ELL’s Undergraduates Win Award
So often scholars toil under the radar on their projects, unacknowledged for their contributions. But not yesterday: The five Undergraduate Researchers who have been steadily preserving Electronic Literature together since last fall––Holly Slocum, Mariah, Gwin, Kathleen Zoller, Andrew Nevue, and Moneca Roath––were awarded 1st Place at WSUV’s 2019 Research Showcase. They competed against 35 other undergraduates or teams of them from disciples like Biological Sciences, School of the Environment, Human Development, Fine Arts, and Psychology. Their project? “Reconstituting Electronic Literature.” Specifically they showed the work they had completed for two projects. The first was the one that saw them translate Deena Larsen’s “Kanji-Kus,” rendered obsolete on contemporary browsers, from Java…
ELL Undergraduate Researchers Reconstitute Deena Larsen’s Kanji-Kus
“All of my kanji-kus are dead, and you can see their husks if you follow these links.”–Deena Larsen So writes Deena Larsen on her website in 2014. But this is not true anymore: Undergraduate Researchers in my lab––Kathleen Zoller, Moneca Roath, Mariah Gwin, and Andrew Nevue––led by project manager Holly Slocum, have reconstituted this intellectually complex and visually stunning work so that it can be accessible to the public for years to come. Kanji-kus are, according to Larsen, “short poems based on the Japanese kanji or ideogram for the word itself” that figure largely in her web-based work from 1999-2002. Larsen’s hypertext novel, Disappearing Rain (2000), for example, is described as…
Mellon Report Submitted
From June 1-December 30, 2018 members of the ELL Team received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build the ELO Repository for the Electronic Literature Organization, which has been hosted by the CMDC Program at WSUV for the past two years. Though the official deadline has long past, the popularity of the work were doing meant ELO continued to receive collections to add to the site––a phenomenon we were hoping to occur. The number has expanded from the seven ELO originally owned or managed to now 15 collections. The newest one was received yesterday: the nearly complete works of Stephanie Strickland. Below is the final report Grigar, the…
Finding Stephanie Strickland’s True North
N. Katherine Hayles said that “Strickland’s poems meditate on the mystery of numbers and the embedded links that connect embodied experience with universal abstraction. Not to be missed. Paul Harris exclaimed that True North is “[a] quintessentially American piece. The poetry is arresting, to eye and mind. Here is a perception of the world filtered through the lenses of contemporary science.” Marjorie Perloff added to this chorus of kudos when she stated “TRUE NORTH is a profound meditation on history and geography, time and eternity, number and a state beyond number.” Find out for yourself why Stephanie Strickland’s hypertext poem, True North, won the Salt Hill hypertext prize, and the book of…
Special Live Stream Traversal of Mark Bernstein’s Those Trojan Girls
Wednesday, March 20, 2019 6:30 p.m. CET (= GMT/UTC +01:00 hour) Hof University, Germany • Institute of Information Systems (iisys) • room G111 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skp3LvJ7YtU Mark Bernstein’s hypertext narrative, Those Trojan Girls, draws its inspiration from Euripides’ tragic play, The Trojan Women, and the Victorian school novel to tell the story of loss. As its description suggests: “The school story of the 19th century ends in graduation. The school story of the 20th century ends in the dissolution of the school. This is a 21st century school story. Troy always falls, yet within the devastation we may perhaps find some scope for hope and for courage.” Those Trojan Girls was created with Storyspace 3.0…
List of Women E-Lit Artists & Scholars Featured on International Women’s Day
The Electronic Literature Lab celebrated International Women’s Day held on Friday, March 8, 2019 by calling out, on our Twitter site, the achievements of 10 women e-lit artists & scholars whose works are held in ELO’s Archives and/or The Dene Grigar Collection. We have collected the posts here in order to highlight, once again, the important contributions of these women. A special thank you goes to ELL’s Undergraduate Researcher, Kathleen Zoller, who developed the photos for these posts. Deena Larsen, “Carving in Possibilities,” from the Electronic Literature Collection 1 @ElitLab celebrates International Women’s Day by featuring American artist Deena Larsen who created such works like “Carving in Possibilities”(2001) & so…
Curiosities of the Curious Mind of Artist Alan Sondheim
This spring international artist Alan Sondheim donated his vast archives of his experimental videos, electronic literature, VR animations, sound work, and music to Electronic Literature Organization. Among the hundreds of digital files were physical artifacts of vintage radio and signaling components and rare books and manuals. “Curiosities of the Curious Mind of Artist Alan Sondheim” features some of the more interesting items from the collection. They reflect the broad intellectual interests of this media artist. Left Cabinet Top Shelf Radio Receiver, circa 1920s. The Principles Underlying Radio Communication. Radio Pamphlet No. 40. December 10, 1918. Signal Corps, U. S. Army. Washington : Government Printing Office, 1919. Hammarlund (Model “C”) Condenser. Pat.…
Voyager’s & The Institute for the Future of the Book Founder, Bob Stein, Visiting ELL
From March 13-March 13, 2019 the founder of The Voyager Company and The Institute for the Future of the Book, Bob Stein, will visit ELL. We will interview him, via our Live Stream YouTube channel, on Thursday, March 14. The Voyager Company, considered the premier publishing house for multimedia book environments, produced close to 75 titles––such as “If Monks Had Macs,” Laurie Anderson’s “Puppet Motel,” and William Gibson’s Neuromancer––on laserdiscs and CD-ROMs in the 1980s and 1990s. ELL holds numerous Voyager publications in The Grigar Collection as well as in ELO’s various collections. The Institute for the Future of the Book with offices in NYC, London, and Brisbane, describes itself…
Celebrating Endangered Data Week with Tim McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero
Having spent the last month immersed in the mechanical pigs, Spam, utopian communes, the Star Trek Holodeck and––yes––acid from Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, I’m now turning my attention to the special Traversal taking place in celebration of Endangered Data Week: A Traversal of Tim McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1992/3. The event, hosted by Digital Scholarship Commons at the University of Victoria’s Libraries and organized by John Durno, Head of Library Systems, takes place on Friday, March 1 from 2:00-3:30 p.m. It features the BC artist performing his work in front of both an online and onsite audience on floppy disk on the…
Live Stream Traversal of Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid
Friday, 2/22/19 2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. PDT Live on YouTube and F2F in Electronic Literature Lab, WSUV Campus, VMMC 211A YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzeZQ05p_1Tli0lDBeWMxOA/live Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=elitpathfinders Twitter: #elitlab, #elitpathfinders Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/electronicliteraturelab/ Experience early born digital literature performed live via YouTube. Drawn from Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar’s concept of the “Traversal,” these performances take place on the original hardware and software for which the work was produced. By broadcasting the Traversals live, audiences across the internet can access important works of electronic literature endangered by time and outmoded hardware, software, and media formats. The YouTube Chat function allows them to interact with the reader and members of the audience. Traversal Highlights Richard Holeton’s…
