afterflash: Showcasing Flash Fiction, Poetry, and Essays from The NEXT

On December 31, 2020 Adobe dropped support of Flash software, a premier platform for net art popular in the late 20th century to first decade of the 21st. Within weeks, born-digital literature created with the software was no longer accessible to the public––including the 447 the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) had collected for its repository. By the end of January 2021 the Electronic Literature Lab’s efforts to restore ELO’s Flash archives began in earnest with a variety of methods: Ruffle.rs, Conifer, Webrecorder, and video recordings attained with the Pale Moon browser and the Wayback Machine.

This exhibition, featuring 48 works the lab selected from the online journals and anthologies held in the ELO’s archives, lays bare both the importance of Flash as a platform for conveying highly experimental and compelling literary art and the challenges artists and preservationists face in keeping the art produced with it accessible to the public.

List of Artists and Works:

Annie Abrahams, "Séparation" / "Separation"
Ingrid Ankerson & Megan Sapnar, "Cruising"
Adriana de Barros, "Blinding Lights"
Giselle Beiguelman and Helga Stein, "Code Movie 1"
Alan Bigelow, "Brainstrips"
Serge Bouchardon, "Toucher" / "Touch"
Mez Breeze, "_Clo[h!]neing God N Ange-Ls_"
Oni Buchanan, "The Mandrake Vehicles"
David Clark, "88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand)"
Sharon Daniel and Erik Loyer, "Public Secrets"
Juliet Davis, "Pieces of Herself"
Claire Dinsmore, "The Dazzle as Question"
Tina Escaja, "Pinzas de metal"
Caitlin Fisher, "These Waves of Girls"
Muriel Frega, "Alice in the 'Wonderbalcony'"
Peter Howard, "Xylo"
Yael Kanarek, Evann Siebens, Meeyoung Kim & Yoav Gal, "Portal"
Aya Karpinksa, "mar puro"
Rob Kendall, "Faith"
David Knoebel, "Thoughts Go"
John Kusch, "Red Lily"
Deena Larsen, "Firefly"
Donna Leishman, "Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw"
Jason Edward Lewis, "Nine"
Mark Marino, "Stravinsky's Muse"
María Mencia, "Birds Singing Other Birds's Songs"
Judd Morrissey, "The Jew's Daughter"
Stuart Moulthrop, "Under Language"
Jason Nelson, "i made this. you play this. we are enemies."
Millie Niss, "The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh"
Santiago Ortiz, "Bacterias Argentinas"
Regina Pinto, "Café de Pao"
Joerg Piringer, "Soundpoems I and II"
William Poundstone, "3 Proposals for Bottle Imps"
Kate Pullinger and babel, "Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China"
Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, "Flight Paths"
Brian Kim Stefans, "The Dreamlife of Letters"
Reiner Strasser and M. D. Coverley, "ii — in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory"
Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim, "Tao"
Stephanie Strickland, "slipping glimpse"
Thom Swiss, "Shy Boy"
Rui Torres, "Amor de Clarice"
Ana Maria Uribe, "Anipoemas"
Dan Waber, "Strings"
Christine Wilks, "Fitting the Pattern"
Jody Zellen, "Disembodied Voices"
Natalie Zeriff, "Meditation on a Barstool"
John Zuern, "Ask Me for the Moon"