Electronic Literature Organization

Among the innovative writing featured at the past three &Now festivals has been a strong showing of electronic literature. Steve Tomasula sends us word that he hopes to see more at The 4th Biennial &Now Festival of Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts to be held in Buffalo, NY from October 14-17, 2009.

From the Call:

PLEASE SUBMIT….
Critical papers, criti-fictional presentations, fiction readings, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects, and cross genre work of all kinds. Pieces that address linguistic transgressions, the limits of genre, or works that promote interdisciplinary explorations are particularly encouraged. Proposals can be for individual readings, critical panels, creative panels, and/or roundtable discussions. (See the full call here)

In a note to ELO, Steve speaks of his desire from the start to include electronic literature as a literary genre, as opposed to a specialty or an oddity. Past &Nows have featured the electronic works of Stephanie Strickland, Rob Wittig, Scott Rettberg, and MD Coverley.

As another sign of the ELO-link, this year’s festival features Robert Coover.

This should be an excellent showcase for ELO works. Please submit or join us there.

Digital Arts and Culture (better known as DAC) 2009 has announced several calls to entice authors and critics of electronic literature. The conference will be held at UC Irvine December 12-15 and takes for its topic: “after media, embodiment and context.”

First and foremost a night of readings: Electronic Literary Arts Performances, curated by Jessica Pressman and Mark C. Marino.

From the call:

Each performance is limited to 5-7 minutes and should take the form of interactive engagement with the audience and dramatic presentations of creative digital-born works.

Second, two tracks in particular may appeal to ELO folks:

• Software/ platform studies, hosted by Jeremy Douglass and Noah Wardrip-Fruin
• Cognition and creativity, hosted by Fox Harrell
• A Space-Time of Ubiquity and Embeddedness — hosted by Ulrik Ekman and Mark Hansen.

Please see the official call for all the details.

British Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded a major grant (£440,000 over 2 years) to ‘Poetry Beyond Text,’ which will include investigations into “digital poetry, books of poetry and photography, artists’ books and concrete and pattern poetry.”

This grant marks another sign of international interest and national arts investment in the exploration of electronic literature.

Below is news from their announcement:

Researchers at the Universities of Dundee and Kent have just been awarded a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to study poetry ‘beyond text’.

The project, entitled Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition involves researchers in English, Comparative Literature, Psychology and Fine Art in a 2-year partnership between the two universities. The team will be led by Dr Andrew Michael Roberts of the Dundee School of Humanities English Programme.

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ELO announces 2 new resources of electronic literature for 2009: The Electronic Literature Collection, vol. 2, and the new Electronic Literature Directory.

1) The Electronic Literature Directory version 2.0 will feature an easy-to-use interface for accessing a robust collection of electronic literature, edited and annotated. As more faculty begin adding electronic literature to their courses, the directory will prove an invaluable resource for accessing new and classic electronic literature. These works have been vetted and documented by the ELO Working Group, coordinated by Lori Emerson. The directory will feature a new design, offering visitors more ways to find the kinds of e-lit they desire while also discovering works they could not have imagined.

Under the Direction of ELO president Joseph Tabbi, the ELD 2.0 was developed from 2006-09 by Maleeka Ingram, Stuart Moulthrop, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland, and ELO Technical Director Ewan Branda. The previous version of the Directory was developed by Robert Kendall and Nick Traenkner.

2) Following up on the widely distributed volume 1, ELO presents Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2. Like vol. 1, This second biannual collection will be available as a stand-alone disc (DVD) and an online collection. The editorial collective for the second volume includes Laura Borràs Castanyer, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley and Brian Kim Stefans.

These two resources with their wide arrays of works will offer yet more answers to the question what is electronic literature? More importantly, they provide reliable, edited collections of materials and links that ensure that scholars will not end their search for new elit on a 404 error. Stay tuned to the RSS feed for ELO for more updates soon.

Announcing a new(er) presentation of Electronic Literature Organization:
Searching for a New(er) Digital Literature.

“Searching for a New(er) Digital Literature” is an exhibition of twelve multimedia works that offer readers representative examples of new digital poetry and fiction on the web. Curated by Alan Bigelow, it includes work by Jim Andrews, Marvin Bell & Ernesto Lavandera, Sommer Browning & Mark Lomond & Johanne Ste-Marie, Andy Campbell, J.R. Carpenter, Chris Joseph & Kate Pullinger, Tammy McGovern, Stuart Moulthrop, Alexander Mouton, Jason Nelson, Victoria Welby, and Jody Zellen.

