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1. See Spot Link. Link, Spot, Link: How to read and appreciate electronic literature (Workshop)

   Abstract
   What is the difference between reading on screen and reading electronic literature? Between an e-book and an e-lit piece? Electronic literature, or eliterature, uses computer technology as an integral part of the work to convey meaning. Find out about the literary art of links, images, sounds, and motions. Make connections between images and text, between sounds and words, between motions and implications. Uncover an exciting new world where writers expand beyond the page and embrace the screen with an array of new literary techniques.

   Agenda
   This workshop will cover 4 basic elements of electronic literature: links, imagery, motion, and sound. For each element, we will read a portion of works to see these elements in action, take part in an exercise to explore writing using these elements, and discuss techniques to recognize and understand these elements.

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 15:41

2. I like IRC & SMS

   Rita Raley's presentation focuses on the use of IRC and SMS in multimedia installations, net-based projects, and street performances. Projects discussed will likely include "Listening Post" (Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin), "RE:Positioning Fear" (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer), "Urban Scrawl" (Sushma Madan and Neil Noakes), "TXTual Healing" (Paul Notzold), and "Simple Text" (Family Filter). While the chat messages used in "Listening Post" are datamined rather than solicited, the other projects are instances of user-driven media. One clear tension to explore, then, will be that between surveillance and participatory culture. Other themes and issues will include public vs. private space, locative media, and electronic English.

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:12

3. Hors-Categorie: An Embodied, Affective Approach to Interactive Fiction

   The interactive fiction work "Hors-Categorie" stages a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France bicycle race. 

   In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various bodily choices—blood doping, shaving one's legs, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects that alter the game state. My effort in writing this work—concerning doping, cyclists, bodies, and ethics—is to think through the potentialities for engaging, designing, and theorizing new media with an emphasis on the embodied nature of affect. 

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:21

4. Cavewriting: Spatial Hypertext Authoring System

   In experimental hypertext fiction workshops at Brown University, undergraduate writers work with programmers to create interactive literary experiences in immersive virtual reality. To involve the writer more directly in the process of implementation, we have created CaveWriting: spatial hypertext authoring system. Authors can manipulate a graphical front-end to position text, multimedia, and 3D models within virtual space, apply special effects, and create hyperlinks which initiate theatrical events. The result can be previewed at any time inside a desktop window. This talk will cover the past and present of cavewriting at Brown and its future at UIUC, UCSD, and beyond.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:36

5. Meta Discourse: An Investigation into Possibilities of Meta-Fictions in the 21st Century

   The old rites of literature are quickly starting to come to a head, and as we move through the 21st century we will find ourselves staring into new modes of expression of literary concepts that we have known only on the printed page for centuries prior. Meta-fiction not only allows for new ways of approaching a narrative but also new ways of approaching literature in general, including electronic literature. Questioning the boundaries between the reader and the writer, the audience and the performer, the characters in the text and the ones reading it, one might say that meta-fiction was one of the first forms of hypertext mediums in which the reader was encouraged to draw on outside influences and information to arrive at the heart of the text. This understanding of meta-fiction, then, makes it an appropriate place to begin an analysis of new modes of discourse and the variability of the messages presented. In such a textually-conscious style of writing, how does the narrative alter according to the mode of presentation while still retaining a questioning and awareness of the literary roots?

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:39

6. Hypermediating the Game Interface: Grand Theft Auto and the Alienation Effect

   One of the most controversial computer games in recent years has been "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" (Rockstar Games 2004). Much of the controversy surrounding the game (including the disparaging critiques of the likes of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) centered around the relationship between the game's simulation of violence, sex, and racial stereotypes and the potential for this game interface to affect the real-world actions of its players. Though "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" is often considered to simply be a gang-violence simulator, this paper will argue that the relationship between the digital interface and the potentially-affected material space can be altered in such a way as to create a sense of distanciation. Drawing from Bertolt Brecht's theory of the Alienation Effect (which is echoed in Bolter and Grusin's theory of the hypermediated interface), I will demonstrate how the customization possible in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" provides a framework for distanciation and socio-political critique essential to Brecht's theory.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:44

7. Blending the Crossword with the Narrative: An Examination of the Storygame

   Interactive narrative cannot be understood as only literature or as only game, nor even as a combative relationship between the two. Narrative-oriented "games" are neither novel nor movie, but they are likewise significantly different beasts than conventional, competitive games. They rather draw elements from both. We will come to terms with the concept of the storygame by examining the historical role of games in stories and stories in games to come to understand how the two forms combined into the modern storygame, focusing on the key traits of interactivity and immersion.

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:47

8. Blurring of Public and Private Space in New Media Art

   This paper seeks to address the discourse of the blurring of public and private space in new media art, specifically in Mouchette.org and Life Sharing by Eva and Franco Matteos. Both pieces utilize an understanding of the social systems inherent in new media art as a set of relations that require the user to complete. This system, dependant upon the relations that the user, the artist and the artwork creates a discourse on the concept of public and private space that is predicated on the notions of interactivity.

   (Source: Author's abstract from ELO 2008 Conference site)

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 23:11

9. Original Chat: Exploring the Origins of the Turing Test

   The chatbot, or conversational agent, is a new media art object that has been around since Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), which is included in ELO's directory of e-lit. These programs have since been adapted for electronic narratives and interactive dramas. Instigating this area of research, Alan Turing's thought experiment/dare, the Turing Test (1950), claimed that computers would soon be able to perform conversational exchange convincingly as humans. While many use the Turing Test to contextualize a discussion about chatbots, few have examined the origins of the Turing Test itself. Crossing the history of technology in this vision of a chatbot legacy, I will outline one new theory of the origins of the Turing Test, suggesting a lineage from the military-industrial complex that helps us to re-examine our interaction with artificial agents in electronic literature from IF works such as Emily Short's "Galatea" to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' "Facade."

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 10:45

10. Brautigan Bibliography and Archive: Digitizing a Literary Life

    I discuss the digitization of the literary life of author Richard Brautigan, a novelist, poet, and short story writer often cited as the writer to best capture the zeitgeist of the counterculture movement in San Francisco during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This digitization creates not only an archive, but a literary bio-bibliography as well, one that is written not from the perspective of an individual author or archivist (myself), but rather as an upshot of heretofore unachievable associations and interconnections of multiple kinds and sources of information (biographical, bibliographical, historical, ethnographical). The result is a 3-D knowledge base, a "data hive" with a unique and individual electronic literary presence

    Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:07

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