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"Conceived by John Cage and realized through the application of programs written at Cage's request by Jim Rosenberg and Andrew Culver (1985-86), this homage to the composer Erik Satie consisted of texts (presents) by writers who knew and loved Satie's work (or who might have if they had existed in a time period thar enabled them to know it), restructured by two computer programs. The texts were written by Henry David Thoreau, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Chris Mann, Marshall McLuhan and John Cage, and also included selections from The Book of Genesis; there was also a "response" by Satie, consisting of selected quotes. One of the computer programs, MESOLIST, by Jim Rosenberg created mesostics on Satie's name and works from lines of text selected by IC a program by Andrew Culver that replicated the chance processes of the I Ching. The reordering of the texts was intended to create a global rather than linear writing. The First Meeting of the Satie Society has also been performed live; on view in electronic space (ACEN's art gallery) it becomes a work made accessible for anyone to use -- "We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use"(1). As a 'meeting' the work conjoins minds of different geographies and times, much as online communities do. The First Meeting of the Satie Society, while conceptually the work of Cage, was written through the convergence of several humans and software -- and reflects of a multiplicity of (not entirely human) voices. Cage's emphasis on the readers' use of the work points both to the importance of process (that art extends beyond its completion by the artist) and to user participation (in creating additional meanings through use)." (Source: http://www.well.com/~couey/artcom/leonardo91.html)

DREAMTIME is a component of CHAOS, a work in progress (see DISCOVER, November, 1989).  It represents the dream activity of two persons, Aloysius McIntosh and Moira daSzem, as well as a third, unspecified consciousness. (Source: readme file in download)

The story starts in 1928 with the finding of Uranium in Colo- rado, and ends in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It tells the adventures of a man, Tulse Luper, a writer and project-maker who spent his life “under lock and key” in several parts of the world and archived his life in 92 suitcases. Tuned to the author’s characteristic style, it is an encyclopedic project, but one that responds in a unique way to the stimuli of new visual languages and narrative formats. Because of this, it is accomplished in different media (a television series, numerous DVDs, movie trilogy, VJing performance, web site, online game, a library of 92 books, various theater events and exhibitions).

(Description from Giselle Beiguelman, "The Reader, the Player and the Executable Poetics: Towards a Literature Beyond the Book")

Anipoems is a series of kinetic poetry making use of animated gifs.

Screen is an alternative literary game created in the "Cave," a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins with reading and listening. Texts, presenting moments of memory as a virtual experience, appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that does not settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster; struck words don't always return to where they came from; and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. (Source: authors' description.)

Experimental film with kinetic typography and analog filtering techniques produced by Lye in the 1930s.

Arguably the first work of electronic literature, this 1952 program used Alan Turing's random number generator to create combinatory love letters on the Manchester Mark I computer. While the output may not be of high literary quality, Strachey discovered and implemented the basic the basic structures of combinatory literature, at a very early point in history.

in absentia is a site-specific web-based writing project which addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, where the author lived for seventeen years. J. R. Carpenter writes, "Faced with imminent eviction, I began to write as if I was no longer there, about a Mile End that was no longer there. I manipulated the Google Maps API to populated "real" satellite images of my neighbourhood with "fictional" characters and events. in absentia is a web "site" haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. in absentia was created with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. It was presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal. It launched June 24, 2008. New stories were added over the summer, in English and French. A closing party was held in conjunction with the launch of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, (conundrum press), at Sky Blue Door, November 7, 2008"

Entre Ville was commissioned in 2006 by OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montréal, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal. J. R. Carpenter writes: "Although I had lived in Montréal for 15 years at the time of the commission, Entre Ville was my first major work about my adopted city. It took me that long to learn the vocabulary. I don’t mean French, or Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Yiddish or any of the other languages spoken in my neighbourhood. I refer, rather, to a visual, tactile, aural, sensorial vocabulary. My home office window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards, gardens and alleyways. Daily my dog and I walk through this interior city sniffing out stories. Poetry is not hard to find between the long lines of peeling-paint fences plastered with notices, spray painted with bright abstractions and draped with trailing vines. Entre Ville is web-based heat-wave poem presented in the vernacular of my neighbourhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time." Entre Ville was launched at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montreal April 27, 2006.

The first work of interactive fiction was Colossal Cave Adventure. Its first iteration was developed in 1975-76 by Will Crowther, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based programmer who was part of the team that developed ARPANET, the original network infrastructure on which the Internet is based (Montfort, 1997, p. 86), and subsequently expanded by Don Woods (1977). Crowther turned his programming skills towards a game about cave exploration after his divorce in order to entertain his children when they visited him (Nelson, 2001, p. 343). Crowther had been a spelunker in his past, helping to map a network of caverns in Kentucky (Jerz, 2007). He used that experience as the basis for the network of caves described in Adventure. The game itself provided a relatively simple experience of navigation and puzzle solving. Players attempted to retrieve objects from within the cave environments, and to win by completing their collection—a kind of textual geocaching.

Crowther originally developed the program for his own kids to play, but in 1977 he posted it on an ARPANET bulletin board, where others could download it and subsequently modify it. This is an important fact and compelling to consider in the light of the evolution of the field of electronic literature. Although commercial and institutional efforts were important for the development of both interactive fiction and hypertext as forms, the real expansion of the field took place after the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web, and the most important distribution channel for electronic literature has been the network, where authors often publish their own work and enable users to experience it online or download it for free.

Crowther himself described Adventure as fairly rudimentary, “just some rather simplistic logic and a small table of known words—of course backed up by some very clever thinking," (Jerz, 2007, p. 20) but he expressed delight that many of the people who played the game thought that there was some complex AI at work enabling players to interact conversationally with the program—an effect very similar to that described by Joseph Weizenbaum when users first interacted with the chatbot ELIZA (1966), seeking privacy for their interactions with a virtual psychologist who was after all only a simple program emulating the talk therapy technique of mirroring, responding to the interactor’s input with different linguistic formulations of the same text (Weizenbaum, 1976).

Crowther’s game set out many of the elements that would become standard components of interactive fiction. The original version of Adventure could recognize 193 words, and provided players with instructions to direct it with commands of 1 or 2 words (Jerz, 2007, p. 30). The essential activity of the game is moving through space and working out some basic puzzles. Crowther did not set out to simply replicate the experience of caving, but also introduced some magical and fantastic elements. The cave is populated with adversaries such as a dwarf, a dragon, and a snake.

The most popular version of Adventure is considered to be a co-authored work by Crowther and Don Woods. After Woods downloaded Adventure from APRANET and played it, he forked the code and expanded considerably upon the original work. While he kept Crowther’s “maze of twisty little passages all alike” he also included a “maze of twisty little passages, all different.” Woods added a number of significant elements to the game, such as a pirate who appears at random to steal the treasure the player has gathered, and objects with tracked states, and a water bottle that can not only be drunk from or emptied, as in the original game, but also refilled with water or oil, and inserted a number of new puzzles. Graham Nelson highlights Crowther and Woods’s distinctly different approaches, “one intent on recreating an experienced world, the other with a really neat puzzle which ought to fit somewhere” (Nelson, 2001, p. 345). As Jerz demonstrated by actually traversing the physical cave system that Crowther explored in Kentucky, the geography of the world originally conceived by Crowther was based fairly faithfully upon his caving experiences in the Bedquilt region of Colossal Cave, while Woods expanded upon the fantastical context of the game.

(Source: Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg)