I’m also going to contribute, occasionally, to a brand spanking new group blog at Netpoetic.com. The new blog is focused specifically on electronic literature and digital poetics. The ringleader of the effort is digital poet Jason Nelson, who has pulled together a diverse group of poets, writers, and scholars, including Alan Bigelow, Brian Stefans, Chris Funkhouser, Davin Heckman, Hazel Smith, Jaka Železnikar, Jason Nelson, John Cayley, Juan Gutierrez, Kenneth Sherwood, Laura Borras, Lori Emerson, Mark Amerika, Mez Breeze, Michael J Maguire, Rui Torres, Sandy Baldwin, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland, and Talan Memmott, to start with. Each contributor agrees to post at least five times a year, which seems like a manageable commitment. I think it will be a great way to stay in touch with the many ongoing activities of the international electronic literature community.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Thursday, May 29-Sunday, June 1, 2008
Vancouver, Washington
Sponsored by Washington State University Vancouver & the Electronic Literature Organization
Dene Grigar & John Barber, Co-Chairs

Producing a work of electronic literature entails not only practice in the literary arts but sometimes also the visual, sonic, and the performative arts; knowledge of computing devices and software programs; and experience in collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and hybridity. In short, electronic literature requires its artists to see beyond traditional approaches and sensibilities into what best can be described as visionary landscapes where, as Mark Amerika puts it, artists “celebrate an interdisciplinary practice from a literary and writerly perspective that allows for other kinds of practice-based art-research and knowledge sharing.”

To forward the thinking about new approaches and sensibilities in the media arts, The Electronic Literature Organization and Washington State University Vancouver’s Digital Technology and Culture program are inviting submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference to be held from May 29 to June 1, 2008 in Vancouver, Washington.

“Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference” is interested in papers that explore forms of digital media that utilize images, sound, movement, and user interaction as well as––or in lieu of––words and that explore how we read, curate, and critique such works. Topics may include:

• New, non-screen, environments for presenting multimedia writing and/or electronic literature
• Research labs and new media projects
• Strategies for reading electronic literary works
• Curating digital art
• Innovative approaches to critiquing electronic literature
• Emerging technologies for the production of multimedia writing and/or electronic literature
• Building audience for new media literary works and writing
• Digital, literary performances
• Publishing for print or electronic media connecting literature and the arts through common archiving and metatag strategies
• Artistic methods of composition used in intermedia storytelling (improvisation, collaboration, sample and remix, postproduction art, codework, hactivism, etc.)

In conjunction with the three-day conference, there will be a juried Media Arts Show. Along with prizes for the most notable work, selected artists will be awarded bursaries to attend the conference featured at the show. Submission guidelines will be posted beginning August 15, 2007 on the conference website.

The keynote speaker is internationally renowned new media artist and writer, Mark Amerika, named a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator.” His artwork has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the ICA in London, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum and has been the topic of four retrospectives. Amerika is also the author of many books, including his recently published collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press), founder of the Alt-X Network, and publisher of the electronic book review. He currently holds the position of Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Deadline for Submissions for Presentations: November, 30, 2007
Notification of Acceptance: December 30, 2007

Vancouver, Washington, located in the Pacific Northwest just across the Columbia River from Portland, OR, is about a six hour drive south of Vancouver, Canada and three hours south of Seattle, Washington. The conference day events will take place at Washington State University Vancouver, a Tier One research Institution built in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains with views of Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helens. The official conference hotel is the Hilton Vancouver located in downtown Vancouver, Washington with easy access to restaurants, bars, and evening conference events. Special rates have been negotiated for conference attendees. A conference shuttle will take attendees to and from the campus daily. The recommended airport is PDX at Portland, which is about a seven minute drive to downtown Vancouver, WA.

The cost of the conference is $150; graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100. Conference registration covers access to all events, the reception, some meals, and shuttle transportation.

For more information, contact Dene Grigar at Grigar@vancouver.wsu.edu.

A Brazilian epoet setting fire to her poems onstage, a la Jimi Hendrix.

Jeorg Piringer Performing at Divan Du Monde on the first night of the E-Poetry 2007 Festival in Paris.

Loss Glazier‘s poem, performed with dancers.

Chris Funkhouser reading from under a sheet, a work with featured dariens, stinky fruit.

Jim Rosenberg reading “Braided Vortex” during the second night of the Festival.

Aya Karpinska‘s reading, one of the best performances at EPoetry.

Stephanie Strickland & Cynthia Lawson Jarmillo demonstrating “Slipping Glimpse.”

The Grand Text Auto Paris interview of John Cayley and Talan Memmott.

I broke away from the conference for a few hours to catch the Samuel Beckett exhibition at the Pompidou. Here’s a bit of “Not I.”

John Cayley’s Imposition was a work that enlisted the audience to download and play one of about 20 files, creating a whispering cacophony in the auditorium.

Maria Mencia demonstrating her cool interactive collage program “Cityscapes.”

Annie Abrahams’ “peurs fears” — a bilingual poem for 12 voices based on internet postings about fear.

Anick Bergeron performing her French translation/remediation of Nick Montfort’s “Ream.”

Talan Memmott‘s “Twittering,” an installation/experimental novel/performance.

