To commemorate thirty years of the electronic book review, we invited foundational editors, contributors, barkers, digital scholars and artists to reflect on ebr's evolving role in the field of electronic literature. These interviews, recorded in April and May 2025, offer a mosaic of personal histories, conceptual insights, and speculative visions. From the DIY ethos of early web publishing to today's AI-augmented critical discourse, each speaker traces ebr's unique influence on their practice and the broader network of digital culture. Together, these conversations form a living archive—an oral thREAD—that honors conviviality, cross-disciplinarity, and the ongoing experiment of critical publishing.
Joseph Tabbi is the founding editor of electronic book review—one of the web’s first open-access journals—and a literary scholar whose career spans the University of Illinois, Chicago and, since 2019, the University of Bergen, where he became the principle investigator in the electronic literature node. Alongside earlier monographs such as Postmodern Sublime (1995), Cognitive Fictions (2002), and his biography of William Gaddis, Nobody Grew but the Business (2015), Tabbi edited the landmark two-volume collection Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review (Bloomsbury, 2020), which gathers nearly 100 essays charting three decades of discourse in ebr. His latest book, The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism (Cambridge UP, 2024), maps the emergence of posthumanist thought across print and born-digital literature.
Mark Amerika is a pioneering figure in digital art and experimental writing. His first novel, The Kafka Chronicles (1993) quickly went through three printings. That same year, he founded the Alt-X Online Network, "where the digerati meet the literati," and soon served as the Founding Publisher of the electronic book review, now celebrating its 30-year anniversary. In 1997, Amerika released GRAMMATRON (1997), a sprawling work of net art selected for the Whitney Biennial (2000). Now a College Professor of Distinction and Founding Director of the Intermedia Art, Writing & Performance PhD program in the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder, Amerika has expanded digital poetics through influential hybrid texts such as META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press, 2007), remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence (Stanford University Press, 2022). His current focus is human–AI collaboration. In 2023, Amerika, with collaborators Will Luers and Chad Mossholder, launched Posthuman Cinema, a suite of AI-generated “ciné-poèmes” presented by Zurich’s Kate Vass Galerie that was selected for the 2024 International Biennial of Digital Art and exhibited at the Arsenale in Montreal. His most recent work, Telephone, made in collaboration with Martine Stig (NL) and Joanna Zylinska (UK), was commissioned by Noorderlicht with funds from the Mondriaan Foundation and premiered at the "Pixel Perceptions" exhibition.
Scott Rettberg is a scholar and writer of electronic literature: co-founder and first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization, he is now Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen and founding director of the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Excellence launched in 2023 with NOK 155 million to study “algorithmic narrativity.” His collaborative hypertext The Unknown (1999) helped redefine networked fiction, while later projects such as the EU-funded ELMCIP initiative (2010–13) produced the open-access Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, a critical infrastructure for the field. Rettberg’s scholarship—including the survey monograph Electronic Literature (Polity, 2018) and recent work on AI-driven storytelling—continues to chart how networked and algorithmic cultures reshape narrative form.
Steve Tomasula is an author and multimedia storyteller whose work bridges experimental fiction and digital aesthetics. A long-time professor at the University of Notre Dame, he is celebrated for hybrid novels such as VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002), an image-text exploration of biotech and identity, and TOC: A New-Media Novel (2009/10), an interactive narrative about time that earned the Mary Shelley Award for Excellence in Fiction and the Electronic Literature Organization’s Best Book prize. Subsequent titles—including The Book of Portraiture, IN&OZ, Once Human, and Ascension—continue his signature fusion of visuals, theory, and speculative storytelling, probing how language, bodies, and data co-evolve. Tomasula’s essays appear widely, and his digital projects have been showcased in electronic-literature exhibitions and design competitions for their inventive use of animation, sound, and interface. Across page, screen, and installation, he keeps pushing the material limits of narrative form to imagine futures where story and technology develop in tandem.
Rob Wittig is a writer-designer whose career charts the evolution from pre-Web bulletin boards to today’s “netprov” (networked improvised narrative). In 1983 he co-founded the IN.S.OMNIA BBS with the Invisible Seattle collective and later chronicled its collaborative experiments in Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing (1994), written after a Fulbright year studying electronic literature with Jacques Derrida in Paris. Building on that DIY ethos, Wittig created seminal Web fictions such as The Fall of the Site of Marsha (1998) and the subscription email novel Blue Company (2001-02), both anthologized in key electronic-literature collections. He formalized “netprov” through projects like Grace, Wit & Charm (2012) and subsequent social-media performances that treat everyday platforms as stages for collective storytelling. His book Netprov, Networked Improvised Literature for the Classroom and Beyond (2021) documents — and shares recipes for — many fun netprovs. Rob taught for many years as an Assistant Professor of Art & Design and Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He now mentors new media artists while continuing to bridge literary experimentation with social technologies, proving that collaborative play remains central to the future of digital narrative.
