Changes on the ELO Board of Directors

During its meeting on Thursday, April 11th, 2002, the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization accepted the resignations of Peter Bernstein, Cathy Marshall, Krish Menon, and Larry Wangberg from the board and accepted the nominations of Alan Liu, Scott Rettberg and Bill Seaman to the board.

Peter Bernstein’s fellow board members commended him for his service to the ELO as a founding member of the board of directors and as Treasurer of the organization during a time of difficult fiscal challenges. Cathy Marshall was commended for her service to the ELO as a founding board member and as Secretary, assuring that accurate records were kept and that all of our filings got in on time. Larry Wangberg was commended for making a generous donation at a crucial time, and for opening up connections between the ELO and the media.

New Director Alan Liu is the weaver of Voice of the Shuttle. He is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1988. He is also principal investigator of the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UCSB titled, Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information, and director of the English Department’s new undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information.

New Director Scott Rettberg is the cofounder of the Electronic Literature Organization and served as its first executive director. Rettberg is a coauthor of The Unknown, a Hypertext Novel, the cowinner of the 1999 trAce/AltX International Hypertext Competition and print book The Unknown: An Anthology. This fall, Rettberg will join the Literature faculty of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey as Assistant Professor of New Media Studies, where he will help to design an undergraduate New Media Writing track.

New Director Bill Seaman is a Professor in the Department of Design | Media Arts, UCLA, where he is exploring issues related to the continuum between physical and virtual/media space. His current research includes the creation of a HYBRID INVENTION GENERATION, exploring a machinic genetics. This research is being funded by a gift from the Intel corporation. A second work with Regina Van Berkel was recently premiered in Collogne, entitled “Inversion”. This Dance / Performance / Installation will be presented in The Holland Dance Festival in November and in the Steps Festival in Switzerland early next year.

The board also accepted the nomination of board member Celia O’Donnell as Treasurer of the organization, and the nomination of board member Marjorie Luesebrink to the new position of Vice-President of the organization.

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Coverage of the State of the Arts Symposium in the LA Times

This Sunday’s Living section of the Los Angeles Times featured an article about the recent 2002 ELO State of the Arts Symposium at UCLA. Aside from a couple of factual inaccuracies (while the mention of Michael Joyce’s Aftermath brought a smile to some of our faces, the actual title of Eastgate’s classic hypertext is afternoon: a story) the article is a fine bit of journalism that captures the spirit of what many are already calling the most important gathering in the history of the nascent field of electronic literature. (Abstract available, article can be purchased for $2.95)
[Link updated April 2005; the article was removed from the Web]

State of the Arts Symposium a Success

The ELO Symposium was a huge success. Three nights of hypermedia readings by new and established artists and two full days of panel discussions by speakers from multi-disciplinary experiences and perspectives. 150 people from all over the world attended the event, proving that this type of Symposium is vitally important to the field and the future of electronic literature.

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