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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

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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

 

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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/

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MELLON FOUNDATION FUNDS ARCHIVING PROJECT AT WSUV ELECTRONIC LITERATURE LAB

News Release from WSU Vancouver
Posted on FlashAlert: June 1st, 2018 1:29 PM

VANCOUVER, Wash. — The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $42,000 to migrate the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) archives to an open-source repository system that ensures their preservation and public accessibility. Much of the archiving and documentation will take place at WSU Vancouver’s Electronic Literature Lab, under the leadership of Professor Dene Grigar, director of the lab.

WSU Vancouver is the current sponsoring institution for the ELO, and Grigar is its president. The university also is a partner in the project, titled “A Comprehensive Online Portal for Electronic Literature Works.” Other partners are the ELO, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria (Canada) and Compute Canada.

Nicholas Schiller, WSU Vancouver librarian and associate director of the Electronic Literature Lab, will also participate as Co-PI. In addition, the project involves scholars from two other institutions who also serve as Co-PIs: Leonardo Flores, professor at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, and Abby Adams, digital archivist at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Student research assistants at WSU Vancouver will also help.

The ELO’s digital archives consist of seven collections of original digital literature––typically referred to as electronic literature, or e-lit. The project addresses the need for improved access, discovery and preservation for these works so that they will be available to scholars of the present and future.

About WSU Vancouver

As one of six campuses of the Washington State University system, WSU Vancouver offers big-school resources in a small-school environment. The university provides affordable, high-quality baccalaureate- and graduate-level education to benefit the people and communities it serves. As the only four-year research university in Southwest Washington, WSU Vancouver helps drive economic growth through relationships with local businesses and industries, schools and nonprofit organizations. 

# # #

Contact Info:
Dene Grigar, 360-546-9487, dgrigar [at] wsu dot edu
Nicholas Schiller, 360-546-9171, schiller [at] wsu dot edu
Brenda Alling, Office of Marketing and Communications, 360-546-9601, brenda_alling [at] wsu dot edu
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Arabic E-Lit Conference in Dubai (Feb 25-27) Commences

The first (to our knowledge) electronic literature conference in Dubai has commenced.  Hosted at RIT in Dubai, the conference was organized by Babak Elahi, Reham Hosny, and Patrick Lichty, Jonathon Penny.  Under the patronage of H. E. Lt General Dahi Khalfan Tamim, deputy chief of police and public security in Dubai.  ELO is proud to be a partner of this first-time event, continuing the spread of electronic literature around the world.

Arabic E-Lit Conference Webpage

Along with presentations and a gallery, the conference includes workshop called “Hacking Electronic Literature” by Hosny, Dene Grigar, and John Barber.  Featured keynote speakers are Katherine Hayles, Zohor Gourram, and Karim Sultan.

Follow the conference hashtag: #arbicelit.

See the full conference program and more here:
https://www.arabic-elit.org/schedule

Below is the full conference program:

Read more Arabic E-Lit Conference in Dubai (Feb 25-27) Commences

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Multilingual Digital Authorship Conference Program (3/8-9/18)

Here’s a sneak peek at the conference program for the Multilingual Digital Authorship conference at Lancaster University March 8-9, 2018.  The conference will feature familiar and new names from ELO’s international body of artists and scholars, reflecting on the topics of translation, poetics, tools, and more.

Multilingual Digital Authorship
Lancaster University, 8-9 March 2018

Read more Multilingual Digital Authorship Conference Program (3/8-9/18)

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CFP: Multilingual Digital Authorship (3/8-9;2/2/18)

Multilingual Digital Authorship
Lancaster University, 8-9 March 2018

The inaugural symposium of The Creative Web of Languages (MEITS flexible funding project) 

