Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms
“Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms” is part of the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Hypertext and Social Media 2023 Conference taking place in Rome at the Bibliotheca Hertziana –– Max Planck Institute for Art History in September 2023. For conference participants, the exhibition aims to expand the understanding of the various ways hypertext has been expressed by artists, world-wide, both in terms of the systems they used and genres with which they experimented. As an extension of the conference held in an important cultural icon, the exhibition aims to promote hypertext as a scientific field of study and artistic practice to new audiences. As such, the exhibition features…
Announcing Deena Larsen, ELL’s Artist in Residence
Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms
What you are looking at is Sierra O’Neal’s 3D model of Lorenzo Miglioli’s 1993 RA-DIO, the first published Italian hypertext and the first in Italy created on the Storyspace platform. As you can see, RA-DIO consists of a print book and two 3.5-inch floppy disks packaged in a plastic sleeve. The floppy disks, formatted for Macintosh and PCs, contains Miglioni’s experimental hypertext and Walter Vannini’s Italian translation of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story. The book contains what Vannini called an “Inter/net/view” with Michael Joyce and the printout of RA-DIO’s contents. A joint venture by Castelvecchi Editore and Human Systems, Castelvecchi oversaw the book component while Human Systems, which owned the…
Society of American Archivist Funded Grant Underway
With our proposal to the Society of American Archivists funded, the lab has begun work to implement ELMS 3.0 to 30 works in The NEXT and test this extended schema for its efficacy. Our project, entitled “Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for Disabled and Sensory Sensitive People,” builds on our efforts, begun in 2021, to extend the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) so that the metadata for these archives consisting of born-digital works of electronic literature, video games, and net art better reflect their participatory, interactive, and experiential qualities. While ELMS 2.0 includes controlled vocabularies for software dependency(ies), authoring platform(s), hardware dependency(ies), peripheral dependency(ies), computer language(s), digital…
Beyond the Click: Breathing as Navigation
by Dene Grigar, Director, Electronic Literature Lab In 2004 I attended Incubation, a conference hosted by Sue Thomas, Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University (UK), from 12-14 July. While there I attended the world premier of Kate Pullinger, Stefan Schemat, and babel’s (pen name for Chris Joseph) experimental born-digital narrative, The Breathing Wall. What fascinated me about the work is that to navigate through the story, the reader breaths into a headset instead of clicking on links. Shortly after the conference, I interviewed Kate for an article for Computers and Composition about The Breathing Wall. Our conversation focused on the challenges of creating an immersive…
MIX 2023
We are preparing for “MIX 2023: Storytelling in Immersive Media,” taking place at the British Library on July 7, 2023. Dene is representing the lab on the panel entitled “Unlocking the Digital Archive: Archiving, Preservation, and Enhanced Curation,” otherwise known as Panel 4. She is both Chairing the panel and giving a presentation about the work the lab is doing with accessibility and metadata. This will be the 7th MIX conference and one that brings together many of the luminaries in the field of interactive media. Kate Pullinger, Caitlin Fisher, Andy Campbell and Judi Alston, Deena Larsen, Judith Pintar, Giulia Carla Rossi, Lyle Skains, among so many others, are involved.…
The Portal to Beyond
Archival Website: https://dtc-wsuv.org/projects/data-entry-portal/index.html Download from itch.io: https://electronicliteraturelab.itch.io/ In Rob Swigart’s Portal players take the role of the Traveler who return to Earth after a long journey through space only to find themselves alone on the planet. Stumbling on an old terminal, they access 12 databases, each revealing bits of information leading to the reasons why people left Earth. Players also encounter HOMER, an abandoned AI, who helps with uncovering the truth and discovers their own humanity. A mystery-puzzle game published by Activision in 1986 and released first for the Commodore 64 before being ported into other formats, Portal has been accessible only via emulation. The author also published a…
In honor of Helen Thorington
Helen Thorington, founder of the influential Turbulence.org (1996-2016), died on April 13, 2023 after a long illness. The lab is grateful for her passion and vision to showcase born-digital art and nurture artists, so many of whom built their careers through their association with Turbulence.org. For us in ELL, it has been a joy to work on The Turbulence Collection at ELO’s The NEXT over the last five years and with both Helen and Jo-Anne to maintain it for them. We are committed to this mission. Below is the obituary that her partner, Jo-Anne Green, posted on Facebook: “Helen Louise Thorington (nicknamed “Teedy”) was born in Philadelphia (1928), and grew…
The 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving
My colleague Erika Fülöp (who is also a Research Affiliate of ELL) and I are giving a paper, entitled “Piloting Shared Born-Digital Archives between the US and Europe,” at the 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving taking place at ISEA 2023 in Paris this May. Our research is based on the project we developed for expanding the archives held in ELO’s The NEXT to locations outside of the U.S. in order to ensure its accessibility and collection foci. Below is the abstract for the paper: Containing several thousand works from the 1980s to today, the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) The NEXT, created and managed by the Electronic Literature Lab…
ELL Is Referenced in Holeton’s Article
The Electronic Literature Lab’s work to reconstruct Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is referenced in the recently re-released Re_Dis_Connection, the publication of the 14th International Conference on Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS). The article, penned by the author, details the work we did to re-conceive Figurski––originally produced on the Storyspace platform––for the Web and for a contemporary audience, many of whom had not been born when the hypertext novel was published in 2001. A free copy of the publication is available from Carnegie Mellon ETC Press at https://press.etc.cmu.edu/proceedings/redisconnection.
