We have a Fulbright Scholar position available at UiB Digital Culture in 2012-2013. The position is now advertised on the CIES site. Fulbright scholarships are available to US citizens residing in the US. This position is for a PhD with at least two years of related teaching experience. The scholar will teach 1.5 courses per term in electronic literature or digital media aesthestics courses at the undergraduate and graduate level with 50% research time, and will have the opportunity to participate in the European ‘Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP) HERA research project events. We will also facilitate lecture visits to other European institutions. The pay is 25,000 NOK per month, and travel expenses are covered by the Fulbright. Although the cost of living in Norway is high, the cost of housing, work-related travel and meals are tax-deductible for the scholar. Travel expenses for dependents are not covered, but there is an allowance of 2000 NOK per month per dependent. Depending on needs and expertise, courses the scholar might teach include DIKULT103: Digital Genres: Digital Art, Electronic Literature and Computer Games; DIKUL105: Web Design; DIKULT203: Electronic Literature; DIKULT251: Critical Perspectives on Information Technologies and Society; DIKULT303: Digital Media Aesthetics; or DIKULT304: Graduate Seminar: Topics in Digital Culture. The position is available either for a semester (5 months) or a year (10 months). A letter of invitation is recommended. If you know anyone who might be interested, they should get in touch with me via the address in the advertisement.

The Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic studies welcomes you to attend two special events celebrating the launch of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 is an international anthology of more than 60 works of electronic literature published under a Creative Commons license online and on DVD. The publication of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 in 2006 had a significant impact on the field of electronic literature, giving readers and educators working in the field a common set of referents in the form of a diverse collection of literary works made for digital media. Volume 2, just published, offers new digital poetry, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, multimedia documentaries, and a variety of other forms of electronic literature.

The University of Bergen program in Digital Culture was one of the sponsors of the publication of the ELC 2 and will make use of it in courses in years to come.

In celebration of this publishing event, two events are planned on Monday, May 2, 2011 in cooperation with the Bergen Public Library and Vagant.

14:00-16:00 Bergen Public Library, Auditorium
Presentation of the ELC 2: Talan Memmott and Rita Raley, Editors
The editors will present the collection and briefly highlight a variety of works of electronic literature in the collection.

Editing Electronic Literature, a Roundtable Discussion
Editors of the ELC 2 (Talan Memmott and Rita Raley) and the ELC 1 (Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland) will discuss the process of selecting and contextualizing works for the two anthologies, preparing the two online and disc editions, and distributing the collections to international audiences. Discussion will be led by Andrew Roberts, Professor of English at the University of Dundee and leader of the Poetry Beyond Text project.

19:30-21:30 Bergen Public Library, Auditorium
Reading of works from the ELC 1 and 2
Featuring readings and performances from

• Lexia to Perplexia by Talan Memmott (ELC 1)
• slippingglimpse by Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan (ELC 2)
• V: Vniverse by Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (ELC 2)
• Letter to Linus by William Gillespie (ELC 2)
• The Unknown by William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton (ELC 2)

Q/A led by Audun Lindholm, editor of Vagant: Journal of Literature and Criticism.

This event is sponsored by the Bergen Public Library, the University of Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group, ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, the Electronic Literature Organization, the Fulbright Foundation, the University of Bergen (Småforskmidler), and Vagant.

After Parthenope Authoring Screencast from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

Monday, March 21st 14:15-16:00
Sydneshaugen Skole, Room 304B
“Exquisite_Code”
Media artist Brendan Howell is in from Berlin as a visiting lecturer at KHiB. Howell will present the “Exquisite_Code” project, and other electronic literature related projects. Exquisite_Code is an algorithmic performance system for heterogeneous groups of writers. http://www.wintermute.org/brendan/

Tuesday, March 22nd 17:00-19:00
Note: Date changed
HF Building, Room 400
“A Show of Hands — Networked Fictions”
Visiting Fulbright lecturer and e-lit author Mark Marino, along with e-lit author Rob Wittig, will present an evening of readings from network-based fiction, locative narrative, and ludic works of computer-based fiction. http://markcmarino.com

Screencast: Introducing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (HD) from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

