2025
This time on Off Center, Scott Rettberg is joined by Sarah Edmands Martin, a designer and researcher at the University of Notre Dame. Her research takes place at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. In this episode they discuss speculative design.
In these edited and approved transcripts from interviews conducted by Will Luers for the ebr@30 online commemoration, Ewan Brenda, Davin Heckman, Lori Emerson, Steve Tomasula, Lai-Tze Fan, Rob Wittig, Will Luers, and Tegan Pyke reflect on how they came to know Joe Tabbi and got involved with ebr.
Rob Wittig and Talan Memmott reminisce about their favorite Netprovs, discuss the ways improvisation on the Web can be tackled, and theorize the future possibilities of the Netprov form after a step back from the platform formerly known as Twitter.
This time around on the Off Center podcast, Scott Rettberg is joined by Kristine Jørgensen, professor of media studies and PI at the Center for Digital Narrative. They discuss male gaming culture and transgressive games, her involvement in the Games and Transgressive Aesthetics project, and as her ongoing project Understanding Male Gamers.
Scott Rettberg talks to Patrick Jagoda—University of Chicago professor and cofounder of both the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab—about transmedia storytelling, alternate reality games, the differences in narrative design for video games and ARGs, and the role ARGs can have in a community.
Scott Rettberg and Mathias Klang discuss the panopticon of surveillance and our problematic relationship with the devices that make our lives easier — while also eroding our privacy.
Rettberg and Rettberg discuss Jill's new book on machine vision and, in doing so, cover the mythological origins of surveillance, cybersemniotics, and the role of fear in the technologization of Western society.
2024
Jhave and Scott Rettberg explore the bright side of AI, the revolutionary advancements in creativity and medicine, while trying not to be consumed by the crushing dark side, the "precarious potential for extinction."
In Off Center Episode 12, Scott Rettberg talks to game designer, academic, and author Doris Rusch about making games with meaning, existentialist psychotherapy, the resurgence of text-based games online, and embodiment: "Let’s talk about Zombie Yoga."
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.
Off 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."
In 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.
Hypertext pioneer Robert Arellano discusses the genre with Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN).
Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), interviews Flourish Klink, podcaster and fandom expert, about their rich history with fandom and fan culture.
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), in conversation with Nick Monfort, who is leading the CDN's Computational Narrative System's research node.
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) is joined by Lai-Tze Fan to discuss gendered AI assistants and the invisible labor involved in editorial work.
Drew Keller, Microsoft employee and graduate of the Digital Culture program at the University of Bergen joins Scott Rettberg to talk about the potential role of AI in our media production. From the Jacquard loom to the PowerPoint designer, human creativity has always been intertwined with technology, but is the rapid increase in AI a revolution in the way we produce media, or just another tool?
2023
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?
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.