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“Seeking” Rob Swigart

Announcing “Seeking,” new fiction by Rob Swigart, innovator, elit author, and former Secretary of the ELO Board. “Seeking” appears as part of the Fictions Present thread in the electronic book review.

*** From ebr:

Rob Swigart’s “Seeking” is a clever and funny story whose roots lie in the materialization of internet interdating connections. Moving through the technological and media reductions of desire, Swigart parallels the overarching theme of “seeking” with a form that is itself punctuated with questions.

Read more “Seeking” Rob Swigart

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Extension: CFP: Visionary Landscapes (12/16, 5/29-6/1)

The deadline for Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference has been extended to December 16, 2007.

The conference takes place from May 29-June 1, 2008 at Washington State University Vancouver in lovely Vancouver, WA. It is sponsored by both the Electronic Literature Organization and WSUV. Speakers include Mark Amerika, Sue Thomas, and John Cayley. A Media Arts Show will be held in conjunction with the conference and will feature art such as digital sculpture, net art, multimedia installations and performances, electronic music, and the like. Workshops in audio production and reading elit are also scheduled.

According to conference co-chair, Dene Grigar,

It should prove to be an interesting weekend for anyone involved in digital media projection, scholarship, and teaching.

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Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University

John Cayley reminds interested potential candidates that Brown’s prestigious Graduate Program in Literary Arts – two years (usually all-found) leading to an MFA – is currently accepting one applicant per year as an Electronic Writer (one of c. 14 per annum; the others apply for 5 fiction, 5 poetry and 3 play-writing places; past ‘electronic’ incumbents are: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Talan Memmott, William Gillespie, Brian Kim Stefans, Daniel Howe; Aya Karpinska is in her second year, and Justin Katko started this Fall). This is a great opportunity for a practitioner to develop and to achieve a widely-recognised academic qualification (a ‘terminal degree’ they sometimes call it here: taken to be a Good Thing). The application deadline for next Fall’s intake is December 15. Full details on the Literary Arts Programs web site:

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New on the Electronic Book Review: Electropoetics

In the latest selection from the Electronic Book Review, Associate Editor Lori Emerson brings together both critics and creators of electronic poetry, some of whom established themselves at the very start and many more who are recent entrants in the field of electronic literature. Essays on print poetry as well as born digital poetry help to situate the field in both a trans-disciplinary and trans-national context.

The collection (more than twenty essays in all) includes three review-essays on the Electronic Literature Collection (volume 1), published by the ELO: “How to Think (with) Thinkertoys” by Adalaide Morris; “Letters That Matter” by John Zuern; and “Electronic Literature circa WWW (and Before)” by Chris Funkhouser. New essays on and by Douglas Barbour, Michael Barrett, Greg Betts, Christof Bruno, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Cain, Robert Creeley, Clayton Eshleman, Alan Fisher, Eduardo Kac, Hugh Kenner, Walter Benn Michaels, Jay Murphy, Janet Neigh, Soren Pold, Christopher Nolan, Jaishree Odin, Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan, Stephanie Strickland, Angela Szczepaniak, Steve Tomasula, and Eugene Thacker.

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“Reading Digital Literature” at Brown University, October 4-7

If you are near Brown University this week from October 4-7, consider attending “Reading Digital Literature,” a colloquium organized by Roberto Simanowski. A description and the website follow.

A curtain of tiny screens with live quotations from Internet chat; stories generated by computer programs; narratives generated by their readers; words that disappear; texts that reveal themselves depending on their readers’ position. How shall we read such moving letters? How do we catch their meanings? How can they make us feel? The conference “Reading Digital Literature” brings together ten specialists from the USA and Europe to search for answers through in-depth analyses.

For details on the agenda, concept, etc., please visit: Reading Digital Literature

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Brown appoints John Cayley to teach electronic writing

Brown’s Literary Arts Program welcomes John Cayley to the faculty as a senior visiting professor. In this position, Cayley will teach electronic writing, including CaveWriting, for a minimum of five years.

Cayley has stated that as a result of this appointment, part of his role will be to ask difficult questions to help push work in the field further. “What will or will not emerge as a widely recognized genre of writing from all the ephemeral new forms and experiments that proliferate across the Net and on the screens of our electronic familiars? How will all this change our notion of what writing is and how writing is made? Writing in and for a 3-D virtual world? It’s here now, and it will come,” says Cayley.

