Announcing the Winners of the 2018 ELO Prize

Announcing International Awards in Electronic Literature: The 2018 ELO Prize
— Montreal

2018 Conference Logo

Literature is changing right in front of our eyes, and this year’s awards from the Electronic Literature Organization celebrate artists and scholars who are at the vanguard.

At the annual conference of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), held this year in Montreal, Quebec, President Dene Grigar announced the 2018 ELO Prize winners: Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean for Novelling, Joseph Tabbi and contributors for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, and N. Katherine Hayles. Honorable Mention winners are María Mencía and Otso Huopaniemi. The shortlisted authors include JR Carpenter, Judy Malloy, IP Yuk-Yiu, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, and Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar.

For more details, see below:

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature honors the year’s best work of electronic literature, of any form or genre. The prize for 1st place comes with a $1,000 award.

Three works were shortlisted works for the Coover Award:

  • R. Carpenter, This is a Picture of Wind
  • Judy Malloy, Arriving Simultaneously on Multiple Far-Flung Systems
  • IP Yuk-Yiu, BOOK OF A HUNDRED GHOSTS 百鬼书

Honorable mention for the Coover Award goes to María Mencía for “The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic”

Winnipeg

“The Winnipeg” combines family history, collective memory, archival research, and digital poetics to commemorate the rescue of thousands of Spanish Civil War exiles from French concentration camps in 1939. One juror described “The Winnipeg” as “a compelling trilingual project that merges kinetic poetry and narrative.”

 

The first place winner of the Robert Coover Award is Novelling by Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean.

Novelling screenshot

Novelling is a recombinant digital novel about fiction itself, and how we read and how we write it. Though Novelling unfolds through the perspective of four characters—a familiar narrative technique—by procedurally remixing audio, video, and text, Novelling ultimately challenges our expectations of fiction, not to mention authorship itself.

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature honors the best work of criticism of electronic literature of any length. Endowed through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1,000 award.

Two works were shortlisted for the Hayles Award:

  • Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (University of Minnesota Press)
  • Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar, Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Digital Writing (MIT Press)

Honorable mention for the Hayles Award goes to Otso Huopaniemi, “Algorithmic Adaptations | Algoritmiset adaptaatiot”

Screenshot of AlgorithmicAdaptations

“Algorithmic Adaptations” is born-digital scholarship, a beautifully designed piece of bilingual, multi-modal web-work. As one of the Hayle jurors put it, “Huopaniemi continues to open our field to practices and engagements less integrated than those that have established it academically, like theater, live performance, and translation.”

The first place winner of N. Katherine Hayles Award is The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, edited by Joseph Tabbi and published by Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Bloomsbury cover

Over 20 authors, reflecting several continents and disciplines contributed to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, debating and analyzing electronic literature with both specific case studies and more general birds-eye perspectives. One of the Hayles jurors called this work a “monumental handbook for electronic literature.” In this nearly 500-page volume the authors, as one juror puts it, “realize their deep affection for generative intellectual work and aesthetic agonism.”

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award honors a visionary artist or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation, it comes with a $1,000 award that can go directly to the awardee or to a young scholar who would use the funds in support of developing online material about the awardee’s achievements.

The Artist or Scholar selected for this award should demonstrate excellence in four or more of the following categories:

  • Creation of opportunities for younger scholars
  • Publication of influential academic studies of electronic literature
  • Practice-based artistic research in the field, with significant presentations and exhibitions of creative work
  • Curatorial activities, particularly including editing and the organization of exhibitions, conferences, workshops, roundtables and research groups
  • Preservationist work, whether individual or institutional
  • Active participation in conferences and exhibitions, both national and international
  • Contribution to ELO as an organization, whether as a member of the Board of Directors or Literary Art Board or as informal advisor

We are delighted to announce this year’s winner of the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award, N. Katherine Hayles.

N. Katherine hayles

One of Hayles’ nominators highlighted the many ways Hayles’ has shaped the field of electronic literature: “her books in particular have guided the research of a generation of electronic literature scholars and brought attention and recognition to the field. She has been a visible presence and advocate for researchers and artists both within the community and in related organizations, including the Modern Language Association and the Association for Computers in the Humanities. A decade later, her book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary continues to be referenced and relied upon. Her work as one of the editors of the first Electronic Literature Collection helped build the initial canon for our discipline, and remains crucial as an archival project and entrypoint into historical discussions of electronic literature.” Or, as one of the jurors put it: Hayles’ “contributions have been so massive for so long.”

ELO awards these prizes at its annual conference. The next conference will be held in Cork, Ireland. The call for next year’s awards will be issued months before via the ELO’s site and social media channels.

