you procreate outsit nick you raffle
you boycott you irrigate
explore I befound you layer control
accelerate chuck
mindmeld
you photocopy
you green thought
you green shade you cram
you cram
you you intern
you cigar
you twitch
you liquidate
twitch
strangling the wind
I reproduce
I declaim you scribble
rephrase
disdain
mary had to make a phone call
but she left the dogs
I can show a little behind the scenes
of what we did last night
what did I just plug into
(moaning)
head
set?
or
computers only go down
so
as you might expect the first step
can you see it
you’ve seen it three layers
video
we turned off the lights
I calibrate
one side of my face
the same intrigue
take the resolution
down
sort of a simmmmmmum
resolution
a readin looks for a text file
a particular name
listening to the voice
running
sound environment
machine
middle layer
anna simple
simple as you might
expect
external
revision process
launch, choose, layer
I guess
that’s not right
you know why
well
let’s turn
this off
I can point this
I can run
my hand in front of this
people start sort of
playing pushing
editing the system
quick behind
the scenes
written in feed
nobody gets anything but mead
easier to add in other machines
my site works that way
holds and grabs that
composing poems
technique and algorithms
it posterizes
it is
not really
doing color
light and dark
particularly light
section shows
the lightest text
read through
we worked it down
to three
the darkest could be nothing
a blind screen
a chair
a microphone
a camera
hey try this
the time it
actually takes
it may take you
a while
death is nothing
compared to this
the distribution
xeroxing
this isn’t something
you compose
you can’t distribute this
how many people
would argue
that people read
the reading of
the reading
logos in space
I had to scrape the
screen
the christmas
of the original
the binary
resistant
the margins
generating
our interests
the neologisms happen
in the middle
we see the torment
a side (issue)
you create a language
dormant explore huge ambient effective
focusing
the disembodied
voices reading
the arm twists
the knees angled
processing
the smell of dessert
apple pastry
naturally speaking
innovation
most people never make
a shale of heroes
never worn
shit ASCII statue is a good science
fiction
the number of folks is dwindling
I and I
crawled up to you
is there a video game
controller in the house
bring me tron
ream
appropriations weren’t just
boring
awful lot
the shading inbetween
Xrated
500pagewordpoem
give me you
our EL
blue one
let me
plug you in
acceleration, tron is in tron
machine
not loading
not loading
sorry there’s a big X
plug in lady
em er el slash dee how dot com blue
thing
it takes
a couple
seconds fuck
writing
I can’t really see
the screen
there’s something enfolding
an installation a purple thing
this
is good
two players playing
a new text book
recombining
into vogue
we have
new text
get the entry high
enough
playing reading piece of
literature
footlong physics letters
hanging
about thirty recombined
all about issues of
transparency surveillance
how we see squishing bladdery
morning
gravity processing components
softee prose nice stuff contributions
fruits of people
green man physical communication
devices netblessing
googling the eyes
click click prototyping
much nicer qualm model
I fucked this multiplayer shrapnel
you’ve made it
subversion
get new text
measley
how do you shower gurglings
onto shadowversions
that don’t exist
gaussian blurge
this is the beginning of the beginning
for me
bizarre lighting underground lockbox
bending the apples
is nearly impossible
they snapped
laborious placing
not the most fun
abstract sound offensive
large structure with every single node
you get the same effect
from walking around it
the user uses program programmatically
a little bit more every time a little bit more
give me just a little more
time
there is a kind of twitching
around the mouse
skipping frames
the soldiers try desperately
single words flip by
you can read the words
Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One
The Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, which I edited along with Nick Montfort, Katherine Hayles, and Stephanie Strickland, has been published. Nick sent along an instant message with visual verification. The Collection, which includes 60 works of electronic literature published under a Creative Commons license, will shortly be available for free from the Electronic Literature Organization via download or physical CD-ROM.
Via GTxA, calls for papers and works for two upcoming electronic literature centered conferences in Europe: E-Poetry 2007 will be held from May 20-23 in Paris at the Université Paris VIII. Submissions of both papers and epoetry are being accepted. Full papers must be submitted by December 10, 2006. Re-Mediating Literature will be held July 4-6, 2007 at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Keynote speakers for that conference include Katherine Hayles, Marie-Laure Ryan, Samuel Weber, and Jan Baetens. 250 word abstracts for that conference are due November 6, 2006.