I’m pleased to announce that we have just flipped the switch and made public the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, the central project being produced at the University of Bergen as part of ELMCIP. The Knowledge Base is an information resource including information about works of electronic literature, critical writing, authors, publishers, organizations, teaching resources, and events in the field. The Knowledge Base is both an information resource and a research archive. Although there are a number of features still in the pipeline and you’ll notice that many of the records in the database are still being developed, we have decided to open the Knowledge Base to readers and contributors while our development process is taking place. It is no longer necessary to log in to access the information in the Knowledge Base. We are also looking for a few brave beta-testers to join the team at Bergen and the researchers working around Europe on the ELMCIP project in contributing to the Knowledge Base and helping us to develop it. As you will see by browsing it, it is developing into quite a powerful research resource that will be useful for everyone working in the field, and it will get even more useful and new records are added and existing ones are developed. If you are a researcher or writer working in the field and would like to join the research community as a submitter or contributor, contact Eric Rasmussen at kb_editor@elmcip.net

We are also planning to collaborate and share information with other databases in the field that document the works and practices of electronic literature, such as the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature Directory. I recently published a paper about the Knowledge Base and our plans for an international Electronic Literature consortium based on sharing and making accessible information about electronic literature titled The ELMCIP Knowledge Base and the Formation of an International Field of Literary Scholarship and Practice which is available in full-text. The Bergen team will also be publishing a number of screencasts showing you how to use and contribute to the Knowledge Base in coming days and weeks.

Our first events will take place this week at UiB. We are welcoming e-lit author, researcher, and new media artist Talan Memmott to campus. We invite you to join us for two events.

On Tuesday Feb 15th, in HF 371 from 12:15-2PM, Talan will present his dissertation-in-progress “Mythologies of Electronic Textuality.”

On Thursday evening Feb 17th, in HF 301 from 5-6:30PM, Talan will show and discuss some of his creative work including electronic literature and video work.

Some of Talan’s e-lit, video, critical writing and other curiosities can be found at: talanmemmott.com

Talan is also to be congratulated for the release this week of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 — which includes 63 works of electronic literature. Talan was one of four editors of the anthology. Also note that UiB was a sponsor of the collection along with MIT, Duke, Brown University, and other peer institutions.

I hope that you will be able to join us for one or both events. Later this term, we will welcome two Fulbright lecturers with us for three week stays: Mark Marino from the University of Southern California, and Rtia Raley from The University of California at Santa Barbara. We are planning several different events, including a release party for the ELC2, later in the term.

A recently opened exhibition at the Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen features a series of short films produced by the artist Len Lye between 1935 and 1979. Curated by HC Gilje and Anne Szefer Karlse, the exhibit presents the films in a random order, shown on three different-sized screens in different parts of the room. The films are experimental, each featuring a different interaction of motion, color, letters, words, music, filtering effects, collaged imagery, and effects particular to the physical media Lye was working with, such as scratches made directly onto the celluloid film. What is remarkable about such films as Trade Tattoo (1937) is not that their effects seem strange or dissimilar to contemporary audiences, but rather that they seem so familiar. I had to check the exhibition program twice as I was watching the films, sure that I must be watching a contemporary video, extensively processed on the computer. A number of Lye’s films looked as if they might have been produced last year. But the layering, filters, and kinetic text effects were all produced by Lye in 1930s, using analogue processes.

The Lye exhibition was a reminder to me that one of the recent trends in electronic literature, towards the production of works that feature letters moving in space, often synchronized to a musical soundtrack, is not precisely a novel phenomena, but something that writers and artists have been experimenting with to some degree since the dawn of moving image technology.

Poets have never been particularly locked into a paradigm of typographic uniformity. Although William Blake‘s poetry is often reproduced in contemporary anthologies without illustrations, the poems themselves were originally published by the poet in lush illuminated editions, in which the typography on the page interacts visually and thematically with the illustrations and decorations. It could be argued that reading the words outside of that visual context is a disservice to the work — the poems as Blake produced them were visual and textual. The images and typography were part of the poem, not separate from it.

In his Un coup de dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) (1897) Stéphane Mallarmé used varied typography, white space, and even the folds of the book itself to enable the reader to associate and recombine different associations among the fragments of the text. The work is often cited as an antecedent to hypertext, as the relation between the fragments is not clearly dictated by the author but primarily constructed by the reader.

The early 20th century Futurist poet F.T. Marienetti used the space of the printed page to create a sense of speed and motion, and to foreground “parole in libertà” (word autonomy): abandoning meter and line to focus on juxtapositions of single words or letters with each other in the typographic space of the page. This movement toward a focus on the impact of singular words and letters is a recurring motif in contemporary digital poetry.

