ELO is in the process of updating its web presence. UCLA undergraduate artist and designer Gabe Dunne is developing the new site, which will launch soon after the new year.
The ELO website, the PAD (Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination) webpages, and the ELO Directory will all participate in this Re-Launch. So, look for our new interface and information in the upcoming months!
ELO’s PAD (Preservation, Archiving, Dissemination) Project is off and running! Members of the PAD committees met in Santa Fe over the weekend to discuss the project and its range, planned future steps and shared information.
In attendence were Jeff Ballowe (Chair of the Operations Committee), Scott Rettberg (Chair of the Archiving/Exhibition Committee), Marjorie Luesebrink (Archiving/Exhibition Committee), Howard Besser (Archiving/Exhibition Committee), Alan Divack (Archiving/Exhibition Committee), Alan Liu (Chair of the Technology/Software Design Committee), Nick Montfort (Technology/Software Design Committee), Bill Warner (Chair of the Copyright/Open Source Committee), Rob Swigart (Copyright/Open Source Committee), Rob Kendall (Director of the ELO Directory), Melissa Stevenson, and Jessica Pressman. Matt Kirschenbaum (Chair of Academic Dissemination Committee) phoned in to participate.
PAD will soon have a presence on the web, accessible from the ELO website. The PAD webpages will be available by the end of November. Check back soon!
The Rockfeller Foundation approved an ELO grant request to provide financial support to the Directory expansion project. The grant will help the ELO expand the Electronic Literature Directory, an online directory of new media art and literature. Work on updating and expanding the Directory has already begun. The Directory can be accessed from the ELO homepage or by clicking the link.
Ravi Shankar, the editor of Drunken Boat, attended the 2002 State of the Arts symposium in Los Angeles and filed a brief “DOMO ARIGATO, E.L.O.: POSTCARD FROM LOS ANGELES” for Poets and Writers online, summarizing his experience of the symposium.
During its meeting on Thursday, April 11th, 2002, the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization accepted the resignations of Peter Bernstein, Cathy Marshall, Krish Menon, and Larry Wangberg from the board and accepted the nominations of Alan Liu, Scott Rettberg and Bill Seaman to the board.
Peter Bernstein’s fellow board members commended him for his service to the ELO as a founding member of the board of directors and as Treasurer of the organization during a time of difficult fiscal challenges. Cathy Marshall was commended for her service to the ELO as a founding board member and as Secretary, assuring that accurate records were kept and that all of our filings got in on time. Larry Wangberg was commended for making a generous donation at a crucial time, and for opening up connections between the ELO and the media.
New Director Alan Liu is the weaver of Voice of the Shuttle. He is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1988. He is also principal investigator of the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UCSB titled, Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information, and director of the English Department’s new undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information.
New Director Scott Rettberg is the cofounder of the Electronic Literature Organization and served as its first executive director. Rettberg is a coauthor of The Unknown, a Hypertext Novel, the cowinner of the 1999 trAce/AltX International Hypertext Competition and print book The Unknown: An Anthology. This fall, Rettberg will join the Literature faculty of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey as Assistant Professor of New Media Studies, where he will help to design an undergraduate New Media Writing track.
New Director Bill Seaman is a Professor in the Department of Design | Media Arts, UCLA, where he is exploring issues related to the continuum between physical and virtual/media space. His current research includes the creation of a HYBRID INVENTION GENERATION, exploring a machinic genetics. This research is being funded by a gift from the Intel corporation. A second work with Regina Van Berkel was recently premiered in Collogne, entitled “Inversion”. This Dance / Performance / Installation will be presented in The Holland Dance Festival in November and in the Steps Festival in Switzerland early next year.
The board also accepted the nomination of board member Celia O’Donnell as Treasurer of the organization, and the nomination of board member Marjorie Luesebrink to the new position of Vice-President of the organization.
This Sunday’s Living section of the Los Angeles Times featured an article about the recent 2002 ELO State of the Arts Symposium at UCLA. Aside from a couple of factual inaccuracies (while the mention of Michael Joyce’s Aftermath brought a smile to some of our faces, the actual title of Eastgate’s classic hypertext is afternoon: a story) the article is a fine bit of journalism that captures the spirit of what many are already calling the most important gathering in the history of the nascent field of electronic literature. (Abstract available, article can be purchased for $2.95)
[Link updated April 2005; the article was removed from the Web]
The ELO Symposium was a huge success. Three nights of hypermedia readings by new and established artists and two full days of panel discussions by speakers from multi-disciplinary experiences and perspectives. 150 people from all over the world attended the event, proving that this type of Symposium is vitally important to the field and the future of electronic literature.
The Gallery of creative works and papers accepted for the ELO Symposium is now online. Access the analytical papers and creative works that were exbhibited in the Gallery from your own computer.
Listen to John Cayley, Larry McCaffery and Scott Rettberg discuss electronic literature on Chicago Public Radio’s “Odyssey.” (Program description) (52 minute Realaudio stream)
[Links updated April 2005]
An LA Times article describes ELO’s first reading event, held this May at the home of Richard Bangs in Redmond, WA. The article includes interviews with e-lit authors and critics including Robert Coover, M.D. Coverley, Katherine Hayles, Shelley Jackson, Dirk Stratton and Rob Wittig. LA Times writer Kim Murphy focuses the piece on the artistic and economic implications of electronic lit. (Abstract available, article can be purchsed for $2.95)
[Link updated April 2005; the article was removed from the Web]