The Spring 2011 issue of the New River is guest-edited by Alan Bigelow.
As I edited this issue, I looked for additional places (other than Facebook, blogs, or Twitter) where new electronic writers might be. As an academic, because it was most familiar to me, I set my sights on current or recent graduates from new media or electronic literature programs. What I learned is these programs are full of talented writers and artists who are happily exploring new and exciting ways to tell a story or express a poem. They are using generative poetry, user-generated story paths, RSS feeds, social networks, and spambots. They are creating Firefox add-ons, interactive videos, phone apps, and 3D immersive environments. They are experimenting with locative media, Wikipedia as source material, and Google image searches. And they are using a hundred other ways to share their genius with the rest of us.
In including the following six works, I followed a few criteria. Since The New River is web-based, it made sense to include only web-based work. I also wanted the works to be interactive. I received many excellent submissions--some truly outstanding in their originality and inventiveness--in video, still image, wearable art, animation, and documentation of installations/performances, but they did not seem the right fit.
What I finally decided on were a combination of what I call "concept" pieces (a broad term and insufficient to fully describe the complexity of the works) and some other pieces that adhere to more traditional narrative lines.
LEA leaps into yet another bold foray, this time revolving around the world of new media poetics. Bursting at the cyber-seams, a spiffy collection of essays by myriad authors await. The proud guest editor of this edition in Tim Peterson and he’s woven together a marvelous mix of nine essays, and curated an equally exciting gallery showcasing four illuminating artist works. (Source: LEA)
Originally distributed with (or completely on?) a set of floppy disks, this special issue of the journal Perforations includes creative and critical works by many pioneering authors and scholars of electronic literature.
Introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.
The papers in this issue reveal a range of conceptions of code. The reading here is doubly satisfying, not only for the clear presentations of these engaging projects, but for the sense of code as undercurrent, the way encoding, language, and artistic expression are separate undertakings, but inescapably intertwined.
(Source: Editorial)
The idea is to break away from familiar patterns of thinking of coding as an activity that exists on its own or as a process that is detached from its produced object. Code as writing but also as writing that "works", the wiring that makes the digital object tick.
This edition reflects upon the need of techniques to approach the ongoing upheavals taking place in today's technology-driven production of (literary) art. The contributions assembled here all discuss ways of reading cultural objects created with digital media. The objects of interest are: a computer game (Soderman), a performance of a work that houses and visualizes its literary artifacts on a website - a huge database of texts by different authors (Rettberg), default settings and electronic poetics in an age of technological determinism (Heckman), literary artifacts in between book and programmable media (Vincler), story-telling in the Gulf (Lenze), and signs in a culture of mashups (Navas). In a time when cultural objects in digital culture reconfigure the reception of their addressees, it is important to develop not only a proper understanding of the impact of these ruptures on literary communication but also an interpretation of the presented moves into the scope of scholarly discussion. Such an engagement calls for what Roberto Simanowski proposes in his contribution: "digital hermeneutics."