Scott Rettberg - electronic literature

Last night at Hordaland Art Center in Bergen, Scott Rettberg, an academic & researcher at University of Bergen gave a talk and presented some of his projects in the field of electronic literature. Of particular interest for BUU was a "sticker novel" entitled IMPLEMENTATION made by Rettberg together with Nick Montfort. The narrative was constructed in small segments that could each be printed on a standard sticker, and the texts/templates were posted on the net. Readers could download and print the stickers, then attach them to surfaces and things in the environment. The novel was therefore distributed across a range of locations in different cities (also rural locations) in the USA and Europe. The stickers were then photographed in situ and the photos posted to a website that holds the entire narative and documentation. In locations where a relatively large number of stickers were placed (Amsterdam for example) the narrative fragments could provide an alternative method of navigating the city space and open up new possibilities for reading that space.