The Electronic Literature Organization, or ELO, is A 501(c)(3) non­profit organization composed of an international community that includes writers, artists, teachers, scholars, and developers. The Organization’s focus is new literary forms that are made to be read on digital systems, including smartphones, Web browsers, and networked computers. ELO is an international organization of artists and scholars, currently based at Washington State University, Vancouver.

For more information about the ELO Prizes, contact Nicholas Schiller, ELO Coordinator at eliterature.org at gmail.com, or Mark Marino at markcmarino at gmail.com.

Event Highlights Indigenious Storytelling and New Media

2018 Conference Logo

http://bit.ly/indigenouselit
August 14, 2018 UQAM

For Immediate Release

Montreal, Aug 13, 2018 – Indigenous storytelling and experimental new media will take center stage at this year’s conference of the Electronic Literature Organization in Montreal when Jason Edward Lewis and Skawennati present the opening keynote “Mod Cyberspace, Mod the World!” on Tuesday at 11:30am at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Skawennati and Lewis ask what does indegnous new media storytelling look like?

Skawennati and Jason Edward Lewis present their experience as co-directors of the Skins workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Digital Media, through which Indigenous youth across Turtle Island have been taught how to make both video games and machinima. Skawennati will explain how and why she adopted the internet as her homebase, touching upon early projects such as CyberPowWow and Imagining Indians in the 25th Century and showing excerpts from TimeTravellerâ„¢ and She Falls For Ages.

“The work we have been doing over the last two decades has been aimed at diversifying the kinds of stories we tell, and how they are told,“ explained Lewis.

Skawennati asked, “When you think of an Aboriginal person, what do you see in your mind’s eye? A sepia-toned photograph of a dark-skinned man wearing feathers and buckskin, carrying a tomahawk? Or what about a vibrantly coloured video clip of a dark-skinned man wearing a Starfleet uniform and carrying a tricorder? What about a tan man jetpacking down the flyway, lit by brilliant billboards, seamless nd seemingly endless? Jason and I want to see what Native people look like in the future. We want to visualize it so that, together, with other artists, with youth, and with you, we can make it real.”

With Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan heritage,, Lewis is the Concordia University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. Born in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Skawennati is a new media artist. Lewis and Skawennati coordinate Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) (http://www.abtec.org/), a research network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing Indigenous virtual environments.

Lewis asked, “What does it mean to be Onkwehonwe? What does it mean to be kanaka maoli? What does it mean to be a Real Human Being? That is the questions we are asking. What did it mean to our ancestors? What does it mean to us today? What stories are we writing now that will still be told seven generations hence? We are writing the stories now that will define ourselves in the future.”

The conference Attention à la marche / Mind the Gap, this bilingual event will focus on the unique dynamics of electronic literature research in Quebec with an eye toward innovations from around the world.

The Canada Research Chair in Digital Arts and Literature, NT2, Laboratoire de recherche sur les oeuvres hypermédiatiques, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and the Consulate General of France welcome more than 300 digital artists and researchers from some thirty countries at the Université du Québec à Montréal campus from August 13 to 17, 2018.

The conference has three components: an academic conference, an exhibition and a festival. The exhibition will be presented at the Centre de design of UQAM and includes 56 works of digital art by local and international artists. During the festival, 15 artists will offer multimedia performances in three Montreal cultural halls: the Eastern Bloc artists’ centre, Concordia University’s Black Box exhibition hall; and the Écomusée du fier monde.

The Electronic Literature Organization, or ELO, is A 501(c)(3) non­profit organization composed of an international community that includes writers, artists, teachers, scholars, and developers. The Organization’s focus is new literary forms that are made to be read on digital systems, including smartphones, Web browsers, and networked computers. ELO is an international organization of artists and scholars, currently based at Washington State University-Vancouver.

The event is August 14th L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) at 11:30-12:30 in Pavillon J.-A. DeSève room DS-R510.

For more information or to make a reservation please contact:

Skawennati:
skawennati@gmail.com

Jason Lewis
jason.lewis@concordia.ca

ARIANE SAVOIE
(514) 947-6763

elo2018mtl@gmail.com       http://nt2.uqam.ca/       https://eliterature.org/

ELO restores frAme Journal to the Web

frAme journal cover

Announcing the restoration of frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology, published by the trAce Online Writing Centre from 1995-2005, has been reconstituted and available to the public thanks to the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO, eliterature.org).

Founded by Dr. Sue Thomas at Nottingham Trent University (Nottingham, England) and edited by Simon Mills, the journal released six issues (published from 1999-2001), featuring 60 works by some of the most important names in media art and scholarship today, including: Mark Amerika, Mez Breeze, Alan Sondheim, Deena Larsen, Belinda Barnet, M. D. Coverley, Talan Memmott, Rainer Strasser, and Patrick Lichty.

“The journal represents an important cultural artifact that speaks to a time in which writers and artists were experimenting with the electronic medium and produced works that challenged traditional publication methods,” according to Dene Grigar, ELO President and Director of the Electronic Literature Lab.

