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New Scientist Discovers Electronic Literature

Members of the Electronic Literature Organization no doubt remember the first time they heard about electronic literature. That exhilarating moment wrapped around a sense of possibility and a desire to get their hands on either the tools of creation or the mind-blowing creations or both. Over the past month, the popular science journal New Scientist has been publishing posts marking its discovery of electronic literature in a series called Storytelling 2.0.

The posts mention ELO and ELO co-founder Robert Coover along with works by Jay Bushman and others. There’s even a mention of ELO-President Nick Montfort, alluding to his work on his IF platform Curveship.

Check out the posts and join the conversation as New Scientist readers discover e-lit.

The posts:

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eliterature.org Blinked, Is Back

We apologize for our site being down as we switched to a new hosting service. We worked to restore the Web publication of the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1 first so that teachers and students, as well as general readers, would have access to it. The organization will be continuing to develop the site, and will be working to ensure that there is less downtime in the future, as we also pursue our three main projects: The Electronic Literature Collection, The Electronic Literature Directory, and our series of conferences.

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New ELO Officers & 3 New Board Members

With the 4th International Conference, ELO announces its new officers and board members.

Taking over the reins from Joseph Tabbi will be incoming President Nick Montfort and Vice President Dene Grigar. Also, ELO announces 3 new members to the ELO Board of Directors: Fox Harrell, Carolyn Guertin, and Jason Nelson. Sandy Baldwin will take over as Treasurer and Mark Marino will continue as Director of Communication.

The term of the ELO President is three years.

Below you will find bios:

Nick Montfort, President

Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Montfort’s digital media writing projects include the group blog Grand Text Auto, the ppg256 series of 256-character poetry generators; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; and several works of interactive fiction: Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester’s Nightmare.

Montfort, with Ian Bogost, wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), the first book in the Platform Studies series. He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world’s longest literary palindrome. He also edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003). His current work is on narrative variation in interactive fiction and the role of platforms in creative computing.

Dene Grigar, Vice President:

Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver who works in the area of electronic literature, emergent technology and cognition, and ephemera. She is the author of “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project“, both of which have appeared in the Iowa Review Web, and When Ghosts Will Die (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce networked narratives. Her most recent project is the “Fort Vancouver Mobile Project,” a locative / mixed media effort that brings together a core team of 20 scholars, digital storytellers, new media producers, historians, and archaeologists to create location-aware nonfiction content for mobile phones to be used at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. She serves as Associate Editor for Leonardo Reviews

New Board Members

Fox Harrell:

Fox Harrell is a researcher, author, and artist exploring the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He and his laboratory, the Imagination, Computation, and Expression [ICE] Lab/Studio develop new forms of computational narrative, gaming, and related digital infrastructures and technical-cultural media with a basis in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Carolyn Guertin:

Carolyn Guertin has a dual appointment in new media. She is Director of the eCreate Lab and Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also a faculty member at Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany and Linz, Austria, an international low residency MFA program in new media at Danube University Krems. She is curator of the celebrated collection Assemblage: The Online Women’s New Media Gallery out of the U.K., and was Senior McLuhan Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, where she was SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow from 2004-06. She has been a Literary Adviser to the Electronic Literature Organization since its inception, is a member of the MLA Committee on Information Technology, and is an editorial board member of Convergence.

She earned her PhD with a study of cyberfeminist digital narrative and the technologies of memory in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has taught, exhibited and published internationally, and does theoretical work in: cyberfeminism, hacktivism, born-digital arts and literatures, (global) film futures, information aesthetics, postliteracy and the social practices surrounding technology (especially social networking and participatory culture). She is working on a new book on new media art, authorship and the politics of creation in our digital world.

Jason Nelson:

Born from the computerless land of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives. Currently he teaches Net Art and Electronic Literature at Griffith University in the Gold Coast’s contradictory lands. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around globe in New York, Mexico, Taiwan, Spain, Singapore and Brazil, at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, ACM, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. But in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal http://www.secrettechnology.com attracts each year.

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ELO Archive and Innovate underway @ Brown

With the start of Deena Larsen’s workshop, E-Lit 101, the 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization is underway at Brown University where both ELO, literary hypertext, and hypertext itself ostensibly began.

The workshop, attended by approximately 150 electronic literary scholars and artists, marks a look back at the foundational work of Robert Coover and the continuation of the ELO PAD project (ARCHIVE) and an the group’s visionary glimpse at the future of electronic literature.

Conference details can be found here.

Twitter stream is tagged: #ELOAI streaming from @eliterature

Among with readings, performances, screenings, and critical panels, the conference will also announce the Electronic Literature Directory 2.0 and the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2.

The conference features a number of tributes to Robert Coover, including artwork and panels that re-explore the work that continues to fascinate and drive this digital avant-garde.

