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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Creator: Barbara Campbell
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Barry Smylie’s “1969/99” features multiple hyperlinked web pages and flash animation. When viewed in Internet Explorer, the user can reveal superimposed text by mousing over images. It is dominated by graphics and sound from popular culture of the 1960s and 1990s. In particular, “1969/99” draws heavily on the themes and images of Fail Safe (1962) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, in which machine malfunctions and humanity’s blind faith in the infallibility of technology accidentally cause a nuclear war. Burdick and Wheeler’s book was adapted for film in 1964 and for television in 2000. Created during the Y2K frenzy, “1969/99” offers a complex (and sometimes comic) cultural commentary and comparison between Cold War America and that of the Millennium. For example, one page titled "the b52s" juxtaposes images of a B-52 strategic bomber with those of the New Wave band The B-52s. The B-52s song "Meet the Flintstones" is the featured audio track on another page, "evolution," where the cartoon images of the Flintstones (1960-66) are superimposed on the cast photo of The Flintstones Movie (1994). In “beatitude,” Smylie quotes from Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “I saw the best minds of my generation,” while the soundtrack repeats “starving, hysterical, naked,” thus leaving the user to fill in the omitted portion of the line “destroyed by madness.” Entry drafted by: Crystal Alberts
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Subject: Flash, html/dhtml, audio
Creator: Barry Smylie
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
Description: A literary web journal (1998-2002) publishing hypertext and hypermedia fiction, poetry, and theory along with interviews with artists and theorists. ISSN: 1528-8102. Entry drafted by: Joseph Tabbi
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Subject: theory, hypertext, hypermedia, fiction, Critical/philosophical, literary journal, poetry, scholarly essays
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: A number of multilinear Web Fictions, Poetry and Hypermedia works: Narratives with text, image, and sound. The collection includes Coverley's "Fingerprints on Digital Glass"- eight short web stories of altered perception as well as "The Magic Millennium CyberCarpet", a story that goes backward and forward in time. The Webpage links also to works created in collaboration with other artists and to Coverley's Academic Pages that include interviews, articles, and Web-Non Fiction having to do with electronic literature. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: poetry, fiction, hypermedia, sound
Creator: Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink/ M.D. Coverley
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: In Errand, animation is used to establish links and disjunctions between images of moving objects in the natural world (e.g. frogs and butterflies) and the lexical and figural dynamics of the poem. These visual-kinetic images heighten the tensions among the meaning-mobilizing acts of "seeing an image," "watching a movement," and "reading a word"; and insofar as these works also employ cursor-activated elements, between "touching" and "reading." Errand reflects on the nature of language and of reading, and these self-reflexive elements are embedded in considerations of how protocols of reading shape our consciousness. In calling attention to gaps between "movement" and "meaning," between "reading" and "acting," Errand grounds its kinetic poetics in concerns of ethics and cultural politics. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: shockwave, women authors, animation, collaborative, interactive, visual poetry, textual instrument, kinetic text, poetry
Creator: Stephanie Strickland, M.D. Coverley
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: Academic journal of the Cyberliterature Research Team at University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal. Its goal is to publish theoretical and critical reflections about the multidiscursivities related to the advent of the digital technologies in three sections: Essays, Theses, and Projects. The journal aims at providing theoretical background suitable for the understanding of works involving automatic text generation and literary experimentalism in general. It was founded in 2006 and is being published annually. ISSN 1646-4435. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
Description: The Electronic Literature Collection is a periodical publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. Published by the Electronic Literature Organization. The publication is available both online at the ELO site and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM. The collection includes author, title, and keyword indexes. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Journal, ELO, Collection of Work