Call for Papers

The World Wide Web is commonly perceived the ultimate tool of homogenizing culture through dominant platforms such as Google and Facebook and consequently as the major culprit in the loss of ground of local cultures. Digital cultures are in reality plural, however, in terms of both form and language, and they not only continue pre-digital traditions through new modes of expression and in a new space for creativity in specific languages, but also invite us to rethink the nature and role of cultural heritage, language, identity, and their relationships today. At the same time, the web remains a fluid and open space that allows for the mixing and cross-fertilization of cultures more than any other previous mode of interaction. Artists and authors who engage in digital creativity often live in and between different cultures and languages that feed into their works; they translate their own or others’ works; engage with audiences across cultures; and are critical of dominant platforms and discourses, which they often hijack. The digital has never been neutral, as Alexandra Saemmer notes, and creatively engaging with it entails questioning established modes of thinking and writing as well as the relationship between language, tradition, and identity. The work of multilingual authors and artists such as Gregory Chatonsky, Alexandra Saemmer, Serge Bouchardon, Canan Marasligil, Lou Sarabadzic, María Mencía, Guillaume Vissac, or Belén Gache, to mention only a few, well illustrate the centrality of these concerns to born digital literature across languages. The importance of the linguistic identity and hybridity of electronic literature is still largely unexplored, however.

This symposium will be the inaugural event of The Creative Web of Languages, a two-year project addressing these questions, funded by the ‘Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies’ AHRC Open World Research Initiative (www.meits.org). The project aims to bring together researchers and artists across languages and specialisms to enable a rich dialogue and a comparative approach. The symposium benefits from additional support from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Department of Languages and Cultures of Lancaster University, and will happen in partnership with the Electronic Literature Organization (https://eliterature.org/).

Confirmed speakers:

Serge Bouchardon; Canan Marasligil; María Mencía; Alexandra Saemmer; Lou Sarabadzic; Claire Larsonneur (Paris 8); Emanuela Patti (Royal Holloway); Claire Taylor (Liverpool University)

200-word proposals for 20-minute papers are invited on digital authors and creative works with a focus on the role of language and languages. Contributions discussing ongoing or completed web-based projects, including blogs, vlogs, microblogs, or social media experiments are particularly welcome. Topics may include, but need not be limited to:

  • The coexistence or mixing of languages and cultures in digital works and projects
  • Linguistic and cultural identity in and through digital creativity
  • Creative web-based communities across languages
  • Linguistic border crossing in digital works and projects
  • Translation and self-translation of digital works
  • The creative web and the politics of language / language and the politics of the creative web

Postgraduate students and early career scholars are particularly encouraged to submit proposals. Two small bursaries for postgraduate speakers will be available to help with the travel and accommodation costs.

Please send your proposal by Friday the 2nd of February to the organizer, Erika Fülöp at e.fulop@lancaster.ac.uk.

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ELO at Baby Castles Jan 4

BABYCASTLES

Jan 4, 2018, 8pm

Baby Castles Reading Image

Join the Electronic Literature Organization at an evening of readings and performances at Babycastles, located at 145 W. 14th St., NY, NY

The event takes place on Thursday, January 4, from 8-10 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

Featured Artists and Works Performed:

  • Nick Montfort, “The Truelist”
  • Stephanie Strickland, “Hours of the Night”
  • Andrew Demirijian, ‘Pan-Terrestrial People’s Anthem’.
  • Laura Zaylea, “Style Guide for Erasing Human Dignity”
  • Alan Sondheim, “Splatter”
  • Kyle Booten, “Gymnasion”
  • Bill Bly, We Descend, Volume 3

 

Nick Montfort, “The Truelist”

Nick Montfort’s computer-generated books of poetry include #!, the collaboration 2×6, Autopia, and The Truelist, the first in the new Using Electricity series from Counterpath. Among his more than fifty digital projects are the collaborations The Deletionist, Sea and Spar Between, and Renderings. His digital artwork was shown this summer at Babycastles in New York and in Boston City Hall. He has six books out from the MIT Press, most recently The Future (in the Essential Knowledge series). He is professor of digital media at MIT and lives in New York and Boston. You can find this with all the italics in place here: http://nickm.com/me.html#summary

Stephanie Strickland, “Hours of the Night”
Stephanie Strickland has published 8 books of poetry, most recently Dragon Logic and V: WaveTercets / Losing L’una, and 11 works of electronic literature. Zone : Zero, book + CD, includes the poem slippingglimpse which maps text to Atlantic wave patterns. Recent digital poems include House of Trust with Ian Hatcher and Hours of the Night with M.D. Coverley. A volume of  New & Selected is forthcoming in early 2019. http://stephaniestrickland.com

