image + narrative

In conversation, Scott Rettberg engages with Roderick Coover and his multiplicitous career that started off as a forest ranger, a cinema projectionist, "a ski bum" and (further along) a winemaker in Burgundy, a couple of years of participant observation in Africa, the first all-electronic dissertation at the University of Chicago, works of combinatory cinema and other "differing narratives" that emerged in a still (inter)active literary and multi-medial career.

Like so many generic literary reconstructions, comics are now being transformed into information -- a process that, for postdoctoral scholar Ilan Manouach, is concomitant with the expansion of tools and services in the field of generative AI. Like so many AI emergences (and emergencies), this one poses important challenges to the comics industry and the careers of comics professionals.

What Mario Aquilina and Ivan Callus accomplished in their "13 Ways of Looking at Electronic Literature", Lisa Swanstrom does for Ecocriticism. Taking as her starting point, Cary Wolfe's book on Wallace Stevens, Swanstrom explores each and every one of Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." What emerges, alongside Wolfe's ecocriticism is a resurgence, in literary studies, of the art of close reading.

In this essay, Doris Hambuch uses the image-based work of Arabic cartoonist Khaled Al Jabri to address concerns of technological dependence to reconsider our use of screens. Rather than simply reprimanding readers about the potentially negative dependence of our contemporary society on technology and its screens, Hambuch instead proposes that we look to Al Jabri's work as a way of reconsidering the role of the screen in visual poetics and graphic literature.

A first draft of this essay was presented at the 2017 ELO Conference at Porto, in a panel organized by the "Nar-Trans" group of the University of Granada.

What binds literature, electronic literature and games is "the shaping and networking of the imagination." Drawing on the ideas of Damasio, Walton and Sartre, Gordon Calleja looks at the synthesizing role of the imagination in narrative indie games.

Jussi Parikka interviews artist Zoe Beloff about her relationship to the emerging set of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies known as media archaeology. In way of response, Beloff discusses some past works, including: Lost (1995), Shadow Land (2000), Claire and Don in Slumberland (2002), Charming Augustine (2005), The Somnambulists (2008), and The Dream Films (2009).

Marie-Laure Ryan argues that dysfunctionality in new media art is "not limited to play with inherently digital phenomena such as code and programs," and provides a number of alternative art examples, while also arguing that dysfunctionality "could [also] promote a better understanding of the cognitive activity of reading, or of the significance of the book as a support of writing."

Jan Baetens looks 'through' and 'at' Bolter and Gromala's Windows and Mirrors and finds a foggy vision.

Christine Bucher, reviewing Beatriz Columnina, considers the narrative and photographic dimensions of interiors designed by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier.