May 10, 2007
ELO Future of Electronic Literature Symposium
The Electronic Literature Organization’s Future of Electronic Literature Symposium last week at MITH at the University of Maryland, College Park, was a great event, bringing together e-lit writers, scholars, and an interested public together for an open mouse/open mic, a daylong symposium, and an ELO board meeting. Highlights included Katherine Hayle’s keynote (nicely summarized at jilltxt), considering the idea of “literary” vs. “literature” and providing very intelligent close readings of a variety of works of electronic literature, readings from new works by Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall, Nick Montfort, Deena Larsen, and others, as well as three very good panel discussions. The process-intensive panel (also very GTxA-intensive) looked at the idea of process from several different angles ranging from process-intensive collaboration, to natural language interface processing, to story generation. The international panel featured demonstrations of electronic literature from around the world, including works in Spanish, French, Catalan, and Nordic languages, and also highlighted the fact that electronic literature is a global movement — ELO isn’t the only organization concerned with this work, but has shared interests and opportunities for collaboration with organizations including nt2, Elinor, Hermeneia, and others. The Future of Electronic Literature panel was also an engaging discussion of how new technologies might effect electronic literature, and how new ways of organizing material and collaborating might effect the way that we shape the field. I hope my compatriots will fill in some of the details here. In the meantime, enjoy some photos of the goingson: flickr sets posted by me, Jason deVinney, and Laura Borras.
May 10th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Hey, Scott,
At the conference, we referenced a wiki list of international, mostly non-English, electronic literature. That list with some commentary and names of elit critics can be found over at Writer Response Theory here. If anyone would like to contribute, just contact me.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
I don’t have pictures from the symposium, but I did scan all the stuff I got while in Maryland. My Flickr. I will be blogging my notes from the symposium on my blog over the next couple days. I’ve created a category so people can follow along. I also scanned the cover of the State Of The Arts book that was being handed out so people can add it to their Library Thing catalog.
May 11th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Mark, We should also link here to your very good pre-conference post which actually summarizes the conference better than my post-conference post.
May 11th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Thanks, Scott,
It’s a very post-pre kind of moment in elit no doubt. I’d like to second the recommendation of William Wend’s blog where has some excellent notes on the panels.
Also, yesterday I published an interview with Jaime Alejandro Rodriguez Ruiz, the Colombian hypertext maestro whose work I discussed at the conference.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
[…] of the memorable moments of May’s Future of Electronic Literature symposium was a first look at slippingglimpse — a new work of e-poetry from Stephanie […]