LEA just released an extensive new issue on Digital Poetry. While I’ve just taken a quick look, it appears to be a terrific collection of essays on contemporary digital poetry, in addition to featuring several compelling works in the gallery. The issue edited by Tim Peterson includes essays by Loss Pequeño Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg, and Matthias Hilner, in addition to works in the gallery by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska and Daniel Howe, mEIKAL aND and CamillE BacoS, and Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet. The correlation between the essayists, authors and works reviewed in this issue of LEA and the contributors to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One suggests to me that the two free publications will make a great pair for teaching. All of the essays in this edition of LEA are available both in HTML and downloadable PDFs.
I was recently interviewed by Simon Mills for framed, his retrospective project of interviews contextualizing digital art and writing between 1998-2004. The interview took shape in the form of several email exchanges over a period of few months. I appreciate the opportunity that Simon gave me to contextualize my past and current projects, in addition to my thoughts on the current state of the field of electronic literature more generally.
I guest-edited a just-released issue of the Iowa Review Web focused on the ways that different forms of new media writing reconfigure concepts of place and space. Another way of looking at the issue, however, is as a Grand Text Auto takeover of Iowa’s finest web journal. The issue features Jeremy Douglass’ interview with Nick Montfort on his interactive fiction Book and Volume and Brenda Bakker Harger’s interview with Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern on their interactive drama Façade. I also interview Shelley Jackson on the various manifestations of the human body in her corpus of work, and interview Jane McGonigal on alternate reality gaming. A short introduction contextualizes the various approaches that authors of electronic literature have used to conceptualize space and place. I hope that you’ll visit, read, and enjoy. Thanks to the authors and contributors and to Iowa Review Web Associate Editor Benjamin Basan for helping to put the issue together.
The frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology which published new media writing, art, interviews and essays from 1995-2004, has stopped actively publishing new work, but it’s going out with a bang rather than a whimper. Simon Mills is editing a project, framed including retrospective interviews with many of the writers and artists whose works were published in frAme. The first installment of framed includes provacative interviews with Mark Amerika, Matthew Fuller, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim. More interviews are coming soon.
I’ve posted a set of photos from the E-Fest. Highlights of the fest included some beautiful interfaces by current Brown e-writing fellow Daniel Howe and next year’s fellow Aya Karapinska, new work by Stuart Moulthrop, an excellent ten minute presentation on Perec and Beckett by Gale Nelson, a short paper on Memory and Real Time by Wendy Chun, Jim Carpenter’s three-laptop generated poetry reading (video clip), and Brian Kim-Stefans’ absurdist sense of humor.
Last week I was in Norway, where I had the pleasure of speaking at the University of Bergen to Jill Walker and Elin Sjursen‘s students in the Web Design and Aesthetics course. Talan Memmott was also there to give a talk. Talan showed some interesting new e-lit work I hadn’t seen before, including some work that is not yet on the web. Memmott showed work from two different streams of his creative practice, “network phenomonology” works such as his well-known Lexia to Perplexia, and a different “history of art” stream that includes new media interpretations of the lives and works of artists such as René Magritte. Talan’s been working in particular lately in a combinatory vein, and many of his works include both combinatory text and music. Of the newer work he showed, my favorite was “The Hugo Ball,” a recombination of a nonsense poem of 78 unique words by the Dadaist poet. As you mouse over the face of the Hugo Ball, it recombines and speaks the 78 words to you as they flash on the screen and the face “speaks” the words in layers of visemes. It’s a fun, and vaguely creepy, piece. While he was there, Talan was also interviewed for Bergen Student Television. The interview is available online for your viewing pleasure.
Also new from Norway, by way of New York City, is Hanna-Lovise Skartveit’s Take the F-Train, a fun and innovative online documentary about the F-Train in NYC, and by extension, about the population of the great melting pot itself. The piece includes a mixture of drawn characters, video of the train’s interior, and interviews with riders of the F-Train, many of whom are immigrants living in New York. The documentary captures the cosmopolitan nature of America’s largest city. The project is part of a larger Digital Storytelling project funded by Norwegian Radio/TV NRK.
