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Electronic Literature Organization

Archive-It Partner Since: Jul, 2007

Organization Type: NGOs

Organization URL: http://eliterature.org/   

Description:

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. Since its formation, the Electronic Literature Organization has worked to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach one another. Since 2006 the ELO has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.

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Title: The Jew's Daughter

URL: http://www.artic.edu/~jmorrissey/tjsd/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: "The Jew's Daughter" is an interactive, non-linear, multivalent narrative. A hypertext, but one that transforms the text (rather than just linking from one stable text to another). As soon as the reader moves the mouse over highlighted keywords (links), segments of a page replace one another fluidly. While always remaining syntactically and semantically intact, passages are replaced by a new text within a static rectangular text-space. The work's content corresponds to the unstable form: Characters, for example, are not fixed identities; they can be, by turns, contemporary and historical. The algorithmic text generation calls on readers to explore a text that changes with the addition or deletion of passages at random throughout the narrative. By placing authors and readers in direct relation to machine-generated text, this piece has helped ground debates on electronic literature. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext collaboration interactive generative text html/dhtml

URL: http://www.bareword.com/sdt/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.betweenpageandscreen.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Born Magazine

URL: http://www.bornmagazine.org/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: Founded as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in 1996, Born is dedicated to the emergence of literary media arts. The magazine provides a platform for collaboration among writers, artists, and others from diverse fields (programmers, musicians, and designers). Submissions can be sent either to the "Birthing Room" or the "Just born" section. The first category features experiments in storytelling. Teams conceive the ground rules for the work and create the final project. The "Just born" section features interpretations while providing both the original static text and the dynamic outcome - after input from the designer. Through such collaboration, a static text becomes literature created in programmable media. Born magazine is unique, in making the process available as well as the products of writingdesign collaborations. Works published quarterly. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Title: infLect

URL: http://www.canberra.edu.au/centres/inflect/index.htm

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: Australian e-journal devoted to multimedia composition and innovative writing. Showcased work brings together text, visual images, and sound. The editors have a special interest in encouraging on-the-page writers to adopt electronic and multimedia formats, and efforts are made to faciliate collaborations among writers and artists working in various disciplines. infLect is divided into volumes, but work appears continuously as it is received and accepted. Work is selected by invitation only. The not-for-profit journal was founded in 2004 and is based in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Title: New River Journal

URL: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: Presenting works of electronic literature along with artist biographies, New River publishes twice a year (December and May, since 1996). One of the issues is managed and edited by grad students from Virginia Tech's MFA Creative Writing Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext digital writing electronic literature fiction html flash journal reviews poetry art

Title: Marginalia in the Libary of Babel

URL: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Fall/marino/index.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: A metafiction written in annotated web pages, this tale follows one narrator's browsing history and reflections on the content he encounters. The tale begins with a meditation on Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" but soon moves into despair at our inability to leave, as Marino puts it: "a meaningful mark on the Internet." But this work makes the Web notable by making use of Web 2.0 features: Social Bookmarking, that allows Internet users to store, share and retrieve visited Webpages. The work uses pages from the Internet for its palette and invites readers to add their own annotations and bookmarks. Adding their own layer of meta-narrative, readers create collaborative Web-Travelogues by leaving a bookmark as a footnote. Marginalia has an enormous history that long predates contemporary footnoting practice. Thus, Marino's work is digitally following the genre of annotation fiction. He asserts: "why not turn the web into a means of characterization, to turn web reading practices themselves into ways of examining the ergodic, interiority of our characters, or to stitch together tales of paranoia in the way that various Alternate Reality Games have." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   web-annotation metafiction java

Title: Roulette

URL: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/nrjguest/howe/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: "Roulette" is a language game for readers, a single work that can be read in roughly 64,000 ways. The lines of the poem shift every time you interact with one of the three lines of the poem. By clicking and holding a block for a few moments, the reader can activate a change in the text. Only one line of the poem changes at a time, so the two stable lines give a context for the altered one, a background against which alternative meanings are generated. Those other lines can then be altered in turn. The work appears clothed in an endless night sky that foregrounds rotating, colorful cubic containers, each one containing smaller rotating cubes. From there, from out of the cubes, the word emerges along with background music that calls to mind a night out at the casino. The poetic content concerns philosophical questions concerning life, relationships, and language, and at times seems to generate a meta-commentary on randomness and the work itself. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Title: The Mandrake Vehicles

URL: http://www.conduit.org/online/buchanan/buchanan.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: This Flash-based creation encompasses a series of 3 prose poems that gradually dissolve (in animated sequences) to reveal poems "hidden" within them. Each of three initial block texts can be read sequentially; however, the essence of this piece is the way letters fly from those initial texts to reveal the hidden poems. Each of these three initial texts have two poems "embedded" in them. At first, the remaining letters remain in place, like the buildings that survived the earthquake. On subsequent pages, these characters close ranks to form the words of the embedded poems. Additionally, each surviving letter casts off versions of itself which fall down the surface of the poem, colliding with other cast-off versions and forming alternate unused words which stack up in a heap below the poem. Thematically, the pieces bring together the "famous occult associations of the European mandrake" with the American one (mayapple). The poems play with the rhizomatic nature of roots and rhizomes of literary allusions. Readers cannot uproot these mandrakes without being caught in the underground tangle of sex, death, and renewal. Entry drafted by: Mark C. Marino

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URL: http://www.crissxross.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.deenalarsen.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Disappearing Rain

URL: http://www.deenalarsen.net/rain/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: The only trace left of Anna, a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, is an open internet connection in the computer in her neatly furnished dorm room. Deena Larsen invites readers to join four generations of a Japanese-American family as they search for Anna and discover credit card conspiracies, ancient family truths, waterfalls that pour out of televisions, and the terrifying power of the web. The detective story unwinds, one link at a time, but even as readers explore Anna's disappearance, Larsen also orchestrates our own disappearance in the virtual reality of the internet. Hypertext links lead the reader to relevant url's on the web for actual companies and institutions (e.g., the Sheraton Hotel, or commonly encountered web pages (e.g., "Object not found"). As these real world links increasingly turn to errors, our search for Anna seems as elusive as the desire to track the Internet's ephemera. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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URL: http://www.desvirtual.com/thebook/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Dichtung Digital

URL: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

Description: Journal on digital aesthetics. Dichtung Digital features articles by artists as well as scholars discussing theories and works of digital literature and art. It was founded in 1999 and contained 36 issues (with each approximately ten contributions) by end of 2007. The site provides a newsletter with short descriptions of all new contributions as well as an index of all contributions and contributors. ISSN number: 1617-6901. This is an archived version before the magazine moved to a new server. Last date accessible: July 27th. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   theory hypertext critical writing game narratives journal collaborative writings interfiction research interviews reviews digital aesthetics conference reports

