRITING PRIZE
The if:book uk new media writing prize is run by Bournemouth University and is approaching its 10th birthday. Find all the past winners at www.newmediawritingprize.co.uk
The Dot Award for Digital Literature was created in 2015 in memory of writer, designer and silver surfer Dorothy Meade.
The Dot Award was won by Lou Sarabadzic , French poet, novelist and blogger living in the UK. She writes:
“Since 1960s, literary criticism has discussed in great depth the role of the reader in the creation of texts and stories. 21st Century technologies made this role even more visible. #NERDS [Never Ending Retelling through Digital Stories] is a project that celebrates and investigates the infinite interactive territories offered by recent developments.
We all have representations coming to mind when thinking about a given story – be it a book, a legend or a TV show. For instance, if someone tells you: ‘Les Misérables’, ‘Catch 22’, or ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, regardless of whether or not you’ve read/seen/understood said work – images will immediately spring to mind. These images contribute to, and form part of, the collective imagination.
My idea is to set up and manage different social media accounts (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) to invite everyone to contribute to the development of one big collective brain (= a website) holding all of these images to encourage new transmission and storytelling practices.”
The DOT AWARD is for a proposal and we don’t publish a shortlist as we don’t want to spill the beans about ideas that haven’t yet been realised. However, you can see all the other New Media Writing Prize shortlisted works on www.newmediawriting.co.uk.
The 2nd Dot Award was won by Greek poet Theodoros Chiotis for a proposal to make a multi-media performance in real time mixing autobiographical journal with machine-created data. He was beamed in by Skype to the Bournemouth event to talk about a year of data gathering and poetry writing.
Judged by the IF:BOOK UK trustees, the 2016 winner was J.R. Carpenter for a proposed work about the wind. In 2017 she was awarded The New Media Writing Prize, donated by if:book, for The Gathering Cloud
The 2017 winner of the Dot Award is Theodoros Chiotis.
Theodoros writes poetry and code poetry in Greek and English. He is the editor and translator of the anthology Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015). His work has appeared in many print and online magazines and anthologies in Greece, the UK, Australia and elsewhere. He has translated contemporary British and American poets into Greek and classical Greek drama into English. His forthcoming collection called Theory of the Machine (2017) is partially based on material sourced by twitter bots, google searches, computer generated poetry. He has written extensively on digital literature, has published a series of code poems and code-inspired poetry in various journals and anthologies and has written hypertexts for educational use. He has presented his digital literary projects at the E-Poetry Festival in London in 2013 and at the Globe Road Festival in London in 2015. He was the concept designer of the HackTheBook Festival at the Onassis Culture Centre in Athens in early 2016 and is currently co-curating the Digital Wednesdays series of talks at the OCC. He lives in Athens and works as the Project Manager of the Cavafy Archive (Onassis Foundation).
A few words on the project:
“I am interested in developing a mixed media performance which will attempt to consider the evolution of autobiographical narrative in real time. The project will be time-based and will unfold throughout a whole year. The autobiographical narrative will incorporate human and machine-generated narrative (sourced from gps-tracked itineraries, health-tracking apps, search engine histories, data derived from digital media such as audio and video recordings and their attendant metadata, as well as personal notes and reflections) in an attempt to reconsider how autobiographical narrative becomes a narrative in putting together and performing an archive of the self. This will be an ongoing mixed media performance that will chronicle the subject’s data-centric relationship with the world and itself; the purpose of the work is to understand how big data impacts on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Will this be a Foucauldian nightmare of self-surveillance? How do algorithms change the perception of ourselves? The data and media material amassed from the year-long performance will be uploaded on a digital repository. The award will give me an opportunity to allow me to pay a small fee towards the hosting of the project.”
