ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature (Report)

The ELMCIP group at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Sweden was in charge of producing an anthology of European electronic literature, a key outcome in the ELMCIP project: ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature. By providing an anthology with creative works and relevant pedagogical material, ELMCIP extends its work into European classrooms, providing teachers and students with an educational experience of network culture. The works are written in a number of different languages and thus reflect the diversity of European electronic literature while also foregrounding how electronic literature represents a uniquely twenty-first century networked, globalized culture that uses communication patterns, aesthetic registers, and literary voices that transcend national boundaries.

The ELMCIP project was partly designed to bring together the disparate groups of writers, teachers, and researchers that were active in clusters throughout Europe. From 2005 onward, during, for instance, important gatherings in London (E-poetry festival 2005) and Paris (E-poetry festival 2007), European and American writers and researchers began to meet more frequently and were able to share their experiences with colleagues outside of their immediate cluster or country. Still, the North American dominance in the field with established organizations—like the Electronic Literature Organization and the Electronic Poetry Center—and main international conferences was evident in 2009 when the ELMCIP project began to be articulated. A key concern for ELMCIP was to address this lacuna regarding supportive structures for electronic literature research and teaching in the European cultural landscape, a need that was clearly observed at the time of the project’s start in 2010. The anthology was thus designed to be a gathering of important European literature as well as a pedagogical resource.

In addition, the project sought to extend, within the multicultural and multilinguistic context of Europe, practices and theories in electronic literature to study how electronic literature manifests in conventional cultural contexts, such as exhibition, theater, and publishing, as well as across language groups: evaluating what effects result from situating electronic literature in these contexts.

(Source: The ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature by Maria Engberg and Talan Memmott)