Announcing winners of 1st Coover & Hayles Awards!

ELO is proud to announce the first winners of the “The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” and “The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature,” two new annual awards in the field.  Designed to draw attention to the rising tide in this area, these awards awards mark a significant new initiative in ELO’s support of scholarship and art in the world of digital literature.

The winner of the Coover award is Jason Edward Lewis for his work, “Vital to the General Public Welfare” (The PoEMM Cycle), and the winner of the Hayles Award is Johannes Heldén & Håkan Jonson for their work, Evolution. Honorary Mention for the Coover Award goes to Aaron Reed for “18 Cadence.”  Honorary Mention for the Hayles Award goes Calum Rodger for “Reading the Drones: Working Towards a Critical Tradition of Interactive Poetry Generation.”  Below is the official announcement of the awards.

“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature”

“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature” saw 18 submissions from Spain, the US, Australia, Peru, the UK, Sweden, Italy, and Brazil. The Criteria Workgroup that developed the Submission Guidelines for the Award included Judy Malloy, Jennifer Ley, Laura Zaylea, and Brian Kim Stefans. The Jury consisted of Bobby Arellano, Christine Wilks, Patrick LeMieux, and Luciana Gattass.

The winner of this award is Jason Edward Lewis for his work, “Vital to the General Public Welfare” (The PoEMM Cycle).

This work is, according to one Jurist, “[i]n its entirety . . . very impressive and most enjoyable to read. There’s a marvellous range of different modalities combined with touch interaction, used to great poetic, narrative and thematic effect. . . . These works are at the cutting edge of electronic literature and stand out in the way they thoroughly embrace interactive reading in the multi-touch, multi-screen present and future.” Another wrote, “This is serious poetry and beautifully designed in an ambitious project cycle.”

Honorary Mention goes to Aaron Reed for “18 Cadence.”

One Jurist remarked that “’18 Cadence” “combines interactive fiction with a memetic, cut-and-paste interface that allows reader and player to become the maker of their own microstories. ‘18 Cadence’ is a beautifully designed, complex reading experience not only of a hundred years of one house, but of those fictions produced by other readers.”  Another wrote, “Engaging story, intentionally minimalist, encouraged discovery as well as play in a multi-modal synchronous interface.”

“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature” is an award given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from supporters and members of the ELO, this $1000 annual prize aims to recognize creative excellence. The prize comes with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

 

“The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature”

 

“The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” saw 9 submissions, consisting of four books and five articles by scholars from the UK, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and Scotland.  The Criteria Workgroup that created the Submission Guidelines for the award included Matt Kirschenbaum, Chris Funkhouser, and Rita Raley.  The Jury consisted of Jill Walker, Anastasia Salter, Pat Jagoda, and Stephanie Boluk.

The Winner of this award is Johannes Heldén & Håkan Jonson for their work, Evolution.

“Evolution” by Johannes Heldén & Håkan Jonson, wrote one Jurist, “an interesting critical-creative experiment. . . . [that] captures the boundary crossing spirit of the ELO.” Another wrote that “Evolution” “is both a work of literature and multi-voiced, multi-modal criticism.” Another wrote that “this collection of seven short critical responses to the generative poem Evolution by Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson plays with the genre of criticism by enclosing the essays within over 200 pages of code. . . .  Each of the essays in this collection is poetic and thought-provoking in its own way. . . .  The rest of the book is left to the code itself, and to logs of its output. Perhaps the book was written, compiled, designed by Evolution itself. Even the table of contents looks like computer code, laid out the way that a piece of software might prefer.  I’m ranking this book first on my list because of its challenges to the form of criticism – there is a creativity and unexpectedness in the way that these responses to the text are presented that is very engaging and that contributes to the work and to the field in general.”

Honorary Mention goes to Calum Rodger for “Reading the Drones: Working Towards a Critical Tradition of Interactive Poetry Generation.”

One Jurist wrote that “this essay offers an extremely clear and useful intervention into why we should study Interactive Poetry Generation in literary criticism.” Another said that it “combines a wide-ranging knowledge of conceptual poetry with computation” and “offers many lucid insights in an under-examined field of literary and media practice.”

“The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” is an award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this $1000 annual prize aims to recognize excellence in the field. The prize comes with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

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This week: ELO 2014 Hold the Light

Logo for ELO14 conferenceThis week we preempt our Summer eReading series to bring you a host of works featured in the 2014 ELO Conference: Hold the Light June 18-21 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  And conference organizers Stuart Moulthrop, Marjorie Luesebrink, Sandy Baldwin, and Kathi Inman Berens have brewed up a lake of Milwaukee’s finest.  You can download the full program.

The conference features three electronic galleries.  The first is on-site, featuring a wide variety of works by new and established authors. The second is online, the Media Arts Gallery, featuring a virtual exhibition of the works from the juried show.  The third is the Gallery of E-Lit 1st Encounters, which feature first time e-lit authors – or at least those new to ELO.

Organized by Kathi Inman Berens and vetted by the gallery jurors, the various exhibition halls have much to dig into even if you can’t make it to Milwaukee. If you can make it, you are in for a wonderful set of panels, roundtables, keynotes, and evening performances.  See the full schedule here.

And stay tuned.  On Friday, at the banquet, the winners of the N. Katherine Hayles and Robert Coover prizes will be announced.  You’ll find out who won if you follow the #elo14 hashtag or the @eliterature Twitter account.

You’ll also find updates in the Facebook group as well.

Summer eReading: This Is

Link to the "This is"Our Summer eReading series continues with a creative work, this time by e-lit author Alan Bigelow, whose works can be found at webyarns.  Bigelow’s piece “This is” includes one of the many divergent adaptations of Jeremy Hight’s ‘missing’ short story “Ethan has nowhere to go.” You can read more about that project in Potomac Review and see more permutations in Unlikely Stories, which includes versions by  Aaron Avila, Scott Davis, Keith Higginbotham, Alexandra Naughton, Jason Nelson, Vera Lucia Pinto, Johansen Quijano, Anastasia Salter, Matthew Sherling, and Brian Vann.
The transformation of Hight’s work from one artist to the next in the electronic literature community demonstrates the collaborative interplay of artists as they re-imagine each other’s works and draw inspiration from each other’s innovations.  Meanwhile, Bigelow says he’s developing another webyarn for later this summer (called “Life of Fly”), which, fortunately for us, means even more Summer eReading!
Medium: Internet-based HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript work for laptop, desktop, or portable devices.

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Summer eReading: Digital Modernism

A continuation of our weekly Summer eReading series, highlighting new works of e-lit and scholarship.

Digital Modernism coverA certain self-referentiality and playful experimentation in works of electronic literature has won it the affection of those with an appetite for the Post-Modern.  But in Jessica Pressman‘s new book, she situates these literary works in a category she calls “Digital Modernism.”  Throughout the monograph, Pressman performs detailed interpretations of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Dakota and William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, and other works of digital literature in the context of print-based, canonical Modernist texts such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos.  In what Rita Raley calls “wonderfully elegant close readings,” Pressman demonstrates how critical reading practices evolve with developments in technologies.

In the midst of these close readings,  Pressman presents her exploration of the media archaeology of older forms of “new media,” epitomized by her analysis of Bob Brown’s Readies, in which she sees anticipation of the fast-flashing words that flicker through so much electronic literature.

Jessica Pressman is currently serving on the Board of Directors of ELO, but has a much longer history of service with the organization, beginning with its time at UCLA.  She will be presenting her recent research at the upcoming ELO 2014 conference in Milwaukee.

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