Bio
Scott Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Director of the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence running from 2023 to 2033. His research and creative practice focus on electronic literature, digital narrative, combinatory poetics, algorithmic storytelling, networked writing, and the cultural implications of computational media. Rettberg works between criticism and making: his scholarship studies the forms, histories, communities, and infrastructures of digital writing, while his creative projects explore how databases, procedures, constraints, and interfaces can become literary methods.
He is the author of Electronic Literature, a broad critical introduction to the field, and has written extensively on electronic literature, digital art, collaborative authorship, and emergent forms of narrative. He is also the author or coauthor of electronic literature and media works including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, Implementation, Frequency, The Catastrophe Trilogy, Three Rails Live, Toxi*City, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, Penelope, and Birds of Norway. These projects range from early hypertext fiction and sticker-based distributed narrative to combinatory poetry, generative fiction, database cinema, virtual reality documentary, and AI-assisted interactive environments. Many of them have been produced in collaboration with writers, filmmakers, artists, programmers, musicians, and researchers.
Rettberg cofounded the Electronic Literature Organization and has remained active in the international development of the field through publishing, curating, teaching, conference organization, and research infrastructure. He led the HERA-funded ELMCIP project, directs the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, and leads the Center for Digital Narrative's Extending Digital Narrative node. Across his academic and creative work, Rettberg is interested in how literary practice changes when writing becomes computational, distributed, procedural, collaborative, and entangled with systems of data, visualization, sound, image, and interaction.
His teaching and mentorship connect literary study with practical experimentation in code, design, archives, and networked publication. At Bergen he has helped build an environment where artists, humanists, technologists, and students can think together about how stories operate inside contemporary media systems. His projects often begin with simple constraints, procedural rules, or shared materials, then follow those structures toward unexpected forms of reading and performance. In collaborative works with Roderick Coover, Nick Montfort, Jill Walker Rettberg, and others, Rettberg has explored how digital literature can move across screen, gallery, cinema, installation, and public space. His work has circulated through electronic literature festivals, media art exhibitions, academic venues, and online collections, and it continues to ask how literary culture can remain inventive, critical, and humane in technological conditions that are always changing. That question also shapes his recent interest in AI-assisted creative practice, where he treats language models and code assistants as materials for experiment, critique, and new forms of authorship rather than as replacements for literary judgment.