Title: Digital Humanities Quarterly

URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

Description: Digital Humanities Quarterly is an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. Founded in 2007 and published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations the journal provides scholarly articles, editorials, and provocative opinion pieces. Distinct is the number of reviews provided that include not only recensions of books but also reviews of new media art installations, web sites, as well as digital humanities systems and tools. ISSN number: 1938-4122. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   Journal critical essays interviews reviews scholarly essays digital aesthetics conference reports

URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

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Title: Dreaming Methods

URL: http://www.dreamingmethods.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: Dreaming Methods projects combine writing with multimedia and web-based technology. All works require Flash Player to view, some pages are only available to subscribers (subscription is free). The collection of works contains exclusive new digital fiction, galleries, critical articles on digital literature and interviews. "Writing and essays" is a section with material discussing the work featured on the Site; with explanations on how it developed and what it might mean. Also, Campbell, the editor of the page as well as users discuss showcased works in an active exhange of thoughts in the discussion forum. E-lit submissions are welcome. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   flash hypermedia audio interactive essays Graphics interviews kinetic text Visual poetry or Narrative

Title: Drunken Boat

URL: http://www.drunkenboat.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: The international web journal Drunken Boat publishes electronic literature and new media art; issue #8 (2006) features over 125 new media contributions of poetry, prose, photography, video, web art and sound along with artists information and an archive. Dossiers and special folios on e.g. the Canadian Strange and Oulipo are presented in elaborated analysis and give important introductions to these subjects. The journal holds an annual Panliterary Award and has appeared annually since 2000. ISSN: 1537-2812. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   net art sound art fiction journal video poetry nonfiction

URL: http://www.eastgate.com/Kokura/Welcome.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: l0ve0ne

URL: http://www.eastgate.com/malloy/welcome.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: l0ve0ne is a hypertext of 129 lexias and was the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop. The text is the diary of a hacker and WebMOO aficionado, Gweneth, and recounts her relationship with a German hacker named Gunter. The text explores the possibilities of emotional, sexual, and even human relationships in a world augmented by and through mediated computer technologies. In reading Gweneth's experiences as she travels across the United States and Europe with and looking for Gunter--who might be posing as his own cousin, Stefan, and consequently remains an unstable and mysterious figure throughout the text--one is reminded of Thomas Pynchon's novel V. Even more like V. herself, however, is the character Aimee. She first appears (depending on the order in which you read the text) as a non-player character (NPC)in a game being designed by the German hacker collective Schinkenbrotchen. Surprisingly, Gweneth later meets Aimee in the flesh and learns that she might have stolen Gunter/Stefan away from Gweneth. The indeterminacy of these characters, the unending search for them, as well as the machine-augmented bodies and sexuality of the characters seems to descend from Pynchon's frequent concerns. One of the first hypertexts written for the World Wide Web, l0ve0ne consists of white text against a black, blue, green, or red background; the black background is most frequent. The links are not words within the text but are rather underscored gaps that appear within the passages. The text can be read with or without frames, and the choice determines with which lexia the text opens. l0ve0ne's last lexia, "reset," directs the reader to another Malloy hypertext, The Roar of Destiny Emanated from the Refrigerator. Entry drafted by: Brian Croxall

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Subject:   hypertext fiction html/dhtml cyberculture webfiction codework

Title: Electronic Book Review

URL: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

Description: Combining elements of graphic design, database programming, and scholarly editing, The Electronic Book Review (ebr) participates in the media developments it critiques. The journal has been in continuous publication since 1994 - as numbered 'issues' up to the year 2001. At that time, the database (and its capacity to remix content from the archive and from other sites) allowed editors to update the site continuously. Content is not presented under one fixed category, but can be gathered under various threads depending on how each essay is tagged. Entry drafted by Joseph Tabbi and Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   systems theory critical ecology writingdesign webarts theory hypertext criticism electropoetics digital writing media discourse theory critical writing fictions present

Title: Electronic Literature Organization

URL: http://www.eliterature.org/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

Description: The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. Since its formation, the Electronic Literature Organization has worked to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach one another. The ELO's main site features an archive of news about the field and information about the organization and its activities. Entry drafted by: Scott Rettberg

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Subject:   context Events Organization News

Title: Epímone

URL: http://www.epimone.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: A collection of e-poetry and visual art gathered from 2002 until 2004. The featured works are born-digital, using software and programming to create an interface where poetry and new media come together. Through such integrations of image, sound, and text, Calvo and Valdeolmillos wish to stress the idea of poetics as a form of "re-creation." In this sense, they offer an electronic materialisation of the rhetoric figure that implies the repitition of the same: Epimone. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext Net Art Animation/Kinetic Interactive Fiction Multilingual or Non-English Generative Text Visual poetry or Narrative video Poetry

URL: http://www.erikloyer.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.flyingpuppet.com/shock/dervish.htm

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: FrAme Journal of Culture and Technology

URL: http://www.framejournal.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

Description: From 1999-2004 the frAme Journal of Culture & Technology was published by the trAce Online Writing Centre at The Nottingham Trent University, England. Twice a year frAme published creative work and critical commentary on new media writing with contributions by artists and researchers dealing with digital culture. ISSN number: 1470-2134. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext criticism Journal Flash poetry fiction essays interviews html/dhtml cyberculture

URL: http://www.gender-f.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: GRAMMATRON

URL: http://www.grammatron.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Inspired by Derrida's "Of Grammatology", Mark Amerika experiments in GRAMMATRON with narrative form in a networked environment. Amerika retells the Jewish Golem myth by adapting it into the culture of programmable media and remixes several genres of text into the story's hybridized style including metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk, and conceptual works affiliated with the Art+Language group. Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story introduces readers to Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who created Grammatron, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (like in the original myth) but with forbidden data -- a specially coded Nanoscript -- the creature becomes a digital being that "contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings." The Grammatron is the personification of the Golem which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. In a number of literary adaptations and works, various characterizations of the Golem and its environment are depicted. With GRAMMATRON, however, Mark Amerika creates a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in the electrosphere. Throughout the story, Abe Golam searches for his "second-half," a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and the reader through a multi-linear textscape (the Grammatron writing machine) where they search for "the missing link" that will enable them to port to another dimension of "digital being" the story refers to as Genesis Rising. The project consists of over 1100 (partly randomized) text elements and thousands of links. It comes with animated and still life images, an eerie background soundtrack, and audio-files that sometimes provide a spoken meta-commentary on the work itself. The work consists of different text-layers the user is free to choose from including a theoretical hypertextual essay titled "Hypertextual Consciousness," the animated text "Interfacing," and the main hypertext "Abe Golam." GRAMMATRON (1997) was initially received as one of the first major works of Net art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. It was the first work in Amerika's Net art trilogy and was followed by PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002). Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext animated text

