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1. Destination Unknown: Experiments in the Network Novel

   PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts & Sciences : English & Comparative Literature, 2003.

   Advisor: Dr. Thomas LeClair

   Scott Rettberg - 26.02.2011 - 16:15

2. Is Life Like a Book or a Smart Phone? Why Form in Fiction Matters

   Rob Wittig's 17 minute video lecture, recorded for a TEDx event at the University of Minnesota / Duluth, lays out some ideas about connections between the design of printed books and a particular idea of life in contemporary culture, in contrast to a model of life based on postmodern ideas of identity. He also references the context of literary history in considering the forms of literature that might be suited to a culture of multitasking and smart phones, at one point comparing Don Quixote to a contemporary gadget-obsessed digital native. The talk and accompanying slideshow provide a useful introduction to some important questions about the relationship between contemporary technologies and literary form.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.03.2011 - 21:37

3. Reclaiming the 'Golden Age': The Second Person in Digital Fiction

   Since the demise of the 'Golden Age' of literary hypertext (Coover 1999) and the theoretical debates surrounding online and offline electronic literature that followed in its wake, the study of digital fiction in particular has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a 'first-wave' of pure theoretical debate to a 'second-wave' of close stylistic and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (e.g. Ciccoricco 2007, Ensslin 2007, Ensslin and Bell 2007, Bell 2010 forthcoming), the discipline and practice of close-reading digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by previous scholarship.

   Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 10:12

4. Death of an Alchemist

   Death Of An Alchemist is a multimedia novel written by Big Data—a detective story generated in real-time from live online content. The installation consists of an 8m wall displaying 128 pages of projected text, symbols and charts. This content is generated by scraping Twitter, Google and social platforms for today’s headlines, social media conversations, memes and more. The text flickers and updates as new data is received, yet still creates a coherent narrative that can be read from beginning to end. This is thanks to a bespoke technique we have termed the “poetics of search”: using a combination of search operators and algorithms to mine data, then string manipulation to fit it cohesively into a new plot. In the story, readers investigate the death of 16th century alchemist Trithemius. He has left behind a supposedly magical book, Steganographia, said to reveal the “clavis magna”: the idea from which all knowledge flows. Readers must decode the book to find the clues to Trithemius’ murder.

   Hannah Ackermans - 10.09.2015 - 10:16

5. Electronic Literature as a Means to Overcome the Supremacy of the Author Function

   In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses.

   Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:07

6. The Not Yet Named Jig

   The lexias for The Not Yet Named Jig appear at the will of the computer, one at a time, or, most effectively, in pages of five, where their meaning is magically changed by the lexias that randomly frame them. Thus, in the generating of many small scenes, a mise-en-scène for a larger narrative emerges. The time is the morning of April 24, 1660. The place is “Mystick Side” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The question was: How could I create a world model of a time and place when many details were simply not available? The answer was to write all known details into lexias, fictionalize only when necessary, and allow the computer to bring up the lexias at will. Building on the authoring system developed for file three of Uncle Roger in 1987–1988, generative hyperfiction was used in Its name was Penelope to create a whole picture of a photographer’s life by accumulating details as seen through her own eyes. In The Not Yet Named Jig, it is used to create a world model of a certain place at a certain time by accumulating historic details of the people and the environment in which they lived.

   Hannah Ackermans - 30.11.2015 - 08:41

7. Narrative Affect in William Gillespie's Keyhole Factory and Morpheus: Biblionaut, or, Post-Digital Fiction for the Programming Era

   Programmable computation is radically transforming the contemporary media ecology. What is literature's future in this emergent Programming Era? What happens to reading when the affective, performative power of executable code begins to provide the predominant model for creative language use? Critics have raised concerns about models of affective communication and the challenges a-semantic affects present to interpretive practices. In response, this essay explores links between electronic literature, affect theory, and materialist aesthetics in two works by experimental writer and publisher William Gillespie.

   Focusing on the post-digital novel Keyhole Factory and the electronic speculative fiction Morpheus: Bilblionaut, it proposes that: first, tracing tropes of code as affective transmissions allows for more robust readings of technomodernist texts and, second, examining non-linguistic affect and its articulation within constraint-based narrative forms suggests possibilities for developing an affective hermeneutics.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 02.06.2016 - 11:15