Electronic Literature Organization

Last updated
Electronic Literature Organization
Formation1999;25 years ago (1999)
Founder Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover, Jeff Ballowe
President
 Caitlin Fisher
Vice President
Anastasia Salter
Secretary
Mark Sample
Managing Director of CELL
Davin Heckman
Website https://eliterature.org/

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". [1] It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of and criticism of electronic literature, hosts online events and has published a series of collections of electronic literature.

Contents

History

Founding and early years (1999-2002)

The ELO was founded in 1999 in Chicago by Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover, and Jeff Ballowe. Rettberg took the role as CEO, and Ballowe was president. In a book chapter about this early phase, Rettberg describes the first three years as a "turbulent and exciting period". [2]

An article in the Los Angeles Times describes the first reading organised by the ELO in July 2000, "a recent evening at the home of Microsoft executive Richard Bangs", with "trays of light finger food and delicately chilled Chardonnay" with "guests from high-tech east side Seattle mingled with representatives of the old-guard arts establishment and half a dozen writers of new fiction who had come to read from their work". [3]

The new organization was able to ride the excitement of the tech industry during the dot-com bubble, but also suffered from the subsequent crash. [2]

Transition to academic hosts (2002-2008)

The ELO had early successes in obtaining funding from individuals in the technology industry and the Ford Foundation (which funded the Electronic Literature Symposium at UCLA in 2002) and the Rockefeller Foundation (which funded work on the Electronic Literature Directory). [2] However, the dot com crash made funding dry up, and despite some local funding in Chicago, the organization had to transition from having full-time staff and an office to being hosted by universities. In 2001 the ELO moved to UCLA, supported by the English department. [2] Marjorie Luesebrink became president, N. Katherine Hayles was faculty advisor, and Jessica Pressman was the managing director. [2] The organization has since been hosted by universities, including the University of Maryland, College Park in 2006 where it was supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (under the direction of Matthew Kirschenbaum), and MIT under the leadership of Nick Montfort. The ELO is currently hosted at York University, Toronto, Canada, under the leadership of Caitlin Fisher, [4] marking the first time this international organization has moved its headquarters outside of the United States.

2008-present

Since the 2007 conference, the ELO has grown annually and by 2015 was gathering hundreds of people at each of its conferences.

Leadership

Past presidents of the ELO include Jeff Ballowe, Scott Rettberg (as Executive Director), Marjorie Luesebrink, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Joseph Tabbi, Nick Montfort, Dene Grigar, [5] and Leonardo Flores. [6] [7] Caitlin Fisher became president in July 2022. [8] [9]

Conferences

The ELO holds annual conferences that include both scholarly presentations and exhibitions and performances of electronic literature. The ELO website contains an archive of past conference websites. [10]

ELO Conferences
YearThemeLocation
2002State of the Arts SymposiumLos Angeles, California
2007The Future of Electronic LiteratureCollege Park, Maryland
2008Visionary LandscapesVancouver, Washington
2010ELO_AI: Archive & InnovateProvidence, Rhode Island
2012Electrifying Literature: Affordances and ConstraintsMorgantown, West Virginia
2013Chercher le texteParis, France
2014Hold the LightMilwaukee, Wisconsin
2015The End(s) of Electronic LiteratureBergen, Norway
2016Next HorizonsVictoria, BC
2017Electronic Literature: Affiliations, Comm, TranslationsPorto, Portugal
2018Attention á la marche / Mind the gap! [11] Montreal, Canada
2019Peripheries [12] Cork, Ireland
2020(un)continuity [13] Orlando, Florida (virtual)
2021Platform (Post?) Pandemic [14] Bergen, Norway; Aarhus, Denmark & virtual
2022Education and Electronic Literature [15] Como, Italy
2023Overcoming Divides: Electronic Literature and Social Change [16] Coimbra, Portugal


Publications

Electronic Literature Collections

The ELO has curated and edited four volumes of electronic literature. [23] [24] [25]

Volume 1 (October 2006). Mark Marino noted in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, "Amidst the collection, there are some works that transcend the collection itself and stand out as pillars of electronic writing. Such pieces have already garnered much critical attention. Most notable among these would be Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter, Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue, Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, and Kate Pulinge r’s Inanimate Alice. [26]

