We Descend

We Descend has been accepted for an artist’s talk/demonstration at ELO_2012, the Electronic Literature Organization‘s Convention in Morgantown WV on 20-23 June. The site is West Virginia University, not far from where daring young felons from my high school used to slip across the border from PA in order to purchase contraband intoxicants (3/2 beer in those days — or was that Ohio? — also cigarettes; both illegal to punkKidz like us).

We’re hard at work whipping up a kick-ass presentation for my sisters & brothers in electronlit, a serious challenge for an old-fashioned literary hypertext built on Ye Antient Node-Linke Moddell, relpete with boxes & arrows (see diagram, right).

But we believe in ourself, and know what to do if they can’t take a joke…

Last weekend, Mighty Haakon & I trekked to Cambridge MA to attend the unConference Dangerous Readings at the MIT MediaLab, where We Descend Volume Two had its debut with a collegial group of fellow-travelers in electronic literature.

Here’s a rough version of the slideshow:

it’s my first whack at using SlideShare, but you’ll get a decent idea of how it looked…

All the Writings have now been added to this excerpt from WDvol2, including the earliest commentary supplied by an unknown Annotator.

Next: the Scholarly Apparatus. That’ll take a few days…

Over the past few days I’ve finished laying the defaultPath Writings, linked ‘em together in order, and cleared away the debris. It should be ready for reading now.

Some pages still have a comment at the bottom — an unintentional “feature” — to which you may feel free to avail yourself until I figure out how to make it go away, since it sort of looks terrible…

This slideshow gives an impression of the various stages of building We Descend.

Building _We Descend_, a hypertext novel from Bill Bly on Vimeo.