Organizers: Caitlin Fisher (York)  and Lai-Tze Fan (Waterloo)

Locations: Toronto, Canada and Waterloo, Canada

For its 25th anniversary, Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is holding an international in-person conference and media arts festival themed “ELO25 @ 25: Love Letters to the Past and Future” from July 10-13, 2025. ELO25 @ 25 is a joint hosting between the University of Waterloo and York University. Optional workshops will happen July 10 at the University of Waterloo in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada. The main conference will happen July 11-13 at York University in Toronto, Canada. We are also excited to announce that we are partnering with Vector Media Arts Festival to share attendees of our respective media art festivals and to collaborate in select events.

The ELO has always been a future-focused organization, with a deep understanding of both digital and analogue histories and processes.  And for 25 years the Electronic Literature Organization has nurtured born-digital experimentation. E-lit is an expansive, interdisciplinary arena bridging literature, technology, art, design, and performance, and there is no better time to learn from ELO’s foundational histories as we collectively move toward society’s literary and technological futures.

Honoring this, we encourage submissions that delve into the rich histories of e-lit and of our own organization. Affection, critique, desire, nostalgia, honoring pioneers. At the same time, an anniversary is a moment to look forward, so we also solicit work that speculates on possible futures–future e-lit, future technologies to support literatures, ELO2050, new speculative avant-gardes, e-lit as a world-building practice. We want your ideas around archives and what we save, futureproofing, accidental futures, equity, steampunk, future libraries and practices, e-lit for technologies that do not yet exist. We welcome approaches to how e-lit also brings Arts-based questions, frameworks, and practices to technological applications and developments. How might our practices inform future tools? Literacies? Audiences? We also welcome work that stretches the boundaries of where e-lit might connect that we don’t yet see represented widely in the field, from physics and health to data science and misinformation. Join us as we ask what the ELO has learned and ponder what the next 25 years will bring.

Website: elo25.org

Contact e-mail: elo25@eliterature.org

Submission portal open November 5 (accessible via conference website)

Types of submissions (deadline for all: January 5 January 15, 2025 AOE)

Individuals may NOT appear in the final program more than twice as lead authors/artists/speakers, but may participate in program events more than twice.

Papers

300-word abstracts for 15-min papers. In a separate document, please include 200-300 word bios for each speaker. There will be an opportunity to submit full papers early for consideration for inclusion in published proceedings. Experimental forms encouraged.

Lightning talks 150-word abstracts for 5-min talks. In a separate document, please include 200-300 word bios for each speaker.

Panels with Papers or Lightning talks + Discussion

Proposed panel with 150-word abstracts of three to four 15-min papers or five to six 5-min lightning talks. In a separate document, please include 200-300 word bios for each speaker.

Artist Talks on their Electronic Literature/Media Artworks

An opportunity for e-lit practitioners to discuss their own works in the context of a 15 minute conference slot (as distinct from a performance or reading of that work–if you primarily wish to read or perform, please choose the performance option instead). 300-word abstract and 200-300 word bio.

In-person Workshops

1-hour workshop intended for hands-on interaction, discussion, and instruction on a topic relevant to e-lit. In addition to a description of the workshop and its goals, please specify: (1) how many participants are imagined (between 15-30) and (2) what tools and A/V you will need to run the workshop. All workshops will be held at the University of Waterloo on July 10, 2025.

In-person E-lit and Media Art Readings/Performances

300-word abstracts for each reading/performance, including tech requirements (if any) and a 200-300 word bio. We strongly encourage including a link to the work or detailed outline/imaging.

In-person Works of Electronic Literature/Media Artworks for the Exhibition

300-word abstracts for each artwork,  200-300 word bios for each artist. We strongly encourage including a link to finished or in-process work or detailed outline/imaging.

Curatorial pitches: do you have a vision for curating a specific set of existing e-lit works or soliciting new works that might work together to advance the conference theme? If so, we have limited capacity to support invited curators. Please do not use the portal – reach out individually to us at elo25@eliterature.org with your ideas.

About Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is a leading global research-intensive university, renowned for entrepreneurship and innovation. It has been voted the #1 most innovative university in Canada for 30 of the last 32 years. At Waterloo, ELO 2025 Co-Chair Dr. Lai-Tze Fan directs the U&AI Lab. ELO25 @ 25 workshop attendees will be hosted at Waterloo on Thursday, July 10, 2024. A local train connects Toronto to Kitchener-Waterloo (via Toronto Union GO Train Station to Kitchener GO Train Station).

About York

Located in Toronto, Canada, York University is empowered by a welcoming and diverse community of over 50,000 students, with a uniquely global perspective. It is the current home of the ELO. At York, ELO 2025 Co-Chair and ELO President Dr. Caitlin Fisher directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab and ELO25 @ 25 will be supported by a range of units engaged with e-lit practices.

About Toronto

Toronto is the largest and most diverse city in Canada and a major cultural hub. Over 160 languages are spoken in the city. Toronto’s Pearson airport connects to cities around the world.

We invite submissions for presentations, performances, and exhibition pieces at the annual Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Media Arts Festival (ELO), to be hosted fully online July 18-21, 2024 by a team based at the University of Central Florida with collaborators around the world.

ELOnline 2024’s theme is (Un)linked. We particularly encourage submissions that center on the web as a contested platform of community and computational creativity, with attention to both dystopian shifts (such as the slow demise of the platform formerly known as Twitter) and hopeful futures. As part of this theme, we invite submissions across all formats considering the 15th-ish anniversary of Twine and more broadly exploring the trajectories of hypertext and the web as a site of electronic literature making, community, and futures. Topics of particular interest include:

• Utopian and Dystopian Imaginaries
• Platform Deaths and Migrations
• Sustainable Electronic Literature
• Queer, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Pedagogies and Practices
• Computational Creativity and Generative AI
• Twine and Hypertext Fictions
• Critical Making and E-Lit in Digital Humanities
• Literary Games and Interactive Fiction Futures
• Mixed, Alternate, Augmented, and Virtual Realities

Submissions are welcome in the following categories:

• Panels. Panels or roundtables of 3 to 6 participants are welcome. We encourage groups proposing panels to prioritize engaging formats, rather than simply organizing a series of long talks. Panels will be scheduled live on Zoom in 75 minute blocks. For panel submissions, please provide a 350 – 500-word abstract of the session, anonymized for peer review.
• Individual Talks. Individual talks (10 to 12 minutes) will be organized into sessions based on common themes. For an individual talk, please provide a 250-300 word individual abstract, anonymized for peer review.
• Workshops. Workshops focused on specific skills, technologies, platforms, and techniques of interest to practitioners and/or scholars of electronic literature are welcome. For a workshop, please provide a 250-300 word individual abstract, anonymized for peer review, and any details about needs or timeslot requirements.
• Performances. Due to the online-only format of the conference, all performances should be suitable for Zoom, and participants are particularly encouraged to make use of the distant modality and interface as part of their performance. For performance submissions, please provide a 350 – 500-word artist statement detailing the aesthetic intentions and structure of the piece. Statements should be anonymized for peer review. Performers should keep in mind the constraints of a 10 to 15-minute time slot.
• Online Exhibition. Due to the online-only format of the conference, all exhibition pieces must be designed for web deployment using web standard technologies and hosted on UCF’s server space. We particularly encourage work engaging thoughtfully with the constraints and affordances of the web, and pointing towards the past, present, and imagined futures of hypertext literature. For exhibition submissions, please provide a 350 – 500-word artist statement detailing the aesthetic intentions and structure of the piece. If available, please provide a URL of the work or a demonstration of the concept in-progress.
• Experimental Track. The experimental track invites participants to propose alternative platforms and modalities for sessions, ranging from text chat to in-game meetings. Hosts of experimental track sessions are responsible for access and moderation to their proposed platform for the duration of their sessions, and are asked to consider the environmental impact and accessibility of their approach as a means for exploring future conference modalities and opportunities. For experimental track proposals, please provide a 350 – 500-word abstract of the session, anonymized for peer review.

Our submission portal at https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/ are open January 1st, 2024 through February 15th, 2024. Notice of acceptances will be distributed by March 15h.

All participants will be invited to submit a longer proceedings paper for publication in the UCF STARS repository (indexed via Google Scholar); however, this type of submission is not required. All conference sessions will be recorded and made available open access in the UCF STARS Repository.

