Off Center Episode 6: Gendered AI and Editorial Labour in Digital Culture with Lai-Tze Fan
Scott Rettberg, Lai-Tze Fan
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) is joined by Lai-Tze Fan to discuss gendered AI assistants and the invisible labor involved in editorial work.
Expanding the Algorithm
Daniel Punday
Daniel Punday reviews Andrew Klobucar’s edited collection of essays, The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics.
Off Center Episode 5: AI, Computational Creativity, and Media Production with Drew Keller
Scott Rettberg, Drew Keller
Drew Keller, Microsoft employee and graduate of the Digital Culture program at the University of Bergen joins Scott Rettberg to talk about the potential role of AI in our media production. From the Jacquard loom to the PowerPoint designer, human creativity has always been intertwined with technology, but is the rapid increase in AI a revolution in the way we produce media, or just another tool?
Davin Heckman Netprov Interview
Davin Heckman, Rob Wittig
Davin Heckman on how his penchant for pranks got him to appreciate netprov and how he turned it into a versatile pedagogic tool that helps to broaden his students’ social sensibilities.
Memorial for Marjorie C. Luesebrink
Dene Grigar
EBR would like to express thanks to Dene Grigar and Deena Larsen at Washington State University Vancouver, for organizing and hosting a memoriam for Marjorie C. Luesebrink and for letting us share the memoriam in our journal.
Who Does Your Game Play?
Hanna Hellesø Lauvli
What can video games teach us about our relationship with animals? Hanna Hellesø Lauvli's review of GAME by Tom Tyler urges us to see life from the other side of the food chain.
ebr historical intertext
Lai-Tze Fan
Returning to past formats in the electronic book review such as 'designwriting from the mid-1990s,' ebr co-editor Lai-Tze Fan alerts readers to a feature that is as much a part of our journal's publication, and positioning, as the essays themselves. As annotations in the margins of print texts allow readers to reference earlier texts, a more interactive, intertextual and perhaps more accessible conversation is made available within and among digital texts.
Off Center Episode 4: Meme Culture, Social Media, and the January 6th Insurrection with Ashleigh Steele
Scott Rettberg, Ashleigh Steele
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative is joined by journalist and Digital Culture graduate Ashleigh Steele to talk about memes, post-truth and the way narrativity shapes our understanding of ourselves and our world. We are increasingly affected by algorithms, AI and conspiracy theories, but what kind of effect does this have on our discourse, and how do we fight back?
Embodied AI: An Extended Data Definition
David (Jhave) Johnston
Multimodal AI trained on YouTube-TikTok-Netflix (object-segmented and identified audio-video-speech) and public domain science data (that exceeds the spectrum of human sensorial field) will be grounded in a world that is in some ways vaster than that experienced by a single human neurophysiology.
Review of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP 2022)
Davin Heckman
Is it possible to discover digital prophecies in thinkers like Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Baudrillard? Heckman has a go at it in this close reading of Dionysius Geoghegan's Code: From Information Theory to French Theory.
In Memoriam, George Landow
Robert Arellano
The editors at ebr asked Bobby Arellano to draft a reflection on the passing of George Landow. Working with Landow in the early years of the Victorian Web, Arellano transferred most of the documents from the Intermedia system into Storyspace and relinked them. We present Arellano's reflection, in memoriam, along with an official obit provided by Ruth Landow (George's friend of 78 years and his wife of 57 years).
Off Center Episode 3: Artistic Research and Digital Writing, with Jason Nelson
Scott Rettberg, Jason Nelson
On this episode of Off Center, Scott Rettberg is joined by artist and poet Jason Nelson to discuss the background behind Jason's weird and intriguing work, creativity in the digital age and the intersection between art and research. Behind every artist there is a story, and Jason's include disappearing masonic rings, Brazilian televangelists and city planning.
MATERIALS FOR A LIFE: “whispered conversations: beholding a landscape through journey and reflection” at Stand 4 Gallery
Joseph McElroy
A post-closing catalog essay on a curious and original exhibition, one that rethinks the very idea of a group show, from singular research journeys by Kate Collyer (not her first) to Alaska, Megan Porpeglia to Sardinia (on a residency for the first time visiting her family roots), and Lorrie Fredette to Cape Cod. Like McElroy's own literary works, these twenty-two artworks are presented through several shifting lenses.
Off Center Episode 2: Joseph Tabbi on the Electronic Book Review, Research Infrastructure, and Electronic Literature
Scott Rettberg, Joseph Tabbi
CDN Director Scott Rettberg and the Center's Principle Investigator Joseph Tabbi discuss the decades-long development of a born-digital, community based publication. The Electronic Book Review brings together literary scholars and conceptual artists from a widening set of disciplines and geographical regions. While foregrounding critical discourse, the journal will bring to our readership the sorts of activities that we'll be featuring in our e-lit node: activities which we designate as a Publishing And Infrastructure Group (PAIG). As our readers pick up on things that our authors have written, they too become an active part of our discursive community. Debates and dialogues are thus the order of the day, as authors and audiences begin to merge.