I’ve just got back from an International Conference on Latin American Cybercultural studies which took place in Liverpool, UK. As many people know – as I’ve been torturing them with my anxiety and nervousness – it was my first conference. Delivering a paper in front of an audience, getting feedback on the spot, answer their question and question yourself again about your own work. Being there was not just about me (or anybody else sitting at a desk) though. It was about exchanging information, getting to know each other, interact with people, learning from their successes and their mistakes, sharing your knowledge and, if that being the case, changing your mind completely and switching to a new perspective on things.

What I have found in Liverpool was a group of people devoted to their researches and projects, people who pursue their passions and interests. Meeting those people, spending time with them, sharing thoughts and laughter has showed me how beautiful it is to work on what you really like, even though your idea could seem awkward and makes a few eyebrows raise (and makes some people literally laugh at you, as it happened to me when I was trying to explain to some people of the local gentry what “cyberculture” means. Ask Marcos Wasem, Diego Bonilla and Sean Hovendick how it ended up with).

Much more than this though what is really amazing is what you get once you’re home: in the silence of your room, in the quietness of yourself you realize how richer you are than when you have left. You start re-thinking about what you have seen, and as you unpack and put your clothes back in closet, find receipts in each and every pocket and cards from the restaurants you’ve been to, you are “unpacking” your suitcase full of experiences. You tidy them up and give them a meaning. You realize that your way of looking at those same things you were used to is changed, and the more you think, the strongest this feeling becomes. Your mind becomes a pepper grinder that keeps turning, so that the pepper gets thinner and thinner and spreads uniformly on your dishes. If the grains are too big, you don’t perceive anything or, which is worse, you happen to bite one and your sense of taste gets numb, preventing you from enjoying the rest of your meal.

When you make a powder out of them though, it pampers and embraces every papilla on your tongue, so that the pleasure of eating is enhanced and flavors mix perfectly.

This is what I must thank everyone for: giving me the most precious pepper for my young and not so experienced grinder, and enriching the flavor of my thoughts.

A couple of months ago the University of Bergen hosted the Seminar on Electronic Literature Communities. People involved in the field took part in the conference whose main topic, as the title suggests, was the analysis of the way in which electronic literature and new technologies in general are able to build communities around them.

Many aspects of this social and cultural phenomenon were examined. Scott Rettberg, cofounder of the Electronic Literature Organization and an associate professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen, was the coordinator of the conference and I think that the program he and his collaborators developed was pretty interesting. Not only were there well-known experts of electronic literature, such as Nick Montfort or Serge Bouchardon, but also scholars either from countries were electronic literature is developing nowadays or from other fields that somehow are connected with it.

Here you can find all the videos from the conference, but I’d like to recommend you some of them:

• Supercritical creativity, a talk by Mark Berry: Turing and Tarde, or how your mind can create a nuclear creative reaction, especially when inserted in a community. Berry starts form Turing’s idea of a supercritical mind, which is kind  of curious. I’ll try to explain it as clearly as I can. So, let’s say you have a certain mass that, if hit by a neutron, can cause a powerful nuclear chain reaction. We call “supercritical” a mass that is big enough to start this reaction. Now, let’s substitute the mass with a mind and the neutron with an idea. If the mind is supercritical, when hit by an idea it “may give rise to a whole theory consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas”. Similarly, is the mind is “subcritical” – and Turing says that animals, for instance, have a subcritical mind – no reaction happens. Given this, his main point is: how can creativity be thought in terms of super and subcritical mass? In other words, are there particular conditions under which creativity is more enhanced and promoted than others? Moving to the ideas of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, Berry states that one a mind is inserted in a community, its creativity is somehow turned on by living in an active and lively context. I think this is a good introduction to the conference because it explains the basic principle that drives it: when there is a community, being it real or virtual, minds are prompted to think more productively and creatively.
• The ELo and US Electronic Literature in the 2000s: Scott Rettberg talks about how the ELO was born and how electronic literature has developed since then in the US. Nobody better than him could have given a talk about the topic. It is interesting to see his notes back to when the ELO was just an idea. It was the hypertext era of electronic literature when the first courses in hypertext writing were coming out.
• Hypertext Fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg: [I am really impressed by his child, he is so quiet!] this insight into the first period of electronic literature, the hypertext era as I said before, is clear, simple and effective. I am having a hard time drawing a sort of timeline on the history of electronic literature but this talk has been really useful to understand the dynamics of how it was born and you realize how important it was to have some communities that acted like nests from which the spreading of electronic literature started (creativity and community seem to rhyme pretty well).
• Electronic Literature Publishing in Europe: Sample Cases from Italy: among the various talks about “national” communities of electronic literature given at the conference, this one is particularly dear to me for obvious reasons. Still, I hope that even though the actual situation of electronic literature in Italy is quite bad — as almost nobody knows anything about it — I am glad to hear that someone is interested in developing it, and I would proudly add myself to the list of people mentioned by Giovanna di Rosario.

I really liked the idea of focusing a conference on the relation between creativity and community and on how collaboration can prove to be a basic requirement for giving birth to marvelous works both of art and of culture (think about wikipedia, for instance).

Speaking of this, there is another curious example I would like to talk about. Here in New York I am taking a class (well, the semester is over but I’m still here, so I speak using the present tense) of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, which is part of my exchange program between the University of Siena and the City University of New York. This course is taught by two professors, Steve Brier and Michael Mandiberg. Our syllabus includes not only many fundamental readings about pedagogy and technology, but also (and this is what makes the course so amazing) examples of how actually technology and pedagogy go together. One of the things that impressed me the most is this book, Collaborative Future. There are many reasons that make this book a unique one:

• Frist of all, is written using Booki, a free software that allows you writing books on the Internet.
• It is a book about collaboration and it was written by a group of people collaborating together (it sounds pretty obvious, but I think that it is coherent more than obvious, and I appreciate coherence).
• It was written according to special “rules”. I am using their words to describe what they did:

This book was first written over 5 days (Jan 18-22, 2010) during a Book Sprint in Berlin. 7 people (5 writers, 1 programmer and 1 facilitator) gathered to collaborate and produce a book in 5 days with no prior preparation and with the only guiding light being the title ‘Collaborative Futures’.

These collaborators were: Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michael Mandiberg, Mike Linksvayer, Marta Peirano, Alan Toner, Aleksandar Erkalovic (programmer) and Adam Hyde (facilitator).

The event was part of the 2010 transmediale festival <www.transmediale.de/en/collaborative-futures>. 200 copies were printed the same week through a local print on demand service and distributed at the festival in Berlin. 100 copies were printed in New York later that month.

This book was revised, partially rewritten, and added to over three days in June 2010 during a second book sprint in New York, NY, at the Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology as part of the show Re:Group Beyond Models of Consensus and presented in conjunction with Not An Alternative and Upgrade NYC. [. . .]

I find the idea of encouraging some people –who have never met each other before– to write a book together about collaboration, in a surprisingly short amount of time, absolutely fascinating. And if you give a look at the book, you will be even more fascinated. Trust me.