The various 20th century avant-gardes built upon the work of the Symbolists and Futurists and developed traditions in visual poetry, sound poetry, and video poetry, engaging in process of continual re-conceputalizaion of the relationship between lines, words, letters, space, motion, and semantics. The personal computer and global network are additions to the toolbox of poets interested in this form of textual materiality which is not essentially new, but rather the continuation of a process rooted in the earlier avant-garde. It might in fact mark the point at which these forms have ceased to be avant-garde, as moving letters, inventive typography, integrated imagery, and even nonlinearity are common aspects of everyday textuality in contemporary media ranging from television to the Web. The same motion graphic techniques used to create a digital poem might be used for instance to sell an automobile or advertise a restaurant’s menu. While Mallarmé or Marinetti’s approaches to poetry may have shocked the audiences of their day, contemporary digital poets are largely simply accessing a contemporary vernacular. Given the comparative ease of achieving multimedia effects on contemporary computers, it is no surprise that many poets are adding visual imagery, motion graphics, sound, and computation-driven effects to their quivers.

A very active thread of practice among poets producing work for the digital media, kinetic poetry is particularly well represented in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, which presents readers with a wide variety of approaches to moving letters.

Peter Cho’s “Wordscapes” and “Letterscapes” are two sets of 26 pieces each, which the author describes as “typographic landscapes.” In “Wordscapes,” we select a letter of the alphabet circulated in the space of the screen before us. Each letter connects to a short sketch based on a word beginning with the letter we select. The sketches are interactive in that as we move the cursor, the word forms react to our touch. The interaction of each piece is based on a playful interpretation of the word selected: As we move the cursor we sail through the sky with “Aloft”, as we navigate “Vanish” the letters hide and fade before our eyes, “Worry” presents us with pulsing lines reminiscent of vertigo, and “Xenophobia” tries to avoid our icon at all costs. The companion work “Letterscapes” is similar but even more granular. Letters here are encountered as entities in their own right, but our interactions with the letterforms break them out of their usual composition — they fracture into three-dimensional objects of diverse geometries. Both of these suites are gems of clever design and typographic wit, produced in the open source platform Processing.

Elegant in its simplicity, “Ah” by K Michel and Dirk Vis ambles through time, Einstein, and the way that idle moments of wandering thought might bring about certain types of epiphany. For the most part, we encounter the text as a single line, scrolling rapidly to the left off our screen and out of our field of vision. As the words move across the screen, they cross over and occlude one another. Periodically however “ahs” “ohs “lalas” and other ambiguous expressions of the thought process will break out of the line and float in arcs across a wider visual field. While the line strings together lucid pondering on physics and the psychology of closure, what it does most effectively is demonstrate how words moving silently through space can non-verbally represent the rhythms, flow, and stuttering of the human thought process. Subtitled “shower song,” the poem is a visual representation of thoughts wending their way through the reader’s brain.

Oni Buchanan’s “The Mandrake Vehicles” could be described both as visual poetry and as an example of recombinant poetics. Each of the three installations begins with page of text about the mandrake plant, a botanical species rich in mythical, magical, and homeopathic associations. Portions of the text for instance describe the shriek of the mandrake plant as it is pulled from the ground. Moving through the seven stages of each installation, the poet first destroys the original text, as letters zoom off into oblivion or fall off to the bottom of the screen, forming new words there. The remaining letters then pull together, forming the lines of a new poem, before the process repeats itself, eventually forming a third text, a poem composed of very short lines. The poet describes each of the three pieces in the series as “vehicles” — an apt summation not only of the movement of the text on the screen but also the fact that as we move through the successive stages of each piece, we move through different poems, each composed from subsets of the words from the same original page. In a way the whole process seems to emulate the process of composing poetry itself. The poems begin with a large space of prose, and winnow themselves down to minimalist expressions.

“The Sweet Old Etcetera” produced by Allison Clifford is a beautiful piece based on the poetry of e.e. cummings, a poet known for his sense of play and formal invention. Clifford pulls the text of a numbers of cummings’s poems into the work. As the reader selects different links within the work, the sound of a guitar strum is heard, and new lines are added to the visual landscape of the work. As we progress through the poem, some of these lines build themselves into a tree; others (from a poem about a grasshopper) literally hop across the screen. The work both immerses the reader in the playful genius of cummings’s poems at the same time as it builds a visual and verbal instrument for its reader to play with as a hilly horizon of words and musical asterisks presents itself for our enjoyment. This is a toy both to think and play with.

