critical practices

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH) that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic.

The domain of DH is typically segmented into the two seemingly disparate strands of criticism and building, with scholars either studying the synthesis between cultural expression and screens or the use of technology to make artifacts in themselves. This book regards electronic literature as fundamentally DH in that it synthesizes these two constituents. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities provides a context for the development of the field, informed by the forms and practices that have emerged throughout the DH moment, and finally, offers resources for others interested in learning more about electronic literature.

(Bloomsbury description)

This presentation focuses on curating electronic literature as a critical practice. Exhibits focusing specifically on Electronic Literature have been mounted at galleries, libraries, universities, convention spaces, and parks and other outside venues. The Electronic Literature Organization’s 2012 Media Art Show, for example, hosted exhibits in five different locations in Morgantown, including a community arts center, local gallery, the university library, a department’s conference room, and the city’s amphitheater, while the MLA 2012 and 2013 exhibits were held at the Washington State and Hynes convention centers, respectively. Exhibits of Electronic Literature are planned for U.S. Library of Congress in April 2013 and Illuminations gallery at University of Ireland Maymooth in March 2014, and in various locations in Bergen, Norway in fall 2015. This range of venues suggests a flexibility and appeal of Electronic Literature that is both scalable and broad. With these qualities in mind, the presentation will discuss questions including but not limited to:

*How is curating an exhibit of Electronic Literature different from curating other types of media/computer-based art?
*What is needed for preparing and, therefore, better educating audiences who visit Electronic Literature exhibits?
* How can we (or do we even need to) interest critics in reviewing Electronic Literature?
* What are some of the best practices we can use for mounting shows of Electronic Literature?

Limbo, released in 2010, is a puzzle platformer that features a player character who awakes in Limbo, on the edge of hell. He must traverse a world of bear traps, giant killer spiders, and spinning gears. As with any game, the player of Limbo will necessarily fail while solving the game’s puzzles; however, this game makes those failures especially painful. The player character is decapitated, impaled, and dismembered as the player attempts to solve each puzzle. The game’s monochromatic artwork, its vague storyline, and these gruesome deaths meant that Limbo, predictably, found its way into various “games as art” conversations. However, this presentation asks whether Limbo can serve as a different kind of boundary object. Given its complete lack of text and its minimalist approach to storytelling, what is the status of Limbo as a literary object? Given Katherine Hayles’ arguments that the field of electronic literature is best served by expanding its perspective to the “electronic literary” and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s research on how both games and digital storytelling can be examined in terms of their expressive processes, it is relatively uncontroversial to consider Limbo in the theoretical context of electronic literature. However, what would such an approach yield? What are the literary traits of such a game, and how might we analyze such traits while ensuring that the game’s procedural expressions and computational expressions are given their due? In short, how might we consider Limbo as having one foot in each world, videogames and the electronic literary, and what would such a consideration provide scholars in electronic literature and game studies?

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 conference site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/limbo-and-edge-liter… )