To learn more about Cayley’s work, visit:http://www.shadoof.net

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Call for Submissions–deadline October 19, 2007

The New River is a journal of digital writing and art, created and edited by Ed Falco. The managing editors are graduate students from Virginia Tech’s MFA Creative Writing Program. We are interested in receiving submissions of original and unpublished digital writing and art.
To submit to The New River, just send a URL to our managing editor, Lauren Goldstein (writer@vt.edu), where we can find and review your work. If accepted, you will be asked to upload all files to our server so we can host it locally. If you have any questions, feel free to email us. Send all inquiries and submissions to newriver@vt.edu.
To view the Spring 2007 issue, as well as archives, visit us at
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Spring/index.html

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The Aesthetics of Net Literature

In The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media editors Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a broad table of contents — including contributions from Jean-Pierre Balpe, Philippe Bootz, Laura Borrà s Castanyer (a member of ELO’s Literary Advisory Board), Markku Eskelinen, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Marie-Laure Ryan, Roberto Simanowski, and ELO Vice-President Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The volume is now available in the U.S.

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Grand Text Auto — Exhibition, Symposium, and Performance

October 4th and 5th, at UC Irvine, an exhibition opening, symposium, and performance features the work of ELO Vice-Presidents Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort and ELO Co-Founder Scott Rettberg.

EXHIBITION: Grand Text Auto

LOCATION: The Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine

OPENING RECEPTION: October 4th, 6:30pm-9:00pm, Beall Center

SYMPOSIUM: October 5th, 1:00-5:00pm, Studio Art Bldg. 712, Room 160, UC Irvine

PERFORMANCE: October 5th, 6:00-8:00pm, Winifred Smith Hall, UC Irvine

GENERAL CONTACT: (949) 824-4339 or http://beallcenter.uci.edu

OVERVIEW

Many blogs have become books – from The Baghdad Blog to Belle de Jour. But Grand Text Auto is the first blog ever to become a gallery exhibition. It opens October 4th and runs through December 15th at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition features the work of Grand Text Auto members Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and their collaborators.

Grand Text Auto is a blog about the potential of digital media, from literary websites to experimental computer games. At the exhibition, the blog members will put these ideas into practice, showing a variety of cutting edge works. Some use the latest in artificial intelligence technology, such as Mateas and Stern’s interactive drama Facade” of which The New York Times says, “This is the future of video games.” The Beall exhibition will feature the first public showing of a life-sized “augmented reality” version of Facade, created in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s GVU Center. Virtual reality is also on display, as with Wardrip-Fruin’s collaborative work Screen, a literary game played with 3D text” never seen before outside of a research lab and presented with support from UC San Diego’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. On the other hand, some works in the exhibition use decidedly do-it-yourself techniques, such as Montfort and Rettberg’s Implementation, an experimental novel distributed around the world on mailing labels. Others are quirky, such as Flanagan’s [giantJoystick], a replica Atari 2600 joystick so large that two people must work together to play (this has its North American debut at the Beall show).

In addition to the gallery show, the members of Grand Text Auto are working together with the Beall Center to present a live symposium and performance evening, both on October 5th. The afternoon symposium (1-5 p.m.) will discuss the power of collaborative blogging, new directions for computer games, and the place of language in digital media. The evening performance (6-8 p.m.) will feature the disturbing and humorous interactive cinema experience Terminal Time (which automatically creates outrageously biased documentaries of the past millennium) and a live performance of the award-winning hypertext novel The Unknown (which tells the tale of a rollicking cross-country book tour). Parking for these events is available in the Student Parking structure at the corner of Campus Drive and West Peltason.

Online, Grand Text Auto (http://grandtextauto.org) is a blog with more than 200,000 visitors a month, collectively authored by six artists and scholars. Offline, Grand Text Auto members have been shown in major art museums, been written about in leading national periodicals, and shipped games that have met wide acclaim and sold millions of copies. The Grand Text Auto exhibition is the first time that these artists will show their work together. Delve into Grand Text Auto’s digital depths October 4 – December 15, 2007 (closed November 22-26) and witness the live debut of blog-meets-reality.