jill/txt

We’re at the Electronic Literature Organization’s symposium The Future of Electronic Literature, which is being held at MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) at the University of Maryland. Right now I’m listening to the panel on process-intensive literature, and you can see them above: Rob Kendall, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland, Scott Rettberg, and Nick Montfort (except he for some reason isn’t in the photo), with moderator Susan Schreibman standing at the podium introducing them. Notably, half of the Grand Text Auto bloggers are on this panel.

I’m participating in a panel on international electronic literature this afternoon, with some very interesting and dynamic people who have been emailing and setting up a wiki for the panel in the past week - while I’ve been travelling and practically networkless. I was able to add a few Nordic works to the wiki page, which is already a formidable resource on international (read: non- Anglo-American) electronic literature.

There’s a great review of the Electronic Literature Collection in today’s Svenska Dagbladet, which is (I think?) Sweden’s biggest newspaper. The review was written by Jesper Olsson, who’s doing his PhD on digital literature at the University of Stockholm (but who apparently doesn’t have a blog yet ;)

We made the Elinor site all snazzy! The new site is just up, so there are a few issues still, and most of the images aren’t there yet, but it’s still looking infinitely better than it was, thanks to Pixelpikene and their team. What you’ll find is a catalogue of more than sixty Nordic works of electronic literature, with brief descriptions, screenshots (when the images are all uploaded) and links to the websites.

Many thanks to the many people who’ve contributed to the catalogue. The descriptions were written by (and most of the works collected by) Marko Niemi (Finland), Karen Wagner (Denmark), Maria Engberg (Sweden) og Hans-Kristian Rustad (Norway). Solveig Smedstad did a lot of work coordinating all this and creating a brochure earlier this year, and she’s also helped migrate the catalogue to its permanent system. Pixelpikene did the design and programming.

The Elinor network for electronic literature in the Nordic countries was initiated by Lisbeth Klastrup, Susana Tosca, Raine Koskimaa, Patrick Svensson, Søren Pold and Thomas Brevik. And me.

We’re having a launch of the catalogue tomorrow, and we’ll also celebrate the Electronic Literature Collection, which Scott Rettberg is a co-editor of. He’ll present the Collection - which is a wonderful anthology of sixty works of electronic literature from USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Free CDs to the first comers - and snacks as well. If you’d like to come let me know! Room 216, HF-bygget, University of Bergen - at 12:15.

Anyone interested in German language electronic literature will be pleased to find Beat Suter’s catalogue of it: “Diese datenbank mit dem korpus deutschsprachiger hyperfictions liefert drei kommentierte listen zum thema hyperfiction.” Beat Suter, who’s based in Zürich, has also published and presented a pile of papers on hypertext fiction, mostly in German, which means I can understand enough to see that I’d love to read them but not enough to really understand them. His site, Cyberfiction.ch, also published new German language hyperfiction.

Of course I followed the link left by the anonymous commenter who wrote in Danish that he could never stop himself from entering a candy store. Crafty marketer, that commenter, or just someone who knows the medium, because at the end of that link is a new blog fiction, or perhaps fiction, a secret diary written in the third person in a style that when I started reading the first entry reminded me of Pan with its feverously incessant paragraphs about a man maddened by fantasies of women but with little ability to communicate with them, or of The Diary of a Seducer maybe simply because it’s about a man fascinated by women, and it’s in Danish. By the time I’d got to today’s entry the tone had shifted to light porn, or perhaps, if I’m generous, this is the explicitness with which Hamsun would have written today. The diary follows the blogging template by including an “about” page:

Ord, der stammer fra hvem som helst, men alligevel ankommer til dig fra en bestemt. Hemmelig dagbog fra en anonym, skrevet af ingen, men henvendt til alle. Han skriver om sig selv i tredje person ental.

Det er en form for onani.

Hver dag tager han et foto af himlen over hverdagen. Disse himmelsyner supplerer hans febrilske bekendelser og lader dig ane en sprække af virkelighed bag skriftens hittepåsomhed.

Fortæl ham, hvorfor du læser hans bekendelser.

I suppose he decided to make the criticism of blogs as mental masturbation literal. While I’ll probably bore of daily descriptions of masturbation I am intrigued at the tone of this diary. And it is so clearly positioned as literary. How interesting.

Hey! Did you see? Putin signed the Kyoto treaty yesterday! That means enough countries have ratified it for it to become binding! Pity the US pulled out, given they’re the world’s worst polluter, but it’s wonderful that the rest of the world’s moving on anyway. Great timing, too, we needed some good news.

The sun’s shining today, too. I’m going into town to hang out in cafés, go to the library, pay for my new sofa and hang up more posters inviting people to Thursday night’s electronic literature readings. You should come too, if you’re in Bergen. Thursday at 8pm, in Bergen Congress Centre, behind the cinema. Morten Skogly, Anne Bang-Steinsvik and Scott Rettberg will be reading.

I can’t read Finnish, so I don’t know what the letters spell, but I quite enjoy watching them tickling their author’s body as he leaps out of the sauna in Timo Harju’s Voi minun ystäväni, which is presented alongside the work of another Finnish author, Saija Sofia. Perhaps the running man being blanketed in letters is not a self-portrait? It appears that the latest issue of the literary journal Lumoja is about digital poetry, and has a web section, which makes me wish I could understand even just a tiny Finnish. (Via afsnitP)

In a linky mood? Try linking to elinor.nu!