Andrew Demirijian, “Pan-Terrestrial People’s Anthem”
Andrew Demirjian is an interdisciplinary artist who creates experimental assemblages of image, sound and text. His practice features a heightened attention to the role of sound and language and uses constraint systems, chance operations and remixing to produce the work. The pieces take the form of interactive installations, digital poems and audiovisual performances. Andrew’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, Fridman Gallery, The Newark Museum, Eyebeam, Rush Arts, Fieldgate Gallery, the Center for Book Arts, LMAK Projects and many other galleries, festivals and museums. The MacDowell Colony, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks, Clocktower Gallery, Bemis Center, LMCC and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts are among some of the organizations that have supported his work. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department and Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College. In 2018 he will be a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab working on a language analysis and visualization project.

Laura Zaylea, “Style Guide for Erasing Human Dignity”

Laura Zaylea is a media artist and Assistant Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. Recent e-lit works include the web-based multimedia novel Closer Than Rustand the “locative romance” and grammar guide Speak2MeInCode. She is currently working on an interactive documentary about LGBTQ families, which can be found at www.LGBTQ-family.com. Laura holds a BA from Brown University and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. More about her creative work can be found at www.LauraZaylea.com. Closer Than Rust – https://laurazaylea.com/creative-work/ctr/. Speak2MeInCode – https://speak2meincode.com/.

Alan Sondheim, “Splatter”
Alan Sondheim is a city-based new media artist, musician, writer, and performer concerned with issues of virtuality, and the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked with his partner Azure Carter among others. Sondheim is interested in examining the grounds of the virtual and how the body isinhabited. He performs in virtual, real, and cross-over worlds; his virtual work is known for its highly complex and mobile architectures. He has used altered motion-capture technology extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of behavior. His current work is centered around notions of gamespace, ‘edgespace’ (the border areas of gamespace) and ‘blankness,’ projections around edgespace. He’s been developing a theory of semiotic splatter / splatter semiotics, dealing with fast-forward literatures of twitter, politics, 4chan, facebook, etc. His writing stems out of codework, a problematic style in which code substrates and surface content interfere with each other – in which, in other words, the textual body and body of text are deeply entangled.  His current music is based on the impossibility of time reversal, on fast improvisation, and anti-gestural approaches to playing. His most recent work is this short biography.

 

Kyle Booten, “Gymnasion”
Kyle Booten is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College.  His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming inFence, Western Humanities Review, Poor Claudia, and the proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  You can see his website at https://kylebooten.me.

Bill Bly, We Descend, Volume 3
Bill Bly is the author of We Descend, an ongoing hypertext archive of writings begun in the 1980s with a fountain pen on notebook paper jammed in a clipboard: Volume One came out on floppy disk; Volume Two is on the web; Volume Three is under development. He has won the Stanley Drama Award and (with John McDaid) the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology. Bill was a founding member of the Hypertext Writers Workshop, and served as recorder for the legendary Cybermountain Colloquium. He has taught hypertext theory and practice at New York University and Fordham University, and was Director of Writing Programs at Wagner College. He lives in Mexico.

The emcee for the evening is Dene Grigar, a curator, e-lit artist, and digital preservationist from the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver. She directs the Electronic Literature Lab and is President of the Electronic Literature Organization.

 

 

Sponsors include the ELO, Babycastles, & Washington State University Vancouver.

