FEATURED EXHIBTIONS

We are pleased to announce three exciting exhibitions as part of ELO25, running from July 11th–13th at York University. Hosted across various campus venues, these include Love Letters: A Showcase of Ephemera of the Electronic Literature Organization, curated by Dene Grigar; Virtual Intrigue and Ephemeral Ruptures, curated by Mary Bunch and Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning; and the Juried ELO25@2025 Exhibition, curated by Joel Ong and Melanie Wilmink. Please navigate through this page for more information on each exhibition. Our exhibition schedule (with locations) can be found HERE!

LOVE LETTERS TO THE PAST AND FUTURE: THE ELO25@2025 JURIED EXHIBITION: Curated by Joel Ong and Melanie Wilmink

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

The ELO25@2025 Juried exhibition presents a rich tapestry of E-lit at the milestone of the
Electronic Literature Organization’s 25th anniversary. While showcasing works that delve into
the foundational histories and pioneering ideas of the field, the exhibition presents vision for
emerging technological applications and developments that would inform future tools and
literacies. With over 40 pieces in 7 galleries, the Juried Exhibition is a poetic and aleatoric walk
through time and space.

The idea of a love letter brings to mind a sense of nostalgia akin to a lost art, or perhaps in
some cases a sense of missed opportunities or mis-directed passions. At least in my mind,
such writing aggregates the nuances of complex emotions, interleaves them and provides a
route to remember and to memorialize a coming-of-age story that may be familiar to most. Our
diachronic approach to this exhibition is deeply committed to the notion of love as a trans-
temporal motivation and a situatedness that goes beyond any one love story or personal
circumstance, beyond any boundary-line of moral or practical ideology. If anything, time, as it
relentless moves, deepens the passions-passions that, like in Vita’s immortal letters to Virginia
Woolf, could be “traced five hundred years back and have become romantic to me, like old
yellow wine”. This exhibition is steeped, marinated and quite literally dripping with love.

At the same time, our current epoch is one that desires meaningful dynamics between human
makers and machinic agents—and productive tensions that push and pull agency back and
forth in co-creative ways. In the age of artificial entities, the writing of love letters seems more a
vicarious account of a machinic conversation, or at best an inter-species one. The ‘how’ we
write determines the ‘who’ we purport to be the agents and recipients of our professed love.
Material agencies meet human hands in generative pieces that utilize computational
augmentations or algorithmic processes such as in Nick Montfort’s “Three Computer-
Generated Books”, and also quite literally, in Jose Aburto’s “Get what you need”, where
generative graphics literally land and glow in your hands, or in Leslie Xin’s “We used to
respect the computer”, in which such tensions emerge through the body of a painting, where
paints, dripping oils merge with NFC chips and augmented realities.

As art historian James Elkins describes, every painting is an act of alchemy, where “to an artist,
a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of ‘pushing paint,’ breathing fumes,
dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing”. The materials of the digital
age are no less imbricated with human experiences, and beyond themselves, they facilitate a
relational architecture of those unnamable things that are felt rather that cognitively received. In
this way, the ELO 25@2025 Juried Exhibition also is a tribute to the melding and mixing of
forms and emergent technologies. Here, artists use generative and interactive electronic media
to create texts that highlight the process of creation, chart unmappable spaces and unknowable
experiences, and revive pioneering artworks such as Deena Larsen’s Stone Moons (1995-99), a
work about a mother battling internal and external forces to protect her pre-verbal autistic
child. It is also unique opportunity to showcase the vibrant community of practice that has
developed over years of collaborative work. Editorials like the online literary journal Taper, or
collaborative groups such as the Decamaron Collective or the eponymous project Notes from
the Reading Group at the End of the World, also support methodologies of co-creation within
and despite emerging technologies, utilizing augmentations of image, sound, online platforms
and virtual objects to contest present worlds and imagine new ones.

