electropoetics
Virtual Realism
Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck review Marie Laure-Ryan's Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. They review the essential characteristics of hypertext to suggest more nuanced ways to understand realism in relation to virtual reality.
Bass Resonance
1999 e-literature award winner John Cayley writes about Saul Bass of classic film title fame. A precursor to language arts innovators Jenny Holzer, Richard Kostelanetz, and Cayley himself, Bass may now be recognized as a poet in his own 'write,' important for a new generation of designwriters creating "graphic bodies of language," moving words and signifying images, in digital environments.
Tending the Garden Plot: Victory Garden and Operation Enduring…
Dave Ciccoricco returns to Stuart Moulthrop, considers Operation Enduring Freedom (2003) in light of Operation Desert Storm (1991), and consults the annals of World War II for a likely source of "Victory Garden," the title of Moulthrop's 1991 network fiction on the Gulf War.
The Contour of a Contour
Despite talk of endings and absences at Eastgate Systems, Dave Ciccoricco investigates continuities in the work of Michael Joyce and Mark Bernstein.
Mimicries
Rone Shavers argues that making readers aware of subjugation - the strategy of Harold Jaffe's False Positive - exposes little and hardly changes our relation to power.
New Media Studies
Scott Rettberg introduces 'New Media Studies': a cluster of reviews, and a term (similar in its emergence to the term 'Postmodernism').
The Materiality of Technotexts
A book about books conscious of their materiality, N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines draws praise from Raine Koskimaa for its own media consciousness, and blame for embodied emphasis.
A User’s Guide to the New Millennium
Over 800 pages, the New Media Reader does not exhaust its subject; it even sets the stage for a companion volume.
Bridge Work
Form and platform are bridged in Stephanie Strickland's "V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una," a book with two beginings and a website to boot. Chris Funkhouser tests the load limit of this innovative, precarious structure.
Justin Hall and the Birth of the ‘Blogs
Rob Wittig looks at one of the earliest "Weblogs," and finds there a persisting model for serial e-fiction and an interaction no less compelling than the literary correspondence between Henry Miller and Anais Nin.