Friday February 21st is the 100th birthday of Raymond Queneau, cofounder of the writing circle Oulipo and author of “One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets” and “A Story as You Like It,” arguably two of the earliest multicursal (hyper)texts. In his honor, Spineless Books presents the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award for the Best Book Length Work of Constrained English Literatur. Submissions accepted for works designed for electronic environments or print, as well as computer-assisted writing (whether explicitly labeled as such or not).
International Digital Poetry Festival Announced
E-Poetry 2003: An International Digital Poetry Festival, is the second event in the acclaimed E-Poetry series inaugurated in Buffalo in April 2001. Directed by Loss Pequeño Glazier from the University at Buffalo, the event will be held at West Virginia University, Morgantown from April 23-26, 2003.
InfLect Journal Now Online
Volume One of InfLect is officially launched! InfLect is a journal of multimedia writing based at the University of Canberra Centre for Writing. The journal showcases creative work which brings together text, visual images and sound into a reciprocal relationship, and also writing which combines critical and creative content. Volume One contains new work by Jim Andrews, geniwate, komninos, Ana Marie Uribe, Jason Nelson, Thomas Swiss, Motomichi Nakamura and Robot Friend, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, and Brian Kim Stefans.
Boston Cyberarts Festival Announced
Director George Fifield announced that a consortium of Boston-area arts and educational institutions will present a two-day Conference on digital and interactive public art on April 26-27 as part of the 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival. “Digital Art and Public Space: Expanding Definitions of Public Art” will focus attention on art and technology and the expanding definition of public space in the 21st century
“Solarcon-6” published by Alt-X Online Network
The Alt-X Online Network, “where the digerati meet the literati,” announces the release of “Solarcon-6,” an ebook collection of stories by Wiley Wiggins. Wiggins’ “Solarcon-6” is the ninth ebook in the Alt-X Press series which features other titles by artists including Eugene Thacker, Mark Amerika, Adrienne Eisen, and Alan Sondheim.
Writing Machines Web Supplement now online
Writing Machines, written by N. Katherine Hayles, and designed by Anne Burdick, is the latest in the Mediawork Pamphlet series. Writing Machines has already been hailed for its exploration of how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.
The Supplement includes an interactive lexicon linkmap, index, bibliography, notes, and errata, and offers alternative mappings of the book’s conceptual terrain with functionalities unavailable in print. Completing the cycle of remediation, the Supplement gives the user the ability to customize his or her own copy of the book by providing Adobe Acrobat .pdf files for each section, some of which are formatted in “printer’s spreads” that can be printed out, folded, and inserted into the body of the book itself. The site also includes information on ordering the book and a comprehensive interview with the author and designer.
The Impermanence Agent at the Whitney Museum’s Artport
The Impermanence Agent (by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Adam Chapman, Brion Moss, Duane Whitehurst) began in 1998 as a storytelling Web agent that customized its texts and images based on monitoring of each reader’s Web browsing. Five years later, the project is turning inside out — rather than showing each individual a story customized for them, it now shows all visitors the stories altered by a few “featured browsers.” During the month of February 2003, the Agent’s story will be progressively altered for these browsers, with the results continually viewable, and at the end of the month, the final version will be archived on the Whitney Museum’s server. With this, the project’s weight shifts between individual experience and collective, between long-term customization and short-term surveillance, between impermanence and archiving. Most users now will never see the original story, but only the results of many browser-driven alterations.
Bill Seaman Wins 2002 Leonardo Award for Excellence
Bill Seaman, ELO Board Member, has been chosen as the recipient of the 2002 Leonardo Award for Excellence for his article, “OULIPO / VS / Recombinant Poetics” (Leonardo 34:5, 2001, Digital Salon Special Issue). In his article, Bill Seaman explores alternative avenues of creativity and redefines them through visual and sonic digital media. OULIPO, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature), encourages writers to explore challenging ways of mixing words and letters in their work.
Bill Seaman is head of the Graduate Digital Media Program at Rhode Island School of Design, and is exploring issues related to the continuum between physical and virtual/media space.
COSIGN 2003
COSIGN 2003: The 3rd International Conference on COMPUTATIONAL SEMIOTICS FOR GAMES AND NEW MEDIA will be held at the University of Teesside (UK) September 10 – 12, 2003 and will explore the ways in which meaning can be created by, encoded in, understood by, or produced through, the computer (using systems or techniques based upon semiotics). Deadline for submissions is March 28, 2003.
DRH 2003
DRH 2003: Digital Resources for the Humanities will occur at the University of Gloucestershire 31 August – 3 September 2003. The DRH conference brings together scholars, librarians, archivists, curators, information scientists and computing professionals to discuss the creation, exploitation, management and preservation of digital resources in the arts and humanities. Proposals for academic papers, themed panel sessions, posters and workshops are invited. The deadline for submission is 31 March 2003.