electropoetics

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."

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.

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 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.

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.

Mariusz Pisarski takes us on a detailed tour through the cognitive intricacies of hypertext classic Victory Garden's migration from Storyspace (circa 1992) to the Web. In so doing, Pisarski observes how years of Stuart Moulthrop’s experience as a mentor and teacher of digital literature, and as a practicing hypertext scholar and writer, are built into the anniversary edition of Victory Garden.

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. xtine burrough is one of the creators of 13 works that were interviewed for the project. She generously shares her thoughts on life and creativity, collapsing spaces and the meaning of a domestic art practice during the pandemic.

Where Tomasula (in his own words) makes “no attempt to historicize the field,” preferring to offer “a snapshot” of a vibrant body of conceptual literary art, Gonzalez in this review arrogates the position Tomasula passes on, and proposes that the many texts in Tomasula's "immensely rewarding" anthology continue in the spirit of postmodern literary forms and show the continuing potency of the postmodern toolbox.

Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass discuss the field of Critical Code Studies (CCS) and introduce three reports about the discussions of the CCS Working Group 2020.

Jeremy Douglass and Mark C. Marino reflect on the activities of the Critical Code Studies (CCS) Working Group 2020.