How to Write about Inaccessible Born-Digital Literature
Having authored critical writing about born-digital literature with Stuart Moulthrop for both the multimedia book, Pathfinders (2015) and print-based book, Traversals (2017) and, then, publishing Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 1 (2018) with the ELL Team, I’ve had much time and practice writing about born-digital literature that is inaccessible to the public. With few exceptions, the focus has been on works to which few, if any, scholars have access. Think electronic literature and literary games published on 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy disks and CD-ROMS with software no longer supported by contemporary computers. But writing for that kind of media is vastly different than writing about literature still in circulation and found on…
Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s Fragment of the Dionysian Body
Performed by Dr. Anna Nacher, Fulbright-in-Residence, Winona State University Friday, 10/18/19 12 p.m.-1:00 p.m. PDT Live on YouTube and F2F in the MOVE Lab, VCLS 3 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGVGeei4_zw&feature=youtu.be Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=elitpathfinders Twitter: #ELitLab Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/electronicliteraturelab/ Join us for a Live Stream Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s Fragment of the Dionysian Body, a hypertext essay created in 1997 as a “travelers guide to the intricacies of Friedrich Nietzche’s The Gay Science.” It will be performed by Dr. Anna Nacher, Associate Professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland and a 2019-20 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the Creative Digital Media program at the Winona State University in Winona (MN).
Announcing Anna Nacher’s Visit to ELL
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Anna Nacher to the Electronic Literature Lab to perform in a Live Stream Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s hypertext work, Fragments of the Dionysian Body, on Friday, October 18, from 12 noon-1 p.m. Dr. Nacher is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland and a 2019-20 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the Creative Digital Media program at the Winona State University in Winona (MN). Her research interests include digital culture, media art, and e-literature. She is currently pursuing a three-year long research project “The Aesthetics of Post-Digital Imagery: Between New Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy,” funded by Polish National Science Centre. She is…
Consider It Down
On Friday afternoon––after a very successful week––we closed the Tear Down the Wall: Hypertext & Participatory Narratives exhibition that ran in conjunction with the 2019 ACM Hypertext Conference. As my previous blog post outlined, we featured nine works by eight artists dating from the mid-1990s to the present. Represented were a variety of platforms, including Storyspace 3.0 and Twine, and a range of approaches from 3D narratives to soundscapes. I laid out the show in an unpredictable way. In other words, the works were not organized in chronological order or by genre. Instead, I wanted visitors to move around the space, encountering the works with a sense of wonder and delight.…
Launch Party for Kathleen Zoller’s Book
We are proud to announce the Launch Party in celebration of Kathleen Zoller’s, The Progressive Dinner Party Restored, a multimedia book built on the Scalar platform that presents her project to restore Jennifer Ley, Margie Luesebrink, and Carolyn Guyer’s special collection of women’s electronic literature, The Progressive Dinner Party, published in Ley’s journal, Riding the Meridian in 1996. Friday, September 27, 2019 1:15 p.m.-2:00 p.m. VMMC 111, Washington State University Vancouver Using Rhizome’s Webrecorder, local files sent to her by the artists, and the Wayback Machine, Kathleen painstakingly updated works produced with Flash or Shockwave for current browsers, restored missing media, and fixed external links where needed. At the event…
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…
Resetting the Table
This essay is a reprint of the Introduction to the forthcoming multimedia book, The Progressive Dinner Party Restored. The author Kathleen Zoller is an Undergraduate Researcher in ELL who received a WSU Undergraduate Summer Mini-Grant to restore “The Progressive Dinner Party,” a special collection created by Jennifer Ley, Marjorie Luesebrink, and Carolyn Guertin and published in 1999 by Riding the Meridian. In the essay Zoller explains the project and the method by which she restored the collection. The book will be released on September 1, 2019. “The Progressive Dinner Party Restored” by Kathleen Zoller The Progressive Dinner Party is a collection of 39 works selected from Carolyn Guertin’s Assemblage, a showcase of new…
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…
