The world of digital publishing is constantly evolving, and undergoing an accelerated quest for know-how. TOPO is specifically interested in new forms of narrative expression and their dissemination through digital media. This program explores various methods of literary creation using digital tools, as well as the integration of literature in a multidisciplinary perspective. The program is also a forum for exchange between artists.
Topics covered
- Geolocation
- Social Media
- Participatory creation
- Mechanical / interactive devices
- Puzzle games
- Spatial layout (physical and virtual)
- Tree-based scripting
- Augmented reality
- Animated typography
- Episodic writing
- Generative processes and artificial intelligence
Detailed Program
Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Informal meeting: getting to know each other
With Bertrand Laverdure + ILINU/ILIDI
Bertrand Laverdure
On display on an Oculus Rift headset, La Chemise de Frank O'Hara, a virtual reality project featuring four manipulable 3D calligrams based on four texts from writer Bertrand Laverdure's poetic suite. The project is the result of a writing residency in Paris at the Le Cube center and at the Bang center in Chicoutimi (Saguenay). These four poems are integrated into a copy of the car used in the film The Last Clean Shirt directed by Albert Leslie (with subtitles by Frank O'Hara).
Digital Literature Incubator (ILINU)
On display on a large touch screen: A Quebec-Mexico cooperation project led by TOPO in 2022-2023. A collaboration between artists and authors that gave rise to a virtual exhibition in Mozilla Hubs.
Saturday, November 11, 12.30 p.m. to 5.00 p.m.
With Lora Boisvert + Yan St-Onge + Gabriel Tremblay-Gaudette
Lora Boisvert
Author, editor and multimedia teacher.
Having begun writing for young people as a teenager, Lora Boisvert now explores the workings of interactive writing, puzzle play and augmented reality through the books she produces as an editor with her colleague Carolyn Chouinard, for Les Éditions AppLit.
Yan Saint-Onge
Yan St-Onge is an intermedia artist, poet, performer, semiotician and Wikipedist. Drawing on his multidisciplinary writing practice, he will present some of his projects, as well as "Flottement. Vanitas intermédia", a work in progress using Twine software that integrates writing, photography, drawing, visual poetry, video & performance. The author is also experimenting with inserting artificial intelligence into the process.
Gabriel Tremblay-Gaudette
Professor of literature at Université Téluq, Gabriel Tremblay-Gaudette devotes his research to digital culture, text-image relationships and the links between literature and video games. He is the founder of the Collectif Obèle, a research-creation initiative that seeks to establish dialogues between literature and video games through artistic performances and installations. For the training session, the Collectif will be presenting projects created within a number of video games that have been hijacked from their initial format to insert literary discourse.
Saturday, November 18, 12:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
With Caroline Barber + Pascale Tétrault + Jean-Sébastien Veilleux
Caroline Barber
Author of books for young people, Caroline Barber defines herself as an everyday writer. She regularly leads writing workshops in schools while pursuing a writing career. She was behind the Mes mots, mon quartier project, produced by TOPO in 2018-2020, a poetic and geolocated creation project in the Rosemont neighborhood (mesmots.ca). She is currently working on a new collective creation project, Pas à Pas - Des piétons dans la ville, with programmer and digital artist Yannick Guéguen. Her practice of the exquisite corpse, as much literary as visual, has for some years been expressed through a variety of material and technological devices.
Pascale Tétrault
Pascale Tétrault is a multidisciplinary artist and poet based in Montreal, whose work develops at the frontier between writing and electronic art. Her studies in communications, creative writing and interactive media shape her current practice. Through the creation of machine sculptures, at the intersection of electronic art and literature, she demonstrates digital poetry off-screen. As a technologist and programmer, she collaborates on the creation of interactive systems for several artists and studios, including Katherine Melançon, Ying Gao and Marie-Andrée Pellerin.
Jean-Sébastien Veilleux
Photographer and digital artist Jean-Sébastien Veilleux will talk about the complex experience of putting the text into space, and the collaborative process with the authors, for the Stellaires project, an installation integrating photography, poetry and video mapping presented at the GO center in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli in 2022, as part of Poetry Month. The project called for the installation of a projection alcove for the interactive staging of the text by poets Catherine Fortin and Dominique Zalitis.
Saturday, November 25, from 12.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.
With Kofi Oduro + David Turgeon + Harley Smart
Kofi Oduro
Kofi Oduro (Illestpreacha) is a creative coder and generator of digital experiences combining video, poetry and programming. For over ten years, his projects have encouraged discussion, reflection, interaction and collaboration, notably through the practice of live coding, where artists code live in front of an audience to generate an audiovisual performance. For the course, Kofi Oduro will focus on the typographic manipulation of words and language, using examples and technologies that play with the dynamic display of text.
David Turgeon
David Turgeon is a writer and web developer with over twenty years' experience in programming, web development and creative writing. He designed the experimental social network Quolibet, where public contributions take the form of freely typed poems. Beyond this project, David Turgeon has solid experience of the web and the evolution of social networks, where new platforms are emerging to replace the current giants, increasingly criticized.
Harley Smart
Anteism Books co-founder Harley Smart will present their latest explorations in art and new technologies that have the potential to transform independent publishing and artist book production. The presentation will cover the development of a new book-reading application for mobile devices, Marginalia, which uses artificial intelligence to create a creative, interactive reading experience. This is a new experimental tool for interacting with the printed book and stimulating universal knowledge learning.
