Electronic Literature Exhibit at the 2012 MLA Convention

A special exhibit of electronic literature at the 2012 Modern Langague Association (MLA) Convention, curated by Dene Grigar, Lori Emerson, and Kathi Inman Berens. "Electronic Literature" features over 160 works by artists who create literary works involving various forms and combinations of digital media, such as video, animation, sound, virtual environments, and multimedia installations, for desktop computers, mobile devices, and live performance. The works presented at this exhibit have been carefully selected by the curators because they represent a cross-section of born digital—that is, works created on and meaningfully experience through a computing device—from countries like Brazil, Canada, Australia, Sweden, the UK, the US, and Spain, and highlight literary art produced from the late 1980s to the present. Thus, the exhibit aims to provide humanities scholars with the opportunity to experience, first-hand, this emergent form of literature, one that we see as an important form of expression in, as Jay David Bolter calls it, this "late age of print."

Making the exhibit more poignant is the fact that 2012 marks the 20 year anniversary of the 1st session held at the MLA on the topic of Electronic Literature. The panel, entitled "Hypertext, Hypermedia: Defining a Fictional Form," featured noted theorists and artists Terence Harpold, Michael Joyce, Carolyn Guyer, Judy Malloy, & Stuart Moulthrop. We have, indeed, come full circle.

(Source: Exhibit webpage)