Erika Fülöp, Serge Bouchardon, et al.
- Medium type
- Web User Interface
- Year
- 2022
- Genre
- E-Literature
- Linguaggio
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Inspiration
- Stéphanie Arc’s Instagram story series #writingis
- Concept, co-design, and project supervision
- Erika Fülöp & Serge Bouchardon
- Co-concept, design, development
- Simon Autard, Alexandre Constantin, Clara Grellier, Samar Mellouki, Miguel Segovia, Adrien Soler, Louis Soto
- Grants
- Discipline Hopping Award of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom
Écrire, c’est… is an interactive participatory website inspired by Stéphanie Arc’s Instagram story series #writingis and developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration between Erika Fülöp (University of Toulouse 2, formerly at Lancaster University), Serge Bouchardon (University of Technology of Compiègne), and students at the latter institution. The website invites visitors to think actively about writing in its complexity and expansion in the contemporary coded and multimedia environment.
At the same time, it is designed to grow a collection of user-generated verbo-visual propositions about the various meanings of, and associations with, writing across times, cultures, arts and other fields. The work opens with a screen presenting in a quick sequence a random subset of images from the work’s participatory database, containing texts and images related to writing, directly or indirectly. The visitor is invited to select a picture without having full control over their choice. On the following screen, they are offered a short proposition beginning with “Writing is…”, also selected randomly from a database.
The visitor can then modify the text if they wish to and to format and position it in the image, or upload a new one. If they authorise, the image-text created is then added to a gallery showing all contributions and to the database of images and texts. In addition to this core functional structure, the hints at the presence of underlying texts and layers of code acting behind the scenes, as log files’ contents appear between two screens. The interface is presented in French and English, but contributions are encouraged in any language and writing system to emphasize diversity.
The aim of this project is to make the users reflect on the concept and realities of writing, to enrich their perception of this complex phenomenon, and to gather a constantly evolving set of varied perspectives on it, while also recognizing the particularities and limitations of the technology and media types involved.
As such, its purpose is on the one hand artistic, inviting to think broadly and creatively about writing; and on the other hand, pedagogical, in highlighting the complexity and diversity of writing as gesture, technology, mode of communication, cultural and social practice, political tool, art form, mental process, object of desire, representation, theory, and so on.
The website was designed to facilitate use in workshops and educational settings and play the role of an illustration and interactive component in sessions on languages and writing, writing technologies and theories, digital culture, and more.
Biography
Erika Fülöp is Professor of Twenty-first-century Literature, Digital Humanities and Creative Writing at the Université de Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès (France). She was previously Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Lancaster University, Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg, and Lecturer in French at New College, Oxford. Since her first monograph, entitled Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in À la recherche du temps perdu (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), she has been exploring contemporary literature with an increasing focus on creative digital and multimedia writing practices. Her latest book, co-authored with Gilles Bonnet and Gaëlle Théval on French literary experimentation on YouTube, Qu’est-ce que la LittéraTube? (Ateliers du Sens public, 2023) is available open access.
Serge Bouchardon is Professor at the Université de technologie de Compiègne (Alliance Sorbonne Université, France), where he teaches interactive writing. His research focuses on digital literature. As an author, he is particularly interested in the way the gestures specific to digital technologies contribute to the construction of meaning. His works have been exhibited in Europe, America, Africa, and the Middle East and selected in various online publications (bleuOrange, Hyperrhiz, SpringGun, The New River). His work entitled Loss of Grasp won the New Media Writing Prize 2011 and has been published in the Electronic Literature Collection volume 4.
