electropoetics

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.

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.

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.

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.

This except from Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives explores the popular and open-source digital storytelling platform Twine. Authors Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop discuss the history of Twine as well as existing works and possible projects.