If you look at the history of the movie trailer, it’s pretty clear that the primary purpose of this creation was advertising. According to Paramount executive Lou Harris, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times of October 25, 1966, the first trailer was screened at Rye Beach, a New York-area amusement park, in 1912: One of the [...]

Electronic literature, despite such promotional successes as we saw at the MLA exhibition, in our two elit anthologies, the New Media Writing Prize, ELMCIP,  and the ongoing efforts by a number of people within the elit community who tirelessly promote what we do, is at a tipping point in its career. Its visibility is fairly [...]

Announcing a collection of poetry generated interactively with computer programs: Gnoetry Daily Volume 1! It includes: N-gram generations (word-based and character-based) * Diastic readings * Cut-ups * n+7s * template generations * codework transformations metaphysical speculation, startling juxtapositions, profane ranting, unpopular political perspectives, and moments of great (though possibly incomprehensible) beauty our favorite poems from [...]

Recently I stumbled upon an odd but thrilling little publication from 1966 called Astronauts of Inner-Space: An International Collection of Avant-Garde Activity which includes – according to the front cover -  17 manifestoes, articles, letters, 28 poems and 1 filmscript. The collection is so astounding that I had to make a pdf of it – [...]

Below are abstracts for the papers that Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink, myself, and Mark Sample will present at the January 2012 MLA Annual Convention in Seattle. We’re all delighted to find that our session is part of the Presidential Theme on “Language, Literature, Learning.” Our papers could certainly change between now and [...]

First, a request. Part of the recent Australian National Poetry Week celebrations included an article about how us proles aren’t appreciating poetry enough. (you know, apart from slam poetry, and rap, and poetry shared on the internet among friends… we ought to be reading more REAL poetry, the kind that counts!) Anyway, part of that [...]

[I posted before about my book Lurid Numbers, a collection of codework texts scheduled to be printed by BlaxeVox, publisher of weird little books, but judged unprintable, despite the best efforts of the publisher to negotiate with the printer, etc. This is fascinating - among other reasons - because it involves a judgment by a computer [...]

Do not print this book (unprintability part 1) Sandy Baldwin What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature? And us… what good are we if we don’t help as much as we can in that destruction? – Julio Cortazar Geoffrey Gatza, fearless director of BlazeVox, that “publisher of weird little books,” took the [...]

CFP – Electronic Publishing Models for Experimental Literature EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION Rui Torres (FCHS/UFP) and Manuel Portela (FL/UC) The use of computers in the humanities raises creative, as well as institutional and intellectual questions. One important set of questions concerns new methods for editing and organizing different kinds of texts (graphic, audio, video, etc.). The impact [...]

Hi all! The other day Jim Andrews commented that poetry generator development involves making parameters configurable by variables and graphic user interface elements. Now, over the last year or so I’ve been asking myself: ytf am I doing this? When I code a poetry generator, what exactly am I exploring? How can I formalize, track, [...]

Below is the paper I’ll be presenting at the E-Poetry Festival next week in Buffalo, NY. I may re-post slight edits on my own website between now and then, but only slight. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there! * Between the much-needed efforts of the Electronic Literature Organization‘s Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) [...]

By Rob Wittig and Mark Marino [Cross-posted at Writer Response Theory] On a recent trip to the University of Bergen, we had the opportunity to meet, discuss, and compare notes on some of our mutual interests in Internet art, specifically in a highly performative, “real-time,” spontaneous form of writing that seemed to run through our [...]

I’ve been writing lately, here and on my own website, about what media studies offers us as a way to read a whole range of writing machines. And for some reason, it’s just a quick step from looking at the typewriter and typewriter poems to the ways in which poets have been hacking copy machines. [...]

Media studies is commonly associated with the study of digital media structures and related phenomena. But the more media theory I read (and lately I’ve been voraciously reading everything by Marshall McLuhan that’s outside of the well-worn Understanding Media) the more drawn I am to thinking through the defining effects of earlier analogue and digital [...]

Reposted from Free Space Comix III: Dear Melts, Digital Humanists, and others, So, in preparation for my presentation on Friday — for which I had planned on assembling an annotated bibliography of books that fell within my understanding of the field of “digital humanities” (and/or “digital literature”), I decided to assemble the books as Amazon [...]