I’m in Chicago attending SLSA 2005, the conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. There’s a whole track devoted to electronic literature, so I’m pretty excited.
In a couple of hours I’m talking in a panel about distributed narration, where I’m going to try to look more specifically at how fragments of narrative connect to each other when they’re not explicitly linked. Scott Rettberg and Jessica Henig are my fellow panelists. Scott will be talking about situationism, fluxus art and sticker literature, and Jess will be talking about emergent narrative. I haven’t actually met Jess yet. I bet she’s in this room listening to the talk before our panel, but I’m not sure which face is hers.
Right now, Dave Ciccoricco, who’s an expat American living in New Zealand, is talking about repetition as the main trope of network fiction. Rob Kendall’s next: he’s talking about the kind of reading that requires divination, such as reading tarot cards, lines on the palm of a hand or tea leaves, and leads from there into a presentation of his most recent literary work, Soothcircuit, a literary divination system. Lori Emerson is next, speaking about print-published computer-generated poetry. She’s surprised to have only found a single woman poet working in this form, Canadian Erin Mouré, and her book Pillage Laud, “computer-generated lesbian sex-poems”. Here, apparently, are some extracts. Rob Swigart is last. Mentions an article about how of the idea of a linear future was invented in [some past period].
