Imagine a medium untethered to gravity, where no wind carries the spoken word and where no magnetic field bounds writers to express thought in a particular direction. In such an environment, what would poetry be? This is the question that media artist Eduardo Kac explores in his work, Inner Telescope. This is the first work of space poetry––that is, poetry produced for creation and performance in space. It was was propelled by rocket ship to the International Space Station (ISS) and enacted by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The Electronic Literature Lab is screening Kac’s video documentation of the production and performance of Inner Telescope. The video is recorded in French…

Bill Bly, the author of We Descend (1997), will visit the Electronic Literature Lab on Friday, September 14. Bly also authored the online chapbook Wyrmes Mete (2002). His print poems and stories have appears in 5 AM, Amelia, American Poetry Anthology, Antigonish Review, Encore, Explorations ’95, MacGuffin, Runes, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Zone 3, along with articles and reviews in Books & Religion, Didaskalia, The Drama Review, Tekka, and Trinity News. He has taught writing at New York University, Fordham University, and Wagner College, where he ran the Writing Program, and has won the Stanley Drama Award, competitive residencies at Shenandoah Valley Playwrights Retreat, Ploughshares International Fiction Seminar, and Vermont Studio Center, as well as fellowships from the…

The Electronic Literature Lab’s collection of important––and fragile––works of hyperfiction and poetry published on removable disks are again the focus of this year’s Live Stream Traversals (re: performances) via YouTube. All events are free & open to the public. Friday, October 26: Kathryn Cramer’s “In Small & Large Pieces” (1994) Friday, November 9: Deena Larsen, “Samplers” (1996) Friday, January 25: Megan Heyward, “Of Day, of Night” (2004) Friday, February 22: Richard Holeton, “Figurski at Findhorn on Acid” (2001) Tuesday, March 26: Stephanie Strickland, “True North” (1997) Friday, April 26: Judd Morrissey & Lori Talley, “My Name is Captain, Captain” (2002) Friday, May 10, George Landow, “The Dickens Web” (1992) For…

“The Art and Science of Hypertext” highlights the way in which hypertext was envisioned and articulated from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. The exhibit features scholarly articles published in ACM Hypertext book of proceedings to hypertext fiction to software and user’s manuals for authoring systems, to the very computers that showcased works, and many other artifacts in an effort to show the deep connection between theory and practice that gave way to innovation and a new form of art. Special Note: All materials are part of the Electronic Literature Lab’s permanent collection, unless noted otherwise.   Materials Exhibited: Left Cabinet: The Art of Hypertext Top Shelf: Macintosh Classic,…

We are happy to announce that Nicholas Schiller, the Associate Director of the Electronic Literature Lab, has been awarded a 2018 Washington Digital Heritage (WDH) grant from the Washington State Library that funds either a new metadata schema or develop an application profile for an existing schema for use in the preservation of born-digital works of literature and other early software. As he states in the grant narrative: “The project can be separated into three distinct phases. The first stage, carried out by Schiller, involves research and examination of existing metadata standards and application profiles for collections of early computer software. Much of this knowledge has already been informally gathered, but…

Visiting ELL on Monday and Tuesday was Prof. Dr. Claus Atzenbeck, the Research Group Leader of the Visual Analytics Research Group at the Institute of Information Systems, Hof University, Germany. He had come to the U.S. for the ACM Hypertext 2018 conference held in Baltimore, MD that took place July 9-12, stopping over in Austin before flying to WSUV. Among many topics we covered were his research into hypertext systems and the knowledge base project he is developing to visualize data based on the proximity of digital objects. He spent much time studying ELL’s library of electronic literature works and reading through some its titles on our vintage computers. On Tuesday…

On Tuesday––a day earlier than we anticipated––we completed the development of the metadata for Turbulence.org for the Coping with Bits project. This means that the undergraduate researchers filled out the fields mapped for ingestion into the data management system that Abby Adams, Nicholas Schiller, Leo Flores, and I are using for creating the ELO’s repository. The two founders of Turbulence.org, Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington, had provided me with two Excel spreadsheets containing the Commissioned Works and Artists for the 358 works listed in Turbulence.org’s inventory. Using these two documents, Abby and Nicholas developed the additional fields needed for enhancing the findability of and documenting the works. Jo-Anne and Helen also…

My interest in born digital literature is born out of a fascination with creative uses of computing technologies for the purpose of human expression. This same interest extends to tools produced for teaching the foundations of that expression––namely born digital multimedia and interactive software for composition and literature college classrooms. Last week we received a donation of such media from my long-time Computers & Writing colleague, Janice Walker, who recently retired from teaching.  The box she sent was full of software many of us used––and created––from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s when book publishers and independent producers were all leaping (or putting their toe) in the multimedia waters that emerged…

After our meeting in Victoria, B.C. with our partners in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab about the Samvera installation, Leo Flores, Abby Adams, Nicholas Schiller, and I returned to Vancouver to hold the final portion of our kick off for the Coping with Bits project in the Electronic Literature Lab. Abby and Nicholas led the undergraduate researchers through the various fields they need to map and had the students run through several works from the Turbulence.org archives, which is the first collection we are planning to document. Leo worked with Greg Philbrook, the CMDC’s tech guru, on website issues. I went through media that Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green had…

For the last five years, the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) has been able to fund undergraduate researchers to work in the lab, participating in faculty research projects and undertaking their own. In 2018-19 the ELL has hired six students, four of which are able to begin this summer to work on the “A Comprehensive Online Portal for Electronic Literature Works” (COPE) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Specifically, they will ensure the quality control of the metadata migrated to the digital asset management system, an experience that will help them gain knowledge of research methodologies, lab procedures, procedural logic, and library and archival practices. The four students involved in…