Creator: The Electronic Literature Organization
Publisher: N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland
Language: English, French
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: A poem with pictures and audio components whose words, composed and presented by Phillipe Bootz, are reworked by the computer freshly each time the piece is launched. The textual elements appear as animated letters on the surface of a shockwave based picture, whose surface (like the superimposed letters) is also changing. This textual and visual flow is accompanied by sound that seems to go in synch with the entire composition but which is, in fact, also part of the programming. Bootz addresses the work both to a reader for the multimedia components and to a "meta-reader" whose reading accomplishment can be widened by exploring the code. Bootz holds that "reading is a limited activity that is unable to give a complete knowing of the work." A translation from the French is given on a separate page, its content responds to what is seen and experienced by the reader. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: music, multilingual or Non-English, shockwave, combinatorial, generative, audio, Animation/Kinetic, Collaboration
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: John Cayley’s “windsound” is an algorithmic work presented as a 23-minute recording of a machine-generated reading of scrambled texts. The cinematic work presents a quicktime-video of white letters on a black screen, a text written by Cayley with a translation of the chinese poem “Cadence: Like a Dream” by Qin Guan (1049-1100). As a sensory letter-by-letter performance, the work sequentially replaces letters on the screen, so that what starts as illegible text becomes readable as a narrative, and then again loses meaning in a jumble of letters. Cayley calls this technique “transliteral morphing: textual morphing based on letter replacements through a sequence of nodal texts.” Sequences of text appear within up to 15 lines on the same screen, thus presenting and automatically replacing a longer text on a digitally simulated single page-a concept Judd Morrissey also applied in "The Jew´s Daughter". Unlike Morrissey’s piece, Cayley’s doesn´t allow the user to interact with the work that appears as a text-movie with ambient sound, murmurs of voices, windsound and synthetic female and male voices reading the non-readable to the viewer. With the letters, narrative perspectives also morph and switch fluidly between the lyrical-I, Christopher, Tanaka or Xiao Zhang, who appear in the story. Thus, the sentence: "‘We know,’" Tanaka had said in English/"‘Tomorrow if we meet/I will have to kill you myself/’" is, in the algorithmic process of the work, later spelled out by the I-narrator. As stated at the very end of the work, John Cayley created “windsound” in memory to Christopher Bledowski. What remains after a blackened screen and a start-over of morphing letters before they vanish conclusively, is windsound. At a certain point in the movie the text says "you have to be/to stay/silent/to hear it" and it seems like the reader has to be silent, too, listening to what he cannot understand, patiently waiting for the moment of legibility. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: poetry, appropriated texts, ambient, non-interactive, synthetic voices, algorithmic, soundscape, transliteral morphing
Creator: John Cayley
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: As the author writes in an introduction to the piece, "Lexia to Perplexia" (2001) began as an observation of the fluctuating and ever-evolving protocols and prefixes of internet technology as applied to literary hypermedia. As well, "Lexia to Perplexia" was originally meant as a critique of both the Author and User/Reader positions in relation to web-based literary content." That is, the reader will notice that in all four sections of the work – "The Process of Attachment," "Double-Funnels," "Metastrophe," and "Exe.termination" -- "Lexia to Perplexia" makes wide use of neologisms as a means of presenting, in Katherine Hayles´ words, "a set of interrelated speculations about the future (and past) of human-intelligent machine interactions, along with extensive resinscriptions of human subjectivity and the human body" (Writing Machines 49). However, the text is performed not only linguistically, but also narratively and visually. Narratively, Memmott alludes to classical literary references ranging from ancient Greek and Egyptian myth to postmodern literary theory reflecting on humans, technologies, and their collaborative agency. Visually, the work makes use of interactive features which override the source text, leading to a fragmentary reading experience. The functioning and malfunctioning of the interface itself carries as much meaning as the words and images that compose the text. As Memmott also instructs his readers to note, the "User/Reader of this piece…encounters a number of screens that appear simple upon access. As the User/Reader interacts with the presented objects -- images, textual fragments, various UI permutations -- the screens are made more." Entry drafted by: Lori Emerson
