[03/12/2007]
Stuart Moulthrop and Isaías Herrero won the 3rd International City of Vinaròs Digital Literature Awards, organised by Vinaròs Town Council and the Open University of Catalonia's Hermeneia research group, for their works Deep Surface (Digital Narrative category) and La casa sota el temps (the "Vicent Ferrer" Award for the best digital work in Catalan), respectively. Both authors also won, jointly, the award for digital poetry with the works Under Language (by the American writer and theoretician) and Universo Molécula (by the Catalan writer).
The UOC and Vinaròs Town Council select a Catalan and an American for the 3rd International City of Vinaròs Digital Literature Awards
The third holding of these awards, which are well renowned internationally, has confirmed the level of interest from the leading creators of digital literature around the world. Some of the winning works in the two previous years have been the subject of study at recent congresses in the field, such as "The Future of Electronic Literature" symposium held at the University of Maryland (USA), or the "e-poetry 2007" congress held at the University of Paris-VIII. Both in terms of the quality and quantity of works presented, this year's awards show the increase in the level of participants, a fact valued highly by the award's jury and a sign of the consolidating position of this innovative initiative to organise awards of this kind.
The winning works
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Digital Narrative Award
- Deep Surface, the winning work in the narrative category (worth $2,500), plays with the metaphor of submersion in reading and its risks. Ironically based on a US government report that warns of the existence of the "risk of reading"quot;, Stuart Moulthrop defines his work as inspired by a strange courtship "between a reading machine and a diving, a free-diving simulator". The work is not just literary, but goes further becoming more like a game, but you need to understand the literary side of things to be able to play the game, how to "breathe" and, thus, how to continue reading.
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Vicent Ferrer Award for the best work in Catalan
- La casa sota el temps, by Isaías Herrero Florensa (the Vicent Ferrer Award for the best work in Catalan, worth $1,000) investigates the narrative possibilities of IT. As Herrero explains: "Enigmas, puns, digital prose and poetry, image and sound in a virtual universe, which, simply by being conceived, exists". The work is an exercise that looks to immerse users in a virtual space, designed and programmed to create an experience that makes the most of the possibilities for interaction applied to conventional narrative. The reader is the protagonist on a journey in which the different media combine to offer them the freedom to explore and construct the universe they wish to create.
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Digital Poetry Award
- Under Language by Stuart Moulthrop, using the twofold sense of language and the strict rules of use that the work imposes, offers a reflection on what it means to write in the present tense: whereby writing is combined with code when using computers to create (or read). We also need to take into account that which is "under language", computer programming language, which forms an inseparable part of the work.
- Universo molécula by Isaías Herrero Florensa, joint winner with Under Language of the Digital Poetry Award (worth $2,500), is an excellent work that looks at the molecular structure of matter, using poetic, literary language. A rich and complex poetic system which, as with molecular properties, uses different forms of representation to reflect the different levels of complexity: from the simplest forms to three-dimensional models.
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