Memorial for Marjorie C. Luesebrink
On November 14, the lab led the Memorial event in honor of pioneering electronic literature artist, Marjorie C. Luesebrink, or “Margie,” who wrote under the pen name M. D. Coverley. The event took place at the Tuesday Salon, hosted by Deena Larsen on behalf of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). Sixty-seven people from all over the world came to the event and many participated by sharing their stories and memories about her. Besides being a practitioner of e-lit art, Margie also served as the ELO’s second president and as a Board Member until her death. She produced two great hypertext novels, Califia (Eastgate Systems, Inc. 2000) and Egypt: The Book…
Forthcoming Events Sponsored by ELL
The Electronic Literature Lab is happy to announce several events taking place in November and beyond that are open to the public. Editathon for Women Electronic Literature Writers at the WikiConference North America Friday 11/10/2023 7 Pm To 9 Pm UTC (2 To 5 Pm EST And 11 To 1 Pm PST) Deena Larsen, Artist-in-Residence in the Electronic Literature Lab, will be working With Wikipedia experts to address issues and barriers for getting works of electronic literature into Wikipedia (crucial as AI uses Wikipedia as a main information source…) Please join in! http://www.tinyurl.com/DeenaMeet Sarah Smith, Author of King of Space, Guest Lecture Monday 11/13/2023 at 4:30 PM PST/7:30 EST…
Welcome Ben Peterson & Sydney Nguyen
The Electronic Literature Lab has added two new staff members, or “Mateys” as we call all of us in ELL: Ben Peterson and Sydney Nguyen. Like the rest of us, Ben and Sydney are affiliated with the Creative Media & Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at WSUV. Ben, who joins us as a Social Media Specialist with a strong background in video production, graduated with a DTC degree in spring 2023. Sydney, a multimedia designer serving as Junior Designer, will graduate this fall with one. Ben’s main duties focus on promoting Re-Imagined Radio across social media platforms and taking over the video editing for the…
Celebrating the Release of Bill Bly’s We Descend, The Complete Edition
Join us at the launch of Bill Bly’s We Descend, The Complete Edition on Tuesday, October 10, 2023, from 9 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PDT via Zoom. We Descend is an “artifactual novel presented as an archive of writings gathered and transmitted over a vast span of time.” Volume 1 was published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1997 on the Storyspace platform. Volume 2, released in 2014, and Volume 3 in 2023, were both produced with Tinderbox for the Web. The 2023 Complete Edition featured in the exhibition is the collection of all three volumes brought together and redesigned for the Web by the lab. The story spans four…
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
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…
