CFP: ELO 2016: Next Horizons (11/15/15; 6/10-12/16) Victoria, B.C.

Next Horizons: ELO 2016


10-12 June 2016
University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.
Deadline for Scholarly Activities & Media Art Festival Works: November 15, 2015
Click here for the Submissions Form

At the annual conference held in Bergen, Norway in August 2015, ELO explored “the end(s) of electronic literature,” construed broadly as the contours, edges, and boundaries of the field and practice. This year the ELO 2016 Conference & Media Art Festival asks now, What’s next? What investigations, interventions, and creations lie beyond the horizons of born digital writing?

“Next Horizons,” the ELO 2016 Conference & Media Art Festival, looks to answer these questions with the intentional connection, integration, and expansion of electronic literature into the Digital Humanities through a partnership between the Electronic Literature Organization and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). ELO 2016 takes place at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, B.C. where over 750 scholars convene each year at DHSI to learn and expand their knowledge of DH tools, methods, and criticism. Taking place from 10-12 June and co-chaired by Drs. Dene Grigar and Ray Siemens, ELO 2016 will feature critical papers and artistic works of electronic literature. Additionally, because collocating the conference and art festival within DHSI presents the unique opportunity for collaborations between the two communities that may result in new knowledge about electronic literature and DH, it also offers opportunities––new formats and approaches to the conference––that take advantage of this affordance.

Opportunities for Participation

ELO 2016 emphasizes both scholarship and creative activities. All events will be peer-reviewed and juried by scholars and artists with expertise in the specific area reflected in the topic or method. Comments will be sent to all who submit a proposal or work. For more information, contact Dene Grigar, President, ELO, dgrigar@mac.com.
Read more CFP: ELO 2016: Next Horizons (11/15/15; 6/10-12/16) Victoria, B.C.

Plataformas de la imaginación October 2015-Jan 2016

ELO is proud to sponsor Plataformas de la imaginación in Mexico City! (October 2015-January 2016)

Plataformas de la imaginación is the first initiative in Mexico carried out to present the current state, the historic trajectory, and the aesthetic variety of electronic literature produced around the world. In consonance with the literary, interdisciplinary, artistic and technological avant-gardes at an international level, this project aims to place electronic literature in the central discussion of the artistic agendas in general, and that of digital culture in particular. The various events comprising the project will be held in Mexico City, and include multiple activities with the support of prestigious Mexican institutions.

The activities of Plataformas de la Imaginación include three exhibits at Universum-Museo de Ciencias (universum.unam.mx), Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (tlatelolco.unam.mx) and Centro de Cultura Digital (centroculturadigital.mx); a handful of interventions and live performances in Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola (casadellago.unam.mx); the world premiere of Eugenio Tisselli’s new piece will take place in Palacio de Bellas Artes (palacio.bellasartes.gob.mx). Additionally, an international symposium will be held at Sala Carlos Chávez of the Centro Cultural Universitario (cultura.unam.mx) featuring conferences by invited artists, critics, and scholars, both national and international.

Featured artists: Alison Clifford, Belén Gache, Benjamín Moreno, Eduardo Kac, Eugenio Tisselli, Jörg Piringer, Loss Pequeño Glazier, María Mencía, Serge Bouchardon, Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Amaranth Borsuk, bpNichol ✝, David Clark, Gustavo Romano, and Jan Robert Leegte. Platformas de la Imaginación was designed by the Laboratorio de Literaturas Extendidas y Otras Materialidades (lleom), a scholarly independent Mexican organization that promotes the creative, analytic and theoretical work linked to hybrid artistic processes and objects (digital and non-digital), with intermedial and literary studies as starting point.
 
 
Timeline
 
Symposium
Oct. 8-9. 2015. Máquinas de Inminencia. Sala Carlos Chávez, UNAM.
Exhibits
 
Oct. 9-Dec. 6, 2015 Literatura electrónica. Escenarios híbridos. Universum-Museo de las Ciencias
Nov. 12, 2015-Jan 17, 2016 Literatura electrónica. Política y cuerpo en el presente digital. Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco
Oct. 23.-Dec 13, 2015. Selecciones como objetos. Centro de Cultura Digital.
Interventions
October 14-18. Miradas desde el post-Internet. El regreso a los materiales. Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola
October 16. IP Poetry: Acto en vivo
October 8. Nuevas y viejas prácticas de lectura: migraciones de una lectura nómada. Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Auditorio
October 10. Crítica de la hibridez digital. Conversación sobre arte electrónico. Museo Universitario del Chopo
October 23. Lectura sonora. Centro de Cultura Digital
November 5. Estreno mundial de La tiranía del código, de Eugenio Tisselli. Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes
November 12. Performance sonoro El Fonófono de Tito Rivas. Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco

