Forum

From the perspective of Library and Information Science, Belov presents an investigation into curating electronic literature in public libraries. Specifically, he addresses the "Digital Arena Electronic Literature Reading Series" produced by the University of Bergen Digital Culture Program and the Bergen Public Library.

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.

This panel explores alternative avenues for education in digital poetics and electronic literary studies. The panel pieces together problems with categorical, single discipline approaches to electronic literature, critical, cultural, and technological studies looking at the pedagogical and curricular issues associated with media-based and network forms of meaning-making, storytelling, and communication. The primary questions here are: What are the conditions under which a practitioner or scholar are considered expert in the as yet undefined field of media-based expression? And: What solutions are traditional academic institutions offering? Thinking beyond, or outside the exclusive field of electronic literature the panel examines and offers potential alternatives to traditional disciplinary scholarship and accreditation. Each panelist will offer viewpoints, curricular and structural suggestions. The panel will be divided into two sections; the first will be a performative example of an alternative avenue for media culture education, and the second will be a rigorous discussion of the issues related to teaching digital culture and electronic creative practice in single discipline, and sometimes tangential programs and departments. The panel members have been selected based on their own experience with these issues as well as their pursuit of alternatives to institutional formulas.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

Emerging media forms do not merely excite artists; they also inspire critics to develop innovative
scholarly works. For over seven years, the USC-based Vectors Journal has promoted webbased
scholarship by developing and publishing projects that utilize experimental design
interfaces, data structures, and digital authoring tools. In this presentation, Vectors’ Creative
Director Erik Loyer, Info Design Director Craig Dietrich, and 2011 Fellow Mark Marino will
present glimpses of critical works that use innovative platforms to explore their material.
Loyer will begin with a presentation that looks at several of his collaborations with scholars
to create the dynamic multimodal works of Vectors. Dietrich will follow with a look at the
new platform Scalar, a publishing platform based on Vectors’ workflows and Semantic Web
technology. Dietrich will also detail Magic, an experimental design fork of Scalar centered on
the presentation of software code. Marino will then present his Scalar piece based on the Magic
fork which analyzes a work of electronic literature, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, including
annotations of the tool’s code.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

This panel will deal with the relationship between extreme affect and electronic literature: How are pain, sex, and death _embodied_ in E-lit, virtual worlds, and textuality so that the abstract, for the reader, performer, or user, becomes empathetically embodied within hir? In other words, how can the skipping/skimming, which characterize the Net, be delayed, so that an actuality of politics and the body emerges? This panel will explore this and related issues. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

In 2009 Nick Montfort wrote a short program--first in Python and later in Javascript--that generated an infinite nature poem inspired by the stunning Taroko Gorge in Taiwan. While Montfort never explicitly released the code of “Taroko Gorge” under a free software license, it was readily available to anyone who viewed the HTML source of the poem’s web page. Lean and elegantly coded, with self-evident algorithms and a clearly demarcated word list, “Taroko Gorge” lends itself to reappropriation. Simply altering the word list (the paradigmatic axis) creates an entirely different randomly generated poem, while the underlying sentence structure (the syntagmatic axis) remains the same. Very quickly Scott Rettberg remixed the original poem, replacing its naturalistic vocabulary (“crags,” “basins,” “rocks,” “mist,” and so on) with words drawn from what Rettberg imagined to be a counterpoint to Montfort’s meditative nature scene--a garage in Toyko, cluttered with consumer objects. J.R. Carpenter followed up Rettberg’s “Tokyo Garage” in 2010 with “Gorge,” a remix that relentlessly depicts the act of devouring food, and “Whisper Wire,” a remix that haunts Montfort’s source code with strange sounds, disembodied voices and ghost whispers. In 2011 an uncoordinated series of other remixes of “Taroko Gorge” appeared: J.R. Carpenter’s “Along the Briny Beach”; Talan Memmott’s cynically nostalgic “Toy Garbage”; Eric Snodgrass’s fluxus influenced “Yoko Engorged”; Maria Engberg’s campus parody “Alone Engaged”; Mark Sample’s Star Trek tribute “Takei, George”; Flourish Klink’s erotic fanfic “Fred & George”; and Andrew Plotkin’s meta-remix “Argot Ogre, OK!”Aside from a common DNA in Montfort’s original Javascript code, these remixes share other similarities, such as the title wordplay, often referencing the original title either homonymously or alliteratively; the list of crossed-out names of previous appropriators that appears on the upper right side of the screen; and of course, the dizzying repetition with a difference of a poem that will never stand still nor ever end. Yet despite these similarities, the various remixes are palpably distinct from one another, both stylistically and thematically. This dynamic between appropriation and individuation suggests that there is much to learn from the example of “Taroko Gorge” and its remixes. To this end, this roundtable will bring together many of the authors of the “Taroko Gorge” remixes. While each author will introduce his or her work with a 1-2 minute artist’s statement, the goal of this roundtable is not to dwell on any specific variation, but to discuss the implications of this work upon the broader spheres of text generation, electronic literature, and remix culture. After a series of prompts by the session organizer (Mark Sample), the audience will be invited to join the discussion. Note that two of the participants (Carpenter and Engberg) will be presenting their artist statements via teleconferencing.

A UK-based bulletin board designed to serve as a "hub for digital writers to share ideas, resources, and discussion."

Established by Dreaming Methods in association with Bournemouth University, the New Media Writing Prize and Crissxross (award-winning digital writer Christine Wilks), the forum encourages the sharing of ideas, techniques and resources as well as general networking and discussion.

(Source: New Media Writing Forum)