Jobs at Georgia Tech and UC Davis

Particularly promising-sounding jobs for electronic literature authors have just been posted by Georgia Tech (review begins October 15) and UC Davis (review begins November 15).

From the GA Tech announcement:

Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) is seeking to fill 2-3 positions at the rank of Assistant Professor in the emerging discipline of Digital Media. We seek practitioner/theorists who combine technical expertise with a strong grounding in the arts and humanities. Candidates should be prepared to teach at the undergraduate and graduate level in LCC’s suite of programs in computational and digital media. A Ph.D. or terminal degree in an appropriate field is required, as is computational proficiency and a demonstrated capacity for significant original research/creative work. […]

Interactive Narrative: Practitioner/theorist of computational expression, with an emphasis on procedural approaches to interactive narrative in various media forms such as virtual/mixed reality, games, and interactive television. Specialties could include one or more of the following: interactive fiction, computational story systems, computational poetry, narrative and cognition, story generation, interactive documentary, narrative intelligence, and AI.

Applicants should send a letter with a statement of research interests and pedagogical approach, a CV, one or two pages of screenshots, and/or a pointer to an on-line portfolio. Applications should be addressed to Chair, Search Committee, LCC, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0165.

From the UC Davis announcement:

The Program in Technocultural Studies of the University of California at Davis has a tenure-track or tenured Open-Rank Professor position available for a faculty member with expertise in media arts practice, preferably to teach in both studies and production, starting in Fall 2007. […]

We are looking for a media artist who can take a critical and creative approach to contemporary culture, technology and the arts, and who possesses a history or demonstrated potential for the high standard of achievement appropriate to employment in a tier-one research university in at least two of the following screen-based areas: interactivity, net, animation, programming, or performed media such as live video. Single-channel film/video makers and scholars are encouraged to apply if they also possess accomplishments in one of these areas. An MA or MFA is required; a PhD. is preferred. Teaching at undergraduate or graduate university levels or equivalent professional practice is required; the ability to teach both studies and production courses is preferred.

Please post (no email applications accepted) a letter of application, curriculum vitae, examples of work, by November 15, 2006, to: Associate Professor Bob Ostertag, Search Committee, Chair Digital Arts Position, Program in Technocultural Studies, One Shields Avenue, University of California, Davis CA 95616-8528. Referees will be will be contacted only for those short-listed candidates invited for campus visits: please include names, street addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, of four people from whom letters of reference may be requested. If materials are to be returned, a self-addressed stamped envelope. For further information, phone 530/752-0573 or check website at http://technoculture.ucdavis.edu

‘Broken Saints,’ a new DVD out this month

Edward Picot has provided a review of Broken Saints, by Brooke Burgess, Andrew West, and Ian Kirby. Broken Saints is an epic 24-part 12-hour-long Flash-animated comic book, which has been visited on the Web by more than five million people, and has sold almost 10,000 copies on DVD. A new DVD version, distributed by Fox, is published this month. The review appears on The Hyperliterature Exchange for August 2006.

Picot says this about Broken Saints: “Senecan tragedy is a useful point of reference for Broken Saints because it shares the same preoccupation with bloody violence, particularly violence within the family. At the end of Broken Saints a deranged father pulls out one of his daughter’s eyes, wires up her brain to the Internet and hangs her on a crucifix made out of computer monitors as part of his attempt to achieve world-domination: a climax so lurid and grotesque that even Seneca might have found it hard to outdo.” To read the whole review, go to http://hyperex.co.uk/reviewbrokensaints.php . The Hyperliterature Exchange is an online directory and review of new media literature for sale on the Web. More than 120 works are now listed. Please visit and browse at http://hyperex.co.uk.

Upgrade! Boston: Robert Kendall + Michael Sheridan, Sept. 26, 7:00 PM

If you are in the Boston area on September 26, 2006, be sure and try to attend UPGRADE! BOSTON, where ELO board member Robert Kendall will be one of the two main speakers. Full details follow.

