The extended submissions period for the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2026 (Un)supervised conference closes at the end of February! We remind our active community of writers, artists, researchers, and developers to submit panels, papers, exhibitions, workshops, performances, and experimental sessions before the period ends, and we invite our community to spread the notice of the Call for Proposals, below, to their respective communities.
The Conference Organizers have also fleshed out an AI policy in response to some questions from interested participants as to what extent artificial intelligence is used in activities and research. The AI Use and Disclosure section of our “Conference Logistics and Policies” reads:
Electronic literature has historically embraced a wide range of procedural content and text generation, including methods that use LLMs and AI. This year’s call foregrounds critical approaches that may or may not involve AI usage directly, and we particularly hope to receive work that transforms, critiques, and pushes at our expectations of these technologies. We acknowledge there are significant environmental, labor, political, and social questions around generative and agentic AI: however, these questions are also raised across many of the tools and platforms on which we work and create. We invite authors and scholars to thoughtfully engage those questions.
For contributors with more concerns, please reach out to the conference co-chairs Anastasia Salter (anastasia@ucf.edu) and John Murray (jtm@ucf.edu), or coordinator P.D. Edgar (pdedgar@eliterature.org) and exhibition and performance questions to Lyle Skains (lskains@bournemouth.ac.uk).
Below is the full Call for Proposals to be shared:
The theme of ELOnline 2026 is (Un)Supervised. One interpretation of this might regard a kind of LLM development, but we also consider perennial questions in the field around who is watching, who is reading, and who is learning about Electronic Literature, especially E-Lit cultures outside this institution. We particularly encourage submissions that center on computational research questions and generativity and the university as spaces where community and computational creativity are contested by many actors and parties. We invite attention to both un-institutioning (such as the decoupling of the federal government from research initiatives at public and international institutions) and the adaptive, critical, reflexive processes of institution-building, maintenance, and reinforcement (initiatives, pedagogies, technologies, labs, partnerships, research organizations, platforms, large-language-models, publications, etc.).
As part of this theme, we invite submissions in celebration of the E-Literary arts across all formats exploring the trajectories of the web, academia, and social platforms as sites of electronic literature making, community care, and movement. Topics of particular interest include:
- E-Lit Access, Anthologies, + Archivism
- Emerging + Migrating E-Lit Networks, Community, + Platforms
- Critical Making, Digital Humanities, + E-Lit Criticism
- Generative / Agentic AI + Computational Creativity
- Institutional Imaginaries After Federal Withdrawal
- Theories, Aesthetics, + Praxes of Resistance
- Anti-Racist, Feminist, + Queer Edu-Labor
- Twine + Hypertext [Non]Fictions & Poetics
- Mixed + Extended Reality + Imaginaries