ELO Holds Epic Conference in Bergen

Artist Judd Morrissey’s augmented reality performance Saturday concluded a week-long conference in Norway, ELO’s second international conference held outside the United States.  Running August 4 through 7, with pre-conference workshops days before and Saturday’s poetry performance after, the ELO 2015: The End(s) of Electronic Literature was one of the largest ever with 194 attendees from around the world.

Hosted at the University of Bergen (UiB), the conference spanned six venues, featuring panel presentations, performances, and five gallery exhibitions.  The group of international artists and scholars gathered to discuss the state of the art of electronic literature and to imagine what comes next. The complete schedule is online here.  (Also, see the ELO 2015 Facebook group).

The program coordinator for the conference was Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen and the program coordinator for ELO2015, and the conference chair was ELO co-founder Scott Rettberg,  also a professor of digital culture at UiB. Roderick Coover, Director of the MFA Program in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, was the conference’s Artistic Chair.

In five exhibitions included:

  • The Ends of the Electronic Literature: Festival Exhibition (University Library from 8/4 to 8/28)
  • Kid E-Lit: Electronic literature for children and adolescents (Bergen Public Library 8/4 to 9/30)
  • Hybrid interface, digital stories (Lydgalleriet 8/4-22)
  • Decentered: an exhibition of global electronic literature (Stiftelsen 3,14; 8/4-23)
  • Interventions: an exhibition of political electronic literature (USF 8/4 to 7)

More information about exhibitions and other open events: http://www.uib.no/nb/fg/elektronisklitteratur/90342/en-festival-elektronisk-litteratur-elo2015

At the end of the conference, two major prizes were awarded: N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature, which was awarded to Sandy Baldwin for his book The Internet Unconscious, and the Robert Coover Prize, which was awarded to Samantha Gorman and Robert Coover for their interactive novella app Pry.

The next ELO Conference will be held in 2016 at the University of Victoria.

More details about the conference, including photos and videos, and details will follow. Congratulations and thanks to all who participated and made this possible.

 

Hayles and Coover Prizes Announced at ELO 2015

At the close of the international conference in Bergen, Norway, the Electronic Literature Organization is happy to announce the winners of the 2015 ELO Prizes.  The Robert Coover Prize goes to Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro for their interactive app novella Pry.  The N. Katherine Hayles Award goes to Sandy Baldwin: The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature.

Instituted in 2014, these two awards are the top honors the organization awards, and these two winning works stand a top a field of extraordinary contributions from the past year.

Sandy Baldwin’s monograph epitomizes the pinnacle of scholarship in the field. The site for Baldwin’s book, explains,

There is electronic literature that consists of works, and the authors and communities and practices around such works. This is not a book about that electronic literature. It is not a book that charts histories or genres of this emerging field, not a book setting out methods of reading and understanding. The Internet Unconscious is a book on the poetics of net writing, or more precisely on the subject of writing the net. By ‘writing the net’, Sandy Baldwin proposes three ways of analysis: 1) an understanding of the net as a loosely linked collocation of inscriptions, of writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; 2) as a discursive field that codifies and organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of ‘electronic literature’; and 3) as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers’ body to the work of the net.

The Internet Unconscious describes the poetics of the net’s “becoming-literary,” by employing concepts that are both technically-specific and poetically-charged, providing a coherent and persuasive theory. The incorporation and projection of sites and technical protocols produces an uncanny displacement of the writer’s body onto diverse part objects, and in turn to an intense and real inhabitation of the net through writing. The fundamental poetic situation of net writing is the phenomenology of “as-if.” Net writing involves construal of the world through the imaginary.

The story app Pry transforms the narrative experience of reading by bringing in stunning visuals and captivating touch-based interaction. The Website for the innovative interactive novella Pry reads,

Six years ago, James – a demolition expert – returned from the Gulf War. Explore James’ mind as his vision fails and his past collides with his present. PRY is a book without borders: a hybrid of cinema, gaming, and text. At any point, pinch James’ eyes open to witness his external world or pry apart the text of his thoughts to dive deeper into his subconscious. Through these and other unique reading interactions, unravel the fabric of memory and discover a story shaped by the lies we tell ourselves: lies revealed when you pull apart the narrative and read between the lines.