Title: Zaira, City of Memories

URL: http://www.haveatrip.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: "Zaira, City of Memories", by Gökçen Ergüven, is a Flash-based hypertext loosely inspired by Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities". The piece combines interactive visual imagery derived from photographs of the urban settings to which the piece refers with brief descriptive passages, aphoristic statements, and poetic musings. The overall structure is organized around a map-like navigation tool which allows readers to follow the text along forking paths, reminiscent of the subway interface of Geoff Ryman’s "253". Unlike Ryman’s hypertext novel, Ergüven’s work follows a single narrative perspective, but does so across the space of three different cities and temporal frames: Ankara (the capital of Turkey, where, according to the author’s abstract, Ergüven was born), Istanbul (where the author lives), and London (where the author would like to live). Zaira is the imaginary city where the past of memory, the present of being, and the desire for the future coexist. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman

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Subject:   antecedent calvino hyperbook hypertext novel invisible cities

URL: http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

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Title: The Progressive Dinner Party

URL: http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/templates/Dinner/dinner1.htm

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: As part of the online journal Riding the Meridian, The Progressive Dinner Party invites the reader to explore thirty-nine online works by women as part of a culinary reading journey through eight different countries and four continents: Cocktails from Australia, Hors d’oeuvres from Europe, Salad from Canada, Fish from the Coasts, Entrée from the US Heartland, Dessert from the Tropics and Brandy and Coffee from New York. The website offers these tempting culinary trajectories for a transnational hypertextual and hypermedial reading experience (playing on the double-meaning of ‘menu’), as well as takes the reader through a hypertextual world map and to a virtual table, which all become an indexical transit zone for a computer-based reading journey from one electronic region of the world to another. A commentary on the collection is provided by N. Katherine Hayles and Talan Memmott. Entry drafted by: Martina Pfeiler

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URL: http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/free.htm

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/transliteracy/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

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Title: HyperRhiz: New Media Cultures

URL: http://www.hyperrhiz.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: In close affiliation with Rhizomes, a parent journal of HyperRhiz, this Site hosts experimental web-based projects. HyperRhiz also provides a forum for the presentation of electronic installations, games, and performances through the use of archival video, photo, and text documentation. It is a peer-reviewed online journal of net art and electronic literature that is published twice-yearly. The journal features an integrated weblog for ongoing news of interest, an online forum for teachers of electronic literature, and a wiki for experimental writing. These features provide a forum for scholars and practitioners of new media culture. The editor's interest lies "in the genres of electronic discourse, and how these formats might affect the expression of complex discourses within new media." HyperRhiz welcomes submissions of net-ready art projects, electronic literature works, and review essays. As the journal's name suggests, works written in the spirit of Deleuzian approaches are welcomed but not required. ISSN: 1555-9351. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext context reviews critical essays online forum video

URL: http://www.impermanenceagent.org/agent/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Inanimate Alice

URL: http://www.inanimatealice.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: A multimedia online novel in three episodes set in China, Italy, and Russia, featuring a girl growing up in the 21st century. The episodes are part comic book, part animation, and part film, in a style intended to suggest Alice's developing career as an animator. Reader participation and interactivity increase as the series progresses, reflecting Alice's engagement and influence in her environment as she grows older. Episodes become more complex and the reader is asked to unravel riddles which become progressively more intricate. This way, Inanimate Alice has a game-like character but it also resembles theater, the coming-of-age novel, and the graphic novel. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   flash fiction interactive Animation/Kinetic collaboration electronic music video graphic novel

Title: Gabriella Infinita

URL: http://www.javeriana.edu.co/gabriella_infinita/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Gabriella Infinita, a metamorphical work, is a lesson in the evolution of the internet. Three versions of the text are available: Novel, Hypertext and Hypermedia. In the tale, Gabriella arrives at the apartment of her lover, Frederico, the author, only to find him disappeared. In his stead, she has only his things, his writings, his clippings, his recordings. At the same time, in a parallel narrative, a group of people try to escape a building. They are trapped, moreso than they think, for they are characters in one of his stories. Since Rodríguez Ruiz made all of these versions available on the web (with commentaries), they serve as an excellent study in the forms themselves. In no way a lesson in progress, the adaptations and translations of his own tale reveal the strengths and limitations of these forms. Entry drafted by: Mark C. Marino

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URL: http://www.judisdaid.com/index.php

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Das Epos der Maschine

URL: http://www.kunst.im.internett.de/epos-der-maschine/edmdiemaschine.html#sound/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Urs Schreiber’s Java-based German Internet opus Das Epos der Maschine ("Machine Epic") epitomizes the control of the "machine" over its user both practically and (meta-) theoretically. As the title suggests, the text regards itself as a poem of epic dimensions, i.e. poetic narrative that acts as a symbol of an entire national or, as in the case of the Internet, virtual paradigm. In other words, Schreiber positions his work in the tradition of the great ethnic and religious epics (e.g. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Nibelungenlied and Milton’s Paradise Lost). By the same token, it follows in the tradition of concrete poetry, which critically and playfully reflects on language itself as well as its inextricable determination by the medium in which it appears. The Epos is a joint venture. Text and programming were done by Urs Schreiber, the graphics by Kai Jelinek and Cesare Wosko, the photographs by Claudia König, and the sound by Die with Dignity. (...) Read the entire elit work article by Astrid Ensslin at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/314

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Subject:   poetry fiction cybertext sound epic machine control multimodal narrative

URL: http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Loss of Grasp

URL: http://www.lossofgrasp.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert’s “Loss of Grasp” explores the terrain of certitude as a tension between the “grasp” and its “loss.” As the title suggests, the piece opens up the space of the grasp after its hold on things has slipped away, focusing the reader’s attention on the anxious desire experienced in loss (as opposed to the more optimistic grasp of the one who aspires towards something). The piece, created in Flash, is divided into six distinct segments, held together by a common protagonist and unified by the recurrence of slippery texts that reconfigure themselves when “touched” by reader’s mouse strokes. Following the poem’s title, readers might be reminded of an earlier literary work, Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” (1855), in which a first-person narrator, the artist Andrea del Sarto, explains, “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?” Like Browning’s work, Bouchardon and Volckaert’s “Loss of Grasp” tells of a man whose pursuit of control is ultimately frustrated in spite of his ambition. (...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Davin Heckman at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/650

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Subject:   Flash interactive poetry digital poetry

