Remediation in Context: A Colloquium on Digital Media
Remediation in Context is a colloquium by the Critical Game Studies Lab dedicated to exploring how we remember, recover, and revitalize digital media of the past. Dene Grigar and Nick Montfort will each present talks on their own current research, both of which concern creative remediations of older digital media. Their topics are as follows.
Dene Grigar, Reconstructing a Born-digital Narrative about Archiving: Bill Bly’s We Descend Complete Edition
In 1997 Bill Bly published We Descend: Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor. Twenty years later, Volume Two was published by The New River Journal, which also gave a sneak peek at Volume Three in 2019. The full edition of Volume Three, which combines all three volumes into one, however, was created by the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) in 2024 in open Web languages in Semantic Markup and enhanced by ARIA.
We Descend involves a literal descent through four ancient eras documented through various archives of writings whose provenance is often unknown or uncertain. Metaphorically, it suggests a deep digging for truths that can never be fully verified.
In combining all three volumes into one narrative for free access on the Web, ELL was challenged with developing a structure that honored the original work and at the same time visualized eons of writings captured in the complete narrative. This presentation provides insights into the media translation methods used to bring this version of We Descend into fruition.
Nick Montfort, 101 BASIC Poems: A Human Project in Creative Computing
A book initially known as 101 BASIC Computer Games (ed. David Ahl) was first published in 1973. It welcomed people of all sorts to the creative potential of the computer, going on to be presented in a “Microcomputer” edition and to sell a million copies. My project takes this book as a central inspiration, but also reimagines poetry, art, and different sorts of “recreational computing” in the “Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Code” that was the lingua franca of the home computing age. I will present works from this in-process project and theorize it as a component of a larger project in a particular sort of creative practice, one of reconstruction and redirection.
Dene Grigar, PhD, is Professor and Director of Creative Media & Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver whose research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of born-digital media.
She has authored 16 media works, 79 scholarly articles, four print books, and seven open electronic resource (OER) publications. She has curated exhibits at the Bibliotheca Hertziana ––Max Planck Institute for Art (Rome), British Computer Society (London), the Library of Congress (D.C.), and for the International Symposium on Electronic Art, among other venues. With Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee) she developed the methodology for documenting born-digital media, a project that culminated in an open-source, multimedia book, entitled Pathfinders (2015), and book of media art criticism, entitled Traversals (The MIT Press, 2017). With James O’Sullivan (University College Cork, Ireland) she has recently co-authored a collection of essays for Bloomsbury Press, entitled Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities. Her recent book, Challenges of Born-Digital Literature: Editions, Translations, and Emulations, is co-authored with Mariusz Pisarski (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland) for Cambridge University Press (2024), involves the production of a theoretical print book accompanied by electronic open source book built on the Scalar platform containing over 90 media assets that demonstrate concepts expressed in the print book.
Grigar serves as the Managing Director & Curator of organization's The NEXT and directs the Electronic Literature Lab.
Nick Montfort is a computational literary artist, professor of digital media at MIT, and principal investigator in the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, Norway. He founded and runs a lab/studio, the Trope Tank. His about 100 creative productions include “Taroko Gorge,” which is often studied and modified. He has also collaborated on many textual and cinematic computational art projects. His books include The Future, Twisty Little Passages, and co-edited collections Output and The New Media Reader. He lives in New York City.