You may remember that Bill Bly, electronic literature artist and author of We Descend, gave me a car full of Macs last summer when he visited me on the way to Milwaukee, MI to the ELO 2014 conference. I asked Jeff, my former student and resident Mac hardware guru who fixes the Macs in my lab, to clean them and service those that needed motherboards, switches, etc.  He arrived today with all but two ready for the lab. Not a minute too soon.  Next Saturday WSUV is celebrating its 25th Anniversary with a celebration for about 3000 people.  I am opening both ELL and the MOVE Lab for tours.  I…

Urszula Pawlicka, a doctoral candidate  from the University of Warmia and Mazury, located in Olsztyn, Poland, has come to the CMDC program as a Fulbright scholar to study electronic literature and cyberculture with Dr. Dene Grigar, becoming the first ELL Visiting Scholar.  “Ula,” as she is called, comes with extensive training.  After completing the first stage of Polish Philology, she spent a year at the University of Warsaw.  Her masters degree was in Journalism and Social Communication, also at the University of Warmia and Mazury, Olsztyn. Her master’s thesis was entitled “Category of communication in Polish cyberpoetry.”  She has published one book, Cyberpoetry. Contexts and Characterization, Korporacja Ha!art, Kraków 2012.  Her most important…

I was very happy to receive the invitation, today, from Ray Siemens to return to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute next summer at the University of Victoria, to teach the course in electronic literature again.  This will make the 4th year in a row that I have taught at the institute. This year I brought my ELO colleagues Sandy Baldwin, Davin Heckman, and Margie Luesebrink with me.  We had 25 faculty members and graduate students in our course from universities in Canada, the US, UK, Ireland, and Poland. Along with the course we all read at an event organized by James O’Sullivan with whom I am collaborating on a book…

The trunk to the black PF Cruiser popped open to reveal a pile of vintage computers, keyboards, boxes of software and other tech goodies destined for ELL.  In the car’s backseat was another mound of vintage tech.  The man who provided this “Christmas in June” experience was none other than Bill Bly, pioneering electronic literature artist and author of We Descend––one of the five works that Stuart Moulthrop and I worked to preserve in the Pathfinders project.   Bill, who drove to WSUV from Pennsylvania by way of Seattle, was on his way to Denver to visit with Deena Larsen, another pioneering electronic artist.  Both will end up in Milwaukee…

ELL was in a shambles today as we packed up computers and other gear we needed for DHSI 2014 where I am teaching a week-long course in Electronic Literature with Sandy Baldwin, Margie Luesebrink, and Davin Heckman. We are taking 10 Mac Minis, iMac, my Apple IIe, Classic, and G3 iMac (my Bondi Blue baby) and setting up a lab for our participants.  Twenty-six people have signed up to attend, so it will be a busy week.  The course materials have been planned for quite a while and have been put online.  Stuart and I got rough drafts of the Pathfinders videos uploaded to our YouTube channel so that I…

I got my Mac Plus back yesterday from repairs, thanks to my Mac Guru, Jeff, who has been overseeing the health of my Macs for several years.  Our love (okay, obsession) for Macs continues to bind us even after he has moved on from being a student to a full-fledged, well-paid programmer.  He is my go-to guy for all things Mac at the Electronic Literature Lab. The Plus (System Code Name:  “Mr. T”) was produced from January 1986 to October 1990.  Mine was manufactured in 1988, runs System 6.0.3, and has 2K of RAM installed on it.  It came with System Finder 5.1 and could, if pressed, run System 7.5.5,…

We can now show Talan Memmot’s Lexia to Perplexia and other works of electronic literature requiring Netscape Communicator in the lab, thanks to our terrific IT team and my research assistant Greg Philbrook.