The exhibit is both online and offline. The offline exhibit launched on January 15th at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, USA. The online exhibit is available at
http://www.terminalapsu.org/exhibitions/digitalliterature/index.html

Laura Borràs Castanyer and Loss Pequeño Glazier have called for papers and works (due: Dec. 1) for  E-Poetry Festival in Barcelona 2009 (May 24-27) at the Universitat Obertat de Catalunya (UOC). Many ELO members participated in E-Poetry 2007 in Paris, and this year’s conference will be another key international e-lit rendezvous.

Artistic events will take place at key Barcelona venues such as the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (http://www.cccb.org/en/ <http://www.cccb.org/en/>), providing authors the opportunity to present their works to a public curious about new literary and artistic trends employing technology and communication during the Setmana de la Poesia.

*Kate Hayles, Roberto Simanowski, and Jean Clément (Université Paris 8) are slated to deliver keynotes.

Selected papers will be published in proceedings.

Organizers include the UOC’s research group Hermeneia with the collaboration of Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo) and the Laboratoire Paragraph (Université Paris 8).

See the full call here:
http://www.uoc.edu/in3/hermeneia/e-poetry_barcelona_09/eng/presentacio.html

Siegen Beyond the Future

ELO announces two exciting connections with The University of Siegen, Germany!

1) The Conference:

“Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres”

International conference at the Cultural Studies Research Center “Media Upheavals” University of Siegen, Germany, Artur-Woll-Haus, November 20-21, 2008 Organized by Professor Dr. Peter Gendolla and Dr. Jörgen Schäfer

The program can be found here:

The conference features many ELO members and affiliates: Roberto Simanowski, Kate Hayles, John Cayley, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and ELO Director Joseph Tabbi.

2) The Collaboration:

The project group at Media Upheavals and the ELO have been collaborating since the summer of 2007. The Siegen database of Critical Works will be folded into the Electronic Literature Directory, version 2.0 that will be found on this site. In addition to collecting works, we are developing a recording format and metadata standard that will be portable and shared, and a model for literary archival projects web-wide.

Announcing Stephanie Strickland’s new book of poems, ZONE : ZERO, which includes a CD with two sequences from the book as interactive digital poems.

Here you will find sample poems, reviews, and recorded readings, along with endorsements from Marjorie Perloff, Rachel Loden, and Brian Kim Stefans,

Stephanie has contributed immeasurably to the production and promotion of electronic literature through her work as a poet, as a critic and theorist, and most recently as a co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. I.

Editor Nick Kocz sends this call from The New River:

The New River is a journal of digital writing and art, created and edited by Ed Falco. The managing editors for the Fall ‘09 issue, Manisha Sharma and Nick Kocz, are interested in receiving submissions of original and unpublished digital writing and art that merges place, history, and culture. However, we are open to considering other pieces as well. Surprise us!

Please check The New River’s submission guidelines for further information. The  deadline for consideration for our Fall ‘08 issue is November 5, 2008. If accepted, you will be asked to upload all files to our server so we can host it  locally. If you have any questions, feel free to email us. To view the Spring  2008 issue, as well as archives, visit us at http://www.thenewriver.us

“A History of the Future of Narrative”: Robert’s Coover’s closing keynote address delivered on September 13, 2008 at the Electronic Literature in Europe seminar at the University of Bergen. Video produced by Martin Arvebro.

A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

The ELO Visionary Landscapes 2008 conference at Washington State University Vancouver was one of the largest in the history of the organization and certainly one of the largest (if not THE largest) international conferences to focus on electronic literature.

The conference also marks a watershed expansion in ELO since all attendees were either current or new members. As this organization continues to grow internationally, the conference drew attendees from 17 countries and 5 continents. The works and presentations continued to demonstrate the diversity of forms that call themselves electronic literature.

Here are some more numerical output from the conference in the first part of a series of post-conference posts.

Links to their bios and works can be found online here. Post-conference news will follow on the ELO blog and can also be found here on the post-conference page.

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted from June 1 to September 30, 2008. Up to three works per author will be considered; previously published works will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection is a biannual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. Volume 1, presently available both online (http://collection.eliterature.org) and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, has been used in dozens of courses at universities in the United States and internationally, and has been widely reviewed in the United States and Europe. It is also available as a CD-ROM insert with N. Katherine Hayles’ full-length study, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

Volume 2, comprising approximately 50 works, will likewise be available online, and as a cross-platform DVD in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection are offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.

The editorial collective for the second volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, to be published in 2009, is Laura Borràs Castanyer, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley and Brian Kim Stefans. This collective will review the submitted work and select pieces for the Collection.

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