Title: Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs

URL: http://www.m.mencia.freeuk.com/birdsfla/skymove.swf

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: In Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs, a work shown as a video installation and now available as a Flash version on the Web, birds' sounds were transcribed into morphemes representing human perception of their songs. The corresponding graphemes are then animated to form the bodies of birds flying with human voices, tweaked by the computer, articulating the sounds denoted by the marks. In the complex processes of translation that the work instantiates, the human is in-mixed with nonhuman life forms to create hybrid entities that represent the conjunction of human and nonhuman ways of knowing. A reenactment of the history of literacy through different media as it moves from sounds present in the environment to written marks (orality/writing), written marks to the iconographic shapes of the animated avian bodies (writing/digital images), accompanied by the re-representation of human speech as computerized voice production (digital multimodality). Although Mencia's work can be classified as electronic literature, it is fundamentally about literacy rather than any literary form, illustrating the interrogations that the literary can undertake of the histories, contexts, and productions of literature. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek (Parts of this description are cited from "New Horizons for the Literary" by N. Katherine Hayles)

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Subject:   Flash Animation/Kinetic audio

URL: http://www.mandelbrot.fr/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: FILMTEXT 2.0

URL: http://www.markamerika.com/filmtext/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: With FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002), Mark Amerika presents a remix of philosophical inquiry on time and being, data perception and manipulation, networking culture, and writing, the final complement of his trilogy (GRAMMATRON, 1997 and PHON:E:ME, 1999). As a tourist in a visually changing landscape, the reader explores an interface that simulates a game-like environment. The user's task is to trigger cones of light that shimmer on the screen. Once activated, narrative paths unfold through animated texts, spoken-words, or videos. A central narrative construction in this work is the creation of a "Digital Thoughtographer" (DT), Amerika's personified concept character. The DT is a lens that looks like an image-capture device through which the viewer can access coded text fragments that appear as programmed scripts, images, and flickering video excerpts. Amerika uses the DT as an instrument that takes the perspective of an omniscent narrator who communicates defragmented statements to the reader/viewer: "There is only perception: the experience of seeing what is there in front of our eyes and capturing that thereness in the experiential act of perception." Mark Amerika's composition of texts is built on Raymond Federman's concepts of surfiction, critifiction, and playgiarism. The texts are digital remixes of theoretical views once expressed and assigned to known philosophers which the DT transmits without referencing sources directly. For example, the following statement resembles Barthes' questions about authorship: "Who are the ghosts in the literary machine?" Elsewhere he evokes Baudrillard, observing "Not only can there be no original, the simulacrum has now lost its punch too", "Aura is interface", "There is only perception." In the work at hand, the reader/viewer's perception blurs with facts and fiction in which Amerika's poetics of hacktivism and remixology are set into scene. Mark Amerika's trilogy ends with the continuation of what he envisoned with GRAMMATRON in 1997: "To approach the computer-mediated network environment of the World Wide Web as an experimental writing zone, one where the evolving language of new media would reflect the convergence of image-writing, sound-writing, language writing, and code writing as complementary processes . . ." (181, META/DATA). Subtitled "MetaTourism: Interior Landscapes, Digital Thoughtography", FILMTEXT 2.0 is a collaborative achievement of many artists and comes along with an ambient background soundtrack. Excerpts from the "Digital Thoughtographer" are available on the author's website at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/download.cfm/c1.pdf Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   Flash video animation collaborative audio music philosophical remix surfiction

Title: The Lair of the Marrow Monkey

URL: http://www.marrowmonkey.com/lair/index.htm/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Upon launching Erik Loyer's The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998), a web-based work of digital fiction powered by Shockwave software animation, readers not only see the opening navigation screen, but must feel their way around it. Nine circles orbit, carrousel-like, around a tower constructed with two triangles, one inverted and resting on top of the other. The sound of an eerie synthesized pulsing accompanies each rotation, which speeds up the farther away the reader moves the mouse. A tiny number appears at the foot of each, counting - up or down depending on which way the shapes orbit - from one to nine. (...) Read the entire elit work article Dave Ciccoricco at http://directory.eliterature.org/node/618

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Subject:   poetry audio music narrative cognition consciousness digital fiction interactive motion graphics interior monologue jazz letters memory mind poem posthuman spoken word

URL: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/future-bodies/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.motorhueso.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: JB Wock

URL: http://www.motorhueso.net/jbwock/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: JB Wock is a self-described “english-speaking blogmachine” created by poet and programmer Eugenio Tisselli. JB Wock, a PHP script, searches the web for a phrase that it “likes” (from a site that publishes notable quotations), “twists” these phrases by substituting synonyms, and publishes the results daily on its blog (which also includes a comment feature, inviting readers to respond). Tisselli includes links to the coding of the PHP script as well as a “Computer Aided Poetry” tool which allows users to alter their own phrases using the JB Wock script. The underlying script itself is an elegant feat in constraint, while the verses that it publishes daily often have an ephemeral and absurd quality, consistent with spirit of the Oulipo movement, but also gesturing towards contemporary debates over the physiological processes of human cognition and the indeterminate character of human expression. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman

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Subject:   poetry procedural constraint-based e-poetry oulipo php script

URL: http://www.narrabase.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

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URL: http://www.netpoetic.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

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URL: http://www.nokturno.org/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

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URL: http://www.nouspace.net/dene/Webpages/Media_Art.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Writing Technologies

URL: http://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/index.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

Description: Writing Technologies was launched in 2007 and is devoted to the research on the relationship between technology and textuality. The peer-reviewed journal publishes twice a year: one themed and one open issue. It offers a forum for paper submissions that examine the textual opportunities and transformations of the literary that technology enables. Emerging digital textualities will be discussed as well as new technologies of textual reproduction that restructure literary history, which transform interpretation and even transfigure the literary object itself. Also, essays on literary texts that engage thematically with technology are welcomed. ISSN: 1754-9035. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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URL: http://www.out-of-sync.com/weatherwebsite2012/project.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: p0es1s

URL: http://www.p0es1s.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: The bilingual website archives a series of exhibitions of international digital poetry and international symposia which debate the poetics of digital texts. p0es1s was held in 1992 (exhibition only), 2000, 2001 and 2004 in Germany. Abstracts of conference presentations as well as critical reviews of the discussions held at the symposia are available on the site. Its exhibited works of digital poetry are accessible in the maintained online-exhibitions or through links provided at the page. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Title: Poems that Go

URL: http://www.poemsthatgo.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: Poems that Go was an online literary journal that showcased kinetic, digital poems quarterly from 2000-2004. The journal was motivated by the question “What makes a poem a poem?” particularly when that poem is configured in digital form that goes beyond the written word by intersecting motion, sound, image, text, and code. The site features an extensive collection of Flash-based poems that display poetry to be multimodal and excitingly experimental. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   new media art Flash Animation/Kinetic critical essays aesthetics Quick Time poetry