Phillippe Bootz‘s “See Venice and Die” was the closing piece of the E-poetry 2007 festival.

A view of Paris from the Pompidou escalator. Au revoir!

• Works that explore and use the possibilities of the computer as a space for creation.
• Literary quality, seen as the renovation of poetic and narrative techniques through new means of creation.
• Quality and accessibility of the interface design.
• In the case of digital poetry, texts submitted may comprise a single piece of work or a compilation of poetry.
• The jury will also take into account works that experiment with the Internet as a medium for literary creation.
• Works entered for these prizes must be unpublished and written in one of the following languages: English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish or Catalan.

The submission deadline is September 14, 2007

In the end, Picot finds the ELC “an essential collection,” and encourages “Anyone interested in the field of elctronic literature to get it on DVD,” though along the way he finds a few nits to pick. The collection is actually published on the web and CD-ROM (old-school) and along with Picot I encourage you to get your copy of the free, Creative Commons-licensed collection of electronic literature, and then make copies of it for your friends.

I’d like to just briefly address a few of the points Picot makes, in order to clarify my perspective as one of the editors. I hope that Nick, Stephanie, and Kate will also jump in with comments if they’d like. I’ll restrict my comments to Picot’s critique of the curatorial/editorial aspects of the project. Picot also reviews four works in the collection, two (“The Jew’s Daughter” by Judd Morrissey and “Windsound” by John Cayley) positively, and two (“MyBALL” by Shawn Rider and “Carrier” by Melanie Rackham) negatively. There are sixty works in the collection, and I think that everyone is entitled to their opinion of each of those works. None of them were included casually. Each of the four editors thought that each work merited inclusion.

Picot picks at a few technical errors, including a coding error that causes two of the Flash works not to function in Internet Explorer, although they do work in other browsers. To the extent that we’re able, we will fix these errors on the web version, though the CD is as fixed in time as any print edition of anthology with a few typos would be.

Some aspects of Picot’s critique are however entirely subjective, and fall under the category of “One man’s bugs are another man’s features.” Picot, for instance, critiques the choice to have links function as simple links, rather than opening another child window. We decided to use simple links, making the ELC work just as most web documents work, rather than having targeted links that open up a profusion of windows or tabs when you click on them. This is debatable, but I think it’s standard web practice to have links that simply open into the same window. I think a lot of people find it irritating to have a webpage open new windows of its own volition, unless they ask it to do so. It’s fairly easy to bookmark a location or to open a link in a new tab if you, the user, choose to do so.

No work in the Electronic Literature Collection is more than two clicks away from the front page. Clicking on a tile of one of the screenshots of the works leads the reader to a page that includes the author’s description of the work, a short editorial description, technical instructions, and publishing history. Picot notes that some of the editorial descriptions might read as “jargon-savvy” in contrast with technical instructions such as “To hear the sound, turn on the computer’s speakers or plug in headphones. Click “Start” to begin,” that might seem like, “Well, duh,” I think there is value both to providing contextual descriptions for each work and to providing “idiot-proof” technical instructions. If you’re preparing to demonstrate a bunch of works of electronic literature to a large group in an auditorium, for instance, it’s not inconceivable that you might forget to plug in the audio cable unless you remember that the given work has sound. We tried to make it as easy as possible for people to operate these text machines.

Picot and others have found fault in the works that are not in the ELC. There are a few factors to take into account here. Although we asked some people to submit work, the vast majority of the works were submitted via an open call process. The authors were not paid anything, and were asked to agree to publish the work under a Creative Commons license. To put it simply: any author who did not submit their work, or did not agree to publish their work under that license was not published in the ELC. If I asked you to a dance, and you did not come, would you be mad at me for not dancing with you?

Some works were turned down by the editors. If there wasn’t unanimous agreement that a work should be included, it was rejected. As Picot notes, there will be future volumes of the ELC, which will present different perspectives on the field. Hopefully anyone who felt that their work was missing this time around will submit next year, or if they felt that a particular type of work was missing (for instance email novels), will encourage an author of that type of work to contribute.

I agree with Picot that the ELC is dauntingly huge, and I have no problem with that. Ulysses don’t scare me, neither. There is a lot of field here, and we’ve only begin to explore it. While no single individual is likely to read all of Alan Sondheim’s Internet Text, for instance, it comforts me to know that a lot of people are likely to read a little bit of it, and that we’ve increased the likelihood that someone will try.

Picot also desires “a general introduction to tell us a little bit about electronic literature.” While the purpose of the collection was more to present people with a wide variety of interesting electronic literature, not to define or limit what electronic literature could be, I’m pleased to note that the Electronic Literature Organization will soon publish a lengthy essay by N. Katherine Hayles, titled “Electronic Literature: What is it?” that presents a survey of the field, and that will hopefully provide just the sort of general introduction that Picot is looking for. Like Picot, all of us want to publicize and popularize this work any way we can. A CD-ROM copy of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, will also be included in N. Katherine Hayles’ next book, Electronic Literature: Teaching, Interpreting, Playing (Notre Dame University Press, forthcoming 2007).

Thanks again to Edward Picot for his work on this review, and for his work in creating a directory that is helping to establish a market for electronic literature for sale on The Hyperliterature Exchange.