Scott Rettberg

Davin Heckman will be joining us at the University of Bergen in August as our 2011-2012 Fulbright scholar in Digital Culture. Applications are now open for the 2012-2013 position. The deadline for applications is August 1, 2011.

We have a Fulbright Scholar position available at UiB Digital Culture in 2012-2013. The position is now advertised on the CIES site. Fulbright scholarships are available to US citizens residing in the US. This position is for a PhD with at least two years of related teaching experience. The scholar will teach 1.5 courses per term in electronic literature or digital media aesthestics courses at the undergraduate and graduate level with 50% research time, and will have the opportunity to participate in the European ‘Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP) HERA research project events. We will also facilitate lecture visits to other European institutions. The pay is 25,000 NOK per month, and travel expenses are covered by the Fulbright. Although the cost of living in Norway is high, the cost of housing, work-related travel and meals are tax-deductible for the scholar. Travel expenses for dependents are not covered, but there is an allowance of 2000 NOK per month per dependent. Depending on needs and expertise, courses the scholar might teach include DIKULT103: Digital Genres: Digital Art, Electronic Literature and Computer Games; DIKUL105: Web Design; DIKULT203: Electronic Literature; DIKULT251: Critical Perspectives on Information Technologies and Society; DIKULT303: Digital Media Aesthetics; or DIKULT304: Graduate Seminar: Topics in Digital Culture. The position is available either for a semester (5 months) or a year (10 months). A letter of invitation is recommended. If you know anyone who might be interested, they should get in touch with me via the address in the advertisement.

Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2
Launch at the Bergen Public Library
Monday May 2, 2011

The Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic studies welcomes you to attend two special events celebrating the launch of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 is an international anthology of more than 60 works of electronic literature published under a Creative Commons license online and on DVD. The publication of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 in 2006 had a significant impact on the field of electronic literature, giving readers and educators working in the field a common set of referents in the form of a diverse collection of literary works made for digital media. Volume 2, just published, offers new digital poetry, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, multimedia documentaries, and a variety of other forms of electronic literature.

The University of Bergen program in Digital Culture was one of the sponsors of the publication of the ELC 2 and will make use of it in courses in years to come.

In celebration of this publishing event, two events are planned on Monday, May 2, 2011 in cooperation with the Bergen Public Library and Vagant.

14:00-16:00 Bergen Public Library, Auditorium
Presentation of the ELC 2: Talan Memmott and Rita Raley, Editors
The editors will present the collection and briefly highlight a variety of works of electronic literature in the collection.

Editing Electronic Literature, a Roundtable Discussion
Editors of the ELC 2 (Talan Memmott and Rita Raley) and the ELC 1 (Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland) will discuss the process of selecting and contextualizing works for the two anthologies, preparing the two online and disc editions, and distributing the collections to international audiences. Discussion will be led by Andrew Roberts, Professor of English at the University of Dundee and leader of the Poetry Beyond Text project.

19:30-21:30 Bergen Public Library, Auditorium
Reading of works from the ELC 1 and 2
Featuring readings and performances from

• Lexia to Perplexia by Talan Memmott (ELC 1)
• slippingglimpse by Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan (ELC 2)
• V: Vniverse by Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (ELC 2)
• Letter to Linus by William Gillespie (ELC 2)
• The Unknown by William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton (ELC 2)

Q/A led by Audun Lindholm, editor of Vagant: Journal of Literature and Criticism.

This event is sponsored by the Bergen Public Library, the University of Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group, ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, the Electronic Literature Organization, the Fulbright Foundation, the University of Bergen (Småforskmidler), and Vagant.

I just prepared a screencast for Judy Malloy’s Authoring Software project, walking through the code of my generative fiction After Parthenope and explaining my process of writing and coding it in Processing.

After Parthenope Authoring Screencast from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

Tuesday, March 15th 12:15-14:00
HF Building, Room 301
“Reading Chatbots”
Visiting Fulbright lecturer Mark Marino, Asst. Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, will discuss his current book project: Reading Chatbots: Conversational Actor Networks: an interdisciplinary investigation into autonomous conversational agents drawing upon theories from Communication, the Humanities, and Social Sciences. The book demonstrates a methodology of software studies, reading chatbots with attention to their performance of race, gender, sexuality, and class. markcmarino.com

Monday, March 21st 14:15-16:00
Sydneshaugen Skole, Room 304B
“Exquisite_Code”
Media artist Brendan Howell is in from Berlin as a visiting lecturer at KHiB. Howell will present the “Exquisite_Code” project, and other electronic literature related projects. Exquisite_Code is an algorithmic performance system for heterogeneous groups of writers. www.wintermute.org/brendan/

Tuesday, March 22nd 17:00-19:00
Note: Date changed
HF Building, Room 400
“A Show of Hands — Networked Fictions”
Visiting Fulbright lecturer and e-lit author Mark Marino, along with e-lit author Rob Wittig, will present an evening of readings from network-based fiction, locative narrative, and ludic works of computer-based fiction. markcmarino.com