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Subject: Animation/Kinetic, textual instrument
Creator: Talan Memmott
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: A poet's playful meditation on the nature and function of letterforms in kinetic two-dimensional space. Dreamlife is a Flash animation, based on a text by the feminist literary theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, which explores the ground between classic concrete poetry, avant-garde, feminist practice, and "ambient" poetics. Stefans responded DuPlessis by using words of her text: "all I did was alphabetize the words in it and then construct shorter poems from them." The short film runs about 11 minutes and shows letters that perform their "dreams" on the screen. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, Animation/Kinetic, visual poetry, appropriated texts, ambient, non-interactive
Creator: Brian Kim Stefans
Language: Engish
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: In Dan Waber and Jason Pimble’s “I, You, We,” (2005) “The viewer is inside a kind of cube, an infinite cube that can be rotated endlessly without returning to the same view. Between I and you and we flows a river of verbs. The piece can be manipulated by clicking or dragging, or will move on its own if left still for a few moments” (Electronic Literature Collection 1). While this “infinite cube” might present something of a shock to a reader used to the conventions of print, the eponymous “characters” of the work (i.e., “I,” “You,” and “We”) are extremely suggestive in terms of perspective. Entry drafted by: Lisa Swanstrom The word “I” is ochre-colored and located at the origin of the work, which is to say the dead center of the three-dimensional “cube.” This “I” does not move, even when the reader grabs the text as instructed, and spins the cube for all it’s worth. In contrast, the word “you” is multiple, blue, and shrinks and grows in size as the cube oscillates, occupying both foreground and background, at some points even seeming to loom larger than the “I,” but always, ultimately, fading away while the “I” remains. This leaves “we” in an interesting position. Like “you,” the word “we” is multiple, occurring nearly twice as many times as the word “you” in any of its lines of distribution. The instances of “we,” however, are lighter than those of “I” and “you”; they have a light, yellow-green hue, which never achieves full saturation. Since the words come in and out of prominence according to both size and color saturation, the word “we” never appears in the foreground. The final word type to appear in “I, You, We” is not indicated at all in the title of the work, but it is what provides the link that allows us to put these titular words within syntactical relation: verbs. Verbs as various as “gallop,” “leapfrog,” “confirm,” “zig-zag,” “blossom,” “leach,” “loot,” and “oscillate” fade in and out of prominence as the processes of “I, You, We” unfold. With these links in place, the piece allows the reader to construct a seemingly infinite set of sentences: I grasp you. We repulse you. I rouse you. We fail you. By putting the “I,” “you,” and “we” into various subject positions, this piece has something to demonstrate in terms of perspective. In some important ways, the piece presses the authority of first-person perspective by showing perspectives in flux, both visually, in that the “you” and “we” words are in continuous motion, as well as syntactically, since the “river of verbs” in some cases allows the reader to re-position subjects as objects, and objects as subjects. With that said, however, the dominance of the “I” is unmistakable. While there are rows and rows of the words “you” and “we,” there is only one “I,” and because this “I” is the axis upon which all the others rotate—as objects, actions, and potential (but never fully actualized) subjects, this piece is an excellent visual abstraction of first-person perspective.
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Creator: Dan Waber, Jason Pimble
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: Promotes current discussion of reading, writing, teaching, and learning practices in a world gone digital. Papers are interested in the pedagogical possibilities of teaching Hypertext-Literature and Interactive Fiction. Contributors also address the state of electronic poetics and reflections on hypermedial reading and writing. Interviews and reviews appear on an annual basis. ISSN: 1524-6493. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Publisher: Computer Writing and Research Lab
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: Publisher for hypertext fiction, nonfiction, and poetry since 1982. Eastgate Systems publishes books about hypertext as well as tools for creating hypertexts.
