Ars Electronica festival + The Afghan Women's Writing Project

2 recommended links:

1) ArsElectronica: hybrid art (+much more)

Ars Electronica is an internationally unique platform for digital art and media culture. It’s made up of 4 divisions: an avant-garde festival, a competition that functions as a showcase of excellence, a museum, and a media art lab. In September, the media festival took place in Linz, and this year's competition winners were announced.

Here the direct links to the winning works in the category computer animation: Nuit Blanche - a short film / 'hyper real fantasy', a fleeting moment between 2 strangers by Arev Manoukian (Canada), there also is a making of online. And the winner in the category digital music & sound art: rheo: 5 horizons - an audiovisual installation by Ryoichi Kurokawa (Japan).

a walk through the festival: there's an excellent feature with many embedded videos online in the german newspaper Zeit. most videos are english with subtitles, so just scroll down, ignore the german, and click the videos: ars electronica videos page 1 / page 2 / page 3

more: more direct links to winners of the other categories are up here, and all winners and honorable mentions are listed here: ars electronica 2010 winners.

related books / categories in Daily s-Press
- let a thousand dictionaries bloom - Sean Burn (live art documentary)
- Letters Patterns Structures - Andrew Topel (visual poetry)
- daily bookshelf: experimental

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2) The Afghan Women’s Writing Project

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media:

"Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project. Most of our Afghan writers participate in the project partially or entirely in secret from friends and family. The Afghan Women’s Writing Project began as an idea during novelist Masha Hamilton’s last trip to Afghanistan in November 2008."

The project reaches out to talented and generous women author/teachers in the United States and engages them, on a volunteer, rotating basis, to teach Afghan women online from Afghanistan. They use women teachers due to cultural sensitivities in Afghanistan. The writing workshops are taught in three secure online classrooms. To read the stories, visit the homepage with latest essays and information.

related books / categories in Daily s-Press
- A Thousand Sisters - Lisa Shannon (the chronicle of a sponsorship)
- Zahra's Paradise(international graphic web novel)
- daily bookshelf: the world these days

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PS: there also is a personal editor's note on this feature, it can be found here: worlds.

The politics of fiction + Reading and Race

3 recommended links:
1) TEDTalk video podcast: "The politics of fiction" by Eli Shafak
2) The Millions ethnicity essay by Edan Lepucki
3) Best of Web 2010 article in the Chicago Tribune


1) TEDTalks video podcast: Elif Shafak on the politics of fiction
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. From the podcast:
"We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people. In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see."

Just as her books, her speech receives biased comments, from "Stunningly and gently radical :)" to "Slow down, woman." A transcript of Elif Shafak' speech is online at bakikuleyi.livejournal: Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction

related books / categories in Daily s-Press
- International Short Fiction (World Literature Today)
- Zahra's Paradise(international graphic web novel)
- daily bookshelf: international
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2) The Millions ethnicity essay: Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction
The Millions is an online magazine offering coverage on books, arts, and culture since 2003. Recently, Edan Lepucki reflects on the books she read about African-Americans, and on fiction / non-fiction books about ethnicity:
"Reading narrative requires empathy. The character’s perspective becomes your own, and through this relationship you begin to feel as another person would. As I read Roots, I felt what Kunta Kinte felt, saw what he saw, and by becoming him, I understood intimately the horrors of slavery. It’s why nonfiction slave narratives, like those of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, were so important to the abolitionist movement, and why fictional slave narratives persist today.
But stories also require complicity: the reader participates in the action of the story simply by imagining and interpreting it. As Zadie Smith points out in this short interview: "Fiction is like a hypothetical area in which to act. That’s what Aristotle thought—that fictional narrative was a place to imagine what you would do in this, that, or the other situation. I believe that, and it’s what I love most about fiction."
related books / categories in Daily s-Press
- Had Slaves by Catherine Sasanov
- How to Escape from a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique
- daily bookshelf: gender + race
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3) Chicago Tribune article: "Best of the Web 2010" edited by Kathy Fish and Matt Bell
From the book section of the Chicago Tribune:
"Reading, poetry and prose written for the Web calls for a different kind of writing than one might find on the printed page and this annual volume is a terrific reminder of great possibilities and experiments in style and form." - Elizabeth Taylor, Literary Editor Chicago Tribune


related books / categories in Daily s-Press
- Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc, edited by K. Fish + M. Bell)
- daily bookshelf: indie + small prize winners / best of anthologies