The Digital Imaginary: Literature and Cinema of the Database (Electronic Literature)

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories. The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process from differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike.

Astrid Ensslin is Professor of Dynamics of Virtual Communication Spaces at University of Regensburg, Germany.

María Mencía is an artist/practice-based researcher and Senior Lecturer in the School of Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University, London, UK. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the ELO-Electronic Literature Organization. Her practice-based research is trans-disciplinary, it explores the poetic space of the in-between in multimodal digital textualities, interactive narratives, poetics of engagement, digital literacies and data visualisation poetics. Most recently, she is the editor of #WomenTechLit, a collection of 28 essays by women working in Electronic Literature.

Rui Torres is Associate Professor of Communication Sciences at University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, teaching Semiotics, Digital Media, and Electronic Literature. He is the director of the academic journal Cibertextualidades, and member of several editorial boards and scientific committees of other Journals in the field of electronic literature. He is, most recently, the editor of Poesia Experimental Portuguesa: Contextos, Ensaios, Entrevistas, Metodologias and PO.EX: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia (co-edited with Sandy Baldwin).

Alex Saum-Pascual is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.