Scott Rettberg

Ph.D.
In 2011
NationalityAmerican
Scientific career
FieldsElectronic literature, digital humanities
InstitutionsUniversity of Bergen
Websitewww.uib.no/en/persons/Scott.Robert.Rettberg

Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization.[1][2][3] He leads the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence from 2023 to 2033.[4]

Scholarship

Rettberg is a professor of Digital Culture in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.[1] He is the author of the book Electronic Literature, which won the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature in 2019,[5] described by Kathi Inman Berens as "a definitive overview of electronic literature".[6] He has co-edited a number of academic collections, including Electronic Literature Communities.[7]

Rettberg was the project leader of the HERA-Funded ELMCIP research project (2010–13), and is the director of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base.[2]

Literary and artistic career

Rettberg became known as an author of hypertext fiction in the 1990s. His first major project was the collaborative web novel The Unknown, A Hypertext Novel, which was written in collaboration with William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton, and Frank Marquadt, and won the trAce/Alt-X Hypertext Competition 1998.[8] It was also featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2,[9] and has been analysed by a number of scholars.[10][11][12][13]

Rettberg's cinematic collaboration with Roderick Coover, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, received the Robert Coover Award in 2016.[14] The annual award is given by the Electronic Literature Organization each year in recognition of an outstanding work of electronic literature.[15][16][17]

The combinatory film Toxi-City: A Climate Change Narrative was created with Roderick Coover, and is described as a film that "shape-shifts each time it plays; an algorithm selects fragments from each of the six narratives and reconfigures them to create an ever-changing, yet thematically consistent, production"[18]

In 2023 Rettberg began experimenting with using ChatGPT and DALL-E to generate narratives[19] that "neither human nor AI could have created alone",[20] including the project Republicans in Love.

The Electronic Literature Organization

Main article: Electronic Literature Organization

Rettberg co-founded the Electronic Literature Organization with Robert Coover and Jeff Ballowe in 1999.[21]

Selected bibliography

References

  1. ^ a b "Scott Rettberg Biography". University of Bergen. Retrieved May 12, 2017.
  2. ^ a b "History of the Electronic Literature Organization". eliterature.org. Retrieved May 12, 2017.
  3. ^ Keller, Julia (May 18, 2001). "E-voking muses". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved October 17, 2017.
  4. ^ Svarstad, Jørgen; Lie, Tove (September 23, 2022). "Tre på rad for Moser-miljøet. 5 av 9 sentre til Universitetet i Oslo". khrono.no (in Norwegian Bokmål). Retrieved September 27, 2022.
  5. ^ "Announcing the 2019 ELO Prizes – Electronic Literature Organization". eliterature.org. August 5, 2019. Retrieved September 6, 2019.
  6. ^ Berens, Kathi Inman (May 2, 2019). "Third Generation Electronic Literature and Artisanal Interfaces: Resistance in the Materials › electronic book review". Electronic Book Review. Retrieved September 27, 2022.
  7. ^ Rettberg, Scott; Tomaszek, Patricia; Baldwin, Sandy (January 1, 2015). Electronic literature communities. Center for Literary Computing. ISBN 9781940425993. OCLC 917358825.
  8. ^ "trAce/Alt-X Hypertext Competition 1998 Results". unknownhypertext.com. 1998. Retrieved October 17, 2017.
  9. ^ Rettberg, Scott; Gillespie, William; Stratton, Dirk; Marquadt, Frank (2011) [1998]. Borràs, Laura; Memmott, Talan; Raley, Rita; Stefans, Brian (eds.). "The Unknown". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved October 17, 2017.
  10. ^ Kolb, David A. (2012). "Story/Story". Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference on Hypertext and social media. HT '12. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 99–102. doi:10.1145/2309996.2310013. ISBN 9781450313353. S2CID 208938632.
  11. ^ Pisarski, Mariusz (2016). "Collaboration in e-literature". World Literature Studies. 8 (3): 78–89. ISSN 1337-9275.
  12. ^ Ciccoricco, David (November 25, 2007). Reading Network Fiction. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 9780817315894. the unknown hypertext gillespie.
  13. ^ Desrochers, Nadine; Tomaszek, Patricia (2014). Bridging The Unknown : An Interdisciplinary Case Study of Paratext in Electronic Literature. pp. 160–189. hdl:1866/12174.
  14. ^ Rettberg, Jill Walker. "Prestigious Award to Scott Rettberg's Hearts and Minds". University of Bergen. Retrieved May 13, 2017.
  15. ^ "ELO Prize: Annual Prizes from the ELO". dtc-wsuv.org. Retrieved May 13, 2017.
  16. ^ "Hearts and Minds Awarded Top Electronic Literature Prize". cada.uic.edu. Retrieved May 12, 2017.
  17. ^ "Prestigious Award to Scott Rettberg's Hearts and Minds". www.uib.no. Retrieved May 12, 2017.
  18. ^ Baille, Katherine Unger (May 13, 2019). "A sense of place on shifting shores". Penn Today. Retrieved September 27, 2022.
  19. ^ Rettberg, Scott; Memmott, Talan; Rettberg, Jill Walker; Nelson, Jason; Lichty, Patrick (2023). "AIwriting: Relations Between Image Generation and Digital Writing". arXiv:2305.10834 [cs.AI].
  20. ^ Andersen, Ingeborg Håvardstein (March 1, 2023). "Kunstig litteratur?". STOFF. p. 22.
  21. ^ Keller, Julia (May 18, 2001). "E-voking muses The next wave in world literature is gestating in a scruffy Ravenswood office" (PDF). Chicago Tribune.
  22. ^ Rettberg, Scott (2018). Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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