WHEN: September 26, 7:00-9:00 p.m.
WHERE: Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, at the corner of Prospect Street, Cambridge. Free parking in the lot on the corner or take the T to Central Square and walk 1 block.

ROBERT KENDALL

Robert Kendall has been writing electronic poetry since 1990. He is the author of the book-length hypertext poem “A Life Set for Two” (Eastgate Systems) and other electronic works published at BBC Online, Iowa Review Web, Cortland Review, Eastgate Hypertext Reading Room, Cauldron & Net, and other web sites. His electronic poetry has been exhibited at many venues in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, and he has given interactive readings of his work in many cities. Kendall has taught electronic poetry and fiction for the New School University’s online program since 1995. He runs the literary web site Word Circuits and the Electronic Literature Organization’s directory, and is co-developer of Word Circuits Connection Muse, a hypertext tool for poets and fiction writers.

MICHAEL SHERIDAN

Michael Sheridan’s videosonic art and documentary films deal with themes of survival, sustainability, and the tipping point between order and chaos. His interest in these issues arises from his experiences of families, institutions, and societies teetering on the verge of collapse or recovering from conflict and disaster. Sheridan’s artwork has been exhibited at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Boston CyberArts Festival and the GASP gallery in Boston. His work on documentaries has appeared on PBS, The Learning Channel, The Discovery Network and National Geographic TV. Sheridan has received numerous awards including those from the National Education Media Network, the Columbia International Film and Video Festival, the United Nations Association Film Festival, and EarthVision.

Upgrade! Boston is curated by Jo-Anne Green for Turbulence in partnership with Art Interactive. It is one of 22 nodes currently active in Upgrade! International, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. If you would like to present your work or get involved, please email jo@turbulence.org.

Logozoa – the birth of textual organisms

ELO board member, Robert Kendall, is currently working on an exciting new project that seeks “to disrupt the conventional role of words in their day-to-day life.” Keep your eyes open for Logozoa living near you, and to learn how you can participate in this project, read the full description below.

Logozoa

Logozoa.com is a collaborative Web site intended to disrupt the conventional role of words in day-to-day life. It disseminates aphoristic texts as downloadable stickers and showcases photos of these stickers in unusual contexts from all over the world.

We put labels and signs on things to tame them — identify, categorize, explain, instruct, proclaim ownership. What if instead the labels could liberate the everyday world from the literal, proclaim rather than cover up the mysteries? What if they could become Logozoa — textual organisms that infest the literal with metaphor and give impetuous life and breath to meaning?

Logozoa (textual organisms, or word animals) take the form of aphorisms, anti-aphorisms, maxims, minims, neokoans, sayings, left-unsaids, proverbialisms, poemlets, microtales, instant fables, and other varieties of conceptual riffs. More than 375 of these creatures reside at Logozoa.com where visitors can download them in PDF format for printing onto standard label sheets.

The Logozoo at Logozoa.com provides a natural-habitat preserve and showcase for photographs of Logozoa stickers. Currently the Zoo holds over 475 photos contributed by numerous photographers from around the world.

And there’s more. An E-Dopt-a-Zoa feature allows you to paste an ever-changing virtual sticker onto your own Web site, and a pair of oracles provide Logozoa in response to your questions.

http://logozoa.com

1001 Nights Cast: A Durational Performance

ELO member Barbara Campbell recently passed the one year benchmark in her performance/writing project 1001 nights cast. Campbell’s first webcast was performed from Paris on June 21st, 2005 and continues for 1001 nights.

“In 1001 nights cast, Barbara Campbell performs a short text-based work for 1001 consecutive nights. The performance is relayed as a live webcast to anyone, anywhere, who is logged onto to http://1001.net.au at the appointed time, that is, sunset at the artist’s location.”

Reinterpreting and expanding the story of Scheherazade, the daily process of 1001 nights cast begins each morning when Campbell reads news coming out of the Middle East; she selects a phrase from her reading that “generates potential.” Campbell then renders the selected phrase in watercolor and posts the painted image of the phrase on the website. Visitors who choose to participate in the project are “invited to write a story using that day’s prompt in a submission of up to 1001 words. The writing deadline expires three hours before that night’s performance.”

