Electronic Literature Organization

Teknokultura, the online journal of the University of Puerto Rico’s Social Sciences Faculty, provides a forum of expression on subjects related to technology and culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. Teknokultura is seeking contributions, such as articles, electronic art, book and website reviews, literary work, and cartoons, that address the integration of technology in our daily social lives. This call for contributions will be open from April 2004 until April 2005. For more information, contact Heidi J. Figueroa Sarriera by email at hfiguero at coqui dot net.

Joseph Tabbi will be leading a seminar titled “The Future of the Page.” This seminar will contrast contemporary cognitive science to poststructuralist theory and hypertext theory in order to understand how literature relates to its materiality on the page. “The Future of the Page” will take place June 3-6 at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Creative Time and Panasonic are proud to present Günther Selichar: Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red, and Green?, an online competition and public art project based on the elementary visual building blocks of digital display screens. Participants are invited to create animations comprised of 15 vertical compositions in blue, red, and green. Three winning entries will be featured on the NBC Astrovision by Panasonic.

On February 25, acclaimed author and critic of digital literature Michael Joyce and artist Alexandra Grant will speak at CalArts in Valencia on “Wordlessness of the mitneinander.” Michael Joyce is the author of the acclaimed early hypertext fiction afternoon: a story, the online novel Twelve Blue, two print volumes of eliterature theory, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, and Othermindedness: The emergence of network culture, and many other works. Joyce was one of the original designers of the Storyspace hypertext writing environment. He is currently a Professor of English and the Library at Vassar College.

The Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication is pleased to announce its 2004 Summer Fellowship Program to foster innovative research for its new electronic journal, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. Scholars, designers, and technologists are brought together by Vectors to explore how technology changes and redefines social and cultural relations. For more information about the fellowship program and how to apply, please visit the Vectors website.

page_space, a show in which ten artists explore the digital page, opens February 28 at the Machine Gallery. The first effort of the page_space project of Machine Poetics, this show is an experiment which reverses the usual collaboration between writing and design. Programmers and designers created digital page architectures that were later exchanged and used as fields for textual exploration. 6:00-8:00 p.m. 1200 D North Alvarado, Los Angeles.

The Department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is seeking a professor to teach undergraduate and graduate programs, conduct research, and work with the university’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities on major digital research initiatives. Scholars with a Native American Studies or American West background are strongly preferred, as well as those with experience in Native American primary sources, electronic texts, digital research, and/or documentary editing. If interested, please contact David Cahan at dcahan at unlnotes dot unl dot edu.

RCCS has published its first book review in a language other than English, Maria Rosales-Sequeiros’s review of Local y Global: La Gestion de las Ciudades en la Era de la Informacion by Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells. Other book reviews at RCCS this month include: Chris Hables Gray’s Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age reviewed by Danielle R. Wiese; Andrew Murphie and John Potts’s Culture & Technology reviewed by Tim Detwiler; and John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication reviewed by Scott Campbell, Christopher Lucas, and Malcolm Dean.

Deena Larsen is one of the people interviewed in “The Uncertain Future of the Past,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan 30, 2004. The article describes the threatened loss of electronic documents as their formats become obsolete and newer machines cannot read them.

This graduate conference, to be held April 9-10, 2004 at UC Riverside, seeks analytical papers and artistic works that probe the question of multivocality or heteroglossia, either in the design of their narratives, or in the nature of their use of electronic media. Critical readings of electronic texts and works are welcome, along with creative experiments with new media. Abstracts/papers/links due March 1, 2004 to cfpenglish at hotmail dot com (no attachments, please).

The “Literature in Programmable Media/Literatur in Netzen/Netzliteratur” research project at the University of Siegen’s Centre of Cultural Research is now online. The site currently contains an archive of articles by project participants, links to sites of artists and scholars with whom the project collaborates, and event announcements. There are plans for an on-line discussion forum in the near future. The project “aims at analysing the ongoing changes of literary communication in programmable and networked media, particularly on the Internet.”

Electronic literature author Stephanie Strickland (True North, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una, Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot) will be doing an e-reading and presentation on February 26. The reading takes place at 5:30pm at the Wyndham Robertson Library, Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.