Call for Barcelona E-Poetry Festival (12/1, 5/24-27/09)

Laura Borràs Castanyer and Loss Pequeño Glazier have called for papers and works (due: Dec. 1) for  E-Poetry Festival in Barcelona 2009 (May 24-27) at the Universitat Obertat de Catalunya (UOC). Many ELO members participated in E-Poetry 2007 in Paris, and this year’s conference will be another key international e-lit rendezvous.

Artistic events will take place at key Barcelona venues such as the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (http://www.cccb.org/en/ <http://www.cccb.org/en/>), providing authors the opportunity to present their works to a public curious about new literary and artistic trends employing technology and communication during the Setmana de la Poesia.

*Kate Hayles, Roberto Simanowski, and Jean Clément (Université Paris 8) are slated to deliver keynotes.

Selected papers will be published in proceedings.

Organizers include the UOC’s research group Hermeneia with the collaboration of Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo) and the Laboratoire Paragraph (Université Paris 8).

See the full call here:
http://www.hermeneia.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=39&Itemid=489

ELO and Siegen join forces

Siegen Beyond the Future
Siegen Beyond the Future

ELO announces two exciting connections with The University of Siegen, Germany!

1) The Conference:

Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres

International conference at the Cultural Studies Research Center “Media Upheavals” University of Siegen, Germany, Artur-Woll-Haus, November 20-21, 2008 Organized by Professor Dr. Peter Gendolla and Dr. Jörgen Schäfer

The program can be found here:

The conference features many ELO members and affiliates: Roberto Simanowski, Kate Hayles, John Cayley, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and ELO Director Joseph Tabbi.

2) The Collaboration:

The project group at Media Upheavals and the ELO have been collaborating since the summer of 2007. The Siegen database of Critical Works will be folded into the Electronic Literature Directory, version 2.0 that will be found on this site. In addition to collecting works, we are developing a recording format and metadata standard that will be portable and shared, and a model for literary archival projects web-wide.

New Collection; Stephanie Strickland’s Zero: Zero

Announcing Stephanie Strickland’s new book of poems, ZONE : ZERO, which includes a CD with two sequences from the book as interactive digital poems.

Here you will find sample poems, reviews, and recorded readings, along with endorsements from Marjorie Perloff, Rachel Loden, and Brian Kim Stefans,

Stephanie has contributed immeasurably to the production and promotion of electronic literature through her work as a poet, as a critic and theorist, and most recently as a co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. I.

The New River’s New Call (11/5/08)

Editor Nick Kocz sends this call from The New River:

The New River is a journal of digital writing and art, created and edited by Ed Falco. The managing editors for the Fall ’09 issue, Manisha Sharma and Nick Kocz, are interested in receiving submissions of original and unpublished digital writing and art that merges place, history, and culture. However, we are open to considering other pieces as well. Surprise us!

Please check The New River‘s submission guidelines for further information. The  deadline for consideration for our Fall ’08 issue is November 5, 2008. If accepted, you will be asked to upload all files to our server so we can host it  locally. If you have any questions, feel free to email us. To view the Spring  2008 issue, as well as archives, visit us at http://www.thenewriver.us

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.

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

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)

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.”

“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