Scott Rettberg
Selected individual and collaborative works in digital literature, generative writing, film, and mixed-media storytelling.
A 3D-modeled birdwatching simulator for listening to common birds of Norway while navigating a landscape, hovering over passing birds to identify species, and learning from data drawn from museum collections, live weather, Xeno-canto, Wikipedia, and related sources.
An AI-produced film based on the style of the preamble to Finnegans Wake, using generative cinema to comment on contemporary American politics.
A darkly comic generative AI digital narrative that meditates on the popular fascination with disaster, mortality, teleology, and AI through an apocalyptic cataclysm that manifests as a global meteor shower impacting cities across the planet simultaneously.
A set of experiments using GPT-3.5 to code short kinetic poems, primarily in p5.js, and small digital artworks. Produced across roughly three months from November 2022 to January 2023, the series explores how AI-assisted coding could open electronic literature to new approaches and to artists trained more in writing and aesthetics than in programming.
A combinatory sonnet generator film based on the Odyssey, linking longing, migration, and extinction through constantly recombined poetry, image, and sound.
A short film shot on the Isle of Inishbofin and in the Galway area, adapted from a feature-length combinatory script and shaped by myth, return, and transformation.
A contribution to Mark Marino and Rob Wittig's netprov project Monstrous Weather, written when the idea of Donald Trump becoming president still seemed comically outlandish. A thread about weather and campfire tales somehow brings Thor and Trump into the same mythic Minnesota storm.
An immersive narrative work on torture, memory, and moral injury, developed from interviews with American soldiers who participated in or witnessed abusive violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A feature-length database-driven climate change film that layers toxic infrastructure, Hurricane Sandy, and speculative narrative into a work that reassembles itself in recurring waves.
A generative film that combines micronarratives, film fragments, and “perverbs” through algorithmic variations that link stories of environmental devastation with one of personal dissolution.
Three short films, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, and Norwegian Tsunami, exploring myth, memory, and catastrophe.
A trigram-based story generator set in Naples, originally made for the Officina di Letteratura Elettronica exhibition at the Palazzo delle Arti Napoli in January 2011 and redeveloped from Processing into JavaScript for the web in 2026.
A somewhat elaborate site-specific joke and performance made for Cabaret Voltage at Karlskrona konsthall in June 2011. A tribute to Talan Memmott, the generator produces a comic diatribe of insults about Karlskrona, Sweden, framed by Lars Hamson, professor of Nordic Relations from the Los Wikiless Timespedia.
A small generator made for Robert Coover's 80th birthday celebration at the ELO 2010 Conference. It splices lines from reviews of Coover's books and interviews into semi-absurd appreciations of the postmodernist maestro, and accompanied a side-roast skit performed with Rob Wittig.
A poetry generator built from 2,000 lines written using only the 200 most frequently used words in English, foregrounding constraint, recombination, and serial variation.
A remix of Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge generator, repositioned in an imaginary Tokyo and later recognized as part of a broader culture of generative literary remix.
A foundational anthology that helped establish a stable, curated, and teachable publishing model for electronic literature across web and library contexts.
A sticker novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place that invited participant readers to place and photograph parts of the story in public spaces around the world.
A multivocal email novel written in reply to Rob Wittig's Blue Company originally distributed in real time, capturing the unsettled atmosphere of the period immediately after 9/11.
A metafictional hypertext about travel, authorship, wherein links trigger timed paratexts around the central story. The author is dead, and he isn't happy about it.
A collaborative web-based hyperfiction about an unruly book tour, widely regarded as a landmark work that brought comic excess and encyclopedic range into electronic literature.
Back when I was a kid, I had ambitions of becoming a regular old fiction writer, and I went to fiction writing school and got an MA at Illinois State University. These are the stories I wrote there. While most read immature and unpolished to me now, I've still got a certain fondness for two or three of them.