 

Cost and Impact

This fully online iteration of ELO is developed in response to concerns raised both within the community and more broadly regarding the environmental impact, accessibility, and affordability of academic conferences. Our approach is intended to reflect an intentional, impact-conscious, approach using established platforms (Zoom, Discord, and the STARS Repository) and minimizing cost both to the organizers and participants.

Membership is not required to submit to the conference. However, all conference participants will be required to join the ELO, with membership fees payable directly to the organization. There is no additional conference registration fee beyond dues: however, those able to do so are encouraged to donate to ELO in lieu of registration.

Questions?

Please direct all queries to the conference co-chairs: Anastasia Salter (anastasia@ucf.edu) and John Murray (jtm@ucf.edu) or exhibition and performance questions to Lyle Skains (lskains@bournemouth.ac.uk)

ELO22 Call for Proposals

Conference: May 30-June 1, 2022
Deadline: January 7, 2022
#ELOitalia
Submit via EasyChair.

The HStudies Research Group of the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), with the University of Nagoya, Graduate School of Humanities (Japan), the Arab Academic Institute of Education/Arab Union for Internet Writers, the Digital Culture Center of Ciudad de México (Mexico), the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Núcleo de Pesquisas em Informática, Literatura e Linguística and the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazilian Digital Literature Observatory (Brazil), the Pontificio Collegio Gallio (Italy) have collaborated to organize the ELO 2022 International Conference and Media Arts Festival.

The theme for ELO 2022 is E2Lit: Education and Electronic Literature. #ELOitalia

We invite artists, researchers, scholars, PhD candidates, experts and practitioners to submit works, papers, case studies, and media artefacts for presentation at the festival and in the different venues of the in-person conference and online workshops and seminars. 

THEME RATIONALE

Our society lives in a moment of complexity, where the exponential emergence of a web-based culture has triggered a different approach in relation to the spaces of communication, relationship, and learning. During the last years, the advent of new personal and wearable devices has favoured the emergence of a new literacy, based on a convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006).

Forms of fiction and literature underwent a process of disembodiment and cross-fertilization during the revolution from the Gutenberg Galaxy — printed paper, mass distribution — to the McLuhan Galaxy — new media, hypertext, collaborative writing — (Castells, 2003). The dimension of literacy has moved from a semiotically-measured geometry (De Saussure, 1916; Hjelmslev, 1969) to a dislocation and a deconstruction of contents and channels that give expression to new products (Derrida, 1974; Landow, 1994; Bolter & Grusin, 1999). The impact of social media on narratology has redefined the meaning of readership and authorship. The author has not only lost their traditional role, but becomes an icon of themself, a collective-minded producer that is self-perceived through the extra-flexed eye of the amniotic network in which they define their narrative experience (De Kerckhove, 2003). 

Literature takes on different roles within the so-called new media. Particularly, digital literature is central to the humanities and to the culture that emerges from the digital environment (Grigar, 2021) and it may play a central role in education too.

Every generation develops blended competencies under the influence of new tools and communication frameworks (Bardi, Ciastellardi, Di Rosario, 2019). For several years now when it comes to storytelling and literature, we have seen cultural references in a continuous process of transformation and redefinition, both because of digital tools available to the public, and because of different emerging channels of dissemination and distribution that are (self)produced in an increasingly massive way. What appears is a different form of understanding and learning, and a new form of education for people at any level and at all ages (not limited, thus, to a scholarly perspective).

This conference seeks to shed light on digital literature according to the epistemological crisis of authorship and the new dimension of participation and relationship offered by both the Web and new media. The conference will offer keynote speeches and talks to examine specific case studies. Moving from the state of the art, the aim is to investigate the interdisciplinary relations in the field of electronic literature, in order to recognize patterns of theories, technologies, and social dimensions of the phenomena to offer a critical toolkit to understand and map out the emerging knowledge and practices created by this field and the multifaceted dimension of education.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following conference’s tracks:

• E-lit as Digital Humanities: Digital layers, multifaceted comprehension patterns and critical thought to redefine the e-lit dimension in educative environments.
• Education beyond the (e)book: The possibilities of participatory culture in educational environments. How can e-lit promote values like democracy, pluralism, participation, diversity and sustainability…
• Coding education: the use of e-lit to set up essential skills to adapt to the digital age.
• E-practitioning: Literature and digital practices at crossroads.
• We are platforms: Rethinking e-lit and its educative role and collaborative practices after the emergence of the pandemic.
• AIrchive and UXPoetry: E-lit and its preservation between Artificial Intelligence and the need of a new poetic of user experience (UX). 
• Digital Heterotopies: The possibilities within e-lit to present, criticize and denounce everyday social rhetoric.
• Education on diversity and sustainability: E-lit as cultural practice to educate about integration, gender respectfulness and global sustainability. 
• Politics and Policies: Education on e-lit as a framework for civic engagement and civil society.
• STEAM-punk: The cross-fertilization among STEAM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics) and the different approaches to e-lit culture. 
• Polysemy and synaesthesia: E-lit forms and works to open a different perspective of meaning and knowledge across multisensorial and plural dimensions of understanding. 

• Electronic Opificium: The Aesthetics of Tech. Experiments and handcrafted works to revitalize the idea behind literature and its digital possibilities.

Interdisciplinary contributions are especially welcome.

Accepted abstracts will be presented in the parallel sessions of the Conference and full papers will be published in the proceedings of the Conference. The conference organizing committee will provide a selection of the best papers to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Submit via EasyChair.

Conference Talks in COMO (ITALY) & online

Submissions are welcome across the following formats: 

• Paper (15 min – a presentation of a single paper by one or more authors – 500 words abstract). Paper submissions should be at most 3500 words long.
• Poster (1- page poster – format A2). 250-word (max) proposal.
• Panel (90 min – a proposal for a complete panel including 3 or 4 separate papers on the same general topic – 250 word overview plus 250 word individual abstracts).
• Lightning Talks  (90 min – a proposal for a complete set of lightning talks, including 4-6 participants – 250 word overview plus 50-100 word descriptions of individual  5-7 minute talks).

Submissions should include the title of the submission, the name(s) and affiliation(s) of contributor(s), biographical notes for contributors, and a 500-word abstract.

The ELO22 conference will feature different synchronous and asynchronous venues. Online pre- and post-conference workshops and seminars will be organized in Japan, Israel, Finland, and Brazil.

For the in-person conference talks can be given in English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese.

The deadline for submissions is January 7, 2022. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by the members of the scientific committee.

Submit via EasyChair.

Festival Exhibition in Como (ITALY) & online

We invite proposals of digital artworks and e-lit pieces to be featured as part of the in-person ELO Conference and Art Festival on E2Lit: Education and Electronic Literature.

All forms of electronic literature, multimodal writing, digital art, playful narrative, literary games, hypertext, and screen fiction will be considered. 

Please, be detailed on any special requirements. Submissions should provide the following information: 

Author name(s) and biographical note(s); 500-word artist statement detailing the aesthetic intentions, the structure of the piece, and its relationship to the conference theme. 

If you would like your work to be considered for a performance, please indicate that on the submission with an additional description (250 words max) of the nature of the performance as well as any technical requirements.

Statements should be anonymized for peer review. Technical specification providing exact details of what will be required to facilitate the work’s inclusion in the exhibition. This should include information on the materials, technologies, and spatial requirements necessary, and what the artist will require the gallery to provide. Please, be as detailed as possible regarding physical components and needs, including wireless internet. 

Pieces accepted to either exhibition will need to be delivered (physically or virtually) prior to the exhibit’s opening, and will remain on display after the conference ends before being returned to the artist.  

The deadline for submissions is January 7, 2022.

Please, note, do to time constraints, participants may only appear in the program twice, including combinations of artworks and talks.

Submit via EasyChair.

For more information, contact Giovanna Di Rosario ELO 2022 Chair, e2lit@hstudies.net or giovanna.dirosario@hstudies.net 

Partnerships

Pontificio Collegio Gallio (Italy)

Politecnico di Milano (Italy)

University of Jyväskylä (Finland)

The Arab Academic Institute of Education/Arab Union for Internet Writers

Nagoya University (Japan)

Federal University of São Carlos (Brazil)

Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil)

Digital Culture Center of Ciudad de México (Mexico)