Honorable Mention for the Coover Prize went to Daniel Howe and John Cayley’s “The Readers Project / How It Is in Common Tongues.” Also, shortlisted were:  K. Reed Petty’s “Belated,” Caitlin Fisher’s “Everyone at this party is Dead/Cardamom of the Dead,” and  Patrick Jagoda’s “The Portal | The Sandbox.”

Honorable Mention for the Hayles Prize went to Lori Emerson for Reading Writing Interfaces (Minnesota). Also, shortlisted were Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism (Oxford), Anastasia Salter and John Murray’s Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT), and Brian Kim Stefans’ “Against Desire” (electronic book review).

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature is an award given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from supporters and members of the ELO, this $1000 annual prize aims to recognize creative excellence. The prize comes with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. The Coover Prize was judged by Jim Andrews, Brian Kim Stefans, and Jason Lewis.

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature is an award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this $1000 annual prize aims to recognize excellence in the field. The prize comes with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. The Hayles Prize was judged by Manuel Portela, Will Luers, and Maria Mencia.

Literary Advisory Board member Rob Wittig coordinated the judging process on both prizes this year.  Judges for the Coover Award included Jim Andrews, Brian Kim Stefans, and Jason Lewis. Judges for the Hayles Award included Manuel Portela, Will Luers, and Maria Mencia.

Announcing CELL Project Site Launch

CELL Project Logo

The Search for Electronic Literature Leads to the CELL Project

http://cellproject.net/

For Immediate Release
— Morgantown, WV

Announcing Cell Project, a new multi-database search for information on electronic literature, created by the Electronic Literature Organization in collaboration with 10 research centers around the world.

The Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL) is an open access, non-commercial resource offering centralized access to literary databases, archives, and institutional programs in the literary arts and scholarship, with a focus on electronic literature.

The purpose of CELL is to better identify works as literary and make the evolving field of born (and genetically) digital writing visible on a global scale. The project will develop communities and best practices in research in born digital literature.

According to Project Leader Sandy Baldwin, “For the first time, users can get a view of the entire field and ask critical research questions. As the database evolves, it will become the go-to site for discoveries in electronic literature. We will research unrecognized aspects of the field, illuminate global issues, and map the ‘literariness’ of electronic literature.”

Although the search engine is Open Access, the content of the databases is edited according to scholarly standards.  That editorial oversight will make the CELL site a valuable resource for students of electronic literature.

More than an “e-lit Google,” CELL offers a “tool for curated, international research into digital literature,” according to Baldwin.

The consortium will draw upon the following data centers:

  • The ELO’s Electronic Literature Directory (ELD);
  •  electronic book review (ebr), one of the oldest all-online peer-reviewed journals
  •  Digital Language Arts Collection, Brown University Digital Repository
  •  ADELTA (Australian Directory for Electronic Literature and Text-based Art), University of Western Sydney (Australia)
  • Hypermedia, Art, and Literature Directory, Laboratoire NT2, Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)
  • The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, University of Bergen (Norway)
  • ADEL – Archive of German Electronic Literature, University of Siegen (Germany)
  • PO.EX – Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Poetry, University Fernando Pessoa (Portugal)
  • Hermeneia, Literary Studies and Digital Technologies Research Group, Universitat de Barcelona (Spain); CELL White Paper DRAFT 7
  • I ♥ E-Poetry, University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez (Puerto Rico)

The project was sponsored by these partners along with the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The management of the project is coordinated by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University, and the technical development takes place at NT2 Lab in Montreal.

By the ELO 2015 Conference in Bergen, up to six sites will be connected to the search.

For more information, contact Sandy Baldwin sbaldwin66 at gmail

Announcing a New Platform for Collaborative Scholarship of E-lit

Announcing ACLS Workbench: A new site for collaborative research.
Site: http://scalar.usc.edu/aclsworkbench

ACLS Workbench Tour from Mark Marino on Vimeo.

ACLS Workbench is a new platform for collaborative research, which enables scholars to create, join, or clone online arguments enhanced with multimedia content.

http://scalar.usc.edu/aclsworkbench

ACLS Workbench has two novel features: the “join” feature and the “clone” feature. The join features allows new collaborators to apply to join your research project. The clone feature allows scholars to copy entire books so they can build their own interpretations.