When poetry, interaction, typography, design, and computation meet, amazing and delightful things can happen. The examples I’ve cited here are just a few among a significant group of kinetic poems in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2. Each takes a different angle of approach to the possibilities and limitations of letters moving through the space of the interactive screen. And still I sense that we are just scratching the surface(s) of new poetics that are emerging in tandem with new technologies.

The first Electronic Literature Collection was published in 2006. Including 60 works of electronic literature of diverse form and content, all published under one cover online and on a CD-ROM, the collection offered readers and educators a valuable resource, a set of works distributed freely under a Creative Commons license. The ELC provided teachers with a place where they could send students interested in exploring e-lit, and critics with a set of archived works around which they could gather their discourse – a set of common touchstones that served to help develop and refine a shared critical language about the emergent forms of literary practice.

The editors’ intention was not to publish a one-off anthology to form the basis for a canon but instead to launch a regular practice of periodically gathering, publishing, and making as widely available as possible curated collections of e-lit. A different collective of writers and critics, reflecting a different curatorial agenda, would edit each successive volume. In addition to reflecting a different aesthetic sensibility, each iteration of the Electronic Literature Collection would demonstrate changes in the nature of the artistic practice of electronic literature, serving as a sort of biennial exhibition for the field of electronic literature, showing transitions in literary and artistic practices in the field over time.

A biennial, of course, generally takes place every two years. We have been awaiting the publication of the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2 for four years. The editorial collective for this second volume in the series: Laura Borras Castanyer, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans, have been hard at work curating, editing, and preparing ELC2 for online and DVD publication. I recently had the opportunity to preview the ELC2, which includes 63 works, and can verify that it is well worth the extended wait. While the contents of ELC2 reflect the same interest in representing a broad array of literary practices in new media as the previous volume, the editors’ interests in particular areas and themes results in a selection weighted more heavily to those types of work than others. The result is a very interesting mix. Stefans’s interests in language poetry, lettrism, and conceptual writing, Raley’s interests in “codework” – digital poetry that interrogates the interface of human language and machine language, and her interests in digital manifestations of political discourse, Memmott’s interests in the relation between film and various avant-garde writing practices, and in the development of writing practices that blend the ideas of poststructuralist theory within multimodal artifacts, Castanyer’s interests in new representations of materiality and in broadly representing the work of European writers, have all contributed to the diverse selection of works in the ELC2.

The editors have provided a glossary / index of works by particular keywords, which provide some clues for readers interested in following thematic, generic, or conceptual paths through the collection. The keywords in this column include: Ambient, Animation/Kinetic, Appropriated Texts, Audio, Augmented Reality, CAVE, Chatterbot/Conversational Character, Codework, Collaboration, Conceptual, Constraint-Based/Procedural, Critical/Political/Philosophical, Database, Documentary, Ergodic/Interactivity/Participation, Essay/Creative Nonfiction, Flash, Games, Gender/Race/Sexuality, Generative, Hacktivist, Hypertext, Installation, Interactive Fiction, Java, Javascript, Locative, Mash-up, Memoir, Multilingual, Narrative, Network Forms, Non-Interactive, Parody/Satire, Performance/Performative, Place, Poetry, Processing, Retro, Shockwave, Stretchtext, Text Movie, Textual Instrument, 3D, Video, Virtual Environment, Visual Poetry or Narrative, and Wordtoy. There are many different threads to follow in this labyrinth, enough to keep to keep the critics busy, if not for the three hundred years James Joyce promised of Finnegan’s Wake, then at least for the two or three years before the next volume of the ELC hits the streets.

I will pick up on some of these themes and explore them further in coming issues of Vagant, but for now will restrain myself to a very brief introduction to one of the more notable trends in this ELC: an interest in ways that techniques and practices of digital literature can be applied in online documentaries, essays, and other forms of nonfiction. Several of the most impressive works published in the ELC2, including Roderick Coover’s Voyage into the Unknown, Sharon Daniels and Eric Loyer’s Public Secrets, and David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) powerfully illustrate the potential of electronic literary forms not only for fiction and poetry, but also documentary and essayistic forms.

