potentiality

An interview with Scott Rettberg at the 2019 CLARIN conference, concerning the field of electronic literature. The wide-ranging interview delves into the history of field, aspects of archiving, documenting and preserving electronic literature, its implications for literary study, some individual projects such as Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, and more. The interview took place on October 1, 2019 at the 2019 CLARIN Conference in Leipzig, after Rettberg's keynote talk.

This volume examines the structure of text-based Future Narratives in the widest sense, including choose-your-own-adventure books, forking-path novels, combinatorial literature, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and alternate reality games. How 'radical' can printed Future Narratives really be, given the constraints of their media? When exactly do they not only play with the mere idea of multiple continuations, but actually stage genuine openness and potentiality? Process- rather than product-oriented, text-based Future Narratives are seen as performative and contingent systems, simulating their own emergence.

(Source: Publisher's abstract)

In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.

In this essay John Cayley reviews Nick Montfort’s #!, a book of computer generated poetry and the code that generated it. Exploring the triangle of Montfort’s programs, the machines that read them, and the output presented for human readers, Cayley situates the experience of reading and writing as intrinsically virtual, powered by its sustained potentiality, rather than its definitive comprehension. (Source: ebr)