The electronic literature meetup at the MLA convention was great fun, and a perfect first celebration of the new partnership between the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
We hope everyone in the electronic literature community has a great 2006 – and at the end of the next year, we hope to see many of you at the next e-lit MLA meetup, at the MLA convention in Philadelphia.
Jay Clayton, William Warner, Neil Fraistat (director of MITH), and Kari Kraus.
Nick Montfort (ELO vice-president) announces the new partnership between the ELO and MITH.
Rita Raley and Carl Stahmer (associate director of MITH).
Steven Jones and Alan Liu (who serves on the ELO board of directors and is head of the ELO’s PAD project).
Jason Rhody and Charles Tryon.
Not pictured is the photographer, Matthew Kirschenbaum (who serves on ELO’s board of directors and is an associate director of MITH).
The Breakup Conversation is a satirical simulation of the conversation at the end of a romantic relationship. The player is expected to perform a breakup over instant messenger, while the computer, playing the role of the soon-to-be-ex, will attempt to guilt and emotionally manipulate the player to give in and fail to break up. The engine includes knowledge of numerous “guilt games†that could take place during a breakup, and some ways of getting through them — for example, the “it’s not you it’s me†ritual, the “why are you doing this to me†blame, the refusals to discuss issues, and other ways in which people panic, reason, plead, lay guilt, and so on. These rituals are treated informally, and meant to be exaggerated and entertaining, rather than psychologically felicitous — they were inspired by sitcoms, personal anecdotes, and popular self-help books on relationships. The Breakup Conversation is a Windows executable program.
Word Museum was created for the Brown University “Cave” — a room-sized virtual reality display. It asks how one can integrate writing into a scalable 3D space when it seems the scalability and 3D can only serve to render text illegible. Is it possible to write a poem that is readable from many angles, that remains legible even when animated, by using only letters that are still themselves if flipped over or turned upside down?
Bobby Rabyd, a.k.a. Robert Arellano, details the “Summer of Hate” by relating intermixed stories of death in the San Franciso Bay area in 1969. Sunshine ’69 was the first Web novel. On its release, Robert Coover said, “no one has grasped the nature of this new thing called the ‘Net with more supple-minded alacrity than the writer Bobby Rabyd.” See the