Just received confirmation that Terry Schenold, Timothy Welsh, and I will be participating in a panel entitled, “Rethinking the Intermediated Experience through Literature and Gaming,” at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Society of Literature, Science and the Arts in Charlotte, NC, November 13th-16th.

Here’s the abstract for the panel:

Considering recent work in new media theory, technoculture studies, and the philosophy of technology, this panel explores some possibilities for how to approach the creative potential of intermediation. In particular, each panelist considers alternatives to theories that are rooted in information theory and asks what a theory of intermediated experience might look like. Focusing not only on print texts, such as Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but also computer role-playing games, such as Morrowind, and electronic literature by Shelley Jackson, the panelists unpack affect, embodiment, and materiality, in particular, in order to articulate how experience unfolds during particular intermediated events. Questions raised by the panelists include: When stressing experience over, say, quantitative data analysis, how does the notion of medium function? Or the subject-object dichotomy? Or the very idea of interactivity? Motivated by differences in both methodology and archives, the panelists understand this panel as an opportunity to work through a theory of intermediated experience as a problematic—why such a theory matters in the first place, what problems emerge, and how those problems allow for certain modes of knowledge-making.