In this republished Medium essay, Ian Demsky takes a personal and playful dive into AI image generation.

Starting with Umberto Eco's 1962 essay, "Opera aperta," and progressing into Emanuela Patti's tentative forays into Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present, Roberta Iadevaia nicely locates a trajectory for Italian e-Lit, albeit one that is still open, "in contention," without any "encyclopedic guarantee, and no single world order on which our imaginative projections can rest."

Rob Wittig and Johannah Rodgers – an independent scholar and a digital writer – discuss the collaborative and community-building nature of Netprov.

Image: DALL·E 2023-03-02 19.55.13 - "a group of people writing collectively a novel on financial crisis."

Rob Wittig and JT Johnson – a digital artist and writer – chat on the beginnings of Netprov, design of fictional worlds, and talent shows.

Image: DALL·E 2023-03-02 20.01.05 - "electronic literature can only exist up to a certain point, and then it dissolves itself as it becomes a discipline."

Rob Wittig and Claire Donato - a writer, a multidisciplinary artist, and a netprov contributor – discuss how a sense of performativity linked with playfulness and joy of collaborative improvisation constitute the very core of netprov.

Image: DALL-E, at a prompt: “A futuristic image of a group of people and AI improvising a theater play”.

In this substantial and original analysis (which is more a review essay than a simple review) Joy Wallace further extends a series of five reflective pieces on the renowned Australian poet, performer, and multimedia writer, Hazel Smith.

Rob Wittig and Jean Sramek - a playwright and netprov contributor – discuss how netprov as networked collaborative writing has changed since one of its earliest instance, Grace, Wit & Charm.

Image: DALL-E, at a prompt: “A group of people, plants and animals collaborating on digital platforms to write a poem”

For Fernando Pessoa, as for the roughly 600 texts that make up his Book of Disquiet, and the estimated 136 heteronyms that Pessoa inhabits in his own writing, there "is life, and there is writing, and they must remain immiscible." Richard Zenith's attentive biography of Pessoa succeeds, in the words of Portuguese literary scholar Manuel Portela, in "forming a homogeneous mixture" when all of the names and textual experiences are brought together in a single, biographical narrative.

In this in memoriam, Patrick Lichty remembers community member and artist, the late Jeremy Hight. We at EBR remember Jeremy fondly. His creative works will continue to be respected for the contributions they make to e-literature.

In his review of Glitch Poetics, Richard Carter finds more than a close reading of contemporary e-lit and AI enhanced writing. In a book that is both aesthetic and machinic, critical and creative, Jones explores the nature of writing itself "and, indeed, reading, in an environment saturated by the rhythms and predilections of digital code."

What is a humanities lab? How do we distinguish between a lab in the humanities and a lab in STEM--especially in various lab processes and factors that include "technicians, technologies, traditions, techniques, and trajectories"? In his review of Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka's book The Lab Book, Jason Lajoie outlines the ways in which labs and lab culture have expanded to make room for making.

In his review of Broken Theory by new media artist and theorist Alan Sondheim, Aden Evens traces Sondheim's eclectic and stylistic meditations on the limits of philosophy, language, and code, expressed through the author's experimental art and research projects. Sondheim's fragmentary monograph and Evens' review by extension explore the inevitability of failure as an 'ontological guarantee' and suggest writing as a necessary—albeit inadequate and unfulfilling—response.

Anna Nacher explores the emergence and spread of the viral hashtag "Kralovec," a satirical Czech language meme protesting the Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory in September 2022. In discussing the social and political impact of memes as collaborative sites of making meaning through media, Nacher analyzes the "creative frenzy" that emerges when protest becomes memetic.

Anna Nacher chats with Mark Marino, Cathy Podeszwa, Joellyn Rock, and Rob Wittig—artists, designers, and new media theorists all—to discuss the impetus and impact of their long-running netprov collaborations (communal and improvisational creative writing conducted online). Interview conducted October 2022.

Melinda M. White's itinerary through the iDMA 2022 Weird Media Exhibition in Winona consider the various forms of weirdness or strangeness evoked by the exhibited works. She explores how strangeness characterises human relationship to constantly transforming technologies, how it manifests itself in our difficult pasts, and how it points to alternative of unexpected futures. While the weird encounters with the exhibition works in no way point to a single, unifying thread or approach to the theme, White's account reveals shared concerns, tendencies, and connections among them. Temporal distance and experiences of loss render familiar technologies, objects, or places unfamiliar; the borders between human and non-human entities and perspectives is blurred or even discarded; humor and surreal irreverence are employed to raise urgent questions on ecology, ethics, and individual or collective narratives and subjectivities.