Electronic literature

Well, ain't this grand? Episode 6 of Inanimate Alice, "The Last Gas Station", has received an Honourable Mention in the Electronic Literature Organisation's 2016 Robert Coover Prize: "The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature is an award given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from supporters and members of the ELO, this $1000 annual prize aims to recognize creative excellence.

Well worth the watch [+ happy to learn from this Symposium that when completed, my own Duke Uni/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library archive will sit alongside those of Judy Malloy, Stephanie Strickland, and Rob Kendall: such amazing companions].

It's not often I get to post here about codework [I nearly typed "codwork" instead then, heh]. Way back in the 1990's when this thing called the "World Wide Web" was kicking off [you *may* just have heard of it?] codework and code poetry were virtually unrecognised genres. Back then, Alan Sondheim, Ted Warnell, Talan Memmott, the anarcho 7-11 crew [myself included], and various Eastgate and Electronic Lit types were rampantly gestating this mix of poetically-infused codecraft.

What is a book, anyway? If players of the brooding computer game Dear Esther can consume a full-blown ghost story simply by wandering at will through a deserted island in Scotland's Hebrides (finding fragments of letters, music, and clues as they walk), shouldn't that be called a book? Critics can't seem to agree on a name for this new genre reflected in Inanimate Alice: multimedia online novels, ebooks, touchable TV, paratext, or technotext have all been used.

Rumors of My Death Source Text- "The Guardian" After an amazing development meeting earlier today with Simon Groth, head honcho of the Oz branch of if:book, I thought I'd take the opportunity to fill you in on some discrete details regarding our new remix project called "Rumors of My Death" [#RoMD]. If that sounds like something that's right up your creative alley, please feast your no-doubt-friday-workbleached-eyes on the following.