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that afternoon, though, the three of us got together and went through the digital materials––lectures, published and unpublished hypertexts, printed essays, etc.––that David had brought…
Linking Literature & Games
“Linking Literature & Games: Exploring Hypertext, Digital Fiction, & the Language of Gaming” is an exhibit curated by Mariah Gwin, an Undergraduate Researcher in the Electronic Literature Lab. Below is her curatorial statement and the list of items included in the exhibit. The URL to the archival site is http://dtc-wsuv.org/mgwin17/ensslin-exhibit. “Linking Literature and Games: Exploring Hypertext, Digital Fiction, and the Language of Gaming” presents literary games, hypertext, and digital fiction focusing on the scholarship of Astrid Ensslin, a professor from the University of Alberta specializing in Electronic Literature and Games. This exhibit features literary works, games, and hardware that date back to the mid-1980s and into the late 2000s. With…
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…
2019-2020 Live Stream Traversal Schedule
We are pleased to announce the 2019-2020 Live Stream Traversal Schedule. Included in this schedule is a special interview with Astrid Ensslin, one of the top scholars of hypertext and philosopher-hypertext artist David Kolb. You do not want to miss these events! Saturday, August 24, 2019 A Conversation with David Kolb, Astrid Ensslin, and Dene Grigar about Hypertext Friday, October 18, 2019 A Traversal of Anna Nacher performing Eric Steinhart’s Fragments of a Dionysian Body Friday, November 8, 2019 A Traversal of Megan Heyward performing her work, Of Day Of Night Friday, February 7, 2020 A Traversal of Eduardo Kac, performing his work, “Storms” and “Accident” Friday, March 13, 2020…
Paper Given at IAUPE 2019
Paper given by Dene Grigar at the 2019 International Association of University Professors of English Conference, Poznan, Poland. Kinetic Poetry: Poetry animated through the affordances of the computer environment, specifically programming languages like Apple BASIC, Visual Basic, and Javascript and software programs like Flash, Shockwave, After Effects, and others. Kinepoeia: “Movement suggested by the textual representation of the word––is drawn from the term, onomatopoeia, the rhetorical strategy that associates sound with textual representation (e.g. bam/bam) but is unlike it is indigenous to the digital medium” (Grigar). See her entry at the Electronic Literature Directory: http://directory.eliterature.org/glossary/4967. Access to Kinetic Poetry Referenced in This Presentation Rob Kendall, “Faith,” https://elo-repository.org/cauldronandnet/volume4/confluence/kendall/title_page.htm. Thom Swiss,…
Afterflash
Proposal for the 2019 National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources, Implementation Grant Dene Grigar, Principal Investigator; Professor, WSUV Holly Slocum, Project Manager; WSUV Nicholas Schiller, Consultant; Librarian III, WSU Libraries, WSUV Dragan Espenschied, Consultant; Preservation Director, Rhizome Greg Philbrook, Technical Support; Technical and Instructional Support II, WSUV List of works we propose to preserve: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1REFxZ71i851zX8m3Yso5n1jc1bpPQXZSDK9Dy9q9SD8/edit?usp=sharing Video clips of the process and animated gifs of a few examples of Flash works: https://vimeo.com/channels/1476957 Abstract By the end of 2020 Adobe will discontinue its support for Flash. Already it has stopped supporting Shockwave. This means that all born digital literary works that used these software programs to create participatory, interactive,…
The Saga of Cleaning NES Consoles
This guest post is by Greg Philbrook, the Instructional and Technical Specialist for the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. He also serves as the tech guru for the Electronic Literature Lab and oversees our Games Library. –Dene Grigar ——————————————————————- Summer is a great time for taking inventory, and the ELL game library is no exception! We recently received some NES consoles as donations. Upon inspection, however, all three were giving a dreaded red blinking light, typically indicating that their lockout chips had failed. The lockout chips (meant to stop reproduction games from playing) are notorious for going bad over time. They send a signal…
Finishing Up the Grant to Preserve Flash and Shockwave E-Lit Works
Since late April I have been working on a grant submission that would provide funding for the ELL Team to use Rhizome.org’s Webrecorder to preserve electronic literature works produced with Flash and Shockwave from 1996-2016 that are archived in the 12 journals, anthologies, and showcases held in the ELO Repository. WSUV gave me seed funding so that during the month of May, the ELL Team could inventory the 12 publications to determine an exact list of works produced with Flash and Shockwave, figure out the level of complexity each entails, and conduct timed runs of the process. We identified 447 works in need of preserving, else they will all be inaccessible…
Project Update
With Holly and Kathleen finalizing the list of 447 Flash and Shockwave works held in the ELO Repository and Greg finishing up the copying of the 75 Voyager CD-ROMS that Bob Stein shared with us during his visit in March, the ELL Team is turning its attention to the completion of several other projects. They include: Photographing the packaging of all Voyager CD-ROMS Putting the final touches on the videos for the NEH grant Finishing our book about the 2018-19 Traversals, entitled Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2, so that we make the August 15th deadline Getting the next two collections of the ELO Repository online––that is: The Stephanie Strickland and…
Data Collection, Final Results
After spending the month of May identifying works as Flash and Shockwave works from the 12 collections from the ELO Repository that relate to journals, anthologies, and showcases for the grant, ELL Team Members Holly Slocum and Kathleen Zoller painstakingly revisited them last week to fine tune the dates and software versions. They then reviewed the information and re-categorized them, if needed, by the level of difficulty of preserving them with the WebRecorder. Here is final count of the works we will be including in the grant: There are 445 works of Flash and Shockwave e-lit and other interactive media forms in need of preservation in the ELO Repository. They…
