Exhibit

What are the “New Horizons” of born digital writing? As the curator of the ELO 2016 Exhibit, I delved into exploring all of the 56 works submitted wondering how each expands our perceptions of electronic literature. As an artist, I am interested in interactions, media, objects, and experiences that are a part of everyday life and reframe one’s concept of art. I’ve co-curated an electronic literature exhibit with Dene Grigar, as well as several film and video shows over the years that have included live performances, so I see many overlaps in curating time-based work and digital writing that pushes the notion of interaction, art, and materiality.

In this exhibit you will notice that there are a wide range of commonplace and cutting-edge digital technologies used to create these digitally born works that explore materiality. Stephanie Strickland and M.D. Coverley’s work “Hours of the Night” uses the ubiquitous PowerPoint to create an experimental poem while Richard Ehrlich’s “Sheila Carfenders, Doctor Mask & President Akimbo” was created with Unity to create an immersive VR experience. Additionally, Aaron Tucker’s “3D Poetry Project” uses poetry about icebergs to create the 3D coordinates to carve away and create 3D printed sculptures while taking into consideration the melt rate, latitude, longitude and altitude of currently mapped icebergs. In Matthew Mosher’s “If These Walls Could Speak,” RFID tags are added to river rocks and used to allow participants to create and play back memories that are programmed into these 3D objects.The social media platform of Twitter is used in Helen Burgess and Craig Saper’s “Loving-Together with Roland’s Bots” to create programmed little prints of “tweeted” conversations between different lovers in conversation and quarrels derived from Roland Barthes’ writings. Building upon the use of hashtags within Twitter to pull real-time tweets tied to the metadata, Álvaro Seiça and Sindre Sørensen’s “aimisola.net/hymiwo.po” pulls the trending tweets with hashtags tied to keywords used in their poem to explore current discourse on immigration policies as well as cultural, social and political issues in Spain.

Consider as you explore this exhibit the topics engrained in both the conceptual and formal aspects of these works and how what it is around you at this very moment that also has the potential to be come what creates the new horizons of digital writing.

Featured Works:

• Abrie, Independent Artist, “To Montréal” [See Artist Site]
• Deanne Achong & Faith Moosang, Independent Artists, “Lulu Sweet: A Gold Rush Tale in 8 Acts” [See Artist Site]
• Damon Loren Baker, Independent Artist; & Jeremy Hight, WSUV, “The Basement” [See Artist Site]
• Alan Bigelow, Medaille College, “A Change of Heart” [See Artist Site]
• Philippe Bootz et al, U of Paris 8, “Elpénor” [See Artist Site]
• Amaranth Borsuk, U of Washington Bothell, et al, “June 17th” [See Artist Site]
• Serge Bouchardons et al, Sorbonne Universités, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, “Untrace” [See Artist Site]
• Mez Breeze & Andy Campbell, Independent Artists, “Pluto” [See Artist Site]
• Helen Burgess, NC State U; & Craig Saper, U Maryland Baltimore, “Loving-Together with Roland’s Bots” [See Artist Site]
• J. R. Carpenter & Barbara Bridger, Independent Artists, “Notes Very Necessary” [See Artist Site]
• M. D. Coverley & Stephanie Strickland, Independent Artists, “Hours of the Night” [See Artist Site]
• Andrew Demirjian & James Proctor, Hunter College, “Color Yourself Inspired™” [See Artist Site]
• Daniel C. Howe, University of Hong Kong,  & John Cayley, Brown University, “Read for us … and show us the pictures“ [See Artist Site]
• Richard S. Ehrlich, York University, “Sheila Carfenders, Doctor Mask, and President Akimbo” [See Artist Site]
• Deena Larsen, Independent Artist, “Toybox: Exploring a New Conceptual Language Through Play” [See Artist Site]
• Will Luers, WSUV; Hazel Smith, U of Western Sydney; & Roger Dean, U of Western Sydney, “Noveling” [See Artist Site]
• Jeff Morris & Elisabeth Blair, Texas A & M, “Tell the Story” [See Artist Site]
• Jason Nelson, Griffiths U, “The Impossible Box” [See Artist Site]
• Allison Parrish, Fordham U, “A Travel Guide” [See Artist Site]
• Sophia Pelka, U of Waterloo, “Tweeting towards Death” [See Artist Site]
• Kate Pullinger, Bath Spa U, “Inanimate Alice; Episode Six: The Last Gas Station” [See Artist Site]
• Aaron Reed, UC Santa Cruz, “Minimalist Story Generators #1-5” [See Artist Site]
• Scott Rettberg, U of Bergen; & Rod Coover, Temple U, “Hearts and Minds” [See Artist Site]
• Loren Schmidt, Independent Artist, “Beads of Orange Glass” [See Artist Site]
• Álvaro Seiça & Sindre Sørensen, Independent Artist, “aimisola.net/hymiwo.po” [See Artist Site]
• Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung, Namir Ahmed, & Aaron Tucker, Ryerson U, “Loss Sets” [See Artist Site]
• Tony Vieira, York University, “Sonic Immersions and Sculptures” [See Artist Site]
• Jody Zellen, Independent Artist, “News Wheel” [See Artist Site]
• José Aburto Zolezzi, Independent Artist, “MATTERS, Electromagnetic Poems” [See Artist Site]