Electronic Literature Organization

Patchwork Girl is one of the most widely-discussed and inventive works of hypertext in Storyspace. It is a feminist retelling of the Frankenstein story that asks “What if Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were true? What if Mary Shelley herself made the monster - not the fictional Dr. Frankenstein?” Robert Coover has referred to Patchwork Girl “perhaps the true paradigmatic work of the era.” See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.

Rest/Less is interactive dance which foregrounds poetry as both environment and method. Spatially representing Field’s graphic poems with lighted grids across the floor, Jewett has developed an interactive video-tracking system which allows the dancers total lyrical freedom as they perform both choreographed and improvisational movement. The dancers trigger lines of poetry as they cross lines of light (poetry which is heard as well as projected) and the text alternates with the sound of wind and a score of windchimes electronically generated based on samplings of the text.

Itinerant is a site-specific sound installation in Boston, Massachusetts. It invites people to take a walk through Boston Common and surrounding neighborhoods to experience an interactive sound work delivered via handheld computer and driven by GPS satellite information. During a walk which may last for more than two hours, visitors hear a personal narrative of family and displacement, interspersed with passages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — the classic tale of a technoscientific monster and the family love he witnesses voyeuristically, but cannot share.

The author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics has invented several new comic forms for the Web. In “The Carl Comics,” McCloud offers an “expandable” comic and a “Choose Your Own Carl” that branches and recombines at numerous points, offering different horizontal and vertical paths. More than a thousand readers offered suggestions, participating in developing this “fully interactive, multiple path, reader-written, death-obsessed comics extravaganza.”

Blue Company is an email novel that was performed in 2001 and 2002, with the current news affecting how messages were sent. A “new economy” worker who is sent back in time to the early renaissance tells the story of his corporate team, Blue Company, and their curious work as he writes e-mails on an illicit laptop to his inamorata. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece and its author.