#tech #elit #queer Really pleased to be included in the next Electronic Literature Collection. If you haven’t had a chance to check  out Queerskins, try it in Chrome or Safari. Thanks as always to my collaborator Cyril Tsiboulski, interactive designer and co-founder of Cloudred Studio. Queerskins explores the nature of love and forgiveness through the story of a young gay physician from a rural Missouri Catholic family who dies of AIDS at the beginning of the epidemic. It consists of 40,000 words of diaristic text, two hours of audio monologues from five different characters, and over a hundred photos and videos curated from Flickr Commons and YouTube and beautiful little Fiip videos of L.A. by filmmaker Jarrah Gurrie.

#MobileMayakovsky is a mobile lounge/library/workshop/performance space designed by architect Peter Franck. It is a public art project that brings the linguistic playfulness, exaggerated style and oblique political commentary inherent to
the manifesto into the digital age. Inspired by the life and poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky,  the project provides participants the opportunity to learn about, reflect upon, and be inspired by early Russian avant-garde artists, both their revolutionary artistic achievements and the often violent repression of their artistic freedom.  With the help of local artists, graphic designers, and poets, passersby will create their own manifestos, which will be printed on site,Tweeted, and performed. In the process, we hope that Russians will reclaim the avant-garde as a celebrated part of their history and creatively respond to current political, social and cultural conditions which stymie free artistic expression. Mayakovsky is a problematic figure in Russia who has been used/resurrected for many purposes. We are, in a sense, resurrecting him again, as a problematic symbol of rebellious creativity that was stifled for political purposes (Mayakovsky himself writing that he “stepped on the voice of his own song”.) The library offers visitors, especially younger people, the opportunity consider the Russian avant-garde  in all its complexities, and, then,  inspired and/or disturbed by this knowledge, to create their own manifestos that will be printed, tweeted and exhibited on site.

Atomic Vacation combines a contemporary database-influenced narrative with

the emotional potency of oral history to generate spaces for actively

contemplating national identity, global citizenship, technology and

embodiment. While players explore Google landscapes of the American West,

visiting places of natural beauty like the Grand Canyon, as well as sites

of nuclear missile storage and testing, Shizuku, a robot girl from the

possible future, narrates the Pinnochio-esque story of her former life on

Earth. Along the journey, the player encounters archival objects (image,

video, sound and text)  from Cold War history (e.g. remarkably callous

State Department films about HIroshima, Paul Robeson’s  testimony

about being considered “less than an American” before the House

Un-American Activities Committee, etc.) and the present-day (e.g. DARPA

research on “narrative neurobiology,” a rescued egg-farm

chicken’s first walk on grass, the Japanese news report about a

prototype robot girl). Players can access other players’

contributions of data (text, sound, and image) offered in response to

in-game challenges, and contribute their own.  Part multimedia fiction,

part historical archive, part community art project (players earn points

for tweets and for adding media to the game) AV allows players to interact

with their present-day selves from the vantage point of a post-apocalyptic

future. The object of the game is to prevent that future from becoming a

reality and to engage players in small, but personally meaningful acts of

archiving, contemplation, and aspiration. The final project will be an

Android app with narrative extensions housed and distributed through

Twitter.

will be translated into Portuguese and featured alongside an interview with Marjorie Perloff in the Brazilian poetry and criticism journal Sibila. Thanks to Régis Rodrigues Bonvicino.

I “interrupted” at the Interrupt3 conference at Brown University by offering the audience the chance to collaboratively create a live, real time 5 min Twitter manifesto on writing and new media. Posting with #fail, the manifesto is quite wonderful. Coming home after dinner I was forced to wade through 11 hours of #fail (lots of failure on Twitter) to find the window we had posted in. The end result is about 70 screen shots. I hope to install it at some point. It will likely fill a few feet of wall. Our disparate voices are like needles in the haystack which begs the question of what manifesto means in today’s networked world of social media.

John Caley invited me to Brown University to cover Interrupt 3 a conference on new media writing and poetics. I had the opportunity to hear conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial poem. I decided to post this essay in response. I appreciate filmmaker and critic Keith Sanborn adding it to the reading list for Bard University’s MFA summer program. I hope this continues the conversation Goldsmith began.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/illya-szilak/the-body-of-michael-brown_b_6891114.html

My review of Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces

My review of Disperse the Light, a show of new e-lit curated by Kathi Inman Berens

This June, I took my family: husband, two kids, young nephew, and sister on a road trip through Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and South Dakota to visit all-American tourist sites like the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore as well as former sites of nuclear warhead storage and testing. The vacation was tweeted live here. Documentation from the trip including hours of GPS-located video from a Virb attached to our minivan window and Google Glass will be used in my next transmedia novel Tiny Drops.

Tiny Drops is an exploration of national identity and our perceptions of time and space in an ever globalized and virtual world. Based on a true story, it tells the tragi-comic story of a Japanese housewife kidnapped by North Korean frogmen off a beach where she is vacationing with her family and taken to Pyongyang to teach a beautiful half-Japanese, half-Korean operative how to “be” Japanese.

The novel will be “housed” in four customized tours through Google Earth (America, South Korea, North Korea and Japan). “Atomic Vacation”: part game, part Cold War archive will be the first. My collaborator, interactive designer Cyril Tsiboulski has agreed to do visual and interactive design for this project. I am actively seeking developers to work on the coding aspects of the project. Contact me at iszilak@gmail.com if you are interested.

I am delighted to be speaking at Temple University Tyler School of Art in the Critical Dialogue series on November 12th. This series has hosted some amazing speakers including Alice Aycock, Dara Birnbaum, Mary Ceruti, Beatriz Colomina, Angela Dufresne, Peter Eleey, Hal Foster, Su Friedrich, RoseLee Goldberg, Hans Haacke, Jens Hoffmann, Joan Jonas, Ralph Lemon, José Lerma, Fionn Meade, John Miller, Wangechi Mutu, Sarah Oppenheimer, John Rajchman, Christian Rattemeyer, Doreen Remen, R.H. Quaytman, Dana Schutz, Josh Siegel, P. Adams Sitney, and Michael Smith and many others.

Event is free and open to the public. Join me if you are in Philadelphia.

I’ll be participating in a panel with Rick Moody and D.J. Spooky moderated by the Council for Literary Magazines and Presses about transmedia story-telling. Join me if you are in NYC.