I’m looking forward to this week’s Brown E-Fest 2006, where I’ll be participating on a panel on “The Game of Fiction” along with Nick Montfort, George Landow, Lutz Hammel, and Stuart Moulthrop. I’ll also be reading a bit from Implementation. The official announcement:
On March 22 and 23, the Brown University Literary Arts Program will present E-Fest 2006, a celebration of new digital literary art. There will be showbizz-style performances of new work each night, starting promptly at 8 p.m., in the McCormack Family Theater at 70 Brown St. (entrance off Fones Alley, across from the Literary Arts building), and symposia all day Thursday in the McKinney Conference Room of the Watson Institute for International Studies, 111 Thayer St. Among the literary hypermedia artists performing are Stuart Moulthrop, Judd Morrissey, Aya Karpinska, Rob Kendall, Scott Rettberg, Nick Montfort, Jim Carpenter, Braxton Soderman, and others. Most of the performers are also participating in the Thursday panels, along with Wendy Chun, George Landow, Lutz Hamel, Gale Nelson, Edrex Fontanilla, and Mike Magee. Symposia topics: 10 a.m. Memory and Real Time. 2 p.m. Noulipo: Recombinant Poetics. 3:45 p.m.: The Game of Fiction. Visit the website. All events are free and open to the public.
These are my notes for the talk I gave yesterday at MITH on genre in electronic literature in the context of the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection that I’m editing along with Nick Montfort, Kate Hayles, and Stephanie Strickland. Even though much of the talk was planned the night before and on the train out, it turned out pretty well. There were about a dozen intelligent folks in the room, and I had the chance to tour MITH, which will soon be the new home of the ELO. I’m very pleased that the ELO will be housed in such a great environment. I’ll be cleaning the talk up and delivering a new version of it in a couple of weeks at Brown as part of the upcoming 2006 e-fest.
Wherefore Genre?
THE PURPOSES OF THE COLLECTION
* “Centering moments” — 2001 E-LIt Awards, 2002 State of Arts, 2006 Collection
* Dissemination function
–Importance and meaning of creative commons
–Importance of viewing/reading works as a collection for scholarly discourse.
* Importance for writers of “place of honor” in the context of a creative culture that exists outside of any sort of traditional market economy, or real-world ftf social structures.
* Archival function
* In some cases (not flash), makes files accessible/searchable for a different kind of scholarly access (forensic) than simple web viewing
Comparison to previous “centering moments” — almost as many submissions, more of them “legitimate.” Less hypertext, more forms. Focus in our selections on representing a broad overview of different types of types. Process: combination of open submission and direct invitation. Accepted only works that would function in a standalone. Criteria for selection was unanimous agreement among the four editors. Resulting collection will include about 60 works of e-lit, out this fall.
Continue reading »
This fall the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, soon to be the new home of the Electronic Literature Organization, has lined up a great series of lectures focused on electronic literature and digital archives. I’ll be giving a talk, “Wherefore Genre? Categorizing Contemporary New Media Writing” on March 7th, and there are many other talks I wish I could attend, including talks by Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, Shelley Jackson, Alan Liu and Joseph Tabbi, and Scott McCloud.
I really enjoyed the ELINOR reading Friday night at the Copenhagen LiteraturHaus. I get so used to seeing the same crowd of folks presenting work in electronic literature, that it’s always a wonderful and pleasant shock to see people from other parts of the world than the one I’m accustomed to exploring ways of working with literary texts in digital environments in their own ways, in their own language. Performing artists included poet Christian Yde Frostholm from Denmark, Johannes Helden from Sweden, Marko Niemi from Finland & Noah Wardrip-Fruin from Norther California and elsewhere. Helden read his poem to an accompanying digital animation and soundtrack. Frosthelm’s work was a fascinating version of what from the perspective of a non-Swedish-speaker seemed to be a Beckettian story adapted in Flash making use of patterns and repetitions, words clumping and clustering and rearranging themselves on the screen. Of the Scandanavian authors I was most impressed with Marko Niemi‘s work, a variety of simple but distinctive and thoughtfully language experiments in flash and html. Niemi writes both in Finnish and English, and presented English language work at the reading. Jill Walker was the emcee, and the host of the Litteraturhaus kept the bar open late, as the DAC attendees clustered round tables with old friends and new. Noah’s reading of Talking Cure and video demo of Screen were also highlights of the evening. Torill posted a great photo of Noah’s reading from the portable Talking Cure intallation on Flirckr. Jill also posted several photos of the reading.
I was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic, Julia Keller, for an article published in the Trib this Sunday, “Plugged-in Proust: Has e-lit come of age?” (archive). William J. Mitchell, head of the Media Arts and Sciences program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also interviewed for the piece, which examines the relationship between control and reading technologies.
