“The Emergence of Electronic Literature” exhibit includes objects and artifacts, books, computers and software, posters and ephemera documenting the rise of the field of electronic literature over the past four decades. Electronic literature includes literary works that take advantage of the context of the computer and the contemporary networked environment. This broad category of digital work includes genres such as hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, computer art installations with literary aspects, interactive fiction, novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs, poems and stories that are generated by computers, network-based collaborative writing projects, and literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. The field is essentially focused on potentially transformative uses of the computer to develop new literary genres, and the experiments that contemporary writers and artists are conducting within the new communications paradigm.
(Source: Introduction to the exhbition catalogue)