https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/123362 2026-04-14T06:18:20Z 2026-04-14T06:18:20Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/12522 2018-03-20T12:25:36Z 2014-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: About our contributors Abstract: Short biographies of contributors.

2014-12-01T00:00:00Z Fenech, Giuliana https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/12521 2018-03-20T12:26:38Z 2014-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: From audiences to publics : convergence culture and the Harry Potter phenomenon Authors: Fenech, Giuliana Abstract: In the mid-nineties, changing business and communication models influenced the way in which cultural industries operated. The spheres of public and private, production and distribution, ownership and access had to be reconsidered and were characterised by convergence culture, a commercial and creative environment based on active participation that offers support for creating and sharing interpretations and original works. Convergence culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic participation and fosters a sense of community growing around people’s common interests and ideologies. It is also a product of the relationship between communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow around them, and the activities they support.

2014-12-01T00:00:00Z Chetcuti, Clara https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/12520 2018-03-20T12:27:28Z 2014-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Enc0d1ng poetry Authors: Chetcuti, Clara Abstract: So-called “poetry in code” mounts a doubled claim to electronic-ness and literariness, and can be dubbed “literary” precisely due to its coded nature. It would seem, then, that code requires at least as much critical consideration as the linguistic and rhetorical devices normally employed in print literature. Insofar as a legitimate codework employs code at the scripting level as a language-generator and –animator, and at the surface level as either executable or non-executable programming, to what extent can E. E. Cummings’s I Will Be (1925) be considered a poem in code? What can be inferred from a comparison between this would-be proto-codework and a canonical digital poem such as Brian Kim Stefans’s The Dreamlife of Letters (2000)? What is it that makes Cummings’ poem a potentially more remarkable codework than Stefans’s? Is it the precociousness of his coded address, or is it the fact that he anticipates the links which N. Katherine Hayles makes between code and liminal somatic states in her essay 'Traumas of Code' (2006)?

2014-12-01T00:00:00Z Baldacchino, Pamela https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/12515 2018-03-20T12:28:11Z 2014-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Trespassing the boundaries of flesh : exploring wounded embodiment through artistic practice Authors: Baldacchino, Pamela Abstract: The aim of this paper is the contemplation of the mineness-otherness relation of being triggered by the onset of serious and chronic illness. The phenomenological theories of Frederick Svenaeus and Martin Heidegger bring to light a form of otherness (alienation) experienced with illness and allow one to question the boundaries of flesh in relation to homelessness and exile. My study is directed towards analysing this experience and finding ways of overcoming such boundaries in an effort to reach out for the suffering other through the process of empathy. The conceptual framework lies embedded in the process of reflection, relation and revelation by which the ill person encounters the self and seeks to reveal new meaning in life. Considering the body in illness as being in a state of internal war, an audio-visual tool called ‘Sanctuary’ was designed to serve the ill person’s narrative. As a mobile space that can be consumed in wards or clinics, it presents a bunker experience which magnifies one’s presence and places one’s whole body in the context of a solitary shelter whilst being assailed. The tool allows the viewer to look out onto digital artwork created as a metaphor of the self.

2014-12-01T00:00:00Z