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&Now Festival Calls for eliterature (6/15/09, 10/14-17/09)

Among the innovative writing featured at the past three &Now festivals has been a strong showing of electronic literature. Steve Tomasula sends us word that he hopes to see more at The 4th Biennial &Now Festival of Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts to be held in Buffalo, NY from October 14-17, 2009.

From the Call:

PLEASE SUBMIT….
Critical papers, criti-fictional presentations, fiction readings, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects, and cross genre work of all kinds. Pieces that address linguistic transgressions, the limits of genre, or works that promote interdisciplinary explorations are particularly encouraged. Proposals can be for individual readings, critical panels, creative panels, and/or roundtable discussions. (See the full call here)

In a note to ELO, Steve speaks of his desire from the start to include electronic literature as a literary genre, as opposed to a specialty or an oddity. Past &Nows have featured the electronic works of Stephanie Strickland, Rob Wittig, Scott Rettberg, and MD Coverley.

As another sign of the ELO-link, this year’s festival features Robert Coover.

This should be an excellent showcase for ELO works. Please submit or join us there.

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SoftWhere: Software Studies Worksop 2008 (5/21-5/22)

Software Studies Gets Underway at UC San Diego!

Wednesday, May 21st, from 12:30-5:00pm, ELO board member Noah Wardrip-Fruin and the Software Studies Initiative at UC San Diego invite you to attend a public event:

SoftWhere: Software Studies Workshop 2008
Time: Wed. May 21 – Thu. May 22
Place: Calit2, University of California, San Diego
Format: Open public session (Wed May 21, short presentations of research in “Pecha Kucha” format)
Closed workshop session (Thu May 22)
URL: http://workshop.softwarestudies.com/

Software studies is a research field that examines software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences. Following on the first Software Studies Workshop organized by Matthew Fuller (Rotterdam, 2006 http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/Seminars2/softstudworkshop), the SoftWhere @ University of California, San Diego is a foundational event bringing together key figures in this emerging area to inaugurate the field. The event aims to coalesce a high-level conversation about what it means to study software cultures, and the direction and goals of Software Studies as an emerging movement. It will take place at Calit2, a pre-eminant research center for future computing and telecommunication (http://www.calit2.net/), where the Software Studies Initiative @ UCSD is located and currently collaborating with researchers on several exciting projects. SoftWhere has has also been timed to precede (and co-ordinate with) the the HASTAC II conference (http://www.hastac.org/) which will begin in nearby U. California Irvine on Thursday evening.
Read more SoftWhere: Software Studies Worksop 2008 (5/21-5/22)

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The Iowa Review Web returns

A new issue of The Iowa Review Web marks its reemergence as a hub of electronic literature. Although the issue has been online for sometime, we wanted to give it a bump for those who had not yet heard:

New Issue:
TIR-W Volume 9 no. 1
Multi-Modal Coding: Jason Nelson, Donna Leishman, and Electronic Writing

Guest-edited by Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink

The issue features an in-depth double interview of the two artists, essays by each artist on the other’s work, essays by Talan Memmott on Leishman and Nelson’s work, and links to their works, including Leishman’s Deviant, Nelson’s Pandemic Rooms and much more.

The next issue, guest edited by Stuart Moulthrop, will focus on playable texts, and will include works by Judy Malloy, Shawn Rider, Elizabeth Knipe, John Cayley, Nick Montfort, and Stuart Moulthrop. The issue will be published this spring.

The overall editor for TIR-Web is Jon Winet, Director, Virtual Writing
University Experimental Wing, jon-winet [at] uiowa.edu

“Publishing electronic literature since 1999, TIR-W is well-known for its commitment to new writing, encouraging the investigation of text and hypertext in theory and practice at their deepest levels.”

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“Second Person” on the electronic book review

Following their game plan (or walkthrough) for First Person, Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have brought their anthology Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media to the electronic book review (ebr) to bring the threads of discussion to life. Section One, Computational Fictions, has arrived at ebr and the subsequent sections will soon follow.

Together with Third Person, these two anthologies will form a trilogy of works from scholars, artists, and industry professionals on interactive narrative and drama forms. According to ebr,

The material in these volumes and on ebr represents a new level of dialogue between creators and critics about emerging forms of fictional and playable experience.

The ebr publication of the texts will not only open the book to readers across the Internet, but will also offer a site for continued conversation as readers respond to the texts through ripostes.

The essays previously published in the ebr “First Person” thread evoked (and provoked) responses from such central figures as N. Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, and Stephanie Strickland.

The publication continues ebr‘s long-standing relationship with MIT press, and that press’ continued work toward public online discussion of its texts, as seen in the recent and ongoing vetting of Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing.

The Table of Contents of the Second Person release follows. Read more “Second Person” on the electronic book review

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New on the Electronic Book Review: Electropoetics

In the latest selection from the Electronic Book Review, Associate Editor Lori Emerson brings together both critics and creators of electronic poetry, some of whom established themselves at the very start and many more who are recent entrants in the field of electronic literature. Essays on print poetry as well as born digital poetry help to situate the field in both a trans-disciplinary and trans-national context.

The collection (more than twenty essays in all) includes three review-essays on the Electronic Literature Collection (volume 1), published by the ELO: “How to Think (with) Thinkertoys” by Adalaide Morris; “Letters That Matter” by John Zuern; and “Electronic Literature circa WWW (and Before)” by Chris Funkhouser. New essays on and by Douglas Barbour, Michael Barrett, Greg Betts, Christof Bruno, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Cain, Robert Creeley, Clayton Eshleman, Alan Fisher, Eduardo Kac, Hugh Kenner, Walter Benn Michaels, Jay Murphy, Janet Neigh, Soren Pold, Christopher Nolan, Jaishree Odin, Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan, Stephanie Strickland, Angela Szczepaniak, Steve Tomasula, and Eugene Thacker.

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The Aesthetics of Net Literature

In The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media editors Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a broad table of contents — including contributions from Jean-Pierre Balpe, Philippe Bootz, Laura Borrà s Castanyer (a member of ELO’s Literary Advisory Board), Markku Eskelinen, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Marie-Laure Ryan, Roberto Simanowski, and ELO Vice-President Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The volume is now available in the U.S.

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Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

MIT Press has just published Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Edited by Pat Harrigan and ELO VP Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the book includes contributions by ELO board members Helen Thorington, Talan Memmott, and Nick Montfort — as well as a diverse collection of writers, game designers, computer scientists, improv actors, media artists, and more. The book’s introduction and table of contents are available online.

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Framed

The frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology which published new media writing, art, interviews and essays from 1995-2004, has stopped actively publishing new work, but it’s going out with a bang rather than a whimper. Simon Mills is editing a project, framed including retrospective interviews with many of the writers and artists whose works were published in frAme. The first installment of framed includes provacative interviews with Mark Amerika, Matthew Fuller, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim. More interviews are coming soon.

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New Issue of ebr: Electronic Book Review

In this issue of ebr, the “waves” thread features essays on “Feminisms: Post, Past, and Present,” introduced by Elizabeth Joyce.

The “critical ecologies” thread includes a review of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and Our Public Needs.

In “end construction,” another response to Lori Emerson’s November 2005 review of Walter Benn Michaels.

“electropoetics” offers Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck on “Marie Laure-Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality”.

Plus reviews of new electronic fictions “Man in the Stretcher,” by Kenneth Bernard, and “Charlie P” by Dick Kalich.