Spring/Summer 2014 Contributors:
Alan Bigelow
Alan Bigelow's work, installations, and conversations concerning digital fiction and poetry have appeared in the Library of Congress (USA), SFMOMA, La Bibliothèque Nationale de France Paris), Turbulence.org, Rhizome.org, The National Art Center (Tokyo), Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, MLA 2012-2013, FAD, VAD, FreeWaves.org, The Museum of New Art (MONA, Detroit), Art Tech Media 2010, FILE 2007-2013, Blackbird, Drunken Boat, IDEAS, New River Journal, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and many other place worldwide. He is currently a Professor of Humanities at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York, USA. You can see his work at http://www.webyarns.com.
My Life in Three Parts addresses the question of how personal identity is influenced by the language of the web. Our online interactions are often circumscribed by tracking software and various social networks. As a result, our identities--how we view ourselves and how others view us--are shaped and expressed, in part, by personal browsing practices and the vocabulary associated with those practices.
So what do our autobiographies look like in this new world? To answer this question, My Life in Three Parts ignores the conventions of traditional autobiography in favor of oblique readings of iconic visual symbols, terminology, and concepts found online within the private and social web-spaces of shopping, art, and mathematics.
This work uses text, images, audio, and videos to create a synthesized narrative of the self. Nothing about personal identity is clear in this work: the life behind the story is only implied.
Andy Campbell
Andy Campbell is the Director of Digital Media for the UK Charity One to One Development Trust and the founder of Dreaming Methods, a portfolio of electronic literature that has been online for over 15 years. www.dreamingmethods.com
Inkubus is a first-person playable coming-of-age story, in media-rich 3D, about a contemporary teenage girl, whoâs connected and clued in. But what lurks in the deepest darkest regions beyond the screen? The story-game progresses via skewed and leading questions, designed to distort the girl's behaviour, before being drawn into a visceral labyrinth where a malevolent force peddles a destructive artificial feminine ideal. With creeping awareness, the girl/the player struggles with the insidious gender stereotyping, where womanhood is rendered as malleable and polymorphic as a digital doll, that threatens to drain her of life.
Joe Davis
Joe Davis lives and works in London.
et al.
Alinta Krauth
Alinta Krauth is a 20-something who spends a lot of time around dogs, and is woken each morning by wild parrots in the trees, though none of this is particularly evident in her writing. Her interests include how digitally presented writing can affect the human body, and her recently exhibited works explore interactive sound art, and 3D projection mapping. www.alintakrauth.com
Wendy, Mak Wing Lam
Wendy, Mak Wing Lam is a year two student in the College of Creative Media (BA) at the City University of Hong Kong.
If each letter equals to a pixel with specific grayscale, what can we see from the paragraph as an image? The text in this piece is from the Book of Ezra. Image of Text is trying to discover the hidden images from text and explore another way to read âtextâ.
Lucien Lau
Lucien Lau, a Creative Media student from Hong Kong, has a keen interest in combining writing, sound and animation into her pieces for expressing personal feelings.
Our brains are designed for work is an animated and interactive e-poem. The idea came from facing tons of tasks with people under lots of stress, watching the clock as the deadline approaches. The work tries to describe the chaos inside our minds.
Mark C. Marino
Mark C. Marino holds an MFA from Notre Dame and a Ph.D. from UC Riverside, where he focused on chatbots, electronic literature, games, and other new media. His works include âMarginalia in the Library of Babelâ and âLiving Willâ (http://markcmarino.com/tales/livingwill.html). He is the founder and editor of Bunk Magazine (http://bunkmagazine.com). He currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California. His recent work, âa show of hands,â is an adaptive hypertext novella. He is the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization. (portfolio here: http://markcmarino.com) At the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (http://haccslab.com), he collaborates on the explication of computer source code. When he is not masquerading as Spencer Pratt or Heidi Montag on social media, Mark writes netprov and makes homemade pasta sauce in Los Angeles.
Jason Nelson
Born from the Oklahoma flatlands of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and net-artworks of odd lives, building confounding art games and all manner of curious digital creatures. Currently he professes Net Art and Electronic Literature at Australia's Griffith University College of Art. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around the globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize), organizational boards he frequents (Australia Council Literature Board and the Electronic Literature Organization), and numerous other accolades (Webby Award), but in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal http://www.secrettechnology.com attracts each year.
Josette Torres
Josette Torres is a member of the Virginia Tech MFA in Creative Writing program's Class of 2010. She also holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Purdue University. She has been writing things in various places on the Internet since 1991. At present she is an instructor in Virginia Tech's Department of Political Science and the volunteer coordinator/writer in residence at the Lyric Theatre in Downtown Blacksburg. Find her work on the World Wide Web, or not.
Christine Wilks
Christine Wilks is a British digital writer, artist and developer of playable stories. Her digital fiction, Underbelly, won the New Media Writing Prize 2010. Her work is published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, including the 'Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2' and the âELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literatureâ, and at her site, www.crissxross.net. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Digital Writing at Bath Spa University.
Inkubus is a first-person playable coming-of-age story, in media-rich 3D, about a contemporary teenage girl, whoâs connected and clued in. But what lurks in the deepest darkest regions beyond the screen? The story-game progresses via skewed and leading questions, designed to distort the girl's behaviour, before being drawn into a visceral labyrinth where a malevolent force peddles a destructive artificial feminine ideal. With creeping awareness, the girl/the player struggles with the insidious gender stereotyping, where womanhood is rendered as malleable and polymorphic as a digital doll, that threatens to drain her of life.
Rob Wittig
Rob Wittig plays at the crossroads of literature, graphic design and digital culture. http://robwit.net A Silicon Valley native, he co-founded the legendary IN.S.OMNIA electronic bulletin board with the Surrealist-style literary and art group Invisible Seattle â a ground-breaking online art project of the digital age. On the basis of this work, Rob received a Fulbright grant to study the writing and graphic design of electronic literature with French philosopher Jacques Derrida in Paris. Rob's book on that work, "Invisible Rendezvous," was published Wesleyan University Press. He then embarked on a series of illustrated and designed digital fictions, including "Blue Company" a subscription novel in e-mail, "Friday's Big Meeting" a fictional chatroom with emotive photo-avatars, and "El Dorado," a horizontally scrolling travelogue (as part of an international collaboration with writers from Hamburg, Germany). Alongside his creative projects, Rob has worked in major publishing and graphic design firms in Chicago, rising to positions of creative direction and leadership of R&D teams. Rob's web fiction "Fall of the Site of Marsha" was among the first works of electronic literature to be archived in the Library of Congress. In 2011 Rob earned an MA in Digital Culture (equivalent to a US MFA) at the University of Bergen, Norway, completing two major electronic literature projects: "Chicago Soul Exchange" and "Grace, Wit & Charm.". He is currently developing high- design, collaborative fiction in a form called netprov, networked improv narrative. Rob is an assistant professor in the Art & Design and Writing Studies departments of the University of Minnesota Duluth.