Roderick Coover, a documentary filmmaker, contributes his interactive panorama documentary Voyage Into the Unknown. The work is one of several projects Coover has developed about the landscape, politics and ecology of the Grand Canyon and Colorado river region, including other interactive environments and the film Canyonlands: Edward Abbey and the Great American Desert. Voyage into the Unknown tells the 19th Century story of John Wesley Powell, the Civil War veteran who set out in 1869 with eight other explorers to be the first to navigate the unmapped Colorado River through its canyons in the desert. The reader experiences this work as a horizontal panorama, extending off the edges of the screen, representing the Colorado River. The panorama has the form of an abstract iconographic map. The map includes icons representing trees, observations, names, rock formations, and events and notes. By clicking on the various icons, the reader encounters a number of different texts about the expedition, about the history of Colorado River during that period, and about the nature, landscape, and ecology of the ecosystem. Like many contemporary map or location-based information systems, Voyage into the Unknown enables its user to explore many different types of information simultaneously in one space. Coover pulls in information not only from Powell’s diary, which was published and widely distributed during the period, but also from the diaries of others involved in the expedition, contemporary newspaper accounts, popular songs and poems of the period and other materials. Throughout, as readers select different waypoints, they are addressed in the second person. Coover pulls readers into the narrative of the expedition, as we run the rapids and experience hardships such as destruction of the raft, the struggle with hunger, and the loss of crew members to the dangers of the river.

Public Secrets by Sharon Daniels and Eric Loyer is a project that addresses a more contemporary concern: the unmitigated growth of the American prison industrial complex. Daniels spent three years working with the nonprofit organization Justice Now, volunteering as a legal advocate for women incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility. Although the state of California has had a media ban in place since 1993 that prevents reporters from conducting face to face interviews with prisoners or using recording devices of any kind, because of her status as an advocate, Daniels was able to record conversations with a number of women inside the prison. She recorded and transcribed these conversations, and then tracked connections between them and between a number of texts ranging from political philosophy to essays about American crime and punishment, Guantanamo Bay, and other aspects of a society increasingly obsessed with security and decreasingly invested in the protection of civil rights. In navigating through the work, the reader encounters a literal prison house of language. Pull quotes pop up in individual cells on the screen and as the reader selects them, other windows open which either include excerpts from contextualizing essays and theoretical works, or launch audio recordings of the inmates recounting their experience of life inside the prison. Hearing the women speak in their own voices has the affect of humanizing the material, and grounding it. The prison industrial complex is no abstraction here, but the force that shapes and controls the existence of those living inside it. Eric Loyer’s innovative design visually communicates the senses of claustrophobia and despair that define the inmates’ lives.

88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) by David Clark is one of the most impressive examples of a multimedia essay I have seen to date. The work is composed of 88 animations circling around themes related to the life and work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom the work posits as a key figure in the intellectual history of the 20th Century, and whose work is used here as a lens to filter an understanding of modern life. This is not however a dry academic exercise or a glorified powerpoint lecture, but a rather mind-bending journey, driven by a narrator who seems at some points a documentary biographer and at others a particularly erudite intellectual conspiracy theorist. The work is multilinear, allowing the reader to “connect the dots” and move through the different vignettes by following linguistic and thematic connections that are laid out for us in the form of star maps. The connections are almost always interesting, if sometimes arbitrary. I had no idea for instance that Adolph Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein attended the same primary school; nor that Wittgenstein’s brother, after losing his right arm, commissioned compositions for one-handed piano players, which he played for the rest of his life; nor did I know that Wittgenstein attended lectures by Alan Turing at Cambridge. 88 Constellations spins webs of connections in attempts to bring some clarity, or perhaps to simply continue to further muddle, the thoughts and works of figures ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Sigmund Freud to Stanley Kubrick. Throughout, in its design and its content, the work uses Wittgenstein’s ideas about the limits of language and the understanding of intellectual discourse as a series of language games as a structuring concept. The visual aesthetic of 88 Constellations is also remarkable. The design style is sparse and subdued, using a palette mainly composed of black, white, and grays, but the designer shows a great sense and appreciation of the power of iconography to render complex concepts comprehensible. Stock footage and clips from a number of different films is sampled very effectively. A number of the vignettes are also interactive and variable: as the reader types certain keys, different visual elements are launched or modified in response. 88 Constellations is a rare work in which the narration, images, animations, icons, and user interaction all seem to bear equal weight and significance: one layer can’t simply be said to be illustrative of another. It is a truly multimedia work in which all of the elements are in conversation with each other, and offers a glimpse of some the directions that the genre of the essay will explore as it evolves further in the new media environment.

The last two “Platform 2″ columns I have written for the Norwegian literary quarterly Vagant (the one currently on newstands and the other in press) have been focused on works in the ELC2. In celebration of the release of the collection, I’ll post the English versions of both columns here.