newsletter

ebr is delighted to announce that the 6th biennial Critical Code Studies Working Group has begun, led by Mark Marino and Jeremy Douglass. Many members of ELO and readers of ebr are contributors to this and previous CCSWGs, and this year’s Group extends previous conversations by focusing on special topics such as Indigenous Programming and Feminist AI. You can follow ongoing conversations (January 20 to February 9, 2020) as they unfold on the Group’s website. * This month, ebr publishes “At a Heightened Level of Intensity: A Discussion of the Philosophy and Poetics of Language in John Cayley’s… continue

Stephanie LeMenager’s essay “Notes on a Civics for the Sixth Extinction” rhetorically navigates the condition of “living climate change.” Here, living climate change refers to responses in the “ambitious cultural project that writers, artists, scholars, and activists have been undertaking” in creating public awareness and procedure in climate change. While LeMenager focuses on the US as a global superpower that is also a climate change denier, recently I have also thought of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for his lack of action in the Australian bushfires (started in September 2019 a… continue

This month’s special issue on “Natural Media” is edited by ebr’s Editors, Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Dean Rasmussen. This gathering developed out of a panel hosted by the MLA’s MS Forum on Visual Media, and it considers the critical intersections of communicative media and media technologies with natural spaces. The essays, reviews, and interview will be of special interest to ebr readers who explore areas that include the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, media archaeology, and ecofeminism. Readers could perhaps start with Lisa Swanstrom’s essay “The Effulgence of the North: An Introductio… continue

This month, ebr publishes a review of Steve Clay and Ken Friedman’s Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, reviewed by Betsy Sullivan and Virgina Kuhn. Known for his work on intermedia, in particular his 1965 essay “Intermedia,” Dick Higgins has been called writer, artist, and theorist. In their review “Many Lives to Live,” Betsy Sullivan and Virginia Kuhn identify Higgins’ unique technological literacy for his generation. In this vein, they highlight that the collection is able to represent Higgins’ experimental approaches to creation, encompassing… continue

The question of whether or not computers can write autonomously is at this point moot (hello, AI and generative text!), but perhaps where the field of digital writing needs further exploration is in the re-examination of writing practices, as well as how they can be taught. In their essay “Digital Writing: Philosophical and Pedagogical Issues,” Serge Bouchardon and Victor Petit argue that the technical (material) and symbolic (cultural) dimensions of digital writing must be explored as a Janus faced issue. Building upon established theories of writing from Derrida and Barthes, the essay explor… continue