electropoetics

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?

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).

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.

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.

Scott and Jill Retberg, directors of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) at the University of Bergen, discuss their motivations and goals for the new research center. Digital narrative encompasses various fields such as electronic literature, game studies, AI, VR, social media narratives, and computational narrative systems. The podcast aims to explore the frontiers of digital narrative by engaging with researchers, artists, and authors in these fields. CDN aims both to produce new research and creation in digital narrative and to present ideas in a more accessible way, such as through exhibitions and popular forms of publication to reach a broader audience. The Off Center podcast is a released on a biweekly basis, and we will be releasing selected transcripts each month on ebr.

Martin reviews Astrid Ensslin's Pre-Web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature, a book that addresses the knowledge gaps surrounding the early era of digital creation and publishing, while testifying to the necessity for multidisciplinary approaches to this field of study. Martin discusses the reconstructivist stance from which Ensslin labors to embed digital literature into our larger understanding of the literary arts.

Reham Hosny (University of Cambridge and Minia University) asserts that works of e-lit resist straightforward classification due to their "hybrid and mosaic nature." This complexity poses formidable hurdles in the development of computational models aimed at categorizing e-lit into distinct genres. The challenge is further compounded by issues such as media format obsolescence, ephemerality, interactivity, and the wide array of manifestations across different platforms. Despite these formidable challenges, Hosny not only explores potential solutions but also provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the core issues associated with the classification of e-lit.

On this first Sunday in July 2023, as the Electronic Literature Organization prepares for its meeting in Coimbra, Portugal, we present a set of reflections by four ELO members who co-organized this Organization's 2021 conference fully virtual conference, titled "Platform (Post?) Pandemic." What we have is an insightful critique of platform conferencing. The concepts of datarama turned dadarama offer a refreshingly literary way of reorienting the discourse of the ELO's annual conference.

This article examines how the formation of data can be seen as an aesthetic way of making sense. Following work in digital aesthetics, the article proposes to understand digital artifacts and processes via formalization and operation of media language. Li traces this idea through several examples from recent literature, film, games, and artwork in South-East Asia. Together with these examples, Deleuze’s philosophical thoughts on a genesis of sense production are re-considered in order to understand a formal way of making sense in producing the new. The notion of “abstraction” from ancient Chinese mathematical thought offers a re-consideration of Deleuze’s “intensive virtual”, that is, the way the formal, the operative and abstraction determine the extensive intensive. Sense-Data and atmospheric language address computation’s materiality in engendering the formal and the operative modalities of media language, as a way of producing states of being and becoming in cultural activities in which the digital is an agency.

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."