Reading

The Boston T1 Party was a hit! More than 100 people turned out and Bernie Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, accepted copies of electronic literature works on physical media to add to the library's collection. The event featured, Adam Cadre and Dirk Stratton,William Gillespie, Talan Memmott, Rob Wittig, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Scott Rettberg, M.D. Coverly, Shelley Jackson, Kurt Heintz, and Nick Montfort.

Boston Public LibraryRabb Auditorium6:30pm - 8:30pmWednesday25 April 2001Admission: free

Online writing is revolutionary - and no solitary affair. The Electronic Literature Organization presented award-winning authors reading from their projected work: Shelley Jackson's monster showed off her stitches, with the audience indicating which thread to follow. The Unknown let the audience yell out when they wanted to switch scenes. The Ed Report team offered a "press conference" about their mock government report. M.D. Coverley revealed "Hidden Places in Califia," reading the concealed beginning and ending of a story about a character the audience selects.

Adam Cadre      Photopia, 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition winner

M.D. Coverley      Califia

William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton      The Unknown, 1998 trAce/Alt-X winner

Kurt Heintz      With participants from the e-poets network

Shelley Jackson      Patchwork Girl

Talan Memmott      Lexia to Perplexia, 2000 trAce/Alt-X winner

Nick Montfort and William Gillespie      The Ed Report, 2000 trAce/Alt-X honorable mention

Noah Wardrip-Fruin      Gray Matters

Rob Wittig      tank20 Literary Studios — Blue Company

A collaborative reading at the NYU Media Research Laboratory featuring Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Stephanie Strickland, Jennifer Ley, Bill Bly, Adrienne Wurtzel, Nick Montfort and William Gillespie, Rob Wittig, and the Unknown

Poetry reading by Amaranth Borsuk, persenting Between Page and Screen, and Doménico Chiappe, reading Tierra de extracción. 

Søren Pold presented "Ink After Print" at the Bergen Public Library on Dec. 2, 2014, as part of the University of Bergen's Electronic Literature Research Group/Bergen Public Library Electronic Literature Reading Series.

'"Ink After Print" is a digital literary installation designed to make people engage with, and reflect on, the interactive qualities of digital literature in public settings such as libraries.' (PR)

The installation allows readers-users to perform, reenact and rewrite recombinant poems written by Peter-Clement Woetmann "and you" (user-reader).

Synthetic in essence and brittle in terms of longevity, digital poetry’s fluid states prevent us from considering works as being plastic. Yet since they are never completely fixed, works of digital poetry always maintain plasticity in presentation on the WWW. They exist in a state of being molded, receiving shape, made to assume many forms – often seeking qualities that depict space and form so as to appear multi-dimensionally.

C.T. Funkhouser’s lecture “On 'New Directions in Digital Poetry'” recounts the challenges and process of preparing a scholarly edition focusing on the pursuit of fully – and usefully – capturing the dynamics of this ever-changing genre. As poetry becomes a networked form, its poetics explodes and singular measurements of its pliancy resist finite definition. Recognizing plasticity as an aesthetic foundation establishes a valuable metaphor for generally qualifying the results of electronic writing to date, “On 'New Directions in Digital Poetry'” explicitly stems from Funkhouser’s experience teaching Electronic Literature courses at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Bio:

Christopher Funkhouser, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of humanities and director of the undergraduate program in professional and technical communication at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Funkhouser is the creator of a proto-anthology of hypermedia poetry and is completing his dissertation on the subject. He edited The Little Magazine Volume 21 CD-ROM, and is responsible for two on-line poetry and poetics journals: Descriptions of an Imaginary Universe and Passages. His work has recently appeared in Talisman, Hambone, and Callaloo. His hypertext POETRY WEBS was produced in conjunction with the 1996 European Media Arts Festival. Funkhouser’s contributions to ebr are both found in the Electropoetics special (ebr5): The House of Poetry...: Recent Noticings*, and Poetry@The_Millennium: A Conversation with Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris.

Funkhouser was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in spring 2005 to travel to Cyberjaya, Malaysia, where he taught a course at Multimedia University entitled “Hypermedia Writing” focusing on the history of digital writing. He also led a creative multimedia workshop, a practice in which he has been involved for more than a decade. His research focused on database programming.

