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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
Richard Holeton’s Writings & Art about the 1970s Counterculture, Drugs, and Pigs
“Well, pigs, I guess.” –Richard Holeton This is the first line of Richard Holeton’s list of 11 “things I want to write about,” found among his papers, dated from 1993-1998, for his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree at San Francisco State University. The list is a collection of topics that includes the counterculture of the early 1970s; relationships between brothers as well as between fathers and sons; Star Trek (“both original and Next Generation plots”); and the murder by Theodore Streleski of his dissertation director––all of which end up in Holeton’s epic hypertext novel, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, published in 2001 by Eastgate Systems, Inc. The work…
Welcoming New Post-Doc to ELL
We are very excited to announce that Monika Górska-Olesińska from the University of Opole will be coming to ELL, September 14-30, 2016, to work on her project, “The Poetry@Science in the Works of Stephanie Strickland.” Dr. Górska-Olesińska holds a PhD (2006) in Art and Humanities from Jagiellonian University in Krakow and serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and New Media at the Institute of Polish Language and Culture Studies. Her research interests include cyberculture, new media art, media theory, digital textuality, electronic literature, history of technology, the intersection of art and science. She is the author of three books and over 15 peer reviewed articles and book chapters.
