Electronic literature
In addition, works of electronic literature are not part of the established publishing industry and so do not have ISBN numbers and are not findable in library catalogues.
Until the early 2000s electronic literature works tended to be published on floppy disk, CD-ROM, in online literary journals or on dedicated websites.
[7] Screenwriter and author Carolyn Handler Miller characterizes works of electronic literature as nonlinear and non chronological where the user experiences and co-creates the story, and where contradictory events and different outcomes are possible.
[9] Scholars have discussed a range of pre-digital precursors to electronic literature, from the ancient Chinese book the I Ching,[10]: 9 to inventor John Clark's mechanical Latin Verse Machine (1830-1843)[11] to the Dadaist movement's cut-up technique.
[16] The original code has been lost, but digital poet and scholar Nick Montfort has reimplemented it based on remaining documentation of its output, and this version can be viewed in a web browser.
"[18]: 11 Stochastic Texts was a program written for a Z22 computer that "produced random short sentences based on a corpus of chapter titles and subjects from Franz Kafka's novel The Castle.
[22] The German philosopher and media scholar Hannes Bajohr [de] writes that Stochastic Texts is an example of the "sequential paradigm" in generative literature, in opposition to newer examples of a "connectionist paradigm": "Instead of hoping to recreate intuition, genius, or expression, the logic of the machine itself – that is, the logic of deterministically executed rule steps – becomes aesthetically normative in Stochastische Texte.
[24] The Italian poet and artist Nanni Balestrini's poem Tape Mark I was composed in 1961 on an IBM 7070, and output from the poetry generator was published in a special issue of a journal edited by the novelist and scholar Umberto Eco and artist Bruno Munari, thus standing as the first Italian work of electronic literature.
[27] The computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum programmed the chatbot ELIZA in 1966, establishing a new genre of conversational literary artefacts or bots.
An example is the installation Blikk (1970) by a Norwegian trio: artist Irma Salo Jæger [no], composer Sigurd Berge and poet Jan Erik Vold.
[30] Vold's readings of his poems were mixed as sound montages by Berge and combined with Jæger's kinetic sculptures in an exhibition at the Henie Onstad Art Center.
The work was recreated in 2022 by the composer and curator Jøran Rudi [no] and is now part of the permanent collection of the Norwegian National Museum.
[34] It has been called a "classic"[35] "so foundational it started a genre",[36] "the Gilgamesh of video games",[37] and is credited with having "informed and inspired generations of players.
[44] Not only writers, but also digital artists created works with strong literary components that have had an influence on the field of electronic literature.
An example is the Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld's The Legible City, which was first exhibited at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 1988.
[50][41] This period is often termed the first generation hypertext era, as N. Katherine Hayles notes that these works used lexia or separate screens in a similar manner to books and pages.
Early web-based hypertext fictions include Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, Adrienne Eisen's Six Sex Scenes and Robert Arellano's Sunshine '69, all published in 1996.
The Canadian author Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls (2001) was a hypermedia novella telling stories of girlhood, using images and sounds as well as links and text.
[70] The American author Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia (2000) offered complex visual and textual layers that sometimes confuse and occlude themselves,[71] and is described by the literary critic Lisa Swanstrom as a "beautifully intricate piece of electronic literature".
[72] Kate Pullinger's Inanimate Alice is an example of a work that began as a web novel and then saw versions across several media, including a screenplay and a VR experience.
[73] Works like The Impermanence Agent, by author and scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin and collaborators, explored the web's ability to customise a story for the reader.
[81] The spread of smartphones and tablets led to literary works that explored the touchscreen, such as Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizarro's Pry (2014)[82] or Kate Pullinger's Breathe: A Ghost Story.
[88] Notable works written in Twine that are frequently discussed as electronic literature include Anna Anthropy's Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013)[89][90] and Dan Hett's autobiographical C ya laterrrr about losing his brother in the Manchester Arena bombing (2017).
[92][93] David Jhave Johnston's ReRites is an example of this new kind of generative literature and is a poetic work written as a human-AI collaboration.
Espen J. Aarseth wrote in his book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature that "it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery".
[101]: 30 Plot lines, emotional intensity, character traits and attributions can vary depending on a reader's chosen path.
[102] J Yellowlees Douglas shows an early example of this in Michael Joyce's 1991 hypertext fiction WOE where romances would occur between different characters, depending on a reader's path.
[103] Because electronic literature is made to be read on computers, works often become unreadable when the software platforms or technologies they are designed for become obsolete.
In 1998, two works shared the 1,000 English pound prize: The Unknown by William Gillespie; Scott Rettberg; Dirk Stratton and Rice by Jenny Weight (Australia).
Three sites received Honorable Mentions: Kokura by Mary-Kim Arnold, **** by Michael Atavar, and water always writes in plural by Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson.
