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1. Words and pictures ex machina? Hypertext and ekphrasis

   Following the concept of "remediation" and the premise that "all of our examples of hypermediacy are characterized by this kind of borrowing, as is also ancient and modern ekphrasis" (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 44-45), I would like to take under consideration a literary work of Portuguese poet Vasco Graça MouraGiraldomachias / Em demanda de Moura (co-author Gérard Castello-Lopes; 2000). 

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 10:28

2. Mapping out Spaces for E-Lit Criticism

   This paper explores the process of discovering works of elit by focusing on the role of the online literary journal. The heyday of Web 1.0, the late 1990s, gave birth to the first generation of electronic literature. To support this emergent art form, this period also delivered a multitude of online literary journals that showcased hypertexts, kinetic poetry, animations, and interactive fiction as well as scholarly articles, interviews with authors, book reviews, and critical discourse. But as the Web became a more graphic-friendly navigation space and debates about cybertext vs. hypertext took centerstage in critical forums, celebration of electronic literature in web-zines and journals seemed to dry up. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, most of the literary journals that had flourished in the late '90s had ceased operations. What are the spaces for electronic literature and its discovery in the 21st century? How do these spaces or lack of them map and remap the field of electronic literature and its criticism?

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 11:56

3. Subjective Boundaries: Shelley Jackson's Hypertexts and the Terrain of the Skin

   This presentation traces connections between Shelley Jackson's hypertext, "Patchwork Girl" (1995), and her more recent "Skin" Project (2003-present): a 2095 word short story published only once, tattooed word-by-word onto the bodies of applicants who have elected to become words, henceforth understood as embodying these words. Both works are interested in consequential relationships between living/dying bodies and texts: what it means to embody a text, what texts do to the body. Through avoiding traditional print media, both pieces also call into question the ways we read or write and the future of the book in the age of digital media.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:28

4. Three-Dimensional Dementia: Hypertext Fiction and the Aesthetics of Forgetting

   Hypertext (the non-sequential linking of text(s) and images) was first envisioned by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in its prehistory as an associational, archival storage system suitable for classifying and sorting vast quantities of information. But where library databases, technical manuals and other knowledge-based hypertexts still fulfill this function, literary hypertext overturns this proposed usage, celebrating both information overload and forgetfulness as the desired end of a reading. Promoting disassociation and an awareness of the spatio-temporal dimensions of its environment, hypertext fiction uses the aesthetics of its three-dimensional interface and structure to frustrate memory and to engender a sensory and emotional response in the reader. Focusing on M.D. Coverley's multimedia hypertext Califia, I will investigate how the aesthetics of the hypertext form become an engine of forgetfulness that drives her text through its explorations of lost memories, including the ravages of Alzheimer's, unofficial histories, secrets, missing pieces and the quest for hidden treasure.

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 12:26

5. Intervals and Links: The Indeterminancy of a Link's Possible Future

   This paper proposes that link node hypertext can be conceived of as a postcinematic discourse and that a major mechanism of this geneology is available through the comparison of the hypertext link to the cinematic edit. I wish to consider the hypertext link from the point of view of Deleuze's cinematic 'sensory motor schema' where the link can be considered as analogous to Bergson's zone of indetermination between perception and reaction. This work builds upon recent theoretical work that has attempted to define hypertext as a temporal or cinematic medium.

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:32

6. Fixing the Computer World

   Nelson believes today's computer world is based on tekkie misunderstanding of human life and human thought.

   These have led to unfortunate traditions and structures: hierarchical directories, the PARC user world (the so-called "modern GUI"), the division of the software world into high-walled applications, WYSIWYG documents (simulating paper under glass that you can't mark or cut up), the redefinition of "cut and paste" from their important meaning of previous centuries, the one-way non-overlappable links of the World Wide Web, the locking of Web pages to Internet locations, XML with its imposed hierarchy and non-overlappable attributes of locked-in descriptors, and now the Semantic Web-- a plan for tekkie committees to standardize the universe of human ideas.

   All these, Nelson says, are based on warped notions of how ideas, and people, work, and come from traditions and mind-set of the tekkie community. But it is not too late to provide alternatives, because the problems of the present approaches corrupt our work and lives at every level, and huge improvements are possible.

   (Source: Author's abstract, Incubation3 conference site, trAce Archive)

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 23:18

7. Space for writing: a sidelong glance at the history of immersive spatial hypertext

   The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop founded by Robert Coover, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word. From 2002 onward writers have explored the possibilities of spatial hypertext in an immersive environment. What this paper proposes is an exploration of the history of the twin currents of hypertext and virtual reality that merged to create this particular form of expression, going back to the early hypertext systems developed at Brown University in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson/van Dam/et al and work in immersive virtual reality at University of Illinois’ CAVE in the early 1990s.

   (Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

   Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 14:42

8. Remediating Stretchtext

   Seventeen years have passed since Coover's inspiring call to defy the tyranny of the line through hypertext, "where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." The profound influence of that clarion shaped the development of electronic literature and attracted the scorn of critics — Sven Birkerts, Laura Miller, Michiko Kakutani – who villified hypertext in defense of the line. Overlooked in the controversy is the embarrassing fact that, even today, we know remarkably little about inventing, implanting, and cultivating the narrative line in its organic richness. We know sequence and rhizome well, but the contours of recursus, timeshift, and renewal remain, for most writers, an arcane craft.

   How may we render a satisfactory account of complex events, fictitious or historical? We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print, and though we may occasionally use links or actemes to introduce variation in presentation or in story, it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot.

   Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:04

9. Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate

   This is the paper where Ted Nelson first coined the word hypertext. What follows is the abstract he wrote for the paper:

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.06.2013 - 12:49

10. Hypertext and Cognition

    The recent evolution of western societies has been characterized by an increasing emphasis on information and communication. As the amount of available information increases, however, the user -- worker, student, citizen -- faces a new problem: selecting and accessing relevant information. More than ever it is crucial to find efficient ways for users to interact with information systems in a way that prevents them from being overwhelmed or simply missing their targets. As a result, hypertext systems have been developed as a means of facilitating the interactions between readers and text. In hypertext, information is organized as a network in which nodes are text chunks (e.g., lists of items, paragraphs, pages) and links are relationships between the nodes (e.g., semantic associations, expansions, definitions, examples -- virtually any kind of relation that can be imagined between two text passages). Unfortunately, the many ways in which these hypertext interfaces can be designed has caused a complexity that extends far beyond the processing abilities of regular users.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.06.2013 - 13:01

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