"I too am a psychic automaton." Mark Amerika, a founding publisher of ebr, shares the onto-operational sources of his (capital C) Creativity with ebr editor Will Luers.

In a series of interviews led in February and March 2021, Nacher, Pold and Rettberg examined how contemporary digital art and electronic literature responded to the pandemic. Their project on COVID and electronic literature was funded by DARIAH-EU and resulted in the exhibition prepared for the ELO 2021 Conference & Festival and the documentary film that premiered in June 2021 at the Oslo Poesiefilm Festival. xtine burrough is one of the creators of 13 works that were interviewed for the project. She generously shares her thoughts on life and creativity, collapsing spaces and the meaning of a domestic art practice during the pandemic.

Where Tomasula (in his own words) makes “no attempt to historicize the field,” preferring to offer “a snapshot” of a vibrant body of conceptual literary art, Gonzalez in this review arrogates the position Tomasula passes on, and proposes that the many texts in Tomasula's "immensely rewarding" anthology continue in the spirit of postmodern literary forms and show the continuing potency of the postmodern toolbox.

After having lived through three generations of electronic literature, and having experienced pre-web, web, and post-web literary periods, Will Luers takes a step back and advocates an "independent digital culture" in which literary artists might explore "a reality between language and the ineffable (be it artistic, religious or secular)." A mixture of technics and magics, we may be approaching a fourth generation of e-lit that is closer to pre-industrial folklore than it is to our present, technically managed space for individual and collective "creativity."

Jeremy Douglass and Mark C. Marino reflect on the activities of the Critical Code Studies (CCS) Working Group 2020.

Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass discuss the field of Critical Code Studies (CCS) and introduce three reports about the discussions of the CCS Working Group 2020.

Meredith Finkelstein surveys key methodological aims of CCS, and considers the ways attending to code can enrich understanding of digital works, looking specifically at digital artist and programmer Eugenio Tisselli’s code for Amazon.html

Patricia Silva explores the impact of Google’s Search algorithm on BIPOC and queer cultures and highlights the iconoclastic work of the Feminist.AI collective, a community of academics, artists, and designers who seek to empower people with ethical ways to store, use, and search information.

Kalila Shapiro discusses the problematic supremacy of English in global programming, and explores ways that Indigenous programming languages, including Jon Corbett’s Cree#, have sought to break down this “cultural coding barrier”

In this article, Richard Carter outlines an ongoing critical and creative engagement in electronic literature, digital sensing, and ecological concerns. Like many who are now publishing critical and creative works together (particularly in The Digital Review), Carter situates his practices in a set of entangled disciplines, and then discusses his developing project Landform.

While Gastropoetics is a marginal practice, these culinary experiments explore the relational dynamics of cooking, hospitality, and eating as persistent humanistic practices, even as such practices are increasingly mediated by "food selfies" and other emerging, performative taste practices. Key to understanding the appeal of gastropoetics is the ad hoc nature of human production and consumption (see de Certeau's "everyday life") performed under the constraints of the generated menu, of the platform, and of the mnemotechnical system itself.

While presenting a series of four selected E-Lit artworks, Marques and Gago demonstrate how our recent pandemic will affect new media art, similarly to the ways in which the Athens Plague affected the writing (and reception) of Greek tragedies. And the same goes for Cinema and Aids, smallpox and illustration, photography and the third bubonic plague, usw.

Dani Spinosa reflects on the relocation of e-Lit scholarship and pedagogy "in the remote classroom for the precariat writ large."

As a follow up to the series of interviews with Ben Grosser in February and March 2021 (published later that year in ebr), we include here a more settled, post-pandemic set of reflections. In the interviews, Grosser noted how "the realities of the pandemic necessitated back then," and maybe still does, "a degree of vigilance about new information": is there anything new that we need to know? The flood of information, however, has been less about knowing and acting on that knowledge than it is about keeping us engaged, and returning us daily, hourly, and minute by minute to our digital doomscrolls. For this newly produced populace that is largely stuck online, Grosser here discusses a net art / e-lit project of his own, an alternative software interface called The Endless Doomscroller.

A critical encounter with one of alt-lit (alternative literature) movement’s most renowned contributors, whose moment (like many in this scene) has passed. Citing Christian Howard, Leah Henrickson advances the argument that “[w]e’re at a turning point in literary studies, and we need to confront how the changes in mode are affecting – and are affected by – the alternative networks of circulation within these digital spaces.”

Through the examples of three types of digital stories, including an interactive narrative for the smartphone based on notifications, a web narrative based on a real time data flow, and the widely used social media feature of stories, Bouchardon and Fülöp explore the relationship between the digital, temporality, and narrative. They ask, "what new narrative forms, or even new concepts of narrative do these new temporal experiences provided by digital technology offer to us?"

Reflections on an emerging digital poetry whose primary theme is ecological loss, and personal reminiscence.

While defining the art object in a post-digital world, Maria Goichoechea de Jorge observes in media artists a nostalgia for an analogue craftsmanship; a rebellion against machinic perfection; and a resistance to forms of human creativity that propel us into an ever more profound symbiosis with our technological lifeworld.

For Saint Augustine, biblical scripture was indispensible to his being able to finish the final draft of his life story. Hemingway advocated stopping midway in a sentence, to ensure a fresh start tomorrow. For us today in the age of algorithmic governance, our stories are more likely to be generated continuously through the words of others using Google search, autocomplete and the algorithm’s statistically-informed guess. In this article, Fernanda Mugica explores the real time writing in charly.gr’s Peronismo (spam), from 2010, a visual poem that combines music and text; Matías Buonfrate's “No poseas un miedo” (2020); and Argentine poet Francisco López Merino's C0d3 P03try.

Building on the work of Souvik Mukherjee (2017), T. Shanmugapriya and Nirmala Menon (2018, 2019), Samya Brata Roy identifies emergent elements of a multimodal E-Lit tradition in India.