Author: ELO

Friday February 21st is the 100th birthday of Raymond Queneau, cofounder of the writing circle Oulipo and author of “One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets” and “A Story as You Like It,” arguably two of the earliest multicursal (hyper)texts. In his honor, Spineless Books presents the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award for the Best Book Length Work of Constrained English Literatur. Submissions accepted for works designed for electronic environments or print, as well as computer-assisted writing (whether explicitly labeled as such or not).

The Alt-X Online Network, “where the digerati meet the literati,” announces the release of “Solarcon-6,” an ebook collection of stories by Wiley Wiggins. Wiggins’ “Solarcon-6” is the ninth ebook in the Alt-X Press series which features other titles by artists including Eugene Thacker, Mark Amerika, Adrienne Eisen, and Alan Sondheim.

Bill Seaman, ELO Board Member, has been chosen as the recipient of the 2002 Leonardo Award for Excellence for his article, “OULIPO / VS / Recombinant Poetics” (Leonardo 34:5, 2001, Digital Salon Special Issue). In his article, Bill Seaman explores alternative avenues of creativity and redefines them through visual and sonic digital media. OULIPO, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature), encourages writers to explore challenging ways of mixing words and letters in their work.

Bill Seaman is head of the Graduate Digital Media Program at Rhode Island School of Design, and is exploring issues related to the continuum between physical and virtual/media space.

The Impermanence Agent (by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Adam Chapman, Brion Moss, Duane Whitehurst) began in 1998 as a storytelling Web agent that customized its texts and images based on monitoring of each reader’s Web browsing. Five years later, the project is turning inside out — rather than showing each individual a story customized for them, it now shows all visitors the stories altered by a few “featured browsers.” During the month of February 2003, the Agent’s story will be progressively altered for these browsers, with the results continually viewable, and at the end of the month, the final version will be archived on the Whitney Museum’s server. With this, the project’s weight shifts between individual experience and collective, between long-term customization and short-term surveillance, between impermanence and archiving. Most users now will never see the original story, but only the results of many browser-driven alterations.