Title: Cruising

URL: http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/spring2001/crusing-launch.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: "We wanted love" recites a voice that narrates a teenager's favorite pastime in Wisconsin, racing up and down the Main Street drag looking to make connections, wanting love. "Cruising" is a flash based poem with cinematic elements marked by a flow of images accompained by the poem text. The filmic flow suggests sights glimpsed from a train's window. A hidden code integrated into the piece lets the user control the speed, the direction, and the scale with the cursor, turning the reader into just another cruiser. The viewer moves between reading text and experiencing the flow of images but cannot exactly have both at the same time. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   flash women authors collaboration audio visual poetry or narrative poetry place cinematic

Title: Blue Company

URL: http://www.robwit.net/bluecompany2002/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Blue Company is a novel composed of email messages from Berto, a lovesick copywriter transferred to 14th Century Italy who addressed letters to his romantic correspondent in the 21st Century. People were able to subscribe to Blue Company and received email messages from Berto for a month. The novel was performed twice: once in Spring 2001 and again in Spring 2002. The 2002 performance was followed by Scott Rettberg's unauthorized continuation of the fiction. He e-mailed to many of the same Blue Company subscribers and composed "Kind of Blue." It is a sequel that re-casts the characters of Blue Company. The last letter of "Kind of Blue" was written by Rettberg and Wittig collaboratively, thus knitting the two pieces together finalizing a collaborative style of "chatmail." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   network forms collaboration visual poetry or narrative email narrative

Title: Jason Nelson: Net Art/Digital Poetics

URL: http://www.secrettechnology.com/works/everything.htm

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: A visual index, with a paragraph of description, of each of Jason Nelson's work. Scrolling from the bottom of the page to the top lets one view the artist's work chronologically from 2001 to the present, offering one potential trajectory for the field development as a whole, spanning hypertexts, short fictions, poems, haikus, games, all of which are computer generated and include image in combination with multimedia elements, code, text, and sound. Browsing the collection means witnessing the ways electronic literature involves readers and shows the potential for involving programming and multimedial devices and embedded text as in, for example the flash-based work titled, "this will be the end of you: play4: within within." Here, holding the mouse allows the user to move "into words" and to play with text as it emerges. Readers control the movement on the interface by holding or releasing the mouse and can thereby determine the mouse driven fly through of texts and images that float towards or away from the user. Or the work, "game, game, game and again game" which uses the a side scrolling gaming interface to navigate through a mix of poetics content and corresponding hand-drawn elements. This play, either literal or through interface serves as a metaphor of what Nelson wishes to transfer with the artwork: some scattered [imaginations, some] oddly organized fire of thoughts and incomplete ideas" or simply a comment on the internet and its nonlinearity and the new possibilities of digital poetics. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext flash generative audio animation textual instrument net art digital poetics poetry network forms combinatorial interactive visual poetry fiction appropriated texts

Title: Deep Surface

URL: http://www.smoulthrop.com/lit/ds/deepSurface.htm

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: On immersion in reading and its risks - where reading means, in this case, pointing and clicking on the work's interface and thereby diving, submerging, and even to risk drowning in the literary pool. The work opens with a simple proposition: "what if the pages of a book - or more accurately, the SO_CALLED PAGES OF THE WEB - were made from some pliable fluid, like water, so that we could dive gradually from one plane of presentation to the next?" The reader is presented with a structure for setting up dive points on the reading interface. At these points, the reader may hover, move to another point, or else move up or down to earn points for a successful reading approach. This kind of imersion through clicking, chosing, and wandering might be thought closer to a game than a literary text, although we have to know something about the developing text to know how to play, how "to breathe," and especially how to read inside this textual immersion. An original take on the peculiarity of electronic textuality, Deep Surface is perhaps best regarded as a textual instrument. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   Flash Animation/Kinetic textual instrument audio interactive Graphics synthetic voices

URL: http://www.springgunpress.com/journal

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

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Title: Frequently Asked Questions about "Hypertext"

URL: http://www.stanford.edu/~holeton/hypertext/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Like Nabokov in Pale Fire, Holeton presents a metafictional parodic exegesis on the academic discourse of early hypertext criticism. Designed in the form of a hypertextual FAQ webpage document, Holeton's short fiction emanates from a poem composed of anagrams of the word "hypertext". Clicking on links produces tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the fictional poem along with perspectives on Language Poetry, cultural studies, feminism, and transgender studies. Nine answers to frequently asked questions offer up "the story with the fan fiction and the double murder." Entry drafted by: Patrricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext network forms fiction html/dhtml parody/satire

URL: http://www.stephaniestrickland.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.studiocleo.com/cauldron/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

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URL: http://www.studiocleo.com/projects/meridian/crimson/crimson1.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Sunshine 69

URL: http://www.sunshine69.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: In the Web's first hypertext novel Bobby Rabyd [Robert Arellano] explores the pop-cultural shadow-side of 1969 -- from the moon landing to the Manson murders, from a Vietnam veteran's PTSD to a rock star's idolatry, from the love-in at Woodstock to the murder at Altamont -- by relating intermixed stories and emphazising graphics and music. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext graphic audio fiction html historical novel

URL: http://www.talanmemmott.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Shadows Never Sleep

URL: http://www.technekai.com/shadow/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Shadows Never Sleep is the final story in a series of narratives written by Aya Karpinska, each exploring different aspects of reading using digital media. As with the prior works in the series, Shadows Never Sleep is evocative of children's stories and folk tales. The work is designed to make use of the iPhone as a storytelling platform. Rather than turning pages or selecting paths through the narrative, readers "zoom" into the story revealing new images and text. Shadows Never Sleep is divided into three "pages," each containing more panels than the prior, 1, 8, and 64 respectively. The simple black and white images are interposed with minimal text, evoking the play of light and dark, and the anthropomorphization of shadows that constitute the subject of this work. Entry drafted by: Dave Parry

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Subject:   interactive children`s stories zoom-narrative iphone picture-story classic folk tale

URL: http://www.technorhetoric.net/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

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URL: http://www.teleportacia.org/war/war.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.thebluemoon.com/hypermedia.shtml

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

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Title: Turbulence

URL: http://www.turbulence.org/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: Turbulence, a project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. has commissioned 140 networked art works and hosted more than 20 distributed, real-time, multilocation performance events since 1996. An archive of these projects, including many with a strong literary focus, is maintained on the site. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   institutions organization net art interviews network forms

URL: http://www.turbulence.org/Works/empty/index.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.turbulence.org/studios/zellen/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: The Iowa Review Web

URL: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/tirwebhome.htm

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: The journal Iowa Review Web started to publish electronic writing in 1999. It includes - along with electronic literature - other varieties of experimental writing and art, author interviews, critical articles, and essays. ISSN number: 1541-972X. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   theory hypertext criticism essays fiction literary journal interviews reviews poetry art

