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1. Getting Your Hands on Electronic Literature: Exploring Tactile Fictions with the Reading Glove

   “Interactive narrative” is a loaded phrase that invokes different dreams for different populations of people. For new media theorists like Janet Murray (1) and Brenda (2) Laurel, it elicits visions of participatory stories enacted within immersive simulated “holodecks.” For theorists of hypertext and interactive fiction like Jay David Bolter (3) and Emily Short, (4) it suggests branching textual environments and rhizomatic tangles of linked lexia. For researchers in computer science and AI, it has manifested in simulations of believable human characters (5), and intelligent storytellers that direct the action in a simulated storyworld along desirable narrative paths (6). Within the digital games community, theorists like Henry Jenkins, (7) Celia Pearce, (8) and Jim Bizzocchi (9) suggest broad framings of narrative that allow it to infuse and enhance gameplay. Outside of academic research, interactive narrative conjures images of “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, role-playing games, and improvisational theater.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 01.07.2013 - 17:57

2. "A Visual Sense is Born in the Fingertips": Towards a Digital Ekphrasis

   In this article, the significance of the rhetorical and modern definitions of ekphrasis will be discussed through the lens of digital literature and art. It attempts to reinscribe the body in ekphrastic practice by adding touch to the abstracted visualism of the eye, and emphasize defining features of the ancient usage: orality, immediacy and tactility. What I call the digital ekphrasis with its emphasis on enargeia, its strong connections with the ancient definition, and on the bodily interaction with the work of art, conveys an aesthetic of tactility; digitalis=finger. By tracing and elucidating a historical trajectory that takes the concept of ekphrasis in the ancient culture as a starting point, the intention is not to reject the theories of the late 1900s, but through a reinterpretation of ekphrasis put forward an example of how digital perspectives on classic concepts could challenge or revise more or less taken-for-granted assumptions in the humanities. In this context ‘the digital’ is not only a phenomenon that could be tied to certain digital objects or used as a digital tool, but as an approach to history, with strong critical potential.

   Scott Rettberg - 03.07.2013 - 14:03

3. Scripts for Infinite Readings

   Material representations and simulations of reading motions can be embodied and enacted through expressive uses of formal devices in programmable works. These interactions between reading self and embodied codes are reflexively choreographed in ways that illuminate the performativity of cognition and interpretation. Meaning production through acts of reading that become scripted in the textual field will be analyzed in 'The Readers Project' by John Cayley and Daniel Howe.

   Scott Rettberg - 06.09.2013 - 11:53

4. Distant Readings of a Field: Using Macroanalytic Digital Research Methods to Data Mine the ELMCIP Knowledge Base

   The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase) is a human-edited, open-access, contributory Drupal database consisting of cross-referenced entries describing creative works of and critical writing about electronic literature as well as entries on authors, events, exhibitions, publishers, teaching resources and archives. The project has been developed by the Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen as an outcome of the ELMCIP project. All nodes are cross-referenced so users can see at a glance which works were presented at an event, and follow links to see which articles have been written about any given work or which other events they were presented at. Most records provide simple bibliographic metadata about a work or event, but increasingly we are also gathering source code of works, PDFs of papers and dissertations, videos of talks and performances, and other forms of archival documentation.

   Scott Rettberg - 06.09.2013 - 15:55

5. The Ethos of "Life": digital writing and the temporal animation of space

   When we strip the lexical band-aid ‘embodiment’ off the more than 350 year-old wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body, we find animation, the foundational dimension of the living. Everything living is animated. Flowers turn toward the sun; pill bugs curl into spheres; lambs rise on untried legs, finding their way into patterned coordinations. The phenomenon of movement testifies to animation as the foundational dimension of the living.

   We propose that the importance of movement in the distribution of space and time is one of the things digital media works make palpable. While western aesthetics – consonant with its spatialised images of subjects and objects – has traditionally paid more attention to spatial form, this is being challenged by new forms of mobility made possible by digital media. These provide both the opportunity for immersion in mediated and programmed/programmable environments, but also the opportunity to move through existing and technologically augmented environments in different ways, using different surfaces and forms of literary inscription.

   Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 15:05

6. On Writing & Digital Media (Performance Research 18:5)

   This issue of Performance Research will enfold an understanding of digital text within the context of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, integrational linguistics, the performance of self and gender, and performance writing. In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital apparatus (dispositif). This includes machinic performance, the performance of codes and scripting, the performativity of language itself on the screen, the semiotics of the click, interactivity between digital language and the body, and how digital texts ‘perform’ us as social beings.

   (Source: Description from Performance Research website)

   Scott Rettberg - 15.10.2013 - 12:58