discussion

First proposed by Annie Abrahams and Deena Larsen at the 2019 ELO Conference in Cork, the ELO Salons initially comprised 10 online sessions on the second Tuesday of every month from February to November 2020. The sessions encompassed close readings and ensuing discussions, collaborative writing experiments, ontological examination of elit, and approaches to increasing elit accessibility and archivability. Each session has been led by a different attendee, recorded, and archived. Conceived by Deena Larsen as "almost like an extended family, which has a core group of people that participated and could function online”, the Salons have been a point of brightness in an extremely difficult year for many. 

For this proposed Virtual Engagement Event, we would like to look back on the fascinating discussions and discoveries of the last year of salons, and look forward to the next. Hosting panelists will include Salon creators Deena Larsen, Johannah Rodgers, and Caitlin Fisher, as well as various session leaders. A Salon organizer will moderate, posing questions to the hosts and attendees alike, and supplement the discussion with images and documents arising from the last year’s engagement. 

Most importantly, the current Salon participants will open the floor to future participants, seeking to build upon its first year in terms of activities and members. What more can we do with these Salons? Who else can we reach? What doors can we open, and how can we enrich our community? We have already engaged in projects increasing accessibility to elit work, exploring marginalized voices, revisiting the foundations of elit, and developing new avenues for creation and discovery of elit. We welcome discussions as to how we can evolve these interactions further, and invite all ELO members and conference attendants to join us. 

The ELO Salons have been a fun thing to look forward to, rather than another dreary required zoom meeting. We started a bit before the pandemic, promising a chance to examine issues and works, and even collaborative tools that lie at the heart of our mutual obsessions: electronic literature. This virtual engagement session will be an open working session to allow participants to reflect on the highlights of the ELO Salons and to help shape its future.

We live in a time of “fake news”... and not just “fake news” fake news for real people and real news about fake people, but fake news about fake news for fake people about fake people. So what does it mean to be “fake” in an age of accelerating information? The Congress of Fakery, a roundtable conversation on frauds, hoaxes, and other forms of informational flimflam by artists in the realm of electronic literature, aims to take up this question with a specific eye on its history, epistemology, practice, and possibilities for future fakery. Gaps we will address are: the real and the fake, the fake and the imaginary, the sender and receiver, differing cultures of reception, official and unofficial, and other rifts in the flow of information.Historical perspectives on fakery would include: discussions of the willing (and unwilling) suspension of disbelief in print traditions; hucksters, crackpots, and quacks; and various manufactured mass misconceptions. Epistemological discussions would include: discussions of authenticity and affect; what makes a fake really fake; and attempts to institutionalize speculative knowledge. Practical discussions would explore propaganda, psyops, and behavioral engineering as tools for the certification of knock-off knowledge.The most significant portion of this roundtable presentation would be a ranging conversation on the political and aesthetic possibilities in the area of synthetic knowledge production especially in an electronic environment. In the face of all this fakery, what can educators do to develop strategies for media literacy? What can activists do with the unstable conditions of post-factual societies? What does art add to the artificial?

The collaborative development of text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) has afforded writers an electronic medium for the discussion, production, and publication of e-literature. A MUD is designed to provide an immersive and interactive experience, and is achieved by the creation of a code-based structure that supports a literary text. However, when multiple contributors are involved there is a tension between the inherently fixed nature of literature and the more fluid versioning of software. In many software development environments, ownership over a work is considered to be counter-productive, whereas authorship of literature is assumed more freely and, as a means of contextual explication, is actively encouraged. MUDs must therefore function under colliding principles of authorship and ownership. The production of a large MUD’s literary text is conceived similar to the cinematic production of a film, with the lead designer of a MUD assuming the role of a ‘director’. The production and proliferation of electronic literature presents new and unique challenges to both the longitudinal administration of a MUD and to the coherence of the literary text. Cohesion of both work and text is hindered by the potentially out-dated, though still functioning, software code of earlier versions of the MUD. Further complications arise during the integration of a new literary text with the already established text of the MUD: style, grammar, language, and thematics, for example, must be uniform. A creative writer, whose intent is to produce a new literary text for a MUD, may be confronted by an already-established literature, into which his or her literary text must be incorporated. The limitations of the code base itself may likewise limit the creative scope for expression. A contributor is limited to only those interactive elements that are supported by the underlying coding architecture. Old versions of code must remain compatible with newer versions, and the opportunities for coherent revision of the entirety of creative output are limited by available developer expertise and the scope of the exercise. A MUD is structurally and creatively dynamic, yet all elements must cohere. We discuss the collaborative development of creative works within the context of software communities, and how systems such as auteur theory have difficulty in providing a theoretical framework for multi-author software projects that have creative outputs, even in those hierarchical projects where they would seem most appropriate. We outline how players in these environments encounter a rich and varied literary experience that is an amalgamation of multiple authors and styles of writing. We discuss relevant models for analysing and understanding this type of e-literature, and provide guidelines for how they can be altered to allow for a more effective application.

At the ELO conference in 2012, several authors had a discussion on the future of the ELO.

E-lit authors Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink organized a panel on the "Future of E--Lit" at the ELO 2012 conference, allowing emerging and early career authors to articulate institutional and economic, as well more familiar technological, developments that constrain and facilitate current practice. The panel papers were released in ebr in March 2014. Luesebrink and Strickland followed up with comments on the papers, offering a "progress report" on the future of the field. The individual responses are available as glosses on the essays and in full here.

In March 2014, the electronic book review (EBR) published nine short papers on the futures of electronic literature and the role of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). These papers reflect talks solicited for a special session of the 2012 ELO conference at West Virginia University, a session proposed by Marjorie Luesebrink in which emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners would offer suggestions on how to improve the ELO as it re-defined its mission in a shifting cultural, economic, and technological landscape. At Luesebrink’s request, Stephanie Strickland gathered a group to participate and moderated the discussion session. Responses ranged from the concrete to the poetic to the theoretical. Luesebrink and Strickland [L&S] respond briefly to each below, providing first the EBR capsule description of each paper and then delineating changes that have (and have not) been made by the organization in response.

A response to the preliminary results presented by Markku Eskelinen and Giovanna di Rossaio, co-authors of a report on Publishing E-Lit in Europe.

Netpoetic is a collaborative weblog exploring digital poetry and electronic literature, including contributions from about 25 authors and critics active in the field, ranging from calls for works and announcements to reviews to pedagogical and theoretical observations. This collective activity is organized by digital poet Jason Nelson.