Title: Unknown Territories: Voyage Into The Unknown

URL: http://www.unknownterritories.org/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: "Voyage into the Unknown" by Roderick Coover is an historical non-fiction hypertext about the first geographic expedition down the Colorado River in 1869. The three-month journey was led by John Wesley Powell who, with his eight fellow boatmen, departed from Green River City in northern Utah towards the Gulf of California. Coover investigates in the question of how we come to know and imagine an "unknown territory" and provides the answer with the navigational technique he applies in his work: an interactive panoramic environment with a digitally re-worked map of the journey, in which the user navigates though the desert landscape using a seamless, horizontally scrolling interface. The reader, who takes the perspective of crew member George Bradley, faces an unknown literary space he can choose to explore in several different ways. He can either use red arrows to move back and forth within the landscape or use the "key" numbered from one to twenty that recalls a chapter-like navigation. In order to "read the unknown territory", the user is forced to explore the map that is marked with points of interest. These markers (abbreviations that are explained in an introductory agenda at the beginning of the piece) work like hyperlinks that, once activated, name places passed, people the group met or events they experienced. A diary-like narrative unfolds in short excerpts of texts that reveal what happend when the crew was declared dead and how they managed to survive in "the darkest hour" when subsistences decreased each day. The narrative is contested with researched facts that interwine with actual diary accounts and works by John Wesley Powell, along with additional publications by other crew members (George Bradley, John Sumner, and Frederick Dellenbaugh). Coover also integrates primary visual works by E.O. Beaman, John Hillers, and Thomas Moran with new and original writing, artwork, and interactive devices. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext Flash nonfiction historical

Title: Seattle Drift

URL: http://www.vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDrift.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Jim Andrews’ “Seattle Drift” is a play on motion and stasis, surface and depth. Its initially simple presentation consists of a self-described “bad text,” a subversive poem that moves and stutters around the screen when given the instruction to do so. A series of simple controls written in Dynamic HTML allows a user to guide its movement: one is given the option to “do” the text (which makes it drift around the screen), “stop” it (which freezes the letters mid-drift), or “discipline” it (which returns the letters to their original position). Stopping and starting the text allows the user to create new linguistic and visual configurations for the poem, and this flexibility is the cause of the text’s status as “bad”—it “used to be a poem, but drifted from the scene.” The poem dares its user with a come-on—“I just want you to do me”—that complicates the supposed transparency and stasis of the traditional written word, and makes the user an accomplice in this transformation. The poem itself has the experimental, minimalist quality that characterizes much of mid-90s net art, exploring the role of particular code functions in the construction of Web aesthetics while also playing with the code’s distance from (and closeness to) the surface of the Web browser. An Easter egg awaits those curious enough to explore the source code. Entry drafted by: Rob Schoenbeck

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Subject:   poetry animation html/dhtml

Title: Enigma n

URL: http://www.vispo.com/animisms/enigman/meaning.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Beginning with the provocative epigram by Phyllis Web, “The world is round. It moves in circles,” which gives way to a minimal interface with the word “meaning” placed in the center of a black screen, Jim Andrews’ “Enigma n” is a densely packaged experiment in the potency of language. With a click of the mouse, the reader can “Prod,” “Stir,” and “Tame” the word, causing the letters to swirl chaotically around no particular center. After all the options have been selected, the reader is permitted to restore order to the word by clicking “Spell.” Conceptually, the temporal sequence (epigram, the assertion of “meaning,” the reader’s acts of disruption, culminating in a restoration of order) might be interpreted as a parable of communication, from sender to receiver. As an experience of reading, the attentive mind will seize upon the various anagrams that arrange themselves chaotically, making sense wherever it is suggested by juxtaposition. However, Andrews’ piece does not simply end with the anti-climactic, almost jarring, return to order. The intrepid reader will quickly move to prod, stir, and tame the text again, and will be rewarded with a fifth option, “0/1,” which freezes the swirling letters in space. Another click on “0/1” opens up another option “Colour,” which invites further exploration leading to a reward at the end. In its entirety, “Enigma n” is an extraordinary and deceptively simple work that offers rich rewards for those who take the time to play with it. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman

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Subject:   poetry animation html/dhtml visual poetry

Title: First Screening

URL: http://www.vispo.com/bp/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Canadian poet bpNichol used an Apple IIe computer and the Apple BASIC programming language to create First Screening, one of the earliest collections of kinetic computer poems, in 1983-1984. The twelve poems in First Screening soundlessly move across a black computer screen and so the work both positions itself halfway between film and sound/concrete poetry and also as a self-conscious (mis-)use of the filmic medium for poetry. In First Screening it also appears as though Nichol - writing at the very beginning of the era of the PC - understands the ease with which the digital computer can efface the body. For example, midway through the screening, the reader/viewer is introduced to “ANY OF YOUR LIP: a silent sound poem for Sean O’Huigin” - the title alone gestures to the absent presence of the body. Once the poem begins, we see/read the simple alternation between “MOUTH” and “mouth,” “myth” and “MOUTH,” “math” and “MOUTH,” “mate” and “MOUTH,” “maze” and “MOUTH,” “amaze” and “MOUTH”, and then the alternation between “ing”, “amaze,” and “MOUTH” which closes with the repeated flashing of “ing” and, finally, “MOUTH.” While the poem is perhaps silent because of the technological limitations of Nichol’s time, looking back on “ANY OF YOUR LIP” it is noticeable how this paradoxical silent sound poem draws attention to its silence at the same time as it enacts and perhaps even encourages readerly interactivity. Especially with the repeated flashing of “ing” at the end of the poem, a verb-ending that signals generalized or uncompleted action, “ANY OF YOUR LIP” invites readers to sound out or to “mouth” the words at the same time as they also try to make sense of the connections between the words as they flash across the screen. While poems in First Screening are not interactive in the sense that we’ve been accustomed to finding on the Internet, they show us another iteration of an expanded sense of interactivity that does not depend on the hypertext link. Entry drafted by: Lori Emerson

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Subject:   Animation/Kinetic kinetic text

URL: http://www.vispo.com/guests/DanWaber/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: human-mind-machine

URL: http://www.vispo.com/jhave/SKETCHES/mind/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Jhave Johnston’s “human-mind-machine” is comprised of three chief components. The most obvious of these are the animated, three-dimensional images of the words in the poems’ title: “human,” “mind,” and “machine” (rendered using Autodesk’s Mudbox software). These three terms, which serve as the piece’s thematic backdrop, hover in the center of the screen, moving, morphing, and mutating to the palpitating, ambient loops that serve as the second, but perhaps most innovative, component of Johnston’s piece. Below the three-dimensional images, lines of text appear, in a variety of fonts, and change in synchronization with the cardial thrumming of Johnston’s soundtrack. In terms of its content, “human-mind-machine” explores consciousness and its competing characterizations as organic and mechanical, patterned and random, individual and collective. Especially powerful is its depiction of life in an apartment building, where the smell of cooking onions by an unseen neighbor imposes upon the speaker’s senses, pointing to a visceral intimacy outside of language. The speaker explains, “We know each other well. breathing and farting in the same tight pool. Sharing the vectors of savage necessity.” The poet captures the subjective character of daily life while rendering this primal experience with a twinge of determinism. The irony, of course, rests in the underlying programming feat of Johnston’s Sound Seeker application, which he describes as an “online real-time beat-synchronized poem animator.” The result is a delightfully chaotic instance of individual expression grafted to a patterned, structured format. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman