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Subject: hypertext, storyspace, software, publisher, catalog
Creator: Mark Bernstein
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: The Electronic Poetry Center provides resources centered on digital and contemporary poetries, new media writing, and literary programming. It serves as a portal of electronic poetry and hosts author pages and works. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: electronic poetry, poetics, author library
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: The group blog is about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms: interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, shared virtual environments, and more. Contributors work as both theorists and developers, and are interested in authorship, design, and technology, as well as issues of interaction and reception. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, computer games, events, interactive fiction, news, interactive drama, reviews, virtual environments, poetry, blog
Creator: Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Language: English
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: overboard is an algorithmically animated work that combines borrowed text with graphic elements and sounds. The text is an adaptation of William Bradford’s account from Of Plymouth Plantation1620-1647 of an incident during the Mayflower crossing. It is a story of a man who falls overboard during a storm but catches hold of a rope and re-surfaces. The author’s adapted text is put through a process of algorithmically steered, time-based changes in which letters appear, disappear, and re-appear. These textual changes show how minute letter substitutions destabilize meaning, while simultaneously evoking other temporary and fluctuating meanings. The sounds are generated in a similar way as the words and help to create an ambient atmosphere. In overboard, the text visually reenacts the story while undermining the words’ lexical relationship until the original letters are restored and the story surfaces again. The ever-changing, ambient text functions as a visual rendering of its own linguistic message: its illegibility is readable as a symbol for the sinking man. The author explains his interest in algorithmically generated processes of textual changes as an intention “to interrogate certain relationships between the granular or atomic structures of alphabetically transcribed language and the critically or interpretatively discoverable rhetorical and aesthetic effects of literature.” (http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2-Cayley.htm) (Parts of this text were modified from "Reading Digital Arts. In-Depth-Analysis and Historic Contextualization" by Roberto Simanowski.) Entry drafted by: Maria Engberg
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Subject: kinetic text, appropriated texts, quicktime, audio, ambient, time-based, constraint-based, translation, algorithm
Creator: John Cayley, Giles Perring, Douglas Cape
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: A journal on Net Art with reference and application to electronic literature. IASL started as a print journal and now takes advantage of online network communication, publishing electronically and free of charge since 1999. As an academic forum, the journal includes both theoretical accounts and artist statements concerning Hyperfiction and Hypermedia. Descriptions of artist projects fall under three categories: "Tips," "Collected Tips," and "Short Tips." Here, one finds discussions on early experiments in electronic writing, ranging from Douglas Davis, "The World´s First Collaborative Sentence" (1994) to Talan Memmott, "Lexia to Perplexia" (2004). The journal appears in irregular intervals and has been available in English translation since August 2003. ISSN: 1612-0442. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: criticism, context, hypermedia, net art, electronic writing
Publisher: Thomas Dreher
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: ‘What if the word will not be still?’ are the opening words of Stuart Moultrop’s dynamic, meta- or anti-theoretical ‘web fiction’ Hegirascope, first released in 1995. This entry is based on an extended, visually enhanced second version, which was launched in 1997. It incorporates 175 pages and more than 700 links, which are only partially visible and controllable. According to the author himself (1997), most pages 'carry instructions that cause the browser to refresh the active window with a new page after 30 seconds. You can circumvent this by following a hypertext link, though in most cases this will just start a new half-minute timer on a fresh page.' The best starting point is, as Moulthrop suggests, to either ‘dive in’ or navigate via an index page to the most significant sequences. (...) Read the entire elit work article by Astrid Ensslin at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/498
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Subject: cybertext, postmodern, time-based, deconstruction, web fiction
Creator: Stuart Moulthrop
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
Description: A community site devoted to interactive fiction. Registration enables users to recommend, rate, and review downloadable games both freely and commercially available. Members retain their copyright of anything they wish to upload, under a Creative Commons licence (Attribution 3.0). Game details appear along with descriptive tags, and these can be used to search for other games that can be similarly described. IFDB is a collaborative place for sharing games and also for getting person-to-person recommendations. When this description was written, the database included 3084 game listings, 293 registered members and 262 member reviews. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: community, interactive fiction, games, wiki
