I had fun talking about electronic literature today. I even slipped in a few laps in the pool after my talk. It‘s a beautiful place.

Here’s a brief summary of the talk, which I intended to be an intro to electronic literature and net fiction that would inspire the audience to explore more on their own. I started by showing some of Anne Bang Steinsland’s I mellom tiden followed by a couple of minutes of Young-Hae Chang’s Dakota, which rose some laughs. I pointed out some similarities to other genres (concrete poetry, animation, music video etc) and then moved on to Rob Bevan and Tim Wright’s Online Caroline, which does completely different stuff. I briefly explained the idea of Magic-tree.com, to show yet another way of doing things, followed by a brief introduction to David Still. Then I stepped back to talk a bit about Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart, continuing with a little bit of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, mentioning how the hypertextual form mirrors the protagonist’s inability to reach a centre. I showed the section on loss at The Uninvited, noting that it also uses the medium in sync with the content. Finally I talked about how readers write, using examples like Metafilter, The Fray, Other People’s Stories and Dikt.no. Some of these are edited, some not, and of course they have different purposes. Weblogs are another place readers writer, and my quick run down of blogs included the Norwegian portal to web diaries, Nettdagbok.no, Nyrup.dk, Oblivio.com, Belle de Jour and I slipped in a story about She’s a Flight Risk that I didn’t have slides for.

If you’re looking for more electronic literature, The Electronic Literature Organisation’s Directory is a good place to start. Rhizome.org, among other sites, has links to net.art. And you can always keep reading this blog 🙂