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Subject:   Flash animation visual poetry 3D sound seeker

URL: http://www.vispo.com/uribe/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/szyalski/index.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/szyhalski/index.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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URL: http://www.waxweb.org/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

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Title: Revelations of Secret Surveillance

URL: http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/gunterandgwen/titlepage.html

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Revelations of Secret Surveillance weaves family history, fictional narrative and documentary material together in the story of German video artist Gunter and American writer Gwen. Spurred on by the discovery of a poem Gunter’s grandmother wrote in Nürnberg in 1933, they begin to explore past and present covert systems of surveillance and social control. Most of the characters in the narrative are recognizable from Malloy’s other work as is the minimalist visual layout of the epic composition, which is divided into preludes, interludes and cantos. The piece is composed as a hypertext in which the individual lexias work as independent entities. They can either be read sequentially by following the progression of the narrative (pressing the blue bar below the text), or the reading can branch out through the links (placed to the left of the interface). In this way an opaque, poetic universe is created, which questions causal relations as well as the probability of chance occurrences. The composition of the piece thus forms its own layer of reflection on the theme of covert surveillance and control. Entry drafted by: Kristin Veel

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Subject:   hypertext control epic surveillance

Title: Uncle Roger

URL: http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/uncleroger/partytop.html/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Uncle Roger by Judy Malloy first appeared from 1986-1987, placing it among the first generation of hypertexts produced on disks - contemporaneous with the earliest versions of Michael Joyce’s "afternoon: a story." The current (2003) revised web-version attempts to keep the original hypertext layout, design, and interaction. The work consists of a series of text nodes, connected via hyperlinks on words and icons. The node texts form a longer narrative in three parts: “A Party in Woodside,” “The Blue Notebook,” “Terminals.” The three sections, or "files" as the author calls them, intertwine personal recollections with descriptions of a pre-Internet, pre-PC age in California. The narrator, Jenny, serves as a focal point. The title figure “Uncle Roger” is Jenny’s uncle, an eccentric semiconductor market analyst, and the Silicon Valley culture and chip industry form the narrative backdrop. The stories bring together pieces of conversation at a California party with Jenny’s memories. In classic hyperfiction fashion, the reader chooses a path through the nodes by clicking on linked words or images. For instance, the section called “Terminals” features a keyboard-like set of icons that function as a navigational tool for accessing the separate story sections. Entry drafted by: Maria Engberg

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URL: http://www.well.com/~jmalloy/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Context

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Title: Faith

URL: http://www.wordcircuits.com/faith/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: In this work of kinetic concrete poetry the interface serves as a stage for words directed by poet Robert Kendall. Each of the expressions used perform Kendall's interpretation of the words meaning "Faith" and resemble a specific character that differs in color, typescript, movement, and sound. The "expanding multi-verse" is a poem in five 'movements' that consists of four differently colored layers of text that are revealed one after the other by mouse clicks. Each of the sucessive layers of text is overlaid on the previous one(s), incorporating the 'old' text into the new. The new words glide into the text from various directions replacing the 'old'. Semantically, each new state engages in an argument with the previous one(s). On the level of content, the poem thematizes the relationship of "logic", "theory", and "doubt". To each of these expressions, a certain color (red, orange, brown, black) and behavior is assigned. Additionally, the five 'movements' are accompanied by music: xylophone-like sounds, melodies of a harp, spheric synthesizer vibrations which merge with the harp in the fourth movement, and in the final instance, the xylophone tones prevail. The orchestrated words performed on the screen reinforce the poem's meaning visually, auditorily, and semantically. Special to this work of concrete poetry is the dynamic use of space that make the words move: some of the words glide out of the text space, other words bend down to the right or, like the word "leap", jump into the foreground. In the end, all words fall to the ground except one: "faith". Parts of this description are cited from "The Virtual Muse. Forms and Theory of Digital Poetry" by Norbert Bachleitner published in: Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric by Eva Mueller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   Flash Animation/Kinetic poetry audio music concrete poetry

Title: Word Circuits Gallery

URL: http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: A collection of electronic literature from 1998 to 2004 which contains, as well, guides, syllabi, downloadable software, and commentary on electronic literature. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext electronic literature fiction commentary syllabi collection digital poetics poetry

Title: About Time

URL: http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/abouttime/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Rob Swigart's "About Time" is a web-based digital fiction that juxtaposes two temporally remote narrative strands. One involves an aboriginal named Mouth with a penchant for exploration and discovery; the other tells of Crockford ("Cro") de Granville, a voracious business mogul who heads the Institute for Cognitive Emergence. Mouth's present is 40,000 years before de Granville's, which is described as the "present day" but appears much more like a mildly dystopic near-future, where a pretentious and egotistical de Granville "skinny-casts" his clients to secure their popular and financial support. Mouth likewise spends his time trying to convince his dull cousin, Tuber, of a world much larger and more complex than their current way of life would allow them to grasp. Thus both Mouth and de Granville conspicuously crave knowledge, but for vastly different ends. Using Flash animation software, "About Time" incorporates both sound and images, but relies on the primacy of the text for its dramatic and aesthetic effect. Composer and performer Allen Strange is credited with the "sound design," which includes introductory music for the text as a whole, musical effects for many of the episodes, and voice-over audio for some of the interactive media elements. The subtitle of the work, "A Digital Interactive Hypertext Fiction, Two Braided Parallel Paths, A Double Helix," is a fairly accurate comment on the structural composition of the text. The navigation is organized in two ways. Each page contains a sidebar menu of links to individual narrative scenes or episodes. In addition, the body text of each episode is populated with a number of links. These links will either open other textual episodes (color-coded by blue text) or, in the de Granville strand, open small windows containing media elements that are typically images with voice-over audio (color-coded red). The result is a reading environment that accommodates a linear, hierarchical reading - from the top of each menu to the bottom - as well as the ability to traverse the lateral linkages. A further navigational element joins the two "parallel" narrative paths, effectively braiding the text into its "double helix" composition: a dynamic image sits at the foot of each sidebar menu. For "Mouth's Journey" it is a futuristic-looking glass sphere in rotation; for "The de Granville Files," it is a rather austere skin of water that ripples in perfect red spheres with the perpetual disturbance of a single droplet, against what could also be a background of screen static. This is the portal between the Mouth's world and that of Cro de Granville, and for the reader a way to not simply imagine two disparate realms but, in effect, experience them in striking and eerie proximity. This is a work about two "times" that are, on the surface, far removed, but nevertheless continually bumping up against one another. The result is a telling commentary on human nature and its "progress" through the ages refracted through the juxtaposition of the two anchoring characters, along with a commentary on a topic toward which all narratives tend - the nature of time itself. Entry drafted by: David Ciccoricco

