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ELO Welcomes 3 New Board Members

ELO is pleased to announce the addition of 3 new members to its Board of Directors:  Philippe Bootz, Leonardo Flores, and Rui Torres.  These three scholar-artists bring a level of artistic and scholarly achievement and expertise that will help ELO grow and develop.  In addition to their deep knowledge of the field, they bring to the board literary expertise in three language spheres (Spanish, Portuguese, and French), so ELO can help build networks of scholars and artists in those literary cultures.

Bios for these three excellent new members follow:

Read more ELO Welcomes 3 New Board Members

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Pathfinders Exhibit at MLA14 Celebrates 25 Years of e-Lit

Pathfinders Logo

This year’s MLA conference will feature an exhibit entitled “Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature” organized by ELO President Dene Grigar and board member Stuart Moulthrop on the past and present of electronic literature.  Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the exhibit continues the tradition of curated works featured at MLA, one Grigar has been actively pursuing for several years. Below is the full press release.

Pathfinders:  25 years of Experimental Literary Art continues the work of Pathfinders:  Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature is a hands-on exhibit, curated by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, taking place at the Modern Language Association 2014 convention in Chicago, IL, from January 9-11 in the Sheraton II, Ballroom, Level 4.

The exhibit generates from Grigar and Moulthrop’s research, “Pathfinders:  Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature,” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and features work of pioneering experimental literary artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as highlights innovative contemporary artists experimenting today with computing technologies for literary production.

The first section of the exhibit, “Paths to Electronic Literature,”
 presents the early works of digital literature that comprise the current preservation efforts by Grigar and Moulthrop for the Pathfinders project.  These works will be made available at the exhibit on computers on which the works were originally experienced by readers at the time of their publication––an Apple IIe, Mac Classic, Mac LC575 and Mac 580, all from Grigar’s Electronic Literature Lab, the site where the Pathfinders research is taking place.  Also highlighted at this station will be raw documentation videos of the artists’ traversals produced for the Pathfinders project.

The second section of the exhibit, “Current Directions,”
features contemporary electronic literature artists who have produced narratives, poetry, drama, and essays via physical computing technologies, augmented reality, social media, mobile media and other innovative approaches.  Seven computer stations showcase the work of Samantha Gorman & Danny Cannizzo; Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, and Ian Hatcher; Andreas Muller; Christine Wilks and Andy Campbell; Jay Bushman and Mike Daisey; Jacob Garbe; Josh Tanenbaum and Karen Tanenbaum; Erik Loyer; and Jason Nelson.

For more information, contact Dene Grigar, dgrigar@mac.com.

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Digital Preservation Project Launches at WSU Vancouver

Following up on their NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, ELO President-elect Dene Grigar sends word of the Pathfinders project with first guest ELO board member Stuart Moulthrop:

“Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature” is making its debut at Washington State University Vancouver July 8 – 9 in the Electronic Literature Lab in the Classroom building, room 210. Stuart Moulthrop, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee and an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction as both a theoretician and writer, will be the first guest. He will also lecture at 7 p.m. July 9 at Nouspace Gallery, 1005 Main St, Vancouver, Wash. The lecture, “Failure to Contain: Electronic Literature and the State of (Machine) Reading,” is free and open to the public.

The project explores the idea of digital preservation and asks the questions: What happens to literary works meant to be experienced on a computing device when the software and computer systems with and for which they were created update, change or become obsolete? Do we allow these works also to become obsolete too, or do we find ways to preserve them?

“Pathfinders,” led by Dene Grigar, associate professor and director of the creative media and digital culture program at WSU Vancouver, and Moulthrop, are developing methods for digital preservation with the goal of capturing not only the digital work but also the human experience of interacting with early digital art . It is supported by a “Digital Humanities Start Up Grant” from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Moulthrop has produced many critically significant works of digital writing and art over the past 25 years. One of his best-known, “Victory Garden,” (1991) was produced for computers that are not compatible with current standards, making the work unavailable for web-based archives without changes to its original form.

To preserve the beauty of the original work, Grigar will videotape Moulthrop in the Electronic Literature Lab as he talks through “Victory Garden” using a vintage Mac Classic. Following Moulthrop’s reading, two readers unfamiliar with “Victory Garden” will be videotaped to produce a record of multiple readers’ experience with the work. This is a process Grigar and Moulthrop call “traversal.”

Three more “Pathfinders” traversals are scheduled through the fall. To learn more, visit http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/pathfinders or contact Grigar at dgrigar@vancouver.wsu.edu

 

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Dene Grigar, dgrigar@vancouver.wsu.edu
Brenda Alling, Office of Marketing and Communications, 360-546-9601, brenda_alling@vancouver.wsu.edu

 

OTHER RESOURCES
Pathfinders website:  http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/pathfinders
Electronic Literature Lab website:  http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/ell
Nouspace Gallery website:  http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/nouspace

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MIT to Host the Electronic Literature Organization

[Official Release]
MIT has long been a premier center of technological innovation. On July 1, a new locus for literary innovation will be added to the mix: The campus will begin hosting the headquarters of the Electronic Literature Organization (https://eliterature.org).

The Electronic Literature Organization, or ELO, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization composed of an international community that includes writers, artists, teachers, scholars, and developers. The Organization’s focus is new literary forms that are made to be read on digital systems, including smartphones, Web browsers, and networked computers.

ELO is coming to MIT with the support of MIT’s world-renowned Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program. CMS, which has an undergraduate major, a graduate program, and several large-scale research projects, is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. The program considers media change and the rise of new forms of writing in different eras, including our current one. ELO’s supporting and collaborating organizations at MIT include the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Hyperstudio; the Literature Section; and the Singapore/MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

There is already a great deal of work in electronic literature ongoing at MIT, including that being done by ELO President Nick Montfort and ELO Director Fox Harrell, who are both on the MIT faculty. The Boston area is home to several other ELO directors and to a great deal of digital art activity, thanks to organizations such as the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Turbulence.org, the AXIOM Gallery, the Upgrade! Boston series, and the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction.

“ELO and MIT have already been successful in advancing the state of the art in electronic literature,” said Montfort. “Now, by working together, we have a chance to sustain ELO’s core operations and projects and to further MIT’s existing commitment to electronic literature. ELO’s coming to MIT will be an chance to find new opportunities for collaboration, here in Cambridge and beyond.”

ELO was founded in 1999 by novelist Robert Coover, electronic author Scott Rettberg, and Internet business leader Jeff Ballowe. The Organization was operated from an office in Chicago until it moved to UCLA in 2001. In 2006, ELO’s headquarters came to the University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH). “ELO’s relationships with its academic hosts have been extremely productive for the organization,” said Montfort. “We’re very grateful for the ways that UCLA and MITH have helped us to accomplish our mission, sustain and add projects, and develop as an organization. With work from ELO’s directors, members, and collaborators, we’re now going to try to establish a long-term home for ELO at MIT that will allow the organization and the campus to continue to benefit from their collaboration for many years.”

ELO’s main projects are currently a biannual conference, the Electronic Literature Directory, the Electronic Literature Collection (the second volume of which was released this past Spring: http://collection.eliterature.org) and the eliterature.org site.