Screencast: Introducing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (HD) from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

I’m pleased to announce that we have just flipped the switch and made public the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, the central project being produced at the University of Bergen as part of ELMCIP. The Knowledge Base is an information resource including information about works of electronic literature, critical writing, authors, publishers, organizations, teaching resources, and events in the field. The Knowledge Base is both an information resource and a research archive. Although there are a number of features still in the pipeline and you’ll notice that many of the records in the database are still being developed, we have decided to open the Knowledge Base to readers and contributors while our development process is taking place. It is no longer necessary to log in to access the information in the Knowledge Base. We are also looking for a few brave beta-testers to join the team at Bergen and the researchers working around Europe on the ELMCIP project in contributing to the Knowledge Base and helping us to develop it. As you will see by browsing it, it is developing into quite a powerful research resource that will be useful for everyone working in the field, and it will get even more useful and new records are added and existing ones are developed. If you are a researcher or writer working in the field and would like to join the research community as a submitter or contributor, contact Eric Rasmussen at kb_editor@elmcip.net

We are also planning to collaborate and share information with other databases in the field that document the works and practices of electronic literature, such as the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature Directory. I recently published a paper about the Knowledge Base and our plans for an international Electronic Literature consortium based on sharing and making accessible information about electronic literature titled The ELMCIP Knowledge Base and the Formation of an International Field of Literary Scholarship and Practice which is available in full-text. The Bergen team will also be publishing a number of screencasts showing you how to use and contribute to the Knowledge Base in coming days and weeks.

This semester we have initiated a new research group at UiB — the Electronic Literature Research Group. With so much research activity now happening in our group in this area, and after consulting with our colleagues in Digital Culture, we decided that it would be good to have a separate research group focused specifically on e-lit, digital art, and other digital media aesthetic-related research in addition to our existing research group in Digital Culture. We are hoping that the group will extend beyond our colleagues in the program at UiB and include researchers and writers interested in these topics from elsewhere, in other UiB departments, in Bergen (and the world).

Our first events will take place this week at UiB. We are welcoming e-lit author, researcher, and new media artist Talan Memmott to campus. We invite you to join us for two events.

On Tuesday Feb 15th, in HF 371 from 12:15-2PM, Talan will present his dissertation-in-progress “Mythologies of Electronic Textuality.”

On Thursday evening Feb 17th, in HF 301 from 5-6:30PM, Talan will show and discuss some of his creative work including electronic literature and video work.

Some of Talan’s e-lit, video, critical writing and other curiosities can be found at: talanmemmott.com

Talan is also to be congratulated for the release this week of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 — which includes 63 works of electronic literature. Talan was one of four editors of the anthology. Also note that UiB was a sponsor of the collection along with MIT, Duke, Brown University, and other peer institutions.

I hope that you will be able to join us for one or both events. Later this term, we will welcome two Fulbright lecturers with us for three week stays: Mark Marino from the University of Southern California, and Rtia Raley from The University of California at Santa Barbara. We are planning several different events, including a release party for the ELC2, later in the term.

Prepress English version of article forthcoming in Norwegian in Vagant 1/2011 as “Bokstaver i bevegelse”

A recently opened exhibition at the Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen features a series of short films produced by the artist Len Lye between 1935 and 1979. Curated by HC Gilje and Anne Szefer Karlse, the exhibit presents the films in a random order, shown on three different-sized screens in different parts of the room. The films are experimental, each featuring a different interaction of motion, color, letters, words, music, filtering effects, collaged imagery, and effects particular to the physical media Lye was working with, such as scratches made directly onto the celluloid film. What is remarkable about such films as Trade Tattoo (1937) is not that their effects seem strange or dissimilar to contemporary audiences, but rather that they seem so familiar. I had to check the exhibition program twice as I was watching the films, sure that I must be watching a contemporary video, extensively processed on the computer. A number of Lye’s films looked as if they might have been produced last year. But the layering, filters, and kinetic text effects were all produced by Lye in 1930s, using analogue processes.

The Lye exhibition was a reminder to me that one of the recent trends in electronic literature, towards the production of works that feature letters moving in space, often synchronized to a musical soundtrack, is not precisely a novel phenomena, but something that writers and artists have been experimenting with to some degree since the dawn of moving image technology.

Poets have never been particularly locked into a paradigm of typographic uniformity. Although William Blake‘s poetry is often reproduced in contemporary anthologies without illustrations, the poems themselves were originally published by the poet in lush illuminated editions, in which the typography on the page interacts visually and thematically with the illustrations and decorations. It could be argued that reading the words outside of that visual context is a disservice to the work — the poems as Blake produced them were visual and textual. The images and typography were part of the poem, not separate from it. Continue reading »

Prepress version of article originally published in Norwegian in Vagant 4/2010 as “Flukten fra språkfengselet”

The first Electronic Literature Collection was published in 2006. Including 60 works of electronic literature of diverse form and content, all published under one cover online and on a CD-ROM, the collection offered readers and educators a valuable resource, a set of works distributed freely under a Creative Commons license. The ELC provided teachers with a place where they could send students interested in exploring e-lit, and critics with a set of archived works around which they could gather their discourse – a set of common touchstones that served to help develop and refine a shared critical language about the emergent forms of literary practice.

