Remembering Robert Coover
Scott Rettberg, Robert Arellano, Larry McCaffery, Lance Olsen, Nick Montfort, Stéphane Vanderhaege, Caitlin Fisher, Thomas A. Bass, Tom LeClair, Alvin LuScott Rettberg and Robert Arellano's collection of interviews "with critics, creative writers, students, and friends of Coover" to commemorate the passing of one of the pioneers in electronic literature.
Robert Coover
John CayleyJohn Cayley commemorates Robert Coover, a prolific writer and one of the first supporters of digital writing and writing with computation who in the 1990s began teaching courses in hypermedia (with George Landow) at Brown University. This obituary was originally composed for communities associated with Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, within which Coover lived and worked for almost a half century, and where John Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts.
Off Center Episode 25: AI Cinema with Will Luers
Scott Rettberg, Will LuersOff center, wayward, slightly off path.... Rettberg and Luers discuss their longrunning encounters with writers, artists, computational film makers and other multidisciplinary "people who come to the electronic literature community, and it’s not only writers, but also artists, visual artists, and you find everyone has a similar kind of wayward path."
Off Center Episode 11: Filmmaking and Combinatory Cinema with Roderick Coover
Scott Rettberg, Roderick CooverIn 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.
William Gillespie Netprov Interview
William Gillespie, Rob WittigRob Wittig chats with William Gillespie about working with constraints and word plays, all the while emphasizing the netprov’s community building potential (a particularly big ellipsis needed, anyone?)
ebr: meeting point for conversations
Anna NacherManaging Editor Anna Nacher recollects the past — and sketches out the future of ebr.
William Gaddis’s Unpublished Screenplays, Stage-Drama Scripts, Prospectuses for Film & TV, and Poetry: An Archival Guide
Ali ChetwyndA survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished creative work in poetry and drama, from a parodic Elizabethan play and the complete script of Once at Antietam to a full western film screenplay and a year of failed pitches for TV drama. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.
William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide
Joel Minor, Ali ChetwyndA survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished prose fiction, particularly short stories from before The Recognitions and incomplete forerunner projects for his eventually published novels. Those include the two aborted novels that evolved into The Recognitions, notes toward a projected novel about filmmaking that provided foundational material for Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own, and more. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.
Off Center Episode 10: Immersive Storytelling in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality with Caitlin Fisher
Scott Rettberg, Caitlin FisherIn this episode of "Off Center," Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, interviews Caitlin Fisher, a pioneer of immersive AR and VR and Director of the Immersive Storytelling Lab at York University.
Experiments in Generating Cut-up texts with Commercial AI
Polina Mackay, James MackayCan ChatGPT or other Chatbot interfaces really write anything better than a feeble imitation of postmodern cut-up techniques? Polina and James Mackay think so, and they offer some reasons for holding onto a human, guiding intelligence in the writing process.
Affect Aesthetic and Politics of the Book
Sol Heo (허솔)A Review of Bookishness, by Jessica Pressman.
Comics as Big Data: The transformation of comics into machine-interpretable information
Ilan ManouachLike 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.
Automatism for Digital Text Surrealists
Nick MontfortWith this brief look at Large Language Model surrealism, Nick Montfort locates and identifies "the id of the internet, of publishing, of podcasting."
Off Center Episode 9: Hypertext as Technology and Literature with Robert Arellano
Scott Rettberg, Robert ArellanoHypertext pioneer Robert Arellano discusses the genre with Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN).
Gaddis’s Broken Doorknob
Alan BigelowFurther memories from yet another student of William Gaddis during the time when WG taught at Bard.