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Electronic literature jobs at the University of Bergen

ELO Co-founder and Board member, Scott Rettberg, sends word of 2 opportunities in Norway! (Note: Summer deadlines for applications.)

Two opportunities are now available at the University of Bergen’s Digital Culture program (http://www.uib.no/rg/digitalculture) for scholars of electronic literature.

FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR/LECTURER IN DIGITAL CULTURE http://catalog.cies.org/

POSTDOC IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read more Electronic literature jobs at the University of Bergen

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The ELO Directory returns 010110

ELO welcomes 010110 (decimal 22) with a special announcement:

The framework for the Electronic Literature Directory version 2.0 is now online:
http://eld.eliterature.org/

Think of this as an open house in a model home for e-lit.

The Directory has always been key to helping outsiders discover electronic literature. With the new version, it will be even easier to add and find works of electronic literature AND criticism.

But there’s more: The ELD will feature venues or “collections,” aggregators of e-lit and criticism.

When you take a glance at our demo works, you will notice some exciting features:

In addition to basic information about author, date, url, and language, entries list software platforms as well as annotations by ELO members. However, registered users will be able to extend the discussion in the comment section or by writing a review.

The ELO Directory team has worked hard to make these works more accessible, developing search tools, categories, and tags, the subject of much discussion on Joseph Tabbi’s recent online meditation (On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature).

The works you see are but a small sample of the ones already vetted, but this is a special invitation to see the structure of this exciting re-imagined resource.

Start by creating an account and submitting creative or critical works or collection sites. Those submissions will be delivered to our Directory team for evaluation and review.We’re looking forward to the re-launch of this flagsite enterprise of ELO.

Watch for full announcements to follow including thanks to the team who have been working so hard to make this a possibility.

At the start of the new decade, it is impossible to predict what new forms of literature will emerge, but you at least know where you can find them: the Electronic Literature Directory.

[Also, reminder, ELO AI deadline: January 15, 2010 or 011501]

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Searching for a New(er) Digital Literature

Announcing a new(er) presentation of Electronic Literature Organization:
Searching for a New(er) Digital Literature.

“Searching for a New(er) Digital Literature” is an exhibition of twelve multimedia works that offer readers representative examples of new digital poetry and fiction on the web. Curated by Alan Bigelow, it includes work by Jim Andrews, Marvin Bell & Ernesto Lavandera, Sommer Browning & Mark Lomond & Johanne Ste-Marie, Andy Campbell, J.R. Carpenter, Chris Joseph & Kate Pullinger, Tammy McGovern, Stuart Moulthrop, Alexander Mouton, Jason Nelson, Victoria Welby, and Jody Zellen.

The exhibit is both online and offline. The offline exhibit launched on January 15th at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, USA. The online exhibit is available at
http://www.terminalapsu.org/exhibitions/digitalliterature/index.html

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ELO’s Visionary Landscapes 2008 Conference by the Numbers

The ELO Visionary Landscapes 2008 conference at Washington State University Vancouver was one of the largest in the history of the organization and certainly one of the largest (if not THE largest) international conferences to focus on electronic literature.

The conference also marks a watershed expansion in ELO since all attendees were either current or new members. As this organization continues to grow internationally, the conference drew attendees from 17 countries and 5 continents. The works and presentations continued to demonstrate the diversity of forms that call themselves electronic literature.

Here are some more numerical output from the conference in the first part of a series of post-conference posts.

149 artistic works submitted
80 papers submitted
36 artists featured in the galleries
16 panels, plenaries, and workshops
74 presenters
120 attendees
10 bursaries awarded
16 classic elit works on display
10 bursaries awarded
2 exhausted conference organizers
Bursary winners included:

  1. Ian Hatcher, USA
  2. Deena Larsen, USA
  3. Marjorie Luesebrink, USA
  4. Judd Morrissey, USA
  5. Stefan Muler Arisona, Switzerland
  6. Kate Pullinger, UK
  7. Stephanie Strickland, USA
  8. Donna Leishman, UK
  9. Ethan Miller, USA
  10. Steve Gibson, Canada

Links to their bios and works can be found online here. Post-conference news will follow on the ELO blog and can also be found here on the post-conference page.

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Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 2 – Call for Work

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted from June 1 to September 30, 2008. Up to three works per author will be considered; previously published works will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection is a biannual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. Volume 1, presently available both online (http://collection.eliterature.org) and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, has been used in dozens of courses at universities in the United States and internationally, and has been widely reviewed in the United States and Europe. It is also available as a CD-ROM insert with N. Katherine Hayles’ full-length study, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

Volume 2, comprising approximately 50 works, will likewise be available online, and as a cross-platform DVD in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection are offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.

The editorial collective for the second volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, to be published in 2009, is Laura Borràs Castanyer, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley and Brian Kim Stefans. This collective will review the submitted work and select pieces for the Collection.

Read more Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 2 – Call for Work