The editors’ intention was not to publish a one-off anthology to form the basis for a canon but instead to launch a regular practice of periodically gathering, publishing, and making as widely available as possible curated collections of e-lit. A different collective of writers and critics, reflecting a different curatorial agenda, would edit each successive volume. In addition to reflecting a different aesthetic sensibility, each iteration of the Electronic Literature Collection would demonstrate changes in the nature of the artistic practice of electronic literature, serving as a sort of biennial exhibition for the field of electronic literature, showing transitions in literary and artistic practices in the field over time. Continue reading »

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2 is now out! Congratulations to editors Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans on bringing this project to fruition. The collection includes 63 works in 6 languages from 12 countries, and includes a wide variety of work, ranging from the classic web hypertext The Unknown, to the amazing narrative database / textual performance work The Last Performance, the minimalist poetry generator stylings of Nick Montfort’s PPG256, to Alan Bigelow’s philsophocomical “comic strips for the Web” Brainstrips, to Allison Cliffords visually stunning interactive treatment of the poetry of ee cummings The Sweet Old Etc.

The last two “Platform 2″ columns I have written for the Norwegian literary quarterly Vagant (the one currently on newstands and the other in press) have been focused on works in the ELC2. In celebration of the release of the collection, I’ll post the English versions of both columns here.

I have chapters in a couple of books that have just recently been released. Jill Walker Rettberg and I coauthored the chapter “Narrative and Digital Media” in the MLA Volume Teaching Narrative Theory. The chapter takes readers through a semester of teaching narrative-based electronic literature works. The volume offers a broad sweep of approaches to integrating the teaching of narrative theory in literature classrooms, and is edited by Jim Phelan, Brian McHale, and David Herman. I also recently published a chapter “Editorial Process and the Idea of Genre in Electronic Literature in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1″ in the volume Archiving Electronic Literature and Poetry: Problems, Tendencies, Perspectives published by the German journal SPEIL edited by Florian Hartling and Beat Suter. The book, including articles in English and in German by a number of leading editors, publishers, authors and artists working in the field of electronic literature, is a valuable contribution to the discourse of the challenges of publishing, disseminating, and preserving works of electronic literature.

Jim Andrews has launched a new collaborative blog, NetArtery, together with Andy Campbell, Chris Funkhouser, Cliff Syringe, Gregory Whitehead, and Jhave Johnston, an innovative and funky group of writers who play in a number of interesting forms of digital and other writing on the network. Should be an interesting one to watch.
# Jim Andrews

During the ELO_AI conference, David (jhave) Johnston shot a couple of wonderful little short films of people responding quickly to the question “What inspired you to get involved with electronic literature?” The results: 51 Keywords (33 seconds) and 51 Responses (18:25).

I posted the talk/skit I performed with Rob Wittig at the ELO_AI Conference, All Tomorrow’s Parties. I was planning a talk on the early days of the ELO, but a few weeks before the conference, John Cayley asked if I could modify my talk to make it more specifically focused on the Tribute to Robert Coover, which was a subtheme of the conference. My goal was to keep some elements of that early history, while delivering the sort of light roast that Coover deserved. That is, to make Coover laugh. I think that Coover and the members of the audience who had actually read some of his books appreciated it, though it did leave me with some explaining for the literalists in the audience who actually thought I was seriously considering spanking my maid.

This week’s ELO_AI conference is dedicated to Robert Coover, the American novelist and Brown University professor who cofounded the ELO and has taught electronic writing workshops at Brown since the 1980s. He has been an important advocate for electronic writing, and did a great deal to make it part of the American literary conversation. I’ll be saying more about Coover during my talk at the conference and during the banquet. But I thought I would share this Robert Coover Criticism, a little generator I threw together to mark the occasion. The generator is built from reviews of his work and interviews he has done over the years.

We will have a Fulbright Scholar position available at UiB Digital Culture in 2011-2012 and in 2012-2013. The position is now advertised on the CIES site. Fulbright scholarships are available to US citizens residing in the US. This position is for a PhD with at least two years of related teaching experience. The scholar will teach 1.5 courses per term in electronic literature or digital media aesthestics courses at the undergraduate and graduate level with 50% research time, and will have the opportunity to participate in the European ‘Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP) HERA research project events. We will also facilitate lecture visits to other European institutions. The pay is 25,000 NOK per month, and travel expenses are covered by the Fulbright. Although the cost of living in Norway is high, the cost of housing, work-related travel and meals are tax-deductible for the scholar. Travel expenses for dependents are not covered, but there is an allowance of 2000 NOK per month per dependent. Depending on needs and expertise, courses the scholar might teach include DIKULT103: Digital Genre