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Subject:   Flash Animation/Kinetic fiction hypermedia animation network forms narrative

Title: The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot

URL: http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: The “Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” is a poem written by Stephanie Strickland as a score for a hypertext implementation, coded by Janet Holmes. Its images are suggestive of digital or mathematical culture, including Webcam photos, a core dump, an animated fractal, and algorithmic patterns inscribed in sand by a computer-driven steel ball. The latter images are from Jean-Pierre Hébert’s and Bruce Shapiro’s work, "Sisyphus" (1999). These images accompany the text of a love poem, a ballad of love gone wrong, or at least not entirely right, between Sand and Soot. At one level, the disjunction of image and text mirrors the difficulties of this pair. However, this discordance will spring into resonant oscillation for readers who either see or read an avatar of carbon-based chemistry in Harry Soot and silicon life in Sand. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext visual poetry interactive html women authors poetry

Title: YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES Presents

URL: http://www.yhchang.com/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works

Description: Flash poems with sound track and cinematic elements, presented as simple black text on white background flashing by in a rhythm syncopated to music, typically jazz. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   flash sound art time-based critical/philosophical electronic music Collaboration net art Multilingual or Non-English poetry parody/satire

Title: NIPP0N

URL: http://www.yhchang.com/NIPPON.html/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: NIPP0N portrays a situation in a night-club and narrates the thoughts, actions, and interactions of a group of businessmen and "working women". In this work, the narrative alternates between first and third-person points-of-view, shifting between the perspectives of the women, the men, and an omniscient narrator. A horizontal screen-division displays the text bilingually: Japanese ideograms in red against a white backdrop on the top and English presented with white letters against red beneath. The unnamed characters are depicted as archetypes: the domineering madam, the leggy, lust-inspiring singer, the man who flirts with the prostitute while praising his loyal wife and making excuses for being out rather than at home. These stories are so common that the female listeners have "HEARD THIS— KIND — ØF — STØRY— MANY — TIMES". Marc Voge and Young-hae Chang, two Seoul-based artists known as Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) usually present their works as flash-narratives that come along with a synergistic interplay of text, music, color, and animation. Music is an integral component of YHCHI's pieces as the Flash animation tends to be synced to the melodies and rhythms of the music they choose. For the work at hand, the duo used a Thelonius Monk recording titled "Japanese Folk Song" from the "Straight, No Chaser" (1967) album. Generally, NIPP0N's narrative identifies the work as revolving around the presentation and deconstruction of binaries: Displayed onscreen are the dichotomies of English/Japanese, red/white, East/West, work/leisure, male/female, or commerce/sex. Its effect is an audio-visual encounter between the languages and cultures. While the work's title is the only indication of a geographical location given, the narrative could happen in any urban setting. It is, in a sense, universal. And so might the cultural critique entailed in this work be applied universally: At the end of the night and of NIPP0N's animation, the parasitic sickness is shown to be a symptom of a larger cultural, and decidedly corporate, epidemic: "THIS— IS — AN — INDUSTRY— LØVING/ YØUR MØM". The work ends by showing that the effects of global corporate capitalism are not limited to the confines of the after-hours bar but are evident in the daytime when the streets are filled with "TØØ MANY MEN IN DARK-GREY SUITS/ HURRY TØ TAXIS,/ AND LØØK HØW MANY— HAVE —CHAUFFERS". NIPP0N exposes a situation in which "TØØ MANY MEN", too uniformly dressed, and possessing too much money spill out of bars and brothels and into a morning light. The presented narrative written by the artists is a single Flash file. It runs for 16 minutes and contains no options for reader-controlled navigation, no buttons to pause, slow, or stop the animation of text that flashes in high-speed in front of the readers eyes. Parts of this description are cited from "Reading the Code between the Words: The Role of Translation in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Nippon" by Jessica Pressman http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2007/Pressman/Pressman.htm Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   Flash music sound animated text scalable dimensions

Title: These Waves of Girls

URL: http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play, and lesbian sexuality. The piece is composed as a series of small stories, artifacts, interconnections, and meditations from the point of view of a girl (or girls) at various ages from four to twenty. Fisher's work is distinct for its hypermedia features: each text passage is illustrated by new images and therefore presents a new interface for each chunk of text, some passages are read by the author. On the level of content, the story's characters try to find and come to terms with their sexuality. Figuratively, this construction of self is mirrored in the hypertextual structure Fisher makes use of: The reader witnesses the characters' identity construction by following one link after the other, coming closer to what identity means to the stories' characters': "We've all been fifteen. I look very much the same, only at fifteen I'm a little larger, a little stronger. I'll believe anything. I tell people I believe nothing." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek

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Subject:   hypertext flash women authors audio fiction dhtml html sexuality memoir

Title: The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A.

URL: http://www.zoebeloff.com/influencing/

Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Description: Zoe Beloff’s "Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A." is flash adaptation of a multimedia installation of the same name created by Beloff in 2001. This web-enabled version combines video, text, audio, and animation to tell the story of Natalija A., a psychiatric patient who was unable to communicate except through writing. Natalija believed that she was being controlled remotely by an “influencing machine,” a mechanical model of her body created by a doctor in Berlin which could be manipulated to control her telepathically. Based on an actual 1919 account of Viennese psychoanalyst Victor Trausk, Beloff’s work contains passages from Trausk’s notebooks, simulated effects of the “diabolical machine,” surrealist footage of medical procedures, and video clips of the actual broadcast technologies that emerged during the early twentieth century to influence populations worldwide. Beloff’s piece is notable for its interface, which presents itself as a “book,” with weathered, yellow pages complete with faint traces of text bleeding through from their opposite sides. Embedded black and white videos enhance the uncanny feel of the piece, giving the “book’s” diagrams a haunting, hallucinatory mood. The audio of the piece combines soundtracks with the video clips with white noise and whispered recitations, suggesting that the mute Natalija is speaking through the book through supernatural means. The result is an atmosphere that seems faded and esoteric, preserving the enigmatic character of Natalija’s unresolved affliction, her allegation that Trausk himself was under the machine’s evil influence, and his suicide the following year. Taken as a whole, the piece might best be understood as a contemporary manifestation of the literary gothic, where facts and speculations anxiously intersect, and conspiratorial notions flourish. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman

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Subject:   video creative non-fiction gothic installation

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