A READING OF COMPUTER LITERATURE
AT DIGITAL ARTS AND CULTURE 2001
Brown University
8pm Friday 27 April 2001
(Roll the Flash introduction (321k) to see how the reading started off.)
This electronic literary reading was arranged as short films are on a festival reel. Each of the works briefly presented in this "reel-time" event was written since DAC 2000. The authors reading came from diverse backgrounds, having begun their electronic writing endeavors in StorySpace (Jackson, Moulthrop, Strickland), on the Web (Coverley, Gillespie, Memmott, Rettberg), in cybertext poetry using HyperCard (Cayley), in commercial gaming (Swigart), and in interactive fiction forms (Montfort).
The title of the reading conflates the title of one of Robert Coover's books, A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This, with that of Espen Aarseth's Cybertext. The reading plays with some of the ideas of Robert Coover's DAC '99 address - you must remember that - exploring whether visually stunning post-hypertext electronic literature is necessarily superficial, as Hollywood films often are. The works presented revealed that a great deal of "Golden Age" crafting of literary forms and conventions remains to be done. In the vein of Cybertext, the works presented included many that think beyond the link and are not easily categorized as hypertext.
John Cayley
Instrumental
M.D. Coverley
Default Lives
William Gillespie
Letter to Lamont
Talan Memmott
Delimited Meshings: a white paper
Nick Montfort
Villadom
Stuart Moulthrop
Marginal Effects
Scott Rettberg
The Meddlesome Passenger
Stephanie Strickland
Cloudberries
Rob Swigart
About Time
Title Design by
Ingrid Ankerson, Poems that Go
With a welcome & introduction from
Deena Larsen