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ELO Board Welcomes Astrid Ensslin

The ELO Board is proud to welcome its newest member, Astrid Ensslin.  Astrid has distinguished herself with her scholarship on electronic literature, including video games and children’s e-lit.  She is a professor of Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta and has published extensively in our field.  Among her many contributions to ELO, she co-curated the e-lit for kids exhibit in Porto. We are grateful to have her experience and talents.
 Below is her bio:
Astrid Ensslin is Professor in Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta. She has a PhD (s.c.l.) from Heidelberg University, and previously held academic and managerial faculty, research, and teaching positions at the Universities of Wales (Bangor), Manchester, and Leeds. Her main publications include Literary Gaming (MIT Press 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013),The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies (Bloomsbury, 2007). She is Principal Editor of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and has led various government and charity funded projects, for example on researching and teaching videogames across cultures; empirical digital fiction reader-response research and curating digital fictions for broad audiences (AHRC “Reading Digital Fiction” project), analyzing digital fictions (Leverhulme Digital Fiction International Network), specialized language corpora, and training graduate students in digital humanities tools and methods.
ELO has a volunteer Board who serve for renewable three-year terms.  See members and bios here: https://eliterature.org/people/
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CALL FOR PAPERS – ELO 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS – ELO 2018
Mind the Gap!
Thinking Electronic Literature in a Digital Culture:
Explorations and Interventions
http://elo2018.org/

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce its 2018 Conference and Festival, hosted by the Université du Québec à Montréal. The Conference, the Festival and Exhibits will be held August 13th to 17th in downtown Montréal, Québec, Canada. Mind the Gap! will be bilingual, with both English and French tracks, showcasing Montreal’s important and dynamic local Québécois e-lit/digital arts community and extending a special welcome to e-lit’s global francophonie.

The aim of this conference is to think about e-lit in a digital culture. What is its relationship to current cultural practices and trends? Two directions are proposed: explorations and interventions. The first direction features e-lit’s exploratory nature, its formal aspects, its use of technology, its renewal of narrative conventions, and at the same time its impact on literary theories and methodologies to renew themselves. The second direction considers e-lit’s place in the public sphere, its relationship to digital and urban culture, to forms of conservation and presentation, and also to performance.

TOPICS

Possible topics for presentations, performances and exhibits are:

Gaps in the field
Translation gaps: code, natural language, media
Narrative theory, temporal gaps and the imaginative space of the in-between
Understanding e-lit: towards digital methodologies and/or pedagogies
Mobile technologies’ effect on writing and reading habits
Perceptual gaps: AR, VR, and Linking Structures
Politics of e-lit: gaps between reception communities
Gaps and Bridges between e-lit and digital humanities
Gender gaps in e-lit
Spoken screens: the gap between performance and presence
Linguistic and cultural specificities to E-lit
Electronic literature and urban culture
Mind the gap! E-lit and humour
Gaps between datasets and interfaces
Archiving differences between libraries and museums
Exhibition differences: ephemeral and permanent installations
What is different about e-lit for children?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

For the Conference (peer-reviewed):

Paper (15 min – a presentation of a single paper by one or more authors – 500 word abstract).
Lightning talk (5 min – a short paper for a focused presentation – 250 word abstract).
Poster (1 page poster). n.b. A poster can be combined with a lightning talk.
Panel (90 min – a proposal for a complete panel including 3 or 4 separate papers on the same general topic – 250 word overview plus 500 word individual abstracts).
Pre-conference Workshop (Action sessions, focused on hands-on group work on a given project or topic – 500 word abstract).
For the Festival (peer-reviewed):

Performance and screening (10 min – readings, actions, interventions – 250 word abstract; provide links to images, videos, etc.)
Gallery exhibit (provide description of installation, as well as technical needs)

Submissions open: October 16th, 2017 to December 15th, 2017.

Acceptances sent out: January 30th, 2018.

You must attend the conference to appear on the program. You may submit as many proposals as you want, but participants may present a maximum of two pieces/papers.

Registration: Early registration will close April 30st, 2018. There will be a registration fee for the Conference (to be determined), which will include ELO Membership, invitations to all sessions of the Conference, the Festival, and the Exhibits. Lunch and coffee-breaks will be served. Conference banquet requires an additional fee.

The conference will be hosted by the University du Québec à Montréal, at the Berri-UQAM subway station. The campus is fully wheelchair accessible. ELO 2018 is committed to making its conference accessible and will provide a simple accessibility guide to all venues.

Some of the sessions will be streamed via the Conference website.

For more information, contact Bertrand Gervais, ELO 2018 Chair, elo2018mtl (at) gmail.com