Robert Coover writes:
When the award-winning digital artist Talan Memmott went to the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Brown University this fall as an MFA candidate in electronic writing, something new was happening. He followed upon such previous e-lit luminaries as Bobby Arellano, Shelley Jackson, Mary Kim Arnold, Mark Amerika, Matt Derby, Judd Morrissey, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, but all of these writers were accepted as graduate fiction writers, not electronic writers. And now the unique fellowship awarded to Memmott has been converted into a permanent annual Creative Writing graduate fellowship in electronic writing, perhaps the first of its kind in the world (any challenges?). It offers tuition and a stipend, partly earned in the second year by teaching workshops, which in the case of those holding this new fellowship will be electronic writing courses, thereby expanding the university’s course offerings in the digital arts. Applicants should follow the existing Creative Writing guidelines, applying to the genre of choice (fiction, poetry, or playwriting) with a clear indication of interest in the digital field. Although there is only one such fellowship at this time, it is hoped that other electronic writers might, through the quality of their writing, be accepted within the traditional genres, thus augmenting the digital community here. In addition to providing print writing samples in one of the three genres (the electronic fellowship is not genre-specific), applicants should submit examples (or documentation) of their electronic writing by way of DVD, CD-ROM, videotape, or web address (URL).
Review of Stephanie Strickland’s V in Publisher’s Weekly
The following is a quote from a review in Publisher’s Weekly:
“If Brian Kim Stefans’s The Dreamlife of Letters (2000)-a gorgeous send-up of Freud, lettrism and contemporary gender-bending-was the first large-scale poem using the internet animator Flash, then this book by Strickland continues to blaze trails of possibility in a new poetic medium. By putting the soul of this book solely online, Strickland reaches beyond True North (1997), which was developed in both print and hypertext versions, and seeks to fully bridge the gap between print and electronic media. The work’s bound component consists of two sections, “WaveSon.nets” and “Losing L’Una,” printed reversibly (so that either section can be seen as beginning the book, and neither ends it) with a centerfold directing readers to a third, free, interactive section at http://vniverse.com. The printed poems encompass a broad range of thematic concerns-including virginity, body, circuitry, waveforms, wormholes, engineering, parturition, mythology, fractals and witchcraft: “This is hallucinated hearing/ in the service of art, of Arthur’s table,// R2, Artemis,/ and Ursa guarding the Pole./ Welcome, then, Presence, Reflection, Shadow,/ Refraction, She Who Stands,// Gnova, Gnomon, Goose, Ouzel, Orca, Longdark,/ Hardware, Software, Wetware, a Dolphin/ leaping, responding/ to the bare boy on her back.” And as in previous work, Strickland engages with a wealth of scientific, historical and biographical source material, particularly regarding the life and thought of Simone Weil (also the subject of Strickland’s The Red Virgin, 1993). But the point here is the endless combinations created by clicking variously on the Web site’s screen filled with gently twinkling stars, which sets off a process of selection, combination, dissolve, and recombination among lines, phrases and sources in the printed text. Strickland’s interrogation of structure finally outshines her content, but readers will sense that she is also creating space for future work, both by herself and by others, bringing intelligence and legitimacy to a new form.”
Violence Online Festival
Violence Online Festival is curated by Agricola de Cologne and seeks poetry works connected to the subject “Violence” to be included in Version 4.0 of Violence Online Festival. The deadline for submissions is December 20.
Cyberarts Database and Initiative Online
The Cyberarts Research Initiative from National University of Singapore presents aa visually engaging online cyberarts database. This is part of a larger University project which includes an artist-in-residence programme, research in virtual reality collaboration, and undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral program development in cyberculture and cyberarts.
UCLA Daily Bruin Covers E-Lit Reading
The UCLA school paper ran a story on the electronic literature reading held on October 19 at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles. M.D. Coverley and Stephanie Strickland read to a full audience. The event was sponsored by the ELO.
Virtual Attic Museum Online
Reiner Strasser and Regina Celia Pinto created a virtual attic for the Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, which is interested in digital art preservation. The spaceless gallery features Strasser and Celia Pinto’s old computers on which they created web.art/net.art. and some creations made on these machines. The project is open to collaborators.
New Work at Wordcircuits
About Time by Rob Swigart is an interactive multimedia novella in which two tales unfold 40,000 years apart with richly thought-provoking and entertaining results. And The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh by Millie Niss. A combinatorial excursion into the textual possibilities of rhinoceri and other matters.
New Beta Site for Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies
The Center for Cyberculture Studies has a new interface and a new database which will able to organize the existing content, especially the book reviews, in new ways. The redesign has been a collaborative project and made possible by the many folks, but David Silver gives special thanks to Jeff Tycz, Martin McGee, and Nectarine Design.
Article on Preserving Digital Art Appears in Wired
The article by Kendra Mayefield exposes what all artists in the digital realm already know: that “As the half-life of these media becomes shorter and shorter, variable media art is in a race against technological obsolescence.” The article then continues to explore some preventative efforts currently in progress.
The ELO is also woriking in this important effort. The ELO PAD (Preserving, Archiving, and Dissemination) Project is already in effect and will become more visible in upcoming weeks.
New Media Poetry Conference
“Aesthetics, Institutions, and Audiences” will focus on poetry composed for digital environments and exploring cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural accounts of this work. The aims: “to look at the possibilities for poetry offered by the electronic convergence of words, images and sound highlight the changing contexts in which literature is produced as a result of the electronic word examine emergent reading possibilities and strategies consider some of the new forms of distribution and archiving made possible by the Web.” In attendance will be: Loss Pequeno Glazier, Thom Swiss, N. Katherine Hayles, Carrie Noland, Katherine Parrish, Marjorie Perloff, Barrett Watten, Martin Spinelli, Jennifer Ley, Etinenne van Heerden, Kenneth Goldsmith, Talan Memmott, Christopher Merrill, John Cayley, Al Filreis, Alan Golding, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dee Morris.