Publisher: Michael J. Roberts
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: The Doll Games is a hypertext project that documents a complex narrative game that Shelley and Pamela Jackson used to play when they were prepubescent girls, and frames that documentation in faux-academic discourse. In “sitting uneasily between” different styles of discourse, the work enlists the reader to differentiate between authoritative knowledge and play. Although the dolls in question are “things of childhood,” the project reveals that in the games the authors used to play with these dolls, one can find the roots of both Pamela and Shelley’s “grownup” lives: Shelley’s vocation as a fiction writer, and Pamela’s as a Berkeley-trained Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Throughout, the project plays with constructions of gender and of identity. This is a “true” story that places truth of all kinds in between those ironic question marks. The Doll Games is a network novel in the sense that it uses the network to construct narratives in a particularly novel way. The Doll Games is also consciously structured as a network document, and plays in an ironic fashion with its network context. (...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Scott Rettberg at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/609
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Subject: hypertext, parody/satire, documentary, gender
Creator: Pamela Jackson, Shelley Jackson
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: Description The New Media Poetry and Poetics issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac gathers in one location many of the major practitioners of electronic literature, circa 2005-2006. Emphasis on writing in networked and programmable media. The authors set out in this issue to perform critical readings of new media poems through various approaches and contexts, so as to define new media poetry and measure the extent to which digital media necessitate a re-assessment of writing generally. A number of critical readings address the role of code in electronic literature (a topic also featured since 1998 in ebr, www.electronicbookreview.com). A frequent argument, is that poems derive meaning from their own precarious existence in networked language environments. The interplay between traditional and digital poetics allows us to see continuities and differences between digital media and earlier modes of innovative writing, notably in the way that certain poets have transformed their concrete poems into "new media" versions. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Publisher: Tim Peterson, Nisar Keshvani, The MIT Press
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Mary Flanagan's "[theHouse]" is a digital poem-environment that consists of strings of transparent, three-dimensional, occasionally intersecting, shifting boxes that are accompanied by paired lines, which in turn are re-combined as the piece progresses; we may watch them as they move across the screen, grow larger or smaller or rotate so that we read them in reverse—as if we could walk to the back of our language. Or, should we want to determine the shape and direction of the text/boxes, we can try to interact with the text/boxes through the mouse. Since Flanagan writes that "[a]s in much of electronic literature, the experience of the work as an intimate, interactive, screen-based piece is essential to understanding and appreciating it," the experience of interacting with this text-environment is primarily one of struggle or difficulty since there is no way to gain control over the text--no way to determine the direction in which the piece shifts. Pulling right on the mouse does not guarantee that the text will also shift right or rotate clockwise; moving the mouse up does not necessarily allow us to venture deep inside the boxes or the text—we may have just flipped the boxes/text or moved to a bird's eye view of this strange computer-text-organism. Thus, despite my interactions with the text, despite the fact that I can "read" most of the lines, in its difficulty "[theHouse]" is at least in part about the mediating effects of an interface that, despite Flanagan's claim above, offers intimacy while also declining it. Entry drafted by: Lori Emerson
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Subject: Animation/Kinetic, individual work, 3D, interactive poetry, interactive art
Creator: Mary Flanagan
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Readers of print conventionally ignore the page surface so as to concentrate on interpreting what is printed there; in "open.ended," by contrast, surfaces are integral. Readers interact with lines of poetry that appearon two translucent shapes - one nested within the other. Because words on the inner shape are visible through the outer one, the printed lines can be read together or separately. The number of possible surface/text combinations is limited, but by merging shapes a surprising range of new stanzas can result. The reader can also control her angle of view so that more than one surface is visible, though all the words may not be legible. As the surfaces obscure the words, the materiality of the digital shapes overcomes linguistic signification. This phenomenon of surface overcoming text also occurs when the shapes overlap and obscure portions of the text. "open.ended" amounts to a poem without beginning or end since one does not move through the text in any predetermined order, yet the poetic object has boundaries delimited by the eight rotating surfaces. The reader's interaction with the shifting text is augmented--and usefully constrained--by an audio track of the author reading so that we, reading to ourselves, are reminded of lines from the poem we have already encountered, or we are given a preview of text to come. Despite the literal instability of the moving text, the audio track is the same each time, which lends consistency to repeated readings. Entry drafted by: Ben Underwood