Ewan Branda is an architectural theorist, software designer, and the systems mind behind electronic book review’s evolving interface, which he reconceives as a living information architecture whose “tags,” “weaves,” and metadata splice the journal into a larger semantic web of digital culture. A former Graduate Chair of Architecture at Woodbury University and current professor-researcher in Montréal, Branda holds a PhD in architectural history and theory from UCLA, an SMArchS in design computation from MIT, and a BArch from the University of Waterloo. His scholarship probes how architecture, software, and late-postwar technocracy shape knowledge systems, and he has taught studios and seminars that mash up AI image-making, game mechanics, and electronic literature. Alongside steering ebr’s redesign since the late 1990s, he has served on the boards of the Electronic Literature Organization and the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, exemplifying his commitment to bridging built space, code, and collaborative publishing.
Davin Heckman Davin Heckman is a scholar of digital literature and media theory. He currently serves as Professor of Mass Communication at Winona State University, and was managing editor of electronic book review (2007-2011) and supervising editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, ensuring the journal’s experimental ethos and its curated database remain vital resources for the field. As secretary of the Electronic Literature Organization and managing director of the Consortium for Electronic Literature (CELL), he helps maintain the infrastructural backbone that archives and contextualizes born-digital writing for scholars worldwide. Heckman’s own work—which includes the monograph A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke UP, 2008) and many essays on “technical estrangement” in e-lit—interrogates how media systems shape everyday life and artistic possibility. A 2011–12 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, he continues to foster international collaborations that expand the reach and rigor of electronic literature studies.
Lori Emerson is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is Founding Director of the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL)—a hands-on collection of still-functioning technology from the 19th century to the early-2000s that she treats as a living archive for experimental research, teaching, and creative practice. Her scholarship exposes the politics embedded in hardware, software, networks, and infrastructures most notably in Reading Writing Interfaces (2014), The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka, 2022), and Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook (2025). Through publications as well as MAL-sponsored exhibitions and workshops, Emerson continually spotlights underexplored layers of technological history.
Lai-Tze Fan is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Technology and Social Change and an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where she directs the U&AI Lab and teaches critical issues around technology, digital media, and design. As Director of Communications and Co-Editor of electronic book review—and editor for an issue of its sibling journal The Digital Review—she curates conversations at the intersection of electronic literature, media theory, and critical design. Fan co-edited Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review (Bloomsbury, 2020) and has guest-edited ebr gatherings on Canadian Digital Poetics and the award-winning special issue Critical Making, Critical Design. Her own creative work includes “Dial”, an interactive poem (with Nick Montfort), and “Masked Making”, a generative textual artwork (with Anastasia Salter and Anne Sullivan), both anthologized in Electronic Literature Collection 4. Across scholarship, editorships, and lab practice, Fan maps how power and interface design shape networked storytelling and communication, while building infrastructures that sustain the electronic literature community.
Will Luers is a digital artist and Scholarly Associate Professor in the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. Celebrated for hybrid works that fuse video, code, and narrative, he co-created the recombinant work novelling (with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean), winner of the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2018 Robert Coover Award. As Managing Editor of electronic book review (2018-2025) and founding editor of its sibling journal The Digital Review, Luers commissions and contextualizes boundary-pushing screen art, digital literature and essay writing, advocating for an independent digital culture. His latest collaboration, Posthuman Cinema (2023–) with Mark Amerika and Chad Mossholder, extends his long-running interest in computational cinema through a series of Generative AI assisted “ciné-poèmes” exhibited at the International Digital Art Biennale and released via Kate Vass Galerie.
Anna Nacher is a digital-culture and feminist media scholar who now serves as Managing Editor of electronic book review—where she co-curates the journal’s “thREADs” clusters that weave translocal, posthumanist, and eco-poetic perspectives into its archive—and sits on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. An Associate Professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University (Kraków), she directs a Polish National Science Centre project on the aesthetics of post-digital imagery and was Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in Creative Digital Media at Winona State University (2019). Nacher’s eco-critical and locative-media research informs special ebr gatherings such as “COVID E-Lit” and “Post-Digital Debates,” while her essays appear in Hyperrhiz, communication+1, and the Electronic Literature Collection. Across editorial work, field-defining scholarship, and permaculture-inspired art practice, she advances collaborative infrastructures that sustain electronic literature’s global, sustainable future.
Tegan Pyke is an emerging digital humanist and media scholar completing her PhD in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, where she investigates how electronic literature is designed, archived, and canonised—particularly in collaborative, community-driven settings. In 2021 she partnered with the British Library to devise a quality-assurance workflow for preserving the New Media Writing Prize collection, sharpening her focus on user-centred, feminist archival practice. As a co-editor and newsletter contributor at electronic book review, Pyke surfaces under-represented voices and experimental histories across the journal’s three-decade corpus. Her recent presentations at ELO 2024 outline strategies for documenting e-lit in Wikidata and for comparing institutional versus grassroots approaches to born-digital storytelling, underscoring her commitment to open, accessible infrastructures that keep off-centre literary cultures alive.