To explore and/or participate in the project, visit http://1001.net.au

Conjoined twin birth announcement: HALF LIFE, by Shelley Jackson

ELO member Shelley Jackson, author of “Skin,” and The Melancholy of Anatomy, has published her first novel, Half Life. The novel tells the story of Nora and Blanche, “a two headed woman in a world where conjoined twins have their own subculture, slang, and self-help books.” When Nora decides to pursue a service called “The Divorce” in an effort “to take back her birthright: the first person pronoun,” only one person stands in her way: Blanche.
For more information on Half Life, visit http://www.ineradicablestain.com/half_life.html

ELO’s Matt Kirschenbaum now Associate Director of MITH

Neil Fraistat recently reported this news about Matt Kirschenbaum, a member of the ELO Board of Directors:

“I am delighted to share the good news that Matt Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English and Acting Associate Director of MITH, has accepted the position of Associate Director of MITH. By now everyone in the MITH Community knows Matt as one of the leading theorists in the field of digital studies, as one of the most interesting practitioners of applied work in the digital humanities, as a blogger extraordinaire, and as one of our most compelling and thought-provoking colleagues. Matt brings to the think tank of MITH a deep and wide-ranging expertise on new media, visual culture, and the digital humanities.”

MITH becomes the new headquarters of the Electronic Literature Organization on July 1.

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Professor Neil Fraistat Appointed Director of MITH (ELO’s New Home)

Professor Neil Fraistat has been appointed as Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) beginning July 1, 2006. Fraistat is a Professor in the Department of English specializing in the Romantic era, textual scholarship, and digital studies. A recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association and the Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize from the Society for Textual Scholarship, Fraistat is well known internationally for his scholarly editions of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry and for his work as co-founder and co-general editor ofRomantic Circles , an award-winning scholarly Website, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, that is published by the University of Maryland and devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.

Beyond his work on Romantic Circles, Fraistat has been an active and highly visible presence in the field of Digital Humanities, creating electronic resources, publishing on such topics as electronic editing, MOOs, and computer gaming; giving talks and running numerous sessions at major conferences; and sitting on the advisory board of several major electronic projects and journals, including Literary and Linguistic Computing, the premier journal in the field. He has just begun a second five-year term on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the field’s key professional organization. Neil has also served on an impressively large number of committees at every level within the university. He has been associated with the Dean’s Task Force on New Technologies and the Humanities (1993), with ARHU’s Committee on New Technologies, 1994-1996, and 2002-2004 (as Chair), and with MITH as both Chair of its Internal Advisory Board (1999-2005) and as Acting Director this past year.

Since its founding in 1999 through a major Challenge Grant from the NEH and under the directorship of Martha Nell Smith, MITH has become one of the most dynamic and exciting units on campus, as well as one of the most renowned institutes of its kind in the world. The coming year provides an auspicious start to Fraistat’s tenure: MITH will become the new headquarters of the Electronic Literature Organization, the premier professional organization for scholars and authors of born digital literature; it will add as Resident Fellows Merle Collins and Angel David Nieves, both working on fascinating multimedia archives involving African culture and history; and it will have as its new Networked Fellow the acclaimed hypertext fiction writer and conceptual artist, Shelley Jackson, who will be working on Skin: A Mortal Work of Art.

CFP: perthDAC 2007

The call for papers for perthDAC 2007 is out. The theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference will be “The Future of Digital Media Culture.” The conference will be held from 15 – 18th September 2007, during the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth. There will be a double blind peer review process for papers. The deadline for 500 word abstracts is 14th August 2006, and the deadline for full papers is 4th December 2006.

Framed

The frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology which published new media writing, art, interviews and essays from 1995-2004, has stopped actively publishing new work, but it’s going out with a bang rather than a whimper. Simon Mills is editing a project, framed including retrospective interviews with many of the writers and artists whose works were published in frAme. The first installment of framed includes provacative interviews with Mark Amerika, Matthew Fuller, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim. More interviews are coming soon.