Hyperrhiz 17

An Interview with Sandy Baldwin and Rui Torres, CELL

Bruno Ministro
University of Coimbra

Citation: Ministro, Bruno. “An Interview with Sandy Baldwin and Rui Torres, CELL.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 17, 2017. doi:10.20415/hyp/017.r01

An Interview with Sandy Baldwin, CELL coordinator, and Rui Torres, CELL member

Conducted and edited by Bruno Ministro, Coimbra, Portugal — July 24, 2015

Part I is devoted to a presentation and discussion of the CELL Project, a search engine developed by the Consortium on Electronic Literature which harvests and aggregates records from across eight partner databases. Sandy Baldwin gives us an overview of CELL’s principles, goals and current state of the art (the interview took place in Coimbra on July 24, 2015 – an important moment of transition for the project). Rui Torres, principal investigator and coordinator of the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature, explains how he sees the CELL Project as a way to guarantee interoperability, open access and decentralization.

Parts II and III are dedicated to the “Computing Literature” series, edited by Baldwin and Philippe Bootz at West Virginia University, giving particular attention to the last book published in this series, PO.EX: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia, organized by Baldwin and Torres.

In Part IV, Rui Torres talks about the further developments of the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature, such as the translation of its entries and works’ descriptions into English. At this moment, thinking on the translation of creative works themselves, Torres and Baldwin also give us some food for thought about the expressivity of language and code.

In Part V, Rui Torres and Sandy Baldwin share their thoughts on literary traditions and the roots of Electronic Literature by looking at decentralized examples of books and practices that set the origins of e-lit outside the paradigm of hypertextuality. They also think aloud about performative uses of language and code across the web, giving a few examples of artistic and non artistic works created in the last years.

View Project: VIEW Video Interview (MP4)