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Subject: poetry, flash, audio, interactive, 3D, spatialization
Creator: Aya Karpinska, Daniel C. Howe
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: Where texts interrelate with image, sound, and video, readers of electronic literature can witness linguistic transformations, unfamiliar arrangements of signifiers and what is signified. In his practice as a professional artist, teacher, and researcher, Seaman interests himself in image-music-text relations that, to his mind, act to generate meaning as "language-vehicles." "Recombinant Poetics" integrates a number of disciplines into literary, artistic, musical, technological, scientific, and philosophical perspectives. Seaman's semiotic and linguistic approach has numerous points of contact with work in electronic literature, not least his involvement with combinatoric methods and Oulipian writing under constraint. The Page provides academic essays as well as poetic texts. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Creator: Bill Seaman
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
Description: The Iowa Review Web’s issue on “Instruments and Playable Text” (published in July 2008, guest edited by Stuart Moulthroup) features seven poetic and narrative works by six authors concerned with writing at the level of interface and code. The featured works (by Judy Malloy, John Cayley, Nick Montfort, Shawn Rider, Elizabeth Knipe, and the editor himself) all explore operations of permutation, chance, and remixing prompted by the reader’s actions. These programmed digital works invite readers to engage in the (literary) play indeed, reading and play in these texts are inseparable. Readerly actions include clicking on images and texts in Malloy’s Concerto for Narrative Data to invoke voices and texts to appear in various formations and juxtapositions. In Nick Montfort’s The Purpling, color-coding and clickable text chunks cause the poem to gradually change into different texts. John Cayley’s riverIsland employs navigation via images, via clickable icons, or by dragging QuickTime images, to access 32 poems reflecting on nature, translation, and language. Both Elizabeth Knipe’s activeReader and Shawn Rider’s two works, So Random and PiTP, invite the reader to enter texts of their own. Finally, Moulthrop’s polyphonic Under Language mixes written text with spoken words and sounds as the reader clicks on the interface’s icons and texts. In this work, as in Cayley's riverIsland, sounds and spoken words also engage the reader as a listener. Different kinds of play, interaction, and participation are juxtaposed with the more standard ways of intellectually engaging with a literary work. Along with the works, The Iowa Review Web issue includes an editor’s introduction and statements by many of the featured artists/authors. Entry drafted by: Maria Engberg
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Subject: Quick Time, poetry, combinatorial, textual instrument, fiction, Critical/philosophical, women authors, html/dhtml, procedural, java, constraint-based, action script
Publisher: Stuart Moulthrop, Jon Winet, Mark NeuCollins
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Prose poem published in The Iowa Review Web (TIR-W), Volume 9, Number 2: "Instruments and Playable Texts" (2008). “The Purpling” is comprised of approximately ten basic web pages of eight to ten lines each. By clicking on hyperlinks connected to segments of varying lengths, the reader enters what guest editor Stuart Moulthrop calls a "maze of recirculating expression.” While the words on the screen remain static, the reader's experience of "meaning" varies depending on the order of visited links. These visited links, in most browsers, also appear in purple, which becomes a visual representation of not only the work's title, but also the mingling of the reader with the text. Consequently, in both form and content, the work calls attention to nature of reading and questions the authority of a text. Entry drafted by: Crystal Alberts
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Subject: hypertext, poetry, procedural, constraint-based
Creator: Nick Monfort
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Shawn Rider's "So Random" consists of a short hypertext narrative of a bus ride told from several different points of view. Each time a reader accesses the work, an instantiation of it is assembled from chunks of text based on tags assigned to each section. For a piece of electronic literature, the work has a conservative visual presentation. Each version consists of three pages that resemble the appearance of text in a word processing program. The reader has the option of reading the pages consecutively or of clicking on words to generate an entirely new three-page version of the work. With relatively few options, the reader is at the mercy of the algorithm assembling the text, and without access to the logic of the text selection, the work feels "so random." Entry drafted by: Ben Underwood
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Subject: hypertext, fiction, Anthologies, algorithm
Creator: Shawn Rider
