Treasures from The Dene Grigar Collection
The Electronic Literature Lab holds the collection of over 300 works electronic literature, video games, and interactive media, along with the hardware and peripherals with with to view the work, collected for the last 29 years by Dene Grigar. The collection highlights include all works of electronic literature published by Eastgate Systems, Inc.; posters, catalogs, and proceedings from many conferences and media art shows that featured electronic literature; books and other printed materials published to accompany born digital works. The items featured in this exhibit, however, are among the rarest in her collection because they represent one of the last, the only iteration of a work or unique work.…
Moving Forward in 2020
2020 marks the 8th year that our lab has been on the WSUV campus. We kick off this new year with some changes to our personnel and many, many exciting initiatives. First, we hired recent graduate, Holly Slocum, as the lab’s official Project Manager. Holly served for close to two years as an Undergraduate Researcher in ELL overseeing numerous projects for us. We are very excited to have her expertise and passion in the lab. Staying with us this spring is Undergraduate Researcher Kathleen Zoller who led The Progressive Dinner Party Restored project last summer. She is a Junior in the Creative Media & Digital Culture (CMDC) program and our…
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…
E-Lit Scholar Astrid Ensslin Visits ELL
We are very excited about the arrival of e-lit scholar Astrid Ensslin to ELL, who will be doing research on the Eastgate Quarterly Reviews of Hypertext from August 14-28, 2019. The lab holds copies of all eight documented copies published by the company. Professor Ensslin is Professor in Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada) and the author of numerous books: Approaches to Videogame Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2019), Small Screen Fictions (Paradoxa, 2018), Literary Gaming (MIT Press, 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013), The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and…
ELL Welcomes Two ELO Fellows
The Electronic Literature Lab welcomes two Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Fellows in 2019-2020. They are Dr. Amy Spencer, a post-doctoral research assistant at Bath Spa University in the UK, and Julia Polyck-O’Neill, a Canadian artist, curator, critic, and writer completing her doctorate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program. Both researchers will work under the mentorship of Dr. Dene Grigar to document works of electronic literature featured in the lab’s Traversal events in the organization’s scholarly ELD and in Wikipedia. Both are funded by Grigar in support of the lab. ELO Fellows is a new initiative by the Electronic Literature Organization aimed at supporting early career scholars interested in developing a…
Finding Stephanie Strickland’s True North
N. Katherine Hayles said that “Strickland’s poems meditate on the mystery of numbers and the embedded links that connect embodied experience with universal abstraction. Not to be missed. Paul Harris exclaimed that True North is “[a] quintessentially American piece. The poetry is arresting, to eye and mind. Here is a perception of the world filtered through the lenses of contemporary science.” Marjorie Perloff added to this chorus of kudos when she stated “TRUE NORTH is a profound meditation on history and geography, time and eternity, number and a state beyond number.” Find out for yourself why Stephanie Strickland’s hypertext poem, True North, won the Salt Hill hypertext prize, and the book of…
Special Live Stream Traversal of Mark Bernstein’s Those Trojan Girls
Wednesday, March 20, 2019 6:30 p.m. CET (= GMT/UTC +01:00 hour) Hof University, Germany • Institute of Information Systems (iisys) • room G111 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skp3LvJ7YtU Mark Bernstein’s hypertext narrative, Those Trojan Girls, draws its inspiration from Euripides’ tragic play, The Trojan Women, and the Victorian school novel to tell the story of loss. As its description suggests: “The school story of the 19th century ends in graduation. The school story of the 20th century ends in the dissolution of the school. This is a 21st century school story. Troy always falls, yet within the devastation we may perhaps find some scope for hope and for courage.” Those Trojan Girls was created with Storyspace 3.0…
List of Women E-Lit Artists & Scholars Featured on International Women’s Day
The Electronic Literature Lab celebrated International Women’s Day held on Friday, March 8, 2019 by calling out, on our Twitter site, the achievements of 10 women e-lit artists & scholars whose works are held in ELO’s Archives and/or The Dene Grigar Collection. We have collected the posts here in order to highlight, once again, the important contributions of these women. A special thank you goes to ELL’s Undergraduate Researcher, Kathleen Zoller, who developed the photos for these posts. Deena Larsen, “Carving in Possibilities,” from the Electronic Literature Collection 1 @ElitLab celebrates International Women’s Day by featuring American artist Deena Larsen who created such works like “Carving in Possibilities”(2001) & so…
Curiosities of the Curious Mind of Artist Alan Sondheim
This spring international artist Alan Sondheim donated his vast archives of his experimental videos, electronic literature, VR animations, sound work, and music to Electronic Literature Organization. Among the hundreds of digital files were physical artifacts of vintage radio and signaling components and rare books and manuals. “Curiosities of the Curious Mind of Artist Alan Sondheim” features some of the more interesting items from the collection. They reflect the broad intellectual interests of this media artist. Left Cabinet Top Shelf Radio Receiver, circa 1920s. The Principles Underlying Radio Communication. Radio Pamphlet No. 40. December 10, 1918. Signal Corps, U. S. Army. Washington : Government Printing Office, 1919. Hammarlund (Model “C”) Condenser. Pat.…
Celebrating Endangered Data Week with Tim McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero
Having spent the last month immersed in the mechanical pigs, Spam, utopian communes, the Star Trek Holodeck and––yes––acid from Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, I’m now turning my attention to the special Traversal taking place in celebration of Endangered Data Week: A Traversal of Tim McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1992/3. The event, hosted by Digital Scholarship Commons at the University of Victoria’s Libraries and organized by John Durno, Head of Library Systems, takes place on Friday, March 1 from 2:00-3:30 p.m. It features the BC artist performing his work in front of both an online and onsite audience on floppy disk on the…