See, nobody on the whole web has linked to ELINOR’s site except me. Not very surprising, I guess, since I’ve not announced it and all it had on it till today was “this site will be constructed and we’re going to do cool stuff for e-lit in the Nordic countries”, but now it’s got info about the seminar, and a nicer design (I used glish.com’s 2 column template and cut and pasted) and our nice new logo, which is inspired by a papyrus scroll, unrolling, see, and it looks a little like an @, too. It was designed by Torill Gallefoss. We might change the colours, we’ve had some discussions, we’ll see. And of course the website’s still a fledling - the catalogue’ll grow and it’ll be bloggified. But you’ll link even to a fledgling, won’t you? Tell the world about it? Come to the e-litteraturfest if you’re nearby?

I know it’s all in Norwegian, but see, non-Norwegians could link and say, look, I can’t read this, but isn’t it cool they’re doing this e-lit thing in Norway?

Shameless, aren’t I?

Our conference is approaching and I’m concentrating on the electronic literature part of it. I’ve shined up the ELINOR website a bit, and I’m adding in a bit more information about the seminar there. Today I’ll be organising fliers for the library and bookshops and book cafés and generally doing the publicity thing.

Morten Skogly and Anne Bang-Steinsvik are both coming to read from their visual, kinetic, interactive poems. Both create literature that combines words and images and movements and interaction, but their work is not at all the same. Scott Rettberg’s coming too, and he’s going to read from Implementation and also, I hope, a little from Kind of Blue. Both works are different altogether from the Norwegian ones and yet also bound to this new medium. This is the first one of the first readings of electronic literature in Norway, and I’m really pleased we’re able to start making electronic literature more accessible.

I love Morten Skogly’s Bokstavlek, and I love Anne Bang-Steinsvik’s imellomtiden.no, and they’ve both written other wonderful pieces I’ll tell you more about later.

You’re going to want to be in Bergen on November 10-12 this year. We’re hosting a conference that is going to be such fun: Digital og sosial. Yes, it’s about social technologies, but more importantly, you get to experience social technologies through workshops, wikis, chats, blogs and lots of opportunities for hands on enjoyment. Read the program for yourself - oh, well, if you don’t read Norwegian, you’ll want this page.

Closest to my heart is the section on electronic literature, on the afternoon and evening of the 11th, which is the first event organised by ELINOR. This part of the conference is free, too! We have Scott Rettberg, founder of the Electronic Literature Organisation and prize-winning author of electronic works, who’ll be talking about The Network Novel. Lisbeth Klastrup, current leader of DiAC at the IT University in Copenhagen, will be speaking about electronic literature in Scandinavia. After that we’ll be doing open space-based workshops. Open space technology is a way of running self-organising conferences that Seb told Liz and me about this summer. Liz has collected links about it, and I even read the book, and though I’m not quite ready to do a full three days of it (though maybe someday?) I think three hours will be a wonderful start. Finally, after people have found themselves some dinner, we’ll have a party with readings and an open bar and a bit of finger food, if there’s money left in the budget.

The conference as a whole is going to be great too. Quite apart from the e-lit goodness, there’ll be inspiring talks by luminaries including Howard Rheingold, Torill Mortensen and Cory Doctorow. There’ll be workshops where you can learn to use wikis and blogs and you can write collaborative fictions and learn about Creative Commons licences in Norwegian and the Norwegian part of the Wikipedia and hear about a location based narrative project in Bergen and even more. We’ll blog and wiki and chat digitally throughout the conference, really seeing how that digital layer can enhance and excite a physical gather. It’s going to be fun!

You’ll need to sign up by October 11. It costs 1500 kroner, which is a great deal: it includes two dinners, three lunches and lots of coffee in addition to the intellectual and social sustenance. If you just want to come to the electronic literature afternoon, that’s free, but you’ll still need to sign up. See you there!

OK, so I’ve got a working website set up for ELINOR at elinor.nu (elinor.com, .net, .org are all taken up by linkfarms or “investors” wanting $8000 for the domain), and there’s some extremely basic content too. More will come after the summer.

Late in March, I was surfing around the Nordic Council’s funding info when I noticed that Nordbok funds projects to further literatury projects in collaboration between the Nordic countries - and the deadline was the next day. Figuring I might as well have a go, I emailed electronic literature buddies in Denmark, Sweden and Finland and fired by their enthusiasm (”Great idea! We’re in!”) and assistence from both collaborators and colleagues, managed to write a grant application in time for the deadline. To my surprise, I discovered I really enjoyed it!

When I returned from my travels, there was a letter from Nordbok in my office inbox. Nordbok has decided to fund your project ELINOR - Elektronic litteratur i Norden / Electronic Literature in the Nordic countries with NOK 140 000. That’s about US$ 20,000, which is a wonderful start for a network to promote and encourage electronic literature in a region that has technology and literature but has not yet combined the two to a great extent.

What we’ll be doing? A website, of course, to showcase electronic literature created in the Nordic region. We also applied for money for two conferences or symposiums, a series of author tours and to write and distribute a leaflet about electronic literature for libraries across the region. We’ll have to see what we’re able to do on smaller budget but I’m hopeful that this initial funding will make it a lot easier for people to find other sources of financing for projects along the way. This funding is for promotion of literature, but I’d also like to connect it to research funding at some point. First, though, I want to help make electronic literature visible enough that at least the reading public realises that it exists!

My partners in starting up this endeavour are Raine Koskimaa in Finland, Patrik Svensson of HUMlab in Sweden, and from Denmark we have Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca in Copenhagen and Søren Pold in Aarhus, and Thomas Brevik is our brilliant technolibrarian expert. We’ll be finding other people in our respective countries, and we’re also working with the well-established international Electronic Literature Organisation.

If you’d like to be involved, or know someone who should be involved, get in touch with me (jill dot walker at uib dot no) or with an ELINOR person in your own country - we’ll set the website up soon to make that easier.