Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe

September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, the 2007 e-poetry conference in Paris, the 2007 Remediating Literature Conference in Utrecht, and other recent activity in the field of electronic literature in Europe. The goals of this gathering are:

1) To provide an opportunity for European researchers to share and discuss their current research on electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital narrative forms.

2) To provide a forum for European authors of electronic literature to share, demonstrate, read, or perform their work.

3) To discuss and explore the foundation of a European research network focused on electronic literature, funding opportunities for such a network, and network activities.

The seminar will last three days and will include about 20-30 participants. The day-long meetings during the first two days will consist of short presentations of papers in panel format. Additionally, there will be performances, readings, and demonstrations of electronic literature in the evenings. The third day of the conference will be dedicated to proposing and discussing the formal establishment of a research network on electronic literature in Europe. Paper presentations should be in English. Presentation and performances of works can be made in English or in the native language of the presenter. (more…)

Yesterday was our fifth birthday. Happy Birthday GTxA!

Ian Bogost writes in “The Rhetoric of Exergaming” that gross motor activity in the living room is inhibited by coffee tables. That seems to be true in many cases, but not when your coffee table is also a functional NES controller. Kyle Downes has built such a furnishing and functional piece of hardware, which also serves as a storage box. A glass tabletop places the unit in beverage-supporting mode. While playing the NES with this controller may not qualify as a fitness activity, it’s certainly a change and engages more than the player’s thumbs. If this trend of controller embiggenment, kicked off by Grand Text Auto’s own Mary Flanagan and her [giantJoystick], keeps rolling along, we might be playing casual games on ginormous cell phones before too long. Oops - we already are. (Thanks to Hanna for the tip about Downes’ project.)

In early 2007, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a reading of all of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

On May 15, 2008, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will host a reading of another work that first appeared on a long scroll of paper - Adventure, in its original version by Will Crowther. “As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds, MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University.” This table-read is at noon on the basement level of McKeldin Library, in MITH’s conference room - at the table, I presume. And the reading may contain spoilers!

Thanks to Dennis Jerz, author of “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave,” for the tip.

Personally, I’m struggling to keep my health up so I can continue playing this game, but if you’re the other way around, and in Baltimore, check out the second day of the Fourth Annual Games for Health Conference 2008. And, dear reader, if you are attending, drop us a note about how the conference is going or a link to anything you have online about your experiences.

May 8-9, 2008 / Baltimore Convention Center / Baltimore, Maryland / Web site for registration: www.gamesforhealth.org

The Games for Health Conference offers a rich platform for learning, promotion, networking and business development for organizations interested in the intersection between games and health. Topics to be covered include exergaming, medical simulation, interactive messaging, health behavior change, medical informatics, physical therapy and game development. More than 300 individuals from 100 organizations - academic institutions, government agencies and foundations - are expected to attend. Also, a pre-conference event on May 7 will offer two workshops: Games Accessibility and Virtual Worlds & Health. All conference participants will have the chance to interact and play with these games that are improving society. Registration is $495.00 for Thursday, May 8 & Friday, May 9 and the pre-conference workshops on Wednesday, May 7 are $99.00-$129.00.

A Review of Prehistoric Digital Poetry:
An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995
By Christopher T. Funkhouser
University of Alabama Press
2007
408 pp.
$75.00 cloth/$39.95 paper

This is an incredible compendium of decades of seldom-noticed work, guided by poetics, that has been done with language and computers. The work surveyed in this book is not “prehistoric” in the sense of being before history was developed; nor does it include pre-computer work that anticipated or laid the foundations for digital practice. But Funkhouser’s effort is clearly archaeological in terms of its scale and effort, and it is an attempt to recover a prehistory in the sense that our awareness of digital media history usually has the graphical, popular Web as its starting point. This recognition of our digital blind spot, or dark age, was what also motivated me and Noah to try to fill in a similar gap with The New Media Reader, which collects materials from WWII to the WWW. (more…)

Why must you hate gamers, game studies? Thus rants classics professor Roger Travis in The Escapist. Ian Bogost rants back.

Here’s something that’s new on the Web: Planet Interactive Fiction, an aggregration of blog posts (from Grand Text Auto among other fine places) about IF. Christopher Armstrong has set this up and, as you can see from a visit, it’s buzzing with useful IF information and discussion.

Now, since we often mention things that are new, I will supplement this happy news with a recollection of some things that are gone, in the sense of no longer on the Web with original URLs defunct: Hotwired, [Internet Archive] an early commercial site that may have been the first sizable Web magazine and which was responsible for the invention of the banner ad. The Spot, [Internet Archive] a Web soap that ran through 1997, is once again totally gone, after a puzzling relaunch which ran from 2004 to (it seems) no later than 2006. The academic journal fineArt Forum [Internet Archive] is gone - their URL simply redirects to the MIssissippi State University page. That journal published the Digital Arts and Culture 2003 proceedings, which are now gone with it. We’ve come to expect that academic journals, however unglamorous they may be, will be around for a while, but when they are digital and rely on continued hosting, universities can just drop them to let them sizzle into the depths if they want.

By the way, it’s great that the Internet Archive has many (not all) of the materials from these sites still available, even if not searchable, even if available at a very different speed from the usual Web. Some of these sites were updated rapidly; some of these and others were no doubt not spidered completely. Those interested in the Web’s history should certainly be grateful for what is there and remains accessible online. Still, the Internet Archive only “solves the problem” of access to the Web’s past to the extent that building one library “solves the problem” of access to and preservation of books. (Historically, it hasn’t.) We need a diversity of efforts with different priorities, policies, and technologies, inspired by the good work the Internet Archive has done but not simply an imitation or mirror of this one successful effort.

The book reviews at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies have been an extremely valuable resource for digital media scholars. The site has been online since 1996; it provides information about events and courses as well as about books. The book reviews in particular have helped those with different approaches (from literature, the visual arts, history, the social sciences, law, and so on) learn about important new media work in adjacent areas, and, of course, has helped to keep scholars aware of the new books available for personal consumption and use in courses. The site has been an important part of the discourse about digital media, one of the really important sites, along with ebr (Electronic Book Review), for discussion of book-length studies and arguments.

So I’m particularly pleased that RCCS has just published Kimberly De Vries’s review of the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1. This anthology of creative digital writing, book-like in many ways but provided on CD-ROM and on the Web, not as bound leaves of paper, was released in 2006 and is to be the first of a series. It has received some very positive attention, most of it internationally - it was reviewed in publications in Australia, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. But in the United States, for the most part (ebr, again, excepted) volume 1 of the ELC has fallen into the crack between the individual Web work and the real book, tumbling through space like at the beginning of Myst. It’s a particularly pleasing surprise that RCCS, with its important focus on books, has chosen to include the first volume of the collection among their materials reviewed. De Vries has provided a thoughtful review, to which two of my co-editors, N. Katherine Hayles and Grand Text Auto’s Scott Rettberg, have replied. Check out the other two May reviews and take note of Hayles’s new book, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, mentioned on here before, which includes the ELC v1 on CD-ROM as an insert.