I’m in Chicago attending SLSA 2005, the conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. There’s a whole track devoted to electronic literature, so I’m pretty excited.
In a couple of hours I’m talking in a panel about distributed narration, where I’m going to try to look more specifically at how fragments of narrative connect to each other when they’re not explicitly linked. Scott Rettberg and Jessica Henig are my fellow panelists. Scott will be talking about situationism, fluxus art and sticker literature, and Jess will be talking about emergent narrative. I haven’t actually met Jess yet. I bet she’s in this room listening to the talk before our panel, but I’m not sure which face is hers.

Right now, Dave Ciccoricco, who’s an expat American living in New Zealand, is talking about repetition as the main trope of network fiction. Rob Kendall’s next: he’s talking about the kind of reading that requires divination, such as reading tarot cards, lines on the palm of a hand or tea leaves, and leads from there into a presentation of his most recent literary work, Soothcircuit, a literary divination system. Lori Emerson is next, speaking about print-published computer-generated poetry. She’s surprised to have only found a single woman poet working in this form, Canadian Erin MourÈ, and her book Pillage Laud, “computer-generated lesbian sex-poems”. Here, apparently, are some extracts. Rob Swigart is last. Mentions an article about how of the idea of a linear future was invented in [some past period].

6 thoughts on “at SLSA in Chicago

  1. gzombie

    If you see Allan Rauch (he’s on the program), please tell him I said hello.

  2. gzombie

    Uh, assuming you remember my real name.

  3. Christy Dena

    Hello Jill! Will you be blogging about the ‘distributed narration’ panel? I’m keen to find out where you and others are at with it.

  4. Jill

    I *mean* to blog about it, but I’ve got some processing of thoughts to do so it might take a little time… Sorry…

  5. dave

    >>>Dave Ciccoricco, whoís an expat American living in New Zealand
    Who’s Pat?

    Though to be an “expat” one would have been at some stage a “pat” presumably, and this is something I have not been, which is not to say I’m “anti-pat” or an “a-pat” when it comes to american-ness necessarily, more that I don’t really buy into the concept of nationalism full stop | period when I ask myself questions about identity – it is such a troublesome concept, though of course essential for inter-national sporting events.

    This of course does not resolve the question of who Pat is, but I would imagine someone with a certain ambiguity.

  6. Jill

    Cool. Go Dave!

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