A Night at the Cybertexts

Event type
Date
Individual Organizers
Associated with another event
Address

Brown University
Providence,
United States

Short description

This electronic literary reading was arranged as short films are on a festival reel. Each of the works briefly presented in this "reel-time" event was written since DAC 2000. The authors reading came from diverse backgrounds, having begun their electronic writing endeavors in StorySpace (Jackson, Moulthrop, Strickland), on the Web (Coverley, Gillespie, Memmott, Rettberg), in cybertext poetry using HyperCard (Cayley), in commercial gaming (Swigart), and in interactive fiction forms (Montfort).

The title of the reading conflates the title of one of Robert Coover's books, A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This, with that of Espen Aarseth's Cybertext. The reading plays with some of the ideas of Robert Coover's DAC '99 address - you must remember that - exploring whether visually stunning post-hypertext electronic literature is necessarily superficial, as Hollywood films often are. The works presented revealed that a great deal of "Golden Age" crafting of literary forms and conventions remains to be done. In the vein of Cybertext, the works presented included many that think beyond the link and are not easily categorized as hypertext.

John CayleyInstrumental

M.D. CoverleyDefault Lives

William GillespieLetter to Lamont

Talan MemmottDelimited Meshings: a white paper

Nick MontfortVilladom

Stuart MoulthropMarginal Effects

Scott RettbergThe Meddlesome Passenger

Stephanie StricklandCloudberries

Rob SwigartAbout Time

Title Design byIngrid Ankerson, Poems that Go

With a welcome & introduction fromDeena Larsen

(Source: Event website, archived by Nick Montfort.)

Record Status