The Electronic Literature Organization restored this journal through the efforts of faculty, students, and staff at the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver as part of its Electronic Literature Archives initiative.

“frAme heralded a time in which scholars and artists were transcending space and time to publish freely to the unknown audience of the, then, new World Wide Web, breaking down international borders and defying print conventions,” said Grigar.

In the brief time frAme was published, web-based practices themselves changed rapidly, from how files were named to how information was coded. Besides providing insights into digital literary art and scholarship of the late 20th Century, frAme points to the changes afoot in publishing and in the communication networks linking people and ideas

Grigar added, “frAme represents the artistic and scholarly vision of a pioneering community whose influence can be felt beyond its base in Nottingham, UK. The artists and writers found in the archives hail from many countries and reflect a global perspective that the trAce Online Writing Centre sought to nurture and share.”

ELO’s future plans include resurrecting the five special issues of frAme, published from March 20, 2003-November 25, 2004, as well as the trAce site, which hosted forums, competitions, online courses, and other events and activities, and personal archives donated to ELO by trAce’s founder, Sue Thomas.

The site can be found at https://elo-repository.org/trace/.

The Electronic Literature Organization, or ELO, is A 501(c)(3) non­profit organization composed of an international community that includes writers, artists, teachers, scholars, and developers. The Organization’s focus is new literary forms that are made to be read on digital systems, including smartphones, Web browsers, and networked computers. ELO is an international organization of artists and scholars, currently based at Washington State University-Vancouver.

For more information contact:
Name: Dene Grigar
dgrigar at me.com

New Partnership: EBR & ELO

Announcing a new partnership of electronic book review (ebr) (www.electronicbookreview.com) and the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) (www.eliterature.org) to facilitate co-publication of scholarly work in the field of born digital literary arts. The collaboration marks the confluence of the largest international organization dedicated to electronic literature and the longest continuously running journal of scholarship in the field.

“We are excited about this new collaboration, which will be a boon for the field in that it leads the way in the integration of digital and print publishing,” said ELO President Dene Grigar.

With the publication in September of John Cayley’s Grammalepsy, ELO launches a series with Bloomsbury Press, entitled Electronic Literature, devoted specifically to born digital literary arts. Portions of each book in the series will also be published in advance by electronic book review. The co-publication is meant to extend the reach of the ELO series to ebr‘s peer-to-peer network of literary authors who are reading with, and writing for, other authors.

“ELO and ebr are natural partners,” said ebr-founder Joseph Tabbi. “They are sister organizations sharing one goal, the advancement of digitally born literary art.”

The collaboration will help increase scholarly production across media and among living archives. ebr will contribute to the peer review of encyclopedic entries for the Electronic Literature Directory (https://directory.eliterature.org/), a massive online reference. In return ELO will publish selected papers from its annual conference in ebr, along with ripostes and blog entries that bring conference themes to a wider public.

The collaboration of these two organizations promises to enrich and extend scholarship in this rapidly evolving field.

For more information, contact ebr Managing Editor Will Luers, wluers@gmail.com

 

ELO 2018: Attention à la marche / Mind the Gap

ELO 2018:
Attention à la marche / Mind the Gap
Literature meets digital culture in Montreal2018 Conference Logohttps://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018
August 13-17, 2018

For Immediae Release

Montreal, Aug 3, 2018 – For the first time, Montreal is hosting the Electronic Literature Organizations Conference. With this year’s theme Attention à la marche / Mind the Gap, this bilingual event will focus on the unique dynamics of electronic literature research in Quebec with an eye toward innovations from around the world.

The Canada Research Chair in Digital Arts and Literature, NT2, Laboratoire de recherche sur les oeuvres hypermédiatiques, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and the Consulate General of France welcome more than 300 digital artists and researchers from some thirty countries at the Université du Québec à Montréal campus from August 13 to 17, 2018.

The conference has three components: an academic conference, an exhibition and a festival. The exhibition will be presented at the Centre de design of UQAM and includes 56 works of digital art by local and international artists. During the festival, 15 artists will offer multimedia performances in three Montreal cultural halls: the Eastern Bloc artists’ centre, Concordia University’s Black Box exhibition hall; and the Écomusée du fier monde.

For the occasion, Productions Rhizome from Québec City present the installation Choeur(s), while Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac will unveil his latest work, The Inner Telescope, produced in collaboration with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station.

The opening reception of the conference will take place on August 13th, starting at 6pm, at the Centre de Design. For more details, see the website.

Academic conference: pre-registration required
Exhibition and festival: open to the public
Opening reception: by reservation

For more information or to make a reservation please contact:

ARIANE SAVOIE

elo2018mtl@gmail.com       http://nt2.uqam.ca/       https://eliterature.org/