.
Hi,
If you haven't already, please pass along this news about the new issue of
Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. This issue focuses on electronic literature.
I've added the editor's introduction to the bottom of this email.
Best,
Mark Marino
Director of Communication
Electronic Literature Organization
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Helen J Burgess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Press release
To: Mark Marino <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Announcement : Hyperrhiz 04 : http://www.hyperrhiz.net
The newest edition of _Hyperrhiz_ is now online. Featuring work from
• Thom Swiss
• Mark Marino
• Braxton Soderman
• Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
• Jaka Zeleznikar
• Michael Peters
• Jeanne Hamming
Also starting this month, we introduce { Literal1.Text }, the online
forum for teachers of electronic literature, convened by Davin
Heckman. Please consider joining up and sharing your expertise as
teachers.
_Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures_ is an online, peer-reviewed
publication specializing in new media and net art. We welcome
submission of net-ready art projects, electronic literature works and
review essays; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Helen J Burgess
Editor, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures
ISSN 1555-9351
Department of English, UMBC
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250
*Helen J Burgess* HR.04: eLit
Issue 4 of Hyperrhiz is dedicated to electronic literature. As Davin Heckman
notes in his introduction to { Literal1.Text }, e-lit, as "a form that was
born quite consciously as a response to emergent technics (both hardware and
software), opens up the door for literatures that can reveal something to us
about the nature of the technical system." This response, increasingly,
forces us to reckon with the ways in which literature is becoming code, and
code, literature. If the works included in this issue are any indication,
the nature of Heckman's "technical system" is generative and additive,
rather than instrumental.
The evolution of interactive fiction since its heady days in the 1990s is
made evident in our two opening works, Thom Swiss' "Blind Side of a Secret"
and Mark Marino's "A Little Show of Hands." Both authors offer narratives in
a hypertextual mode, but both have moved beyond the early "pick a path"
model of hypertext - Swiss by creating a Flash piece that tempts us with a
"secret" at the same time as it recalls for us the frustration and
circularity of talk-therapy, and Marino by using Juan B. Gutierrez's
Literatronic adaptive hypertext system to create a narrative that unfolds
according to statistical matchings of lexia.
Braxton Soderman's work, as he notes, depends on the "relationship between
dynamic form and semantic content," a constant and generative struggle
between code and meaning. His "Dialogue Between Two Eyeballs" recalls this
struggle through a systematic "rupturing of words" on the screen, as a way
of signifying the effect dynamics has on semanitcs. Rachel Strickland and
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo's work "slippingglimpse" reimagines this struggle
as a kind of non-human reading technology, starting with observed ocean
patterns: water reads poem, poem reads video, video reads water: the text
that appears mapping the water's movement at run-time.
Jaka Zeleznikar's work, consisting of two add-ons written for the Firefox
browser, perhaps plays the most consciously with the idea of technics as
additive -- in this case, a static piece of code(the add-on) "reading" and
producing a dynamic piece of text. These two pieces must be installed as
software plugins, and then used in the browser to generate a literature from
the active page, a kind of multilingual technological parasitism that
realises itself (in the case of the *Crke* plugin) literally as letters.
The genre-crossing nature of multimedia provides a fruitful space for
exploring the ways in which media both supplement and reconfigure literature
and scholarship - in the form of interplays between fiction, art, criticism,
digital image, video and print text. Michael Peters' "Mooring the Vaast Bin"
presents a corpus of material that adds through video, audio, text and
illustration a "mooring" for an absent work (*Vaast Bin*, a print text).
Peters' work suggests that a central text is always accompanied by addenda,
reimaginings, and visual/aural "accompaniments." In her review of Flanagan
and Booth's edited collection *re:skin*, Jeanne Hamming notes the close and
varied "fleshy crossings" the book has produced between fiction, nonfiction
and art in the quest for a "techno-sexuality." These crossings, she argues,
"[depart] from the convention in scholarly publications of segregating
primary material from criticism."
Finally, in this issue Davin Heckman introduces the { Literal1.Text } forum,
which will be an ongoing resource for teachers of electronic literature. The
works in this issue of Hyperrhiz, clearly, suggest that teaching electronic
literature will be both challenging and, potentially, a chance to open up
discussions about the interplay between software, hardware, and a new
generative technics.
*Helen J Burgess
Winter 2007*
--
Writing Program
University of Southern California
http://WriterResponseTheory.org
http://CriticalCodeStudies.com
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