eliteratuur

http://revuebleuorange.org

http://collection.eliterature.org/2/

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/

http://elmcip.net/

http://futureofthebook.org.uk/

E-Literature, I-Literature, Transliterature, I-Literature, New Media Writing?

On digital storytellers
'...Ben described the net-native literary forms that have emerged to date as 'incunabula'. I didn't know what the word meant. He explained that, in the
Middle Ages, when they first started printing books, there were all kinds of experiments which explored print technologies but hadn't yet settled into a form that made full use of them. Ben suggested that forms of Web writing today are at an equivalent stage. The word 'incunabulum' stuck with me. There's something endearlingly fragile and tentative about it, as though Net-based forms of writing were a new species of winged things,
freshly-hatched and still a bit soggy and crumpled.'
Sebastian Mary on if:book - blog of the Institute of the Future Book

Janet Murray – Hamlet on the Holodeck

"What all these pieces have in common is a concerted attempt to do more than upload the conventions of print text or film (boundedness, single authorship, linearity) into an environment that encourages in many ways the inverse of these traditions. They all have limitations, but all are pushing at the boundaries of what the new technologies make possible: multiple or anonymous authoring, new languages, strange temporalities and
explicit acknowledgement of the intertext.”

With digital media, the once sacred nature of text is sacred no longer. Instead, we can change it continuously and in real time. As a result, time itself becomes an active element in the crafting of stories.

When we think about digital's effect on storytelling, we tend to grasp for the lowest hanging fruits: words will move, pictures become movies, every story will be a choose-your-own-adventure. While digital does make all of this possible, these are the changes of least radical importance.
The biggest change is not in the form stories take but in the writing process. On the simplest level, books can be pushed to e-readers in a Dickensian chapter-by-chapter format - as author Max Barry did with his latest book, Machine Man. Beyond that, authorship becomes a collaboration between writers and readers. Readers can edit and update stories, either passively in comments on blogs or actively via wiki-style interfaces.

First, and my main point, the whole "written word" (literal) as a "written word" (figurative) is only fairly recent in the whole of human history, and coincides with book print. Before that, stories were by definition changing, even when written down - just look at "parallel versions" of the grail legend, arthurian myths, and merlin/morgana/morgan-le-fay stories. Stories were adapting memes. Which they somehow ceased to be with book print. In fact, the first story that ceased to be adaptive was the bible (following an initial period of hefty adapting). So there's no 2.0 here, just a 13.6 or something. There's only some 500-600 years of western fixed stories, and now that's finally changing (a bit).

there is indeed a big hunger that was left unsatisfied, to interact again with the artist (in olden days, Shakespeare adapted his stuff after every show until the public thought it was good; Manet -or was it Monet- went by his buyers' houses to do some more work on the canvas). It's bringing art back to the whole "il miglior fabbro" concept, away from the "high creator"... music artists interact more directly with fans as well...