(Source: UiB)

About Shelley Jackson

Shelley Jackson is the author of the virtually-canonized hypertext novel Patchwork Girl published by Eastgate. Jackson was recently selected as a Village Voice Writer on the Verge. Jackson describes herself as the lovechild of Samuel Beckett and Pippi Longstocking. On her website, ineradicablestain she writes: "Shelley Jackson was extracted from the bum leg of a water buffalo in 1963 in the Philippines and grew up complaining in Berkeley, California. Bravely overcoming a chronic pain in her phantom limb, she extracted an AB in art from Stanford and an MFA in creative writing from Brown. She has spent most of her life in used bookstores, smearing unidentified substances on the spines, and is duly obsessed with books: paper, glue, and ink.

As for ink on paper, she has left her ineradicable stain on Conjunctions, Fence, The Fetish Anthology, and many restaurant napkins. Her first book, The Melancholy of Anatomy, will be published by Anchor in January 2002. Shelley Jackson also illustrates children's books, including two of her own, The Old Woman and the Wave and the forthcoming Alchemical Dog. She lives in transit and specializes in everything."

About the respondent, Joseph Tabbi

Joseph Tabbi is the author of Postmodern Sublime (Cornell 1995) and American Autopoiesis (Minnesota, forthcoming). He edits the electronic book review, teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is at work on editions of the last fiction and collected non-fiction of William Gaddis (Viking/Penguin). His essay on Mark Amerika appeared at the Walker Art Center's phon:e:me site, a 2000 Webby Award nominee.

(Source: ELO Interactions series site)

As part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Caitlin Fisher, winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for Fiction for "These Waves of Girls" and John Cayley, winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for Poetry for "Windsound," will read from and demonstrate their work. Following the reading, they will be joined by Scott Rettberg and the Judge of the 2001 Award for Fiction, Larry McCaffery, for a discussion of their work and of the field of electronic literature.

About John Cayley and Caitlin Fisher

The winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for Poetry, London-based Anglo-Canadian poet John Cayley is a bookseller and the founding editor of the Wellsweep Press. He is widely known for his writing in networked and programmable media. He has lectured on the writing program at the University of California, San Diego and is now an Honorary Research Associate of Royal Holloway College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of Dartington College of Arts, associated with their degree-level course on Performance Writing.

The winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for Fiction, Caitlin Fisher recently completed a hypertextual dissertation in Social and Political Thought and is currently an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Cultural Studies at York University, Toronto. Fisher is a founding editor of j_spot, the Journal of Social and Political Thought and a member of the Public Access art collective. She writes with the 'Stern Writing Mistresses' in Toronto.

About the respondent, Larry McCaffery

Larry McCaffery has published numerous scholarly books and essays dealing with postmodern literature and culture including four volumes of interviews: Anything Can Happen (with Tom LeClair), Alive and Writing (with Sinda Gregory) and Across the Wounded Galaxies, and Some Other Frequency. He is the editor of the influential Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, and of After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology. McCaffery has also co-edited the FC2's Black Ice Books since 1992 with Ronald Sukenick. He is currently Professor of English at San Diego State University. McCaffery was the Judge of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for Fiction.

About the Chicago Humanities Festival

The 2001 Chicago Humanities Festival is a feast for the mind with over 130 programs packed into an annual celebration. From November 1-11, the world's most exciting writers, scholars, actors, musicians, and artists explore Words & Pictures.

(Source: ELO Interactions series site)

About Poems that Go

Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson are the co-editors of Poems That Go, an influential kinetic poetry Web site. Megan Sapnar is completing the M.A. Program in Communications, Culture and Technolog at Georgetown University. Ingrid Ankerson is completing the M.A. Program in Publications Design at the University of Baltimore.

Poems that Go exists to unite words, design, music and motion and to celebrate poetry through technology and the Internet. The Editors write that: "We are interested in exploring a new form of poetry - one that abandons the traditional approach to literature. One which expresses experience, ideas and emotions through motion graphics and animation. One which integrates these art forms to challenge the definition of poetry. One which challenges you, the new writers and artists, to discover extraordinary ways to express emotion."

About the respondent, Michelle Citron

Professor, Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at Northwestern University, Michelle Citron has made ten films and videos including Parthenogenesis, What You Take for Granted..., and Daughter Rite, a ground breaking experimental narrative about mothers and daughters, which Vincent Canby in the New York Times hailed as a "stunning achievement" Citron's films are distributed in seven countries and are in the permanent collections of over 200 universities and film schools including New York University, the Australian Film and Television School, USC, the Art Institute of Chicago, Brown University, and Yale University. Her films have been reviewed in a range of publications from Variety to Film Quarterly. Her book, Home Movies, Autobiography and Other Necessary Fictions, is published by the University of Minnesota Press. She is also the author/director of the interactive CD Rom narrative, As American As Apple Pie.

(Source: ELO Interactions site)