Linking Literature & Games
“Linking Literature & Games: Exploring Hypertext, Digital Fiction, & the Language of Gaming” is an exhibit curated by Mariah Gwin, an Undergraduate Researcher in the Electronic Literature Lab. Below is her curatorial statement and the list of items included in the exhibit. The URL to the archival site is http://dtc-wsuv.org/mgwin17/ensslin-exhibit. “Linking Literature and Games: Exploring Hypertext, Digital Fiction, and the Language of Gaming” presents literary games, hypertext, and digital fiction focusing on the scholarship of Astrid Ensslin, a professor from the University of Alberta specializing in Electronic Literature and Games. This exhibit features literary works, games, and hardware that date back to the mid-1980s and into the late 2000s. With…
Resetting the Table
This essay is a reprint of the Introduction to the forthcoming multimedia book, The Progressive Dinner Party Restored. The author Kathleen Zoller is an Undergraduate Researcher in ELL who received a WSU Undergraduate Summer Mini-Grant to restore “The Progressive Dinner Party,” a special collection created by Jennifer Ley, Marjorie Luesebrink, and Carolyn Guertin and published in 1999 by Riding the Meridian. In the essay Zoller explains the project and the method by which she restored the collection. The book will be released on September 1, 2019. “The Progressive Dinner Party Restored” by Kathleen Zoller The Progressive Dinner Party is a collection of 39 works selected from Carolyn Guertin’s Assemblage, a showcase of new…
Curatorial Statement for “Tear Down the Wall” Exhibition at ACM Hypertext ’19
Below is my curatorial statement for the exhibition I am mounting at the ACM Hypertext ’19 conference at Hof University 17-20 September 2019. The archival website for the exhibition can be found here. Tear Down the Wall: Hypertext and Participatory Narratives, held in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext 2019 at Hof, Germany, borrows the theme from the conference––tear down the wall––that celebrates the 30thanniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The conference has also been envisioned by Conference Chair Claus Atzenbeck to “reunify different hypertext research directions and communities” (“About”). Born digital literature––what has been come to be called electronic literature, or e-lit––is one of these directions and communities…
2019-2020 Live Stream Traversal Schedule
We are pleased to announce the 2019-2020 Live Stream Traversal Schedule. Included in this schedule is a special interview with Astrid Ensslin, one of the top scholars of hypertext and philosopher-hypertext artist David Kolb. You do not want to miss these events! Saturday, August 24, 2019 A Conversation with David Kolb, Astrid Ensslin, and Dene Grigar about Hypertext Friday, October 18, 2019 A Traversal of Anna Nacher performing Eric Steinhart’s Fragments of a Dionysian Body Friday, November 8, 2019 A Traversal of Megan Heyward performing her work, Of Day Of Night Friday, February 7, 2020 A Traversal of Eduardo Kac, performing his work, “Storms” and “Accident” Friday, March 13, 2020…
E-Lit Scholar Astrid Ensslin Visits ELL
We are very excited about the arrival of e-lit scholar Astrid Ensslin to ELL, who will be doing research on the Eastgate Quarterly Reviews of Hypertext from August 14-28, 2019. The lab holds copies of all eight documented copies published by the company. Professor Ensslin is Professor in Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada) and the author of numerous books: Approaches to Videogame Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2019), Small Screen Fictions (Paradoxa, 2018), Literary Gaming (MIT Press, 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013), The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and…
Paper Given at IAUPE 2019
Paper given by Dene Grigar at the 2019 International Association of University Professors of English Conference, Poznan, Poland. Kinetic Poetry: Poetry animated through the affordances of the computer environment, specifically programming languages like Apple BASIC, Visual Basic, and Javascript and software programs like Flash, Shockwave, After Effects, and others. Kinepoeia: “Movement suggested by the textual representation of the word––is drawn from the term, onomatopoeia, the rhetorical strategy that associates sound with textual representation (e.g. bam/bam) but is unlike it is indigenous to the digital medium” (Grigar). See her entry at the Electronic Literature Directory: http://directory.eliterature.org/glossary/4967. Access to Kinetic Poetry Referenced in This Presentation Rob Kendall, “Faith,” https://elo-repository.org/cauldronandnet/volume4/confluence/kendall/title_page.htm. Thom Swiss,…
Afterflash
Proposal for the 2019 National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources, Implementation Grant Dene Grigar, Principal Investigator; Professor, WSUV Holly Slocum, Project Manager; WSUV Nicholas Schiller, Consultant; Librarian III, WSU Libraries, WSUV Dragan Espenschied, Consultant; Preservation Director, Rhizome Greg Philbrook, Technical Support; Technical and Instructional Support II, WSUV List of works we propose to preserve: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1REFxZ71i851zX8m3Yso5n1jc1bpPQXZSDK9Dy9q9SD8/edit?usp=sharing Video clips of the process and animated gifs of a few examples of Flash works: https://vimeo.com/channels/1476957 Abstract By the end of 2020 Adobe will discontinue its support for Flash. Already it has stopped supporting Shockwave. This means that all born digital literary works that used these software programs to create participatory, interactive,…
The Saga of Cleaning NES Consoles
This guest post is by Greg Philbrook, the Instructional and Technical Specialist for the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. He also serves as the tech guru for the Electronic Literature Lab and oversees our Games Library. –Dene Grigar ——————————————————————- Summer is a great time for taking inventory, and the ELL game library is no exception! We recently received some NES consoles as donations. Upon inspection, however, all three were giving a dreaded red blinking light, typically indicating that their lockout chips had failed. The lockout chips (meant to stop reproduction games from playing) are notorious for going bad over time. They send a signal…
Finishing Up the Grant to Preserve Flash and Shockwave E-Lit Works
Since late April I have been working on a grant submission that would provide funding for the ELL Team to use Rhizome.org’s Webrecorder to preserve electronic literature works produced with Flash and Shockwave from 1996-2016 that are archived in the 12 journals, anthologies, and showcases held in the ELO Repository. WSUV gave me seed funding so that during the month of May, the ELL Team could inventory the 12 publications to determine an exact list of works produced with Flash and Shockwave, figure out the level of complexity each entails, and conduct timed runs of the process. We identified 447 works in need of preserving, else they will all be inaccessible…
ELL Welcomes Two ELO Fellows
The Electronic Literature Lab welcomes two Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Fellows in 2019-2020. They are Dr. Amy Spencer, a post-doctoral research assistant at Bath Spa University in the UK, and Julia Polyck-O’Neill, a Canadian artist, curator, critic, and writer completing her doctorate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program. Both researchers will work under the mentorship of Dr. Dene Grigar to document works of electronic literature featured in the lab’s Traversal events in the organization’s scholarly ELD and in Wikipedia. Both are funded by Grigar in support of the lab. ELO Fellows is a new initiative by the Electronic Literature Organization aimed at supporting early career scholars interested in developing a…