After a hiatus for redesign, the electronic book review is back online. A review/essay I wrote in response to Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, titled “First Person, Games, and the Place of Electronic Literature” is among the crop of new offerings. Brian Kim Stefan’s Priveleging Language: The Text in Electronic Writing, which makes a compelling argument for a return in digital poetry to a focus on language as having “some notion of address,” as attempting to communicate intentioned meaning rather than serving as just another form of material. In “Bass Resonace,” John Cayley provides an interesting reading of the graphic and film title work of Saul Bass, digging into a genre that offers some lessons for creators of kintetic poetry.
Matt Kirschenbaum just sent out an exciting announcement about a new journal that will serve as a forum for scholarly and creative work in electronic media. Digital Humanities Quarterly will publish scholarly articles, editorials, experiments in interactive media, and reviews of books, web sites, new media art, and digital humanities systems. Importantly, this will be a free, open-access journal, and both critical and creative work will go through a peer review process.
Call for Submissions
Digital Humanities Quarterly
Submissions are invited for Digital Humanities Quarterly, a new open-access peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Submissions may be mailed to submissions@digitalhumanities.org. A web submission form will also be available soon.
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Laurence Sterne (1713-68) wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy in Shandy Hall, Coxwold, York, in the 18th Century. The innovative nonlinear novel is often cited by contemporary new media writers as an influence on their creative practice. It was recently announced that Shandy Hall will now house Asterisk*, a center for the study and development of narrative. Rather than simply developing the site as a museum dedicated to Sterne’s life and works, the center will be dedicated to innovation in both old and particularly new work. Asterisk* will support residencies for artists, “we envisage that these residencies will take forward current practice in a variety of narrative engagements: with diverse media, non linearity, digression, interactivity and audience participation, particularly (though not exclusively) where these intersect with technology.” The center will also commission new works, host exhibitions and performances, lectures and events, and a web forum. Last year hypertext author Deena Larsen completed a short hypertext, Shandean Ambles, during a three-day residency at the site. Asterisk* is now accepting applications for two three-week residencies this fall, one intended for a new media artist and the second for a writer with minimal technical background interested in integrating new media into his or her practice. Asterisk* also intends to gather an extensive library of innovative interactive literature at Shandy Hall.
Every night for 1001 nights, Barbara Campbell is performing a short text-based work via web video. Her project 1001 Nights Cast is structured around the frame of tale of Scheherazade and 1001 nights. Participants contribute stories through the following procedure: each morning Campbell wakes and scans the headlines for a short phrase to use as a prompt. She then creates a watercolor image of the text of the prompt, which she posts to the site. Reader participants then respond to the prompt, writing story 1001 words or less in length. Each night Campbell reviews the day’s submissions and adapts one for performance, or, if she’s received no suitable submissions, generates a text by other means, such as a Google search. The stories are preserved in on the site as a text archive, though the video performance occurs only live, at a scheduled time published on the site. As of August 15th, fifty-seven nights into the project, it seems to be going well. Thirty-four different authors have contributed stories. The stories don’t seem to be interwoven into each other outside of the frame tale, so each story stands on it own. Although the editing process is expedited, the 1001 word length, longer than a short short but shorter than a typical short story, is conducive to concise stories with a well-honed sense of economy.
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Implementation Reading at the Steelyard
On Sunday, Nick and I read Implementation as part of the Provflux lectures at the Steelyard. We read from photos which were projected on the side of a truck. About 20 people were in the audience, sitting on stools and benches or lying on blankets spread out on the dirt floor. Hanna Wallach took these pictures.
The Electronic Literature Organization’s new site, designed and engineered by Nick Montfort, is now in place.
One new feature of the site is a showcase designed to feature exemplary electronic literature. The five most recent items are visible at the top of the main page, and everything featured to date is accessible via the “Showcased E-Lit” link just below the search field. The showcase is an excellent descriptive complement to the extant Electronic Literature Directory, a large index of information about e-lit. An RSS feed of the showcase is available so that readers can automatically keep bookmarks to the current entry or syndicate the showcase on their own pages.
News entries and other pages on the site are now easily searchable. The news (including a five-year archive) is also accessible by category and by date. We have tried to redirect as many previous URLs as possible to current resources, to avoid leaving anyone with page not found errors. The new site is also designed to be easier to maintain and manage into the future, allowing the ELO to communicate with members and the reading public more effectively.
The new, more frequently updated and more useful, website is the first of several new initiatives planned by the organization. Stay tuned to the site for the launch of other new programs in coming months. The ELO is a 501(c)3 nonprofit literary organization founded in 1999 that has a mission to promote and facilitate the writing, reading, and distribution of electronic literature.
Props to Nick, a Vice-President of the board of the ELO, and his helpers for a job well done.
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