transition from print

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

Pedro Barbosa recalls in this interview his memories of the first studies and works of electronic literature back in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Porto. Starting from considerations about his collaborative works he makes a comparison between printed literature tradition and the age of new media focusing on the paradigmatic change of this very transitional period with live in and the differences of the creative work. Furthermore he makes an interesting statement on regard of the aesthetics of new media by comparing works of electronic literature with the oral tradition. In the end he mentions some of the milestones of electronic literature that he considers important.

With the arrival of the electronic media, the limits and possibilities for writers of prose fiction changed fundamentally. On the Internet, writers, who had had to depend on the linearity of the signifier in the printed media for the production and consumption of their fiction, explored the new patterns of signification suggested by the computer-based media. And, since the late 1990s, multimedia platforms have appeared, allowing writers to manipulate all kinds of text – video as well as audio, written as well as spoken – in an almost endless variety of ways. My paper takes a look at what happens to prose-fiction when it moves from the world of the printed book to the screen. I'm interested, first and foremost, in the work of contemporary writers who are using the multimedia platform FLASH in their attempts at "adapting" fiction already in print for the computer screen, e.g. Jeanette Winterson, or who have moved beyond hard copy fiction and are producing multimedia events instead, e.g. Alan Bigelow.