ACLS Workbench is built on the ANVC Scalar platform, which offers special affordances for presenting multimedia content and custom hyperlinked paths through material. Combined with features to annotate video and code along with Workbench’s affordances, this new platform offers a powerful tool for collaboration. (Video introduction of the site: http://youtu.be/twMliWAt5KA )

As a demonstration of Workbench, we are launching Reading Project, the online companion to our recent book: Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit just published by University of Iowa Press.

http://scalar.usc.edu/aclsworkbench/reading-project/

The book offers a collaborative investigation of one work of digital literature, modeling an argument for more intensive collaboration in the digital humanities by combining scholars who draw their methodologies from visual analytics, Critical Code Studies, media archaeology and others. The ACLS Workbench site presents our arguments and findings in an online multimedia format. Crucially, future scholars may clone our online book and use its assets to build new arguments.

The book argues: “Collaboration can produce understandings that are greater than the sum of their parts. Conversely, collaboration can foster new ways of understanding what we do as critics, scholars, and readers. Such reflection and innovation is vital not only to literary criticism but also to the future of the humanities more generally” (137). Workbench was designed to present and promote these collaborations.

ACLS Workbench was designed by Jessica Pressman (San Diego State U), Mark C Marino (USC), and Jeremy Douglass (UCSB) as part of an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship in collaboration with Lucas Miller, Craig Dietrich, and Erik Loyer. The platform is online and freely available. The demonstration book Reading Project was developed with the kind permission of William Poundstone and the assistance of Elizabeth Shayne.

Contact Us:

Jessica Pressman, jessicapressman0 at gmail
Mark Marino, markcmarino at gmail
Jeremy Douglass, jeremydouglass at gmail

For more on Scalar, see: http://scalar.usc.edu

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Pathfinders Book Online!

Pathfinders

ELO President Dene Grigar and Board Member Stuart Moulthrop are releasing a new free online book entitled Pathfinders, which features resources about foundational works of early electronic literature from some of the biggest names in the field.  This is a vast resource for anyone wishing to study electronic literature or include it in their courses.  Below is their full announcement.

In the decade between 1985 and 1995, as personal computers grew familiar and the Internet became a presence in everyday life, assumptions about reading, writing, and text began to change. Digital tools allowed increasingly powerful combinations of media. The ancestors of blogs and social networks appeared.  Experimental writers began to use tools like hypertext as the basis for fiction and poetry.

In the face of all these changes, the idea of the book remained essential in understanding the new nature of writing.  Yet the book could no longer be limited to traditional forms.  To understand the early history of electronic writing we would need a new kind of book; but what would it be like?  How would it capture the interactivity the effort now required of readers? How would it reflect the graphics, movement, and sound that that had become important narrative strategies? How would such a reinvented book make accessible works meant to run on an Apple IIe or early Macintosh computer, in these days of tablets and smart phones?

Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature, by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, answers these questions in the form of a multimedia, open-source web-book created for a wide array of digital devices. It features 173 screens of content, 53,857 words of text, 104 videos, 203 color photos, and various audio files, providing readers with access to four important computer-based works of literature that were among the first to be sold commercially in the U.S. — but are now seriously threatened by obsolescence.

The book, whose production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be released June 1, 2015 and made available free of charge through the open-source platform Scalar, created by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California.

Using video and still photography, Pathfinders captures demonstrations of four groundbreaking works, performed by their authors on vintage systems.  Readers accessing the book will watch Judy Malloy walk through her database novel Uncle Roger, originally published on the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and considered by some the first example of social-media literature.  They will also see a tour of Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, a revolutionary hypermedia novel-in-a-box by John McDaid, and a demonstration of two classics in the early hypertext system Storyspace, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and William Bly’s We Descend.  Extensive interviews with all four authors add an important dimension of oral history to the project.

All four are acclaimed works of fiction representing the cultural impact of digital technologies that resonate today in experimental writing, video games, cinema, and virtual reality experiences.

Pathfinders was created by Dene Grigar, Professor and Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver, and Stuart Moulthrop, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  Demonstrations and research took place in the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL), a working collection of electronic literature and vintage computers dating from1983 assembled and directed by Grigar. The designer of the Pathfinders book is Will Luers, faculty member in the CMDC Program. Madeleine Brookman, a junior in the CMDC Program, served as the Research Assistant to the project.

The formal book launch party is scheduled for Friday, June 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Nouspace-Angst Gallery, located at 1015 Main Street, Vancouver, WA. The works of these authors will be displayed on vintage computers and copies of the book will be on view to the public. For more information, contact Dr. Dene Grigar, dgrigar at wsu.edu.

 

The book will be available at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/pathfinders.

ELO Prize 2015

The 2015 ELO Annual Prize

http://elo-prize.nimbus.digital/
S
ubmission Deadline May 5

The ELO is proud to announce the 2015 “N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” and the “Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature.” Introduced in 2014, these awards honor the best works of art and scholarship in the field of electronic literature.  The 1st place winner is awarded $1000, a plaque, and a one-year membership to the ELO.  One prize for Honorable Mention will be awarded and consists of a plaque and one-year membership in ELO. Guidelines for submissions can be found on the announcement page for each award.

“The Robert Coover Award
for a Work of Electronic Literature”

“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature” is an award given for the best work of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from supporters and members of ELO, this annual prize aims to recognize creative excellence. The prize for “1st Place” comes a $1000 award, a plaque showing the name of the winner and the acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for “Honorary Mention” is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. The Guidelines and Online Submission Form for this award are found here.  Submissions open on April 5, 2015.

 

“The N. Katherine Hayles Award
for Criticism of Electronic Literature”

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” is an award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The prize for “1st Place” comes a $1000 award, a plaque showing the name of the winner and the acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for “Honorary Mention” is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and the acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level The Guidelines and Online Submission Form for this award are found here. Submissions open on April 5, 2015.

 

Deadlines

Nomination Submissions:  April 5-May 5, 2015
Jury Deliberations:  May 15-July 15, 2015
Award Announcement:  ELO Conference Banquet, Bergen, Norway, August 6, 2015

For more information, contact Dr. Dene Grigar, President, Electronic Literature Organization, dgrigar@mac.com.

New Special Issue of Hyperrhiz Spotlights Netprov

hyperrhiz cover

Announcing the publication of Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, issue 11, guest edited by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig, putting the spotlight on netprov.  “Netprov” is a term Wittig coined for “networked improv narratives,” and many of the works and essays in the new issue reflect on and develop the meaning of that term.

The issue includes critical essays by Kathi Inman Berens, Lauren Burr, Leonardo Flores, Davin Heckman, and Peggy Weil and includes an hour-long compilation of interviews  with an international array of creators of electronic literature, conducted by Talan Memmott.

Along with Twitter-based netprovs, the issue also features creative works, including bot poetry authors, netprovs, to ARGs, to interactive fiction, to electronic poetry. Artists include Jean-Pierre Balpe, Mez Breeze, Deena Larsen & Maje Larsen, Peter McDonald and Patrick Jagoda, Reed Gaines and Arianna Gass, and Glen Gatin along with Wittig and Marino.

The issue also features a review of Richard Rinehart and John Ippolito’s Re-Collection by Eddie Lohmeyer and Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces by Kathi Inman Berens.

Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, the peer-reviewed sister journal of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, is published twice-yearly.  Hyperrhiz:  provides a forum for experimental new media projects (both critical and creative) located outside or across current disciplinary boundaries. Its editor is Helen J. Burgess of North Carolina State University.

For more about Hyperrhiz, go here: http://hyperrhiz.net/about-hyperrhiz.html

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CFP: Reading Wide, Writing Wide in the Digital Age: Perspectives on Translitatures

Please see this call from the LEETHY Group in Madrid!

Call for papers:
Reading wide, writing wide in the Digital Age: perspectives on transliteratures
Complutense University of Madrid
22nd -23rd October 2015
Organizer: LEETHY Group

The launching of Google Books and of Google Earth in 2004 could be considered a symbolical landmark in the configuration of memories and localization in space, a kind of milestone. Is there a time before and a time after 2004? Should we be getting ready for a change in literary reading and writing? Certainly, these days, we are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration of the circulation of products and materials, of people, texts and memories, while the national and global imaginaries coexist, fight and produce literatures. Commonplaces are repeated about contemporary literatures, new readers, globalization, the Internet etc., but, in fact, we do not find enough contrasted experiences and studies that support many of these assertions.

Read more CFP: Reading Wide, Writing Wide in the Digital Age: Perspectives on Translitatures