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ELO Elects New President, Vice President, and Secretary

www.electronicbookreview.com
President Elect of ELO, Dene Grigar

ELO is pleased to announce the election of new officers. Dene Grigar has been elected as the next ELO President; Sandy Baldwin, Vice President; and Davin Heckman Secretary.

Drs. Heckman and Baldwin will take their new posts immediately, and Dr. Grigar will take the Presidency at the 2013 ELO Conference in Paris.  We are fortunate to have such accomplished board members take these positions. They have already distinguished themselves in their service to the organization.

As incoming President, Dr. Grigar moves from her position as Vice President.  During her time in ELO, she has coordinated a major conference (2010 Visionary Landscapes);  several major exhibitions, including recent events at MLA 2012 and 2013 and the Library of Congress, and has worked toward networking ELO with other organizations.  She has played a pivotal role in the organization and has been actively involved in ELO’s recent events.  Her work has greatly raised the profile of the organization and electronic literature more broadly.

We relay our gratitude to President Nick Montfort, who has served his post with excellence for the past three years. During his tenure, Dr. Montfort has overseen the release of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, the ELO Conference at Morgantown (2012), the development of the Electronic Literature Directory, and many other key projects, along with managing the day-to-day operations of ELO.  Dr. Montfort will continue as Faculty Advisor, as our headquarters remains at MIT, where he is on faculty.

Mark Marino has stepped down as Secretary, but he will continue as the Director of Communication.  Vice President Talan Memmott will also continue to serve.

Some information about our new officers can be found below.

Sandy Baldwin (PhD, NYU) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. In this capacity, he directs numerous projects on new media and digital humanities, as well as teaching courses on multimedia writing. He has been a Fulbright Scholar of new media studies in Austria and Visiting Professor of hypermedia at the University of Paris 8 (St. Denis). Baldwin is a scholar of code, bodies, and creativity in new media, with numerous essays on this topic. He is Managing Editor of electronic book review and the creator and publisher of Computing Literature, the only academic book series devoted to scholarship on electronic literature. His codework poetry is collected in several books and he creates glitched/interventionist computer game performances. For over a decade, he has collaborated with Alan Sondheim on an exploration of performance and embodiment in virtual worlds.  Baldwin formerly served as ELO Treasurer. He has also been involved in planning the annual ELO conference and in managing the database interoperability between the ELOs CELL partners.

 

Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver who works in the area of electronic literature, emergent technology and cognition, and ephemera. She is the author of net art works, like “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project,” both of which have appeared in The Iowa Review Web, and multimedia performances and installations, like When Ghosts Will Die (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce networked multimedia narratives. Recent projects include the “Fort Vancouver Mobile” and “The Grand Emporium of the West” funded by a 2011 NEH Start Up grant and a 2012 “We the People” grant, respectively, and explore location-aware nonfiction content for mobile phones to be used at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. She is the recent recipient of a 2013 NEH Grant, along with Stuart Moulthrop, to  preserve works of electronic literature, circa 1985-1995.  She is also Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and President-Elect of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Grigar has curated 10 exhibits since 2005, including those for the Planetary Colleguim, the ELO 2008 and ELO 2012, the MLA 2012 and MLA 2013, and the Library of Congress.  Upcoming exhibits she will curate include a showcase at the 2013 Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria and an exhibit at Illuminations, the gallery for the School of English, Media, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, in March 2014. Grigar is the Founding Director of Nouspace Gallery & Media Lounge, the gallery located in downtown Vancouver associated with the CMDC Program.
Personal Website: http://www.nouspace.net/dene

 

Davin Heckman (Associate Professor, English, Siena Heights University) is the Supervising Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory. His book, A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke University Press, 2008), addresses the intersection of technology and everyday life. In 2011-12, Heckman was a Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. His articles on “digital poetics” can be found in Culture Machine, Dichtung Digital, electronic book review, and Leonardo Electronic Almanac.  He is the “electropoetics” thread editor for the electronic book review and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards for the journals Rhizomes, Hyperrhiz, and Reconstruction.

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E-lit Exhibit at the Library of Congress

Following up their back-to-back exhibits at the Modern Language Association, ELO Vice President Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens are bringing electronic literature to another hallowed venue that was formerly the primary proving grounds of print matter: the U.S. Library of Congress.

Running April 3-5, the exhibit, “Electronic Literature & Its Emerging Forms,” part of the “Electronic Literature Showcase,” features 27 works of electronic literature––dating from 1982 – 2013––by American authors, relevant printed works from the Library of Congress collections, readings by select authors featured in the exhibit and hands-on workshops for visitors.

Along with the exhibit, the Library of Congress’s “Electronic Literature Showcase” includes an exhibit of rare books; a keynote address by ELO board member Stuart Moulthrop, panel discussion about electronic literature’s connection to major areas of knowledge and creativity featuring Berens; Grigar; Matthew Kirschenbaum, associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; and Nick Montfort, current President of the Electronic Literature Organization. As a sign of her dedication to training future e-lit scholars, Grigar has also continued to draw and train student docents from her home institution, Washington State University-Vancouver (WSUV). All events are free and open to the public.

From the WSUV announcement:

Generally defined as a “digital born” literary work, electronic literature is a “first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer.” In a world dominated today by smart phones and tablets, the term computer has come to include any computing device. The electronic literature featured in the exhibit has been produced by major American artists and influential pioneers working in any language, and reflects a broad spectrum of genres and approaches, e.g. kinetic poetry, hypertext fiction, animated graphic novels and augmented reality environments. These works will be displayed on iMacs, iPads, vintage Macintosh computers, and vintage Atari game systems.

This exhibit of electronic literature is the Library of Congress’s first. It was made possible by digital humanist Susan Garfinkel, research specialist with the Digital Reference Section, CALM Division, at the Library of Congress, as well as colleagues in her department and at the Library.

For more information about the exhibit, contact Grigar, dgrigar at vancouver.wsu.edu, or visit the exhibit website at http://dtc-wsuv.org/elit/elit-loc/. For information about the Electronic Literature Showcase, contact Susan Garfinkel, elit at loc.gov, or visit the website at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/elit-showcase.html.

Follow the event on Twitter @eLitatLOC and hashtag #elitloc, as WSUV student Evan Flanagan directs the social media for the event.