Volume 2 (February 2011) Tim Wright explains that "the process of gathering, archiving and tagging the works to make them more easily available to a wider audience, also freezes (necessarily) what may have been otherwise ephemeral or in situ." [27]

Volume 3 (February 2016) Urszula Anna Pawlicka noted that ELC3 represents a "post" code range of literature. [28] This work also includes Qianxun Chen's Shan Shui, Porpentine's With Those We Love Alive, Borsuk's Between Page and Screen, Illya Szilak's Queerskins, Emily Short and Liza Daly's First Draft of the Revolution, Jeremy Height's 34 North 118 West, J.R. Carpenter's Along the Briny Beach, Mark Marino and Rob Wittig's Being@Spencer Pratt, Caitlin Fisher's Everyone at This Party is Dead, Anna Anthropy's Hunt for the Gay Planet, N. Katherine Hayle 's Speculation. [29]

Volume 4 (June 2022). ELC4 presents the largest and most diverse group yet of elit authors writing in Afrikaans, Ancient Chinese, Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, isiXhosa, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mezangelle, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Setswana, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, South African Sign Language, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Yoruba [30]

Awards

The 2001 Electronic Literature Awards

In 2001 the ELO announced the Electronic Literature Awards, with a $10,000 prize (funded by ZDNet) for the best work of fiction and the best work of poetry. [31] [32] 163 works were submitted, and each was reviewed by at least three people on the board, after which the highest scoring works were passed on to judges Larry McCaffery and Heather McHugh. [2] Rettberg notes that the diversity of works submitted and shortlisted was "an eye-opener (..) in terms of what I might consider 'fiction' and 'poetry' to be in the e-lit context'. [2]

In 2001, These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher won the fiction prize and windsound by John Cayley won the poetry prize. The excitement of the era can be felt in an interview by the cable television channel TechTV with Fisher after the awards gala in New York. [33]

ELO Awards (2014-)

After a pause due to a lack of funding, the ELO Awards were rekindled in 2014, and since then an annual award has been given to the best literary work and the best work of scholarship on electronic literature. [34] Each award comes with a $1000 stipend.

Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

This award honors the year’s best work of electronic literature, of any form or genre.

Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature
YearAwarded to
2014Jason Edward Lewis, Vital to the General Public Welfare
2015 Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, Pry
2016 Scott Rettberg and Roderick Coover, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project
2017Alan Bigelow, How To Rob a Bank
2018Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean, Novelling
2019IP Yuk-Yiu, False Words 流/言
2020Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato, The Library of Nonhuman Books
2021Leise Hook, The Vine and the Fish
2022 David Jhave Johnston, ReRites [35]

Honorable Mention: "Al Barrah" by Reham Hosny.

2023Everest Pipkin, Anonymous Animal. Runner-up: "The (m)Otherhood of Meep (the bat translator)" by Alinta Krauth

Honorable Mention: "The Decameron 2.0" by The Decameron Collective


N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature

This award honors the best work of criticism of electronic literature of any length.

N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature
YearAwarded to
2014 Johannes Heldén  [ sv ] and Håkan Jonson  [ sv ], Evolution
2015 Sandy Baldwin, The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature
2016 Jeremy Douglass, Jessica Pressman, and Mark Marino, Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope
2017 David Jhave Johnston, Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry’s Ontological Implications
2018 Joseph Tabbi, Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature
2019 Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature
2020 Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies
2021 Jessica Pressman, Bookishness
2022 Lai-Tze Fan (editor) “Critical Making, Critical Design,” Issue 01 of The Digital Review [35]
2023 Lyle Skains, Neverending Stories: The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction. Runner up: Opera aperta: Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present" by Emanuela Patti. Honorable mention: “Girl Online” by Joanna Walsh


Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award

This award honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field.

Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award
YearAwarded to
2016 Marjorie C. Luesebrink
2017 John Cayley
2018 N. Katherine Hayles
2019 Mez Breeze
2020 Judy Malloy
2021 Kate Pullinger
2022 Alan Sondheim
2023 Stephanie Strickland
Maverick Award
YearAwarded to
2021 Talan Memmott
2023 Deena Larsen

Related Research Articles

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden (1992), which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library (1999), and Hegirascope (1995), amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Montfort</span> American poet & digital media professor

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Brian Kim Stefans is an American poet known for his work in experimental poetry and electronic literature. He is a professor of poetry, new media and screenplay studies in the English department of UCLA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deena Larsen</span> American writer of electronic literature (born 1964)

Deena Larsen is an American new media and hypertext fiction author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. Her work has been published in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, and Blue Moon Review. Since May 2007, the Deena Larsen Collection of early electronic literature has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephanie Strickland</span> American poet

Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">María Mencía</span>

María Mencía is a Spanish-born media artist and researcher working as a Senior Lecturer at Kingston University in London, United Kingdom. Her artistic work is widely recognized in the field of electronic literature, and her scholarship on digital textuality has been widely published. She holds a Ph.D. in Digital Poetics and Digital Art at the Chelsea College of Arts of the University of the Arts London and studied English Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink was an American writer, scholar, and teacher. Writing hypermedia fiction under the pen name M.D. Coverley, she is best known for her epic hypertext novels Califia (2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006). A pioneer born-digital writer, she is part of the first generation of electronic literature authors that arose in the 1987–1997 period. She was a founding board member and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and the first winner of the Electronic Literature Organization Career Achievement Award, which was named in her honor. Lusebrink was professor emeritus, School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College (IVC).

New Binary Press was an independent publishing house founded in 2012 in Cork city, Ireland. In a Tweet dated 19 January 2021, the New Binary Press announced that it had ceased operations. It published print books and electronic literature, specialising in more experimental works, as well as a number of periodicals. It was established and run by its editor, James O'Sullivan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dene Grigar</span> American digital artist and scholar

Dene (Rudyne)Grigar is a digital artist and scholar based in Vancouver, Washington. She was the President of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2013 to 2019. In 2016, Grigar received the International Digital Media and Arts Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Rettberg</span> American-Norwegian digital culture professor and author

Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He leads the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence from 2023 to 2033.

Tina Escaja, also known as Alm@ Pérez, is a Spanish-American writer, activist, feminist scholar and digital artist based in Burlington, Vermont. She is a Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages and Gender & Women's Studies, and the Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program at the University of Vermont. She is the winner of the International Poetry Prize Dulce María Loynaz, and the National Latino Poetry Award for Young Adults, Isabel Campoy-Alma Flor Ada. She is considered a pioneer in the field of electronic literature in Spanish. She is a full member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE), and Corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE).

David Jhave Johnston is a Canadian poet, videographer, and motion graphics artist working chiefly in digital and computational media,. and a researcher at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. This artist's work is often attributed, simply, to the name Jhave.

Richard Holeton is an American writer and higher-education administrator. Holeton's creative works are foundational in the hypertext and electronic literature genres. As a writer, his most notable work is the hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, which has been recognized as an important early work of electronic literature and is included in the hypertext canon.

<i>These Waves of Girls</i> 2001 hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher

These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher that won the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Fiction in 2001. The work is frequently taught in undergraduate literature courses and is referenced in the field of electronic literature as a significant example of early multimodal web-based hypertext fiction, placing Fisher "at the forefront of digital writing".

Lexia to Perplexia is a poetic work of electronic literature published on the web by Talan Memmott in 2000. The work won the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award that year.

Light-Water: a Mosaic of Meditations is a "hypermedia work" that utilizes and layers images and poetry to "create a striking experince of poetic meditation." Created by Christy Sheffield Sanford in 1999, the work consists of ten poems that produce a "visual-literal meditation on light and water." Through the implementation of timelines within the poems and overall work, Light-Water illustrates how "space-time possibilities for literature can now be more adequately realized through the use of spatio-temporal dhtml editors."

Caitlin Fisher is a Canadian media artist, poet, writer, and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto where she also directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab. Fisher is also a Co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab, former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair and an international award-winning digital storyteller. Creator of some of the world’s first AR poetry and long-from VR narratives. Fisher is also known for the 2001 hypermedia novel These Waves of Girls, and for her work creating content and software for augmented reality.

The NEXT: Museum, Library, and Preservation Space is a repository of net art, electronic literature and games. It is supported by the Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University at Vancouver and the Electronic Literature Organization. This is a digital museum dedicated to reviving and maintaining these works to make them accessible to all. Physical artifacts are held at the Electronic Literature Lab in Washington, US.

