In a series of interviews led in February and March 2021, Nacher, Pold and Rettberg examined how contemporary digital art and electronic literature responded to the pandemic. Their project on COVID and electronic literature was funded by DARIAH-EU and resulted in the exhibition prepared for the ELO 2021 Conference & Festival and the documentary film that premiered in June 2021 at the Oslo Poesiefilm Festival. Ben Grosser is one of the creators of 13 works that were interviewed for the project. He generously shares his thoughts on life and creative practice during the pandemic, the impact of platforms on the digital culture and creativity and platform culture in general.

In her essay “Is this a game, or is it real?”, Naomi Mandel revisits WarGames, a 1983 film that significantly shaped the popular imagination of computer games and military networked technology at the time. Mandel argues that the film prompts a non-mimetic reading that emphasizes deeper, infrastructural and operational meanings of the screen. Placing it in the context of the history of computer games, Mandel points out that WarGames anticipates the evolution of the medium by playing with distinctions between real world and game, and questioning whether such distinction matters at all.

In a study that traverses more than half a century – going from e-lit precursor Christopher Strachey’s M.U.C. Love Letter Generator (1952) to Michael Joyce’s experimental hypertext afternoon: a story (1990) to Kate Pullinger’s data-driven touchscreen work Breathe (2018) – Rettberg (University of Bergen, Norway) situates experimentation with digital interfaces in a longer tradition of innovation in literary and scholarly production. She also argues for the central importance of such experimentation in the ongoing development of both electronic literature and the digital humanities, suggesting that speculation in the design of digital interfaces can help preserve and extend the interpretative and intuitive aspects of Western literary and scholarly traditions, while also bringing the limitations and exclusions of such knowledge systems into focus.

With a focus on sound elements in the e-literary, Hannah Ackermans (University of Bergen, Norway) insightfully traces the role of accessibility and (dis)ability in electronic literature. Problematizing the universality of electronic literature practices and rewriting the familiar concepts (such as defamiliarization or constraint), she uses the notion of accessibility as a perspective that both proposes inclusive models of electronic literature and helps to understand creative work on a fundamental, material level.

Literary forms seen as tools of mind transgressing the field of the literary and repurposing digital media so that they are capable of refocusing cognition in beneficial ways – these are the lines of thought shaping Kyle Booten’s analysis of algorithmic co-writers. To be able to respond to both challenges, it is proposed that researchers rigorously and systemically study how digital tools are being creatively used and repurposed, learning from models that have emerged within the mainstream Human-Computer Interaction research.

To browse the internet is to subject oneself to sophisticated and unceasing techniques of attention-capture, of which the pop-up advertisement is only the most crass and vexatious example. This paper describes the development of Nightingale, a web browser extension that fights distraction with distraction. It does this by injecting the web with pop-up ads consisting of semantically-relevant fragments of the poetry of Keats. Nightingale represents an attempt to engage in “noöhacking”—that is, repurposing the cognitively-destructive aspects of contemporary digital media in order to care for one’s own mind.’

In this article, Kelsey Cameron and Jessica FitzPatrick propose attunement, a conceptual intervention that returns lived experience to critical making. They argue for attunement in three areas: disciplinary recognition of making, labs and other university maker spaces, and campus-community engagement. Attunement helps bring equity into critical making, highlighting how larger systems shape individual acts of making.

FEATURED ARTIST: In this essay, Caitlin Fisher reflects on the ideas, processes, and approaches that have shaped and influenced her work in digital storytelling and electronic literature for over 25 years. She invokes theorists like Borges, Haraway, and Aristotle and critical concepts of hybridity, string theory, hypermedia, and spatial narratives to illuminate readers about the simultaneous timelines, continuity, and forking paths that run through the river of her work.

In this conversation and accompanying "How to Not" guide, Drs. Lai-Tze Fan, Kishonna Gray, and Aynur Kadir consider responsible theories and methods towards racial equity, racial justice, and anti-racism in game design. Their main focus is on how games can provide a platform for helping people understand and learn about these issues.

This essay explores intersections among queer theory, critical making methodology and inclusive design through a research creation piece that aims to problematize normative video game controller schemes.

Jin Sol Kim and Lulu Liu interview the Decameron 2.0, a Canadian collaborative made up of professors and artists who are inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s plague narrative The Decameron (1348-1353) to develop creative works during and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Burdick situates the speculative software prototypes of Trina: A Design Fiction as design-theory hybrids that can expand our understanding of critical making and critical design. The essay offers four readings of the Trina prototypes, designed as research into speculative writing technologies that are situated and embodied. The essay concludes with the introduction of an “Indexical Reader,” a design concept for close and distant reading in the Humanities.

Nacher, Rettberg, and Pold offer a curatorial statement about the COVID E-Lit Exhibition--one of the many exhibitions held at the ELO 2021 conference. This Exhibition in particular, they explain, focused on reactionary, reflexive, and recovery-based art in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stanfill and Salter reflect on conferencing amidst their organization of the 2020 ELO Conference in Orlando, Florida that had to change to due a global pandemic. Sharing their experiences and wisdom, they discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various virtual platforms for conferencing, coupled with the contexts of concurrent politics, co-location, and lessons for the future.

Wright explores the digital manifestation of an orihon manuscript style for how it can expand how we think of the novel's form. He considers how digital versions of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year and his own print novella make use of the concept of the fold as identified in the orihon style.