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Warning: Digital / eLit is highly perishable and some links may come and go on this list. Turns out digital wasn’t entirely the stabilizing medium it was early reputed to be. But these are some of my favorite experiments in electronic literature, both stories and poems, and we can enjoy them while they exist online in some form or another.
Impulses to fight when you are introduced to another person’s ideas:
- I’m feeling angry because I didn’t think of this first.
- I’m feeling dismissive because I would never do this sort of thing.
Impulses to embrace:
- If I were to do something similar with these gizmos I would….
- I don’t fully get this but I’m just going to experience it and think about it later.
I’ve also created a blog for exploring Electric Lit Reviews.
Story Games/Interactive
“De Baron” by Victor Gijsbers (2006)
Link to the Mark Sample walk through video (48 minutes)
What to look for: the moral implications of how you proceed through the story as the “hero”
“Quings Quest VII” by Dietrich Squinkifer (2014)
Electronic Literature Organization link
What to look for: the essay on sexism in video games and choices women can make
“The Stanley Parable” by Davey Wreden (2013)
Link to the walk-through of all endings (1:35 minutes)
What to look for: a very literate take on the absurdity of video games
Auto Generated
“Frequency” by Scott Rettberg (2009)
Electric Literature Organization link
What to look for: the patterns you gravitate toward seeing
“Takei, George” by Mark Sample
I Love ePoetry Link (about)
Direct link
What to look for: making random sense of the pop culture references
“6 Weird Questions Asked in a Weird Way” by David Jhave Johnston
I Love ePoetry link
What to look for: the cognitive ways we assemble a line of reading
“Channel of the North” by Jan Baeke and Alfred Marseille (2012)
Electric Literature Organization link
What to look for: Is there such a thing as a reading rhythm?
“First Screening” by Barrie Phillip Nichol (1984)
This is an early, great pre-windows operating system piece.
Electric Literature Organization video
What to look for: Watch ELO’s video incarnation of the piece and see what meanings can be created by words that move.
“Evolution” by Johannes Helden and Håkan Jonson (2013)
This is halfway between video and machine generated as it uses an algorithm.
Electric Literature Organization link
What to look for: An authored poem changing, editing itself randomly by a machine, how the editing process can be its own piece.
Video Things (often Flash)
“Proposals for Bottle Imps” by William Poundstone (2002)
Note: This only works for me in Chrome browser.
What to look for: just the experience
The Struggle Goes On by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Electronic Literature Organization link
What to look for: the blur in the lines between poetry and music
Twitter Pieces
Witch Court Reporter by poet Richard Osmond
This is a Twitter feed that re-posts news items from old European witch trials. The process of remediation (taking content from one media into another) really changes the meaning of the little blurbs.
Mark Samples’ Trio of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound Twitterbots (auto-generated):
Discontinued by Twitter: @BlackBoughBot, @JusttoSayBot, and @SoMuchDependsBot
Overview and samples: http://iloveepoetry.com/?p=11638#more-11638
Taking iconic pieces of poetry and automating alternate versions of them.
What to think about: how adjectives and nouns get created in poems.
Blog Novels
The Dionaea House by Eric Heisserer
This is a great haunted house story told through blogs and comment boards. You can see how the chaos of all the voices on all the blogs assembles the story.
What to think about: how does the medium of storytelling tell the story.
The Sick Land by Jon Hill
A science fiction horror story by Jon Hill, also told through a single blog. Good for the use of one blog to present a story.
Apps
Jody Zellen’s art apps
(As of summer 2017 I’m receiving errors about the apps needing an operating system update soon)
“Urban Rhythms”
What to look for: social implications and meanings for each interactive segment
“Episodic”
What to look for: how the tiny narratives assemble together
“News Wheel”
What to look for: information overload
“4Square”
What to look for: your associations between the words and images
“Device 6” by Simogo AB
What to look for: the many ways of telling a story with added interactive audio and video
Books About Digital Poems & Art & Culture
- Literature in the Digital Age by Adam Hammond
- The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich (Advanced)
- The New Digital Storytelling by Bryan Alexandar
- New Media Poetics by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss
- Media Poetry by Eduardo Kac
- Graphs, Maps, Trees by Franco Moretti
- New Directions in Digital Poetry by C.T. Funkouser
- The New Media Reader by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
- Life in Code by Ellen Ullman
- The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age by Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone
Experimental Works in Book Form
- Poetical Dictionary by Lohren Green
- Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra
- Buzzing Hemisphere/Aumor Hemisferico by Urayoan Noel
- Residuum by Martin Rock
- The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson
- Free Ferry by Ann Cefola
Things I’ve Worked On