The Portal to Beyond
Archival Website: https://dtc-wsuv.org/projects/data-entry-portal/index.html Download from itch.io: https://electronicliteraturelab.itch.io/ In Rob Swigart’s Portal players take the role of the Traveler who return to Earth after a long journey through space only to find themselves alone on the planet. Stumbling on an old terminal, they access 12 databases, each revealing bits of information leading to the reasons why people left Earth. Players also encounter HOMER, an abandoned AI, who helps with uncovering the truth and discovers their own humanity. A mystery-puzzle game published by Activision in 1986 and released first for the Commodore 64 before being ported into other formats, Portal has been accessible only via emulation. The author also published a…
In honor of Helen Thorington
Helen Thorington, founder of the influential Turbulence.org (1996-2016), died on April 13, 2023 after a long illness. The lab is grateful for her passion and vision to showcase born-digital art and nurture artists, so many of whom built their careers through their association with Turbulence.org. For us in ELL, it has been a joy to work on The Turbulence Collection at ELO’s The NEXT over the last five years and with both Helen and Jo-Anne to maintain it for them. We are committed to this mission. Below is the obituary that her partner, Jo-Anne Green, posted on Facebook: “Helen Louise Thorington (nicknamed “Teedy”) was born in Philadelphia (1928), and grew…
The 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving
My colleague Erika Fülöp (who is also a Research Affiliate of ELL) and I are giving a paper, entitled “Piloting Shared Born-Digital Archives between the US and Europe,” at the 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving taking place at ISEA 2023 in Paris this May. Our research is based on the project we developed for expanding the archives held in ELO’s The NEXT to locations outside of the U.S. in order to ensure its accessibility and collection foci. Below is the abstract for the paper: Containing several thousand works from the 1980s to today, the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) The NEXT, created and managed by the Electronic Literature Lab…
ELL Is Referenced in Holeton’s Article
The Electronic Literature Lab’s work to reconstruct Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is referenced in the recently re-released Re_Dis_Connection, the publication of the 14th International Conference on Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS). The article, penned by the author, details the work we did to re-conceive Figurski––originally produced on the Storyspace platform––for the Web and for a contemporary audience, many of whom had not been born when the hypertext novel was published in 2001. A free copy of the publication is available from Carnegie Mellon ETC Press at https://press.etc.cmu.edu/proceedings/redisconnection.
Live Traversal by Rob Swigart on February 14
Tuesday, 2/14/23, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. PST Live on YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/electronicliteraturelab Twitter: #ELitLab Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/electronicliteraturelab In person on the WSUV campus, VCLS 3 Join us for the Live Stream Performance by Rob Swigart, who will read from the two works he published with Eastgate Systems, Inc.: Directions (1994) and Down Time (2000). Both will be read via the CD-ROM on the Mac G3 iMac “Tangerine” running System Software 9.2 held in Grigar’s personal collection. The event is hosted by the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver and moderated by the lab’s Director, Dene Grigar. About the Works Directions (1994), subtitled “A quasi-sentimental pseudo-scientific hyperpoem,” is a collection of hypertextual…
Visualization Space Is Live at The NEXT!
The Visualization space, long planned for The NEXT, is now live at https://the-next.eliterature.org/visualizations. When artists and scholars send the lab their digital works, they often also ship their physical archives. This means that we are holding boxes of personal papers, notebooks, books, and ephemera that correspond to the digital media The NEXT is hosting. In an effort to share some of the most historically compelling of these artifacts, the lab called upon our lab mates, Sierra O’Neal and Kathleen Zoller, to re-create them as 3D models. Visualizations you will see at The NEXT include packaging used for early born-digital media as well as objects, like the beach ball that Richard…
Report about the Lab’s Update to ELO’s The NEXT
The Electronic Literature Lab has been busy during its planned Winter Refinement period: 1) enhancing the metadata for many collections held in The NEXT, 2) preserving works produced with Flash and other outmoded software, such MIDI and Java Applets, and 3) completing the “Cite” feature that allows visitors to cite all the works in The NEXT. Metadata, Preservation, and Citation Feature To date, the lab has updated the metadata for and preserved works in The frAme Collection, The Word Circuits Collection, and close to 50% of the 369 works in The Turbulence Collection. These efforts bring those collections donated early in the development of the ELO’s Repository to the level of…
Metadata for VR Narratives
Richard Snyder and I submitted our essay, “Metadata for Access: VR and Beyond,” to forthcoming volume of The Future of Text, edited by Frode Hegland. As we write in our abstract Interacting with virtual reality (VR) environments requires multiple sensory modalities associated with time, sight, sound, touch, haptic feedback, gesture, kinesthetic involvement, motion, proprioception, and interoception––yet metadata schemas used for repositories and databases do not offer controlled vocabularies that describe VR works to visitors. This essay outlines the controlled vocabularies devised for the Electronic Literature Organization’s museum/library The NEXT. Called ELMS (Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema), this framework makes it possible for physically disabled visitors and those with sensory sensitivities to know…
Treasures from the Rubenstein
by Dene Grigar After Triangle SCI 2022 ended on Thursday, I stay an additional day in Durham so that I could visit the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University again. This was my third visit to the library to do archival research into the Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall, and Judy Malloy Papers that the library holds. No matter how many times, though, I visit, I discover new treasures that I somehow overlooked before. Yesterday was no different. After researching information about Kendall’s hypertext poem, “Penetration,” which along with “Dispossession” is part of his The Seasons collection (and that we are adding to the Rob Kendall Collection at The…
Triangle SCI Begins
Triangle SCI began today in Durham today. Dene and Richard are here developing the metadata fields for visitors to The NEXT with disabilities for better access. We kicked off the event with an opening event at The Rickhouse where we met with the other teams invited to the week-long retreat. This year’s theme is Reckoning, Care, and Repair, and we are one of five teams invited to participate. Besides ours, entitled A Post-Pandemic Reckoning: Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for People with Disabilities, there are: *Joshua Neds-Fox, Matt Ruen, Teresa Schultz, Brianne Selman, Leila Sterman, Stephanie Towery’s Building a contextual alternative to scholarly journal un/safelists *Karen Stoll Farrell, Kimberly…
