The Future is Yesterday
On the side of a lonely stretch of highway in a bleak part of Kansas, a man is pasting a sign on a billboard. The activity frames this episode of Season 4 of Fargo, with the phrase, “THE FUTURE is,” lingering through the storyline until it is finally punctuated at the end of the episode with the word, “NOW!” The message’s optimism and urgency screams at the viewer and belies the unseemly demise of many character’s lives (a few by tornado) during the course of the hour. The future is Now! Hurry! I pondered that message on Friday during the launch of the book, The Future of Text, and excellent symposium of…
11 FAQs about Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story
For the past month I have been preparing for the live group reading of Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel, afternoon, a story and the paper Richard Snyder and I are giving about hypertext at the ELO 2020 conference. My research led to: identifying every available manifestation of the work renumbering past editions and organizing them with the, heretofore, unidentified editions so that there is consistency throughout all of the manifestations of the novel versioning the novel according to changes to software so that it is easier for scholars to know what tech to use when accessing it tracking down more precise publication dates through email interviews, databases, and the Internet Archive…
“Let Her Name Be Remembered: A Final Post about the #womenofelit Project”
By Dene Grigar, Professor & Director, Electronic Literature Lab 280 women e-lit pioneers and visionaries hailing from 30 countries, 162 of which were featured on Twitter shout outs: This was the final tally for the celebration of women e-lit pioneers and visionaries the Electronic Literature Lab held during Women’s History Month. (See Appendice) The event generated from the simple desire to honor women, tell their stories, amplify their deeds, and encourage others to know about them. For the Electronic Literature Lab, such an event exemplifies one aspect of the mission of a feminist lab. That said, the impetus for this particular approach to the event––that is, honoring women e-lit pioneers…
Celebrating Women in E-Lit
March is National Women’s History Month and, so, in 2020 the Electronic Literature Lab celebrated the contributions women have made to the field of born digital literature, from its roots in early hypertext literature and theory to the more recent artistic practices of Virtual Reality and sensor-based haptic experiences, to name but a few. Each day we tweeted about women and the work they have done to grow the field. At the end of each day, we archived the tweets here on this site so that people could return and find them. It was a very successful event in that this blog post about the project was one of two…
Expanding the David Kolb Collection
On Friday, August 23, David Kolb, philosopher and author of the hypertext essay, Socrates in the Labyrinth (1994) spent the day with Astrid Ensslin and me in the lab. In the early afternoon, we held a formal event entitled, “For What Is Thinking, If Not Linear?’ – A Conversation with David Kolb, Astrid Ensslin, and Dene Grigar about Socrates in the Labyrinth, Hypertext, and the Lore of Electronic Literature,” that was videotaped by Undergraduate Researcher Moneca Roath and will be made available on Vimeo in early September. Later that afternoon, though, the three of us got together and went through the digital materials––lectures, published and unpublished hypertexts, printed essays, etc.––that David had brought…
