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1. Process-Intensive Fiction

   Unlike digital poetry, which has pursued process-intensive directions throughout its history, the dominant directions of digital fiction make relatively light use of computational processes. Whether one looks at the traditions of hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, or video games, the primary model is a set of connections (traveled in different manners) between largely static chunks of language. This panel explores a set of alternatives to this model. The suggested potential panelists include the author of the first book on this topic, published in 2009 (Wardrip-Fruin); one of the authors of Facade, the first fully realized interactive drama (Mateas); the creator of Curveship, a new interactive fiction tool that introduces discourse-level variation as a first-class parameter (Montfort); a prominent author, commentator, and tool builder (Short); the author of Blue Lacunae, a vast, highly variable interactive fiction (Reed); the creator of new algorithms for literary variability based on conceptual blending (Harrell); and the author of the mainstream game industry's most ambitious project in this space, Far Cry 2 (Redding).

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:39

2. Conditions of Presence: The Topology of Network Narratives

   The development of the cultural field of electronic literature faces significant challenges today. As everyday network communication practices and habits of media consumption change, they impose expectations on how narratives are expressed, experienced and interacted with by readers and users. These expectations produce an imperative to accommodate additive and emergent participation processes that influence how narratives are structured. It is increasingly important to strike a balance between authorial agency and user generated content, between the core creative vision of a cultural creator and the contributions of casual participants, between narrative coherence and improvisational interactions. Resolving these antinomies is crucial in order for the field of electronic literature to support both the development of popular digital fiction and a continuing tradition of experimental literature.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:18

3. Narrative, Affect and Materialist Aesthetics in Post-Digital Technotexts

   After much excitement about hypertext fiction in the 1990s, many digital-literary-arts practitioners moved away from narrative. There seemed to be a recognition that the hyper-reading digital environments promote was not conducive to long-form narratives. Lev Manovich’s influential The Language of New Media (2002) declared that databases dominated over narrative; narrative was now a residual, if not yet obsolete, epistemological form. But born-digital authors have not entirely abandoned narrative; rather, the narrativity inherent to their artifacts has been diffused, redistributed across non-linguistic modalities. New production technologies make it easier to integrate images, animations, music, sounds, and other modalities into cybertextual artifacts often more akin to video games than novels. In multimodal environments, where textual output is more variable, narrative qualities can appear elusive or ephemeral. Nonetheless, narrativity, like other indicators of literariness, persists in new media writing.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:26

4. Running Out of Time: The Strategies of Ending in Digital Fictions

   Ever since the early theorizing of electronic literature, both the beginning and ending of these literary works has been seen as problematic issues. In the spirit of Umberto Eco’s “open work” (in English 1989), especially hypertext works were considered challenging to the closed nature of literary work – there may be several entrances to the work, but even more importantly, there is no fixed ending but rather, alternative, optional exit points. J. Yellowlees Douglas’s The End of Books or Books without End, a cornerstone in this field, provided a detailed analysis of M. Joyce’s Afternoon, putting much emphasis on its various endings.

   If the early 1990’s theoretical discussion was mainly concerned with hypertext, the current electronic literature scene with its dozens of new modes of expression, technologies and genres, has grown used to the fact that most of the works do not offer a definite ending, but either a set of alternative endings, or, no obvious ending at all. The openness of dynamic ergodic literature has become such a naturalized phenomenon that there has not been much theoretical interest in the question of ending in electronic literature lately.

   Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 11:05