Below are the remarks given at ELO 2019 by Dene Grigar, President, ELO, 2013-2019. 16 July 2019
Three years ago, the founders of Turbulence.org, Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green, put out a call on social media for support with hosting its prodigious archives of 344 works of net art that date back from 1996. ELO answered that call and now hosts the site. While we were busy setting up the Turbulence site, Sue Thomas, the founder of the trAce Online Writing Centre, also put out a call for support. The archives belonging to her organization, which began in 1995 in Nottingham, England, were in danger of being lost and, so, she was looking for a permanent home to move her archives to. ELO once again stepped in: We were able to reconstitute trAce’s journal frAme and are working to restore other files relating to trAce that were built in an early version of Cold Fusion.
As my lab mates and I, at the Electronic Literature Lab, were preparing Turbulence and trAce for hosting and access, it occurred to me that it was us, ELO, that has lived on to do this important work of saving the legacy archives that constitutes our field’s history––actually, the literary history of the early age of computing. As I look around the room, I see people whose works are part of these archives. I find it interesting that ELO has not only survived, but thrived these 20 years. The result of our success is that we represent the field, a field that unless the world loses electricity, will continue to grow and prosper.
The question I asked myself is, “Why?” What made it possible for ELO to survive the dot.com crash of the early 2000s and financial struggles of recent recession? How is it that we are now an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association, collaborating with Rhizome to preserve Flash and Shockwave e-lit, and partnering for the last three years with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute to teach DH scholars about e-lit?
The answer to that question is simple: It is due to people in this community who are passionate about e-lit and willing to work hard toward the mission to facilitate it and promote it. From Scott Rettberg, Jeff Ballowe, and Robert Coover who founded us in 1999. To our second president Margie Luesebrink and our patron Kate Hayles who gave us an academic home at UCLA in 2001. To our 4th and 5th Presidents Joe Tabbi, who led us while we were at MITH, and Nick Montfort, who hosted us at MIT, and so provided vision and leadership to carry us forward. To my colleagues on current and past ELO Boards who have volunteered their time, effort, and many times funds, to support the organization. To everyone of you who make up the field and support ELO with your membership, donations, and attendance in its many events and activities.
The relationship between a field of study and a professional organization is a vital one. A scholarly field needs a learned society in order to thrive because learned societies promote the field and, thus, help to grow it and feeds the knowledge base promised by the presence of a learned society. It is an ecosystem that once functioning is self-sustaining.
What it is that ELO as a learned society offers the field? The annual conferences and media art festival like you are participating in now––but also the Electronic Literature Collections, our Electronic Literature book series with Bloomsbury Press, our Electronic Literature Directory, the Electronic Literature Archives and Repository, our new ELO Fellows program, our annual Hayles, Coover, and Luesebrink prizes, and our Consortium for Electronic Literature. In this way, ELO serves you, serves the field. It is your learned society. Metaphorically speaking, ELO is an umbrella providing shelter, a foundation giving stability, a home providing warmth, and for many of us, a family providing good will.
I have been fortunate to have been part of ELO these past 13 years and for the last six as your President. I thank you all for your friendship, kindness, love, and support. It gives me great pleasure, now, to turn over the Presidency to my colleague Leo Flores.