References

  1. ↑ "Electronic Literature Organization". ELO. 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-21.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rettberg, Scott (2015). "Developing an Identity for the Field of Electronic Literature: Reflections on the Electronic Literature Organization Archives". Electronic literature communities. Scott Rettberg, Patricia Tomaszek, Sandy Baldwin. Morgantown, WV. p. 81-112. ISBN   978-1-940425-99-3. OCLC   944133627.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  3. ↑ Murphy, Kim (2000-07-24). "Electronic Literature: Thinking Outside the Book". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2022-10-15.
  4. ↑ "Professor Caitlin Fisher named president of Electronic Literature Organization". 22 July 2022.
  5. ↑ Flood, Alison (2014-03-12). "Where did the story of ebooks begin?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  6. ↑ Burnette, Ellen Gwin. "Dr. Leonardo Flores named chair of Appalachian's Department of English". today.appstate.edu. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  7. ↑ "ELO History – Electronic Literature Organization" . Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  8. ↑ "Professor Caitlin Fisher named president of Electronic Literature Organization – YFile". 22 July 2022. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  9. ↑ Marino, Mark (2022-07-15). "ELO Presidency Transition from Flores to Fisher". eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  10. ↑ "Electronic Literature Organization Conference Archive". conference.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  11. ↑ Marino, Mark (2018). "ELO 2018: Attention à la marche / Mind the Gap – Electronic Literature Organization" . Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  12. ↑ O'Sullivan, James (2019-07-10). "ELO2019: Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival, Programme and Book of Abstracts". University College Cork: 1–166.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. ↑ "ELO2020 Conference and Media Arts Festival – Electronic Literature Organization 2020 conference" . Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  14. ↑ "ELO 2021". conferences.au.dk. 2021. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  15. ↑ "ELO 2022 – Electronic Literature Conference Italy" . Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  16. ↑ "ELO 2022 – Electronic Literature Conference Italy" . Retrieved 2022-01-14.
  17. ↑ "Home | Electronic Literature Directory". directory.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  18. ↑ "PAD – Electronic Literature Organization" . Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  19. ↑ Montfort, Nick; Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (2004-06-14). "Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature". eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  20. ↑ Liu, Alan; Durand, David; Montfort, Nick; Proffitt, Merrilee; Quin, Liam R.E.; Réty, Jean-Hugues; Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (2005-08-05). "Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature". eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  21. ↑ Bloomsbury. "Electronic Literature: Bloomsbury Publishing (US)". www.bloomsbury.com. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  22. ↑ Grigar, Dene; Moulthrop, Stuart (2015). Pathfinders. Nouspace Publications. ISBN   978-0-692-14708-5 . Retrieved 2022-10-13.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  23. ↑ "Electronic Literature Collection". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  24. ↑ Hall, María Cristina; Castelán, Silvia; Nepote, Mónica; Gb, Camila (2022). "Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  25. ↑ "Electronic Literature Collection". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  26. ↑ Marino, Mark (2008). "Review: The Electronic Literature Collection Volume I: A New Media Primer". DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly. 2 (1).
  27. ↑ "The Electronic Literature Collection V2". Cordite Poetry Review. 2011-11-30. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  28. ↑ Pawlicka, Urszula Anna (2016). "Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections". CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 18 (1). Purdue University Press.
  29. ↑ "Electronic Literature Collection - Volume 3". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2024-04-30.
  30. ↑ Berens, Kathi; Murray, John; Skains, Lyle; Torres, Rui; Zamora, Mia (2022-01-01). "Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4". English Faculty Publications and Presentations.
  31. ↑ "The 2001 Electronic Literature Awards". eliterature.org. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  32. ↑ Richer, Adam (2000). "Electronic Literature Awards : $10.000 Prizes For Fiction & Poetry". University of Bergen Library Collection: Electronic Literature - posters and other historical documents.
  33. ↑ Swish, Laura (2001). Grigar, Dene (ed.). TechTV Interview with Caitlin Fisher. TechTV / Vimeo.
  34. ↑ "Past ELO Award Winners – Electronic Literature Organization" . Retrieved 2022-10-13.
  35. 1 2 Snyder, R. (2022-10-04). "Announcing the 2022 ELO Prizes – Electronic Literature Organization" . Retrieved 2022-10-13.
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