RiTa† is an easy-to-use natural language library that provides simple tools for experimenting with generative literature. The philosophy behind the API is to be as simple and intuitive as possible, while still providing adequate flexibility for more advanced users. The download comes in two flavors: 1) the ‘core’ package, containing the jar files and documentation, and 2) the ‘TTS’ package that adds text-to-speech support. Additionally, statistical models for tagging, chunking, and parsing are available for more advanced users (see ‘Stat-Models’). RiTa optionally integrates with Processing and is both free and open-source. Continue reading

An Evening with Electronic Literature Organization :: December 13, 2011; 7:00 pm :: The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, NY.

Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) presents an evening of multimedia, interactive, performative readings highlighting a broad range of born-digital literary forms, including game-inspired, collaborative, database, film/video, generative, and kinetic image work. The evening’s presentations showcase five projects selected from the second Electronic Literature Collection, published in February 2011, and created by Oni Buchanan, Jhave Johnston, Illya Szilak, Sandy Baldwin, and collaborators — Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan. Continue reading

2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference — Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints :: June 20-23, 2012 :: West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV :: Call for Papers — Deadline: November, 30, 2011.

ELO 2012 Media Arts Show :: June 18-30, 2012 :: Monongalia Arts Center, Morgantown + online :: Call for Works — Deadline: November 30, 2011.

Electronic Literature: Where is It? — Even if nobody could define print literature, everyone knew where to look for it - in libraries and bookshops, at readings, in class, or on the Masterpiece channel. We have not yet created, however, a consensus about where to find electronic literature, or (for that matter) the location of the literary in an emerging digital aesthetic. Continue reading

Fall 2011 Purple Blurb @ MIT, Cambridge, MA:

Seeing and Writing: Russian Multimedia Poetry by Natalia Fedorova :: October 24, 2011; 5:30 pm :: 14E-310 — Natalia Fedorova’s work includes an interactive novel, Madame Ebaressa and a Butterfly, co-written with Sergeij Kitov; 7, a  hyper fiction piece with three possible endings; Dialogue Between a Policeman and a Ballerina, a video installation with the Factory of Found Clothes; and two poetry films, Snow Queen and Just do not not do it. She is also the founder and curator of VIDE0.txt, a poetry film festival in St-Petersburg, Russia and the co-curator of SELF-ID.com, a digital publishing portal. Continue reading

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Third Hand Plays: “automatype” by Daniel C. Howe by Brian Stefans:

Daniel C. Howe, like joerg piringer and Erik Loyer, can be described as both an artist and a researcher. His homepage lists a number of projects, many in progress, some merely sketches, bu he doesn’t make any clear division between research and art, not surprising given his array of degrees and residencies. An early project involved developing a series of 3D fonts, which puts him in a tradition of experimental font makers including the previously mentioned Paul Chan, who replaced individual letters with words, scribbles, or abstract shapes, Peter Cho with his Letterscapes, and Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland, who created the first “RandomFonts,” which resemble conventional letters but with visual variations — added noise, slight warps in the lines and points — with each click of the key.” More >>

Turbulence Spotlight: Six Sided Strange by Jason Nelson [Needs Speakers/Headphones]:

Six Sided Strange is a net-artwork series built from unsolvable Rubik’s cubes and hidden narratives, from pixilated game character collages to abstract streams of color and lines. The cube is central to how we organize and understand. It is a puzzle of unsolvable junctures, a humanistic shape created to order and organize. Six Sided Strange disrupts the cube, wandering inside/around the recombinatory playground of Rubik’s 56 squares, exploring how images and designs relate to narrative. These are interactive/dynamic sculptures, brief storylands, and all manner of wonderments. There is nothing to win, but then again there never was. Continue reading

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 17 Issue 1: MISH MASH, August 2011.

Transmediation as Betrayal: The Case of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Editorial by Lanfranco Aceti: When inheriting the history of a publication like the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) it is difficult to stay faithful to historical traditions and at the same time catch up with the evolution of contemporary online media and social networks.

Academic Vanitas: Michael Aurbach and Critical Theory by Dorothy Joiner: In a satiric series of sculptures, Michael Aurbach uses laughter to lampoon the excesses of the contemporary scholarship known as critical theory. Spun from psychology, linguistic hermeneutics, and philosophy, critical theory, in Aurbach’s view, tends to deemphasize art objects, substituting fatuous speculations for straightforward analysis. Continue reading

Third Hand Plays: “Scrape Scraperteeth” by Jason Nelson by Brian Stefans:

“Jason Nelson’s huge body of electronic literature, most of it done in Flash, might at first seem the work of an obsessive outsider; the fact that he is an American living in Australia might only confirm this assumption. Each of his pieces is replete with text, images (and often video), strange sounds, and most importantly, unusual interfaces that encourage as much play by the user as it must have taken the creator to design it. Rotating cubes, infinitely regressing images, rainbow-colored compasses, genetic code, Tron-like 3-D boxes (with a nod to Rez), and slot machines have provided inspiration for his variations on the GUI (graphical user interface), all in the service of exploring the varieties of recombination possible with digital text, not to mention images and sounds.” More >>

Turbulence Artists’ Studios: Andreas Maria Jacobs — Using Google search results, textual fragments found on the Web are programmatically rearranged, deformed or crushed. By applying this strategic process new, dismantling and reorienting contexts arise, not directly conforming to the mundanity of the original result listings, deconstructing and re-contextualizing the actual text. Both reflecting and reinforcing changing attitudes and roles towards art, religion and technology. [Needs Firefox Browser]

Andreas Maria Jacobs lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Walkenried, Germany with Judith V. and their 3 children. He has been the publishing editor of Nictoglobe magazine online since 1986. His work is included in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2.