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: slippingglimpse is a 10-part generative Flash poem combining videos of ocean patterns with text. The work introduces three modes of reading: fullscreen, high resolution, and scroll-text mode. In the first two modes, fragments of words and phrases appear in the ocean, mapped and remapped to movement in the video image, turning from an unreadable text to a decipherable composition. In fullscreen mode, ocean videos "read" the poem text somatically or gesturally. In high-rez mode, the ocean-patterning itself is best visible, those patterns the videographer set out to capture and enhance. Only the scroll-text mode permits human reading of linear print text. The language of the poem comes in part from sampling and recombining the words of visual artists as they reflect on their own work (among them, Helaman Ferguson, Manfred Mohr, David Berg, Ellen Carey, Frances Dose, Marius Johnston, Jon Lybrook, Susan Rankaitis, Hildegard of Bingen). Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, collaborative, kinetic text, poetry, women authors, visual poetry, video
Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Judd Morrissey, Goat Island, and 145+ additional contributors are contributing to the work-in-progress The Last Performance (dot org). The project’s developers describe it as “a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community.” The project is a kind of hopeful monster, a mutated form of literature that combines elements of dance and performance, information and physical architecture, and Oulipian constraint-driven approaches to writing. The visual presentation of the project is based on the structure and details of the Dzamija, a mosque built on top of an old church in Zagreb, Croatia. Elements of the structure were derived from a dance performance by Goat Island, a Chicago-based performance collective. The organizational principles of the text are largely algorithmic. The individual texts themselves are written in response to a series of odd, seemingly arbitrary constraints such as “Construct a last performance in the form of a heavy foot that weighs 2 tons and remains in good condition.” The texts that form the material basis of the project are contributed both by the authors who have been working most closely on the project for two years and by readers who stumble across it on the Web and decide to contribute a text by responding to a constraint or to one of the other texts.(...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Scott Rettberg at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/606
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Subject: hypertext, poetry, collaborative, narrative, database, visualization
Creator: Judd Morrissey
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
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, flash, cyberculture, art, essays, interviews, poetry, journal, digital art, fiction, html
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Kind of Blue, while a complete email novel or "chatmail", is the latter element of a two-part email fiction project began by Rob Wittig in his Blue Company project. According to the Blue Company description, Rettberg "missed the daily installments in his inbox to the point that he began to compose and e-mail a response, a sequel, a rebuttal...in which the characters of Blue Company are re-cast and re-imagined." The novel consists of a series of emails sent among the characters, beginning with an unlikely romance and darkening to a murder investigation. The structure of the novel is fairly simple: the reader first encounters a hyperlinked list of the emails in chronological order, which serves as a table of contents. Clicking on any link takes the reader through to that email, a pale blue frame with black text, laid out over a royal blue background. The emails themselves contain no links or clickable options, save buttons to move to the previous email or the next email (which subtly directs the reader to move through the email lexias in order), or to return to the "Inbox". There are no attachments or links to external pages, keeping the reader contained within the narrative itself. The reading experience is voyeuristic: the "Inbox" could ostensibly be the reader's inbox, and these personal emails have somehow landed there for perusal. On a surface level, this visual and structural design appears to mimic the email experience that is now part of our daily existence. But on several deeper levels, the novel becomes divorced from this typical inbox feel. The reader cannot save, move, forward, or reply to these messages. They are, in a sense, artifacts, frozen. The reader can observe - again, with a voyeuristic feel, given the personal content of the emails - but cannot take part in the narrative as s/he would if this were truly an email inbox. On a textual level, Kind of Blue is a combination of the carelessly composed email, the intimately considered handwritten letter, and first person narrative that occasionally drifts into poetry, depending on the character. The longish emails are quite detailed and forthright, and display little of the editing capabilities of the email form, relying instead upon the notion that the characters are apt to hit "send" before taking a read-through, offering their thoughts in their raw form. The exposition and character revealed tend toward the first person narrative style, cut up and sent as emails. As a result, Kind of Blue merges digital communication and literary storytelling into a narrative that fits neatly into neither category, stretching the bounds of each. Entry drafted by: Lyle Skains
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Subject: fiction, chatmail, email novel
Creator: Scott Rettberg
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Collections of Works
Description: The first gallery of new media art to showcase an international collection of born-digital art and literature by women artists from around the globe. It includes links to author pages and more than 300 works of born-digital literature. In reference to Derrida, this page is an 'assemblage,' a multiplicity, a coming together of languages, skills, and visions, a collection of art texts, and an exhibit showing the act of fitting disparate pieces together under the umbrella of gender. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypermedia, flash, visual poetry, net art, kinetic text, Collection of Work, video
