Sunday, March 29, 2026
In Chapter 7, "Divergent Streams," Rettberg looks at how electronic literature has branched out into different artistic and social contexts such as locative narrative, digital literary installations, virtual reality, etc. While earlier chapters focus on specific genres (like hypertext or generative art), this chapter looks at how e-lit interacts with other digital cultures. I liked how Rettberg discusses how e-lit moved from being something you read alone on a computer screen to something you experience in a gallery or museum (Installation Art). The idea that modern electronic literature rarely stays in one "lane” and is often mixed with elements of gaming, social media, and physical hardware was very interesting to read about in this chapter. Rettberg reflects on how the field has been shaped by organizations and how archiving these "divergent" works is a major challenge because digital platforms go obsolete so quickly. Instead of one single "great tradition," e-lit is made up of many smaller, overlapping communities (indie gamers, digital poets, net-artists). NFB games like “Far Away From Far Away” and “Bubble” were very cool to look at and interact with as my first examples of e-lit from this genre. For my “bring it in” I decided to look into a place called “Earth Illuminated Orlando” which is described as an immersive art installation where users walk through the exhibit and go on a sensory journey while seeing different earth landscapes and journeys.
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For my final I've firmly settled on the sizeable Twine project I began last semester. My intention was originally to create an escape r...
I was interested in the idea of e-lit as being made of overlapping communities of different technologies and ideas, too. So interesting that printed novels seem like such a "great tradition" whereas e-lit can be pretty much anything someone can dream up and program.
ReplyDeleteI like how you mentioned how e-lit is becoming something that we don't have to experience on our own or through a computer screen. We talked about this a bit in the last chapter, but it is still an interesting concept how e-lit can be created and experienced collectively.
ReplyDeleteEarth Illuminated sounds cool, do you have a good link for it? I found a couple of YouTube videos just made by people going there.
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