Creator: Carolyn Guertin
Publisher: trAce Online Writing Centre, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Language: English, Multilingual
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Once the reader enters the Case Collection he learns that "a flood threatened to destroy everything." Two diaries, an illustrated children's book, a journalist's sound recording and other artifacts from a naturalist's secret collection could be saved. The reader is welcome to explore the narrative space of the project that provides a database of the 'saved' narrative objects such as films, photographs, letters, maps and diaries that accompany over 600 writings visually. These digital narrative objects can be browsed, they are from a fictional 1910 natural history expedition and relate to the life and trial of Sir Francis Case. The diaries, for instance, serve as minute details of an expedition to "a lodge on a hill" and the reader learns: "I have a conversation with the missionary, Amelie. She tells me that we are the Company's guest and best stay on good terms with their officials. I have developed a different view of matters during the course of my travels, but I dare not to tell her." With its graphical representations as well as the textual and literary browsing structure the Digital Case Collection bears a 'playable media' character using game elements to achieve interaction. It allows the reader to have exploratory trips one can return to and follow up on. Gaming conventions are used against the grain to mediate on the nature of digital artifacts and their relationship to time and space. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: metatextual, playable media, graphics, historical
Creator: Tal Halpern
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: The Unknown is a collaborative hypertext novel written on the World Wide Web during the turn of the millennium. It is a text about a book tour that takes on the excesses of a rock tour. The work is notorious for breaking the "comedy barrier" in electronic literature, replacing the pretentious modernism and self-consciousness of previous hypertext works with a pretentious postmodernism and self-absorption that is more satirical in nature. The Unknown includes several sections or "lines" of content including a sickeningly decadent hypertext novel, metafictional bullshit, documentary material, correspondence, art projects, documentation of live readings, a press kit, and more. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, network novel, encyclopedic, metafiction, comedy, collaborative, postmodern, fiction, parody/satire, html/dhtml, network forms
Creator: William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Arteroids is a literary shoot-em-up poem-game for the Web. The battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness. Pilot your red id-entity text against poetry and the forces of dullness. Winner takes wall. Write your own texts in Word for Weirdos. Save poetry from yourself. Game mode or play mode. Play for life and death in game mode. Shoot for art in play mode. Go on. I dare you. Entry drafted by: Scott Rettberg
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Subject: cybertext, poetry, shockwave, animation, interactive, software, digital poetics, digital art, audio, hypermedia, kinetic, game
Creator: Jim Andrews
Collector: ELO
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: A Shockwave work by Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson. This work was made as the third component of an intermedia poem whose two other parts were bound together, upside down to each other, in a volume written by Strickland and published by Penguin, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una, 1992. At the center of the book are pointers to the url. The digital poem was published in the Iowa Review Web, 2002, with critical material by Jaishree Odin, and with an essay by the authors in New River, 2003.
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Subject: visual poetry, interactive, collaborative, textual instrument, women authors, shockwave, poetry, kinetic text
Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Creator: Donna Leishman
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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Collection: Electronic Literature: Context
Description: For over 10 years Alt-X is devoted to supporting experimental art and writing publishing innovative online art and literature. Alt-X serves as an internationally visible hub of digital arts cultural production and is known as a place where "the digerati meet the literati." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: systems theory, critical ecology, writingdesign, webarts, hypertext, electropoetics, media discourse theory, fictions present, digital arts
Creator: Mark Amerika
Type: Collection
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Shelley Jackson’s 1997 web-based hypertext, “my body—a Wunderkammer” employs many of the same strategies that make her celebrated Patchwork Girl (1995) so conceptually interesting, albeit on a smaller scale. With its asynchronous mode of storytelling, its vivid images, and its layering of different texts, all of which need to be explored, re-mixed, and assembled by the reader for any coherence to emerge, “Wunderkammer” has much in common with the way a reader must stitch together the disparate pieces of “the monster’s” story to make sense of Patchwork Girl. (...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Lisa Swanstrom at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/566
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Subject: hypertext, autobiography
Creator: Shelley Jackson
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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