The juried exhibition showcases approaches to arts-based questions, frameworks, and
practices for technological applications and developments within the contexts of socio-political
and ecological poly-crises. “Fire and Water” by Jolene Armstrong and Monique Tschofen,
for instance, features a profound mix of news feeds, ChatGPT-enabled kinetic poetry generation
and sculptural forms to find a meaningful combination for the role of technology in the age of
climate catastrophe and ways to fine-tune the unstable detritus of unfactual, unlikely, and
impossible images and text that AI otherwise creates. “Closure” by Hacheng Lui and Bryan
Sng (Twentysix Interactive) presents an interactive station that necessitates the closing of
one’s eyes, a counterintuitive process today that exposes the complex notion of equanimity
within todays’ world of technical objects and surveillance culture.

Held in tandem with other exhibitions, Love Letters: A Showcase of Ephemera of the
Electronic Literature Organization (curated by Dene Grigar) and VIRTUAL INTRIGUE &
EPHEMERAL RUPTURES (curated by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning and Mary Bunch), the
ELO25@2025 Juried exhibition is a milestone exhibition offering a pathway down ELO’s
foundational histories towards an imagination what the next 25 years will bring. We invite to join
us as we visit and re-visit these love letters to the past and future.

Melanie Wilmink is an arts researcher and curator who examines the spectatorial dynamics of media art
environments. She is an Assistant Professor in Global Media & Communication Arts at Woosong University (Daejeon,
South Korea). Joel Ong is artist-researcher whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the
environment. He is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Emerging Digital Art Practice at the
University of Victoria. As curators, Joel Ong and Melanie Wilmink have collaborated on a number of creative projects,
brought together by a mutual interest in how technology facilitates a material relationship between humans and
invisible worlds.

LOVE LETTERS: A SHOWCASE OF EPHEMERA OF THE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ORGANIZATION: Curated by Dene Grigar, PhD, Managing Director & Curator, The NEXT

https://dtc-wsuv.org/projects/love-letters

ARCHIVIST’S STATEMENT

Introduction: My Thought Process
When one holds physical archives numbering into the thousands and can showcase only miniscule portion of them, it is––as you can imagine––a challenge. For someone like me trained as a digital storyteller, I want to present a cohesive narrative with the materials selected. But what story? And with what materials?
Looking at the schedule for this media festival where two exhibits are already featuring the art of electronic literature, I made the decision to focus on the materials that document the existence of the art––what is commonly referred to as ephemera––rather than a selection from the 3000 works of electronic literature we are holding at The NEXT. Ironically, ephemera, which comes to us from in Greek meaning “for a day”, had been regarded as items not intended to endure: posters, announcement cards, notebooks, photographs. But considering the brevity of the lifespan of digitally produced art––that is, our electronic literature––ephemera are sometimes all that is left of a work once its technology has become outmoded, the domain name of the server hosting it not renewed, or its server space completely lost due to nonpayment, and all of the other phenomena that affect its accessibility.

Why a Showcase of “Stuff”?
Ephemera are interesting stuff to collect. Not many people appreciate collecting ephemera nor understand their worth. So, let me explain my passion for doing so. It may help with understanding this showcase of it at this festival.

In the early days of electronic literature, ephemera came in the form of paper. Lots and lots of paper. Disks often came packaged in paper––that is, cardboard paper––and many times contained paper in the form of registration cards, announcements for more electronic literature to buy, or a note thanking the buyer for purchasing the work. Folios were interesting because they were akin to book covers or record albums in that they were designed to catch our eye: An image of the author smiling at us (re: Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story), a provocative character from the work (re: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl). Breadcrumbs from the print world to the electronic, making us feel comfortable with this strange new phenomenon. Electronic literature readings sometimes generated posters that were plastered on walls of university hallways and office doors announcing an artist would be on campus talking about their work. There were also announcement cards mailed or passed out listing a new work of art or scholarly book about electronic literature. Interestingly, ephemera is not limited to paper. Some artists created t-shirts emblazoned with the name of their work of electronic literature (re: Lorenzo Miglioli’s Ra-Dio.). Some artists performed in costume (re: Rob Wittig) or used props during their readings(re: Richard Holeton). Cups, screen cleaners, tote bags, writing pens, mouse pads––all were produced to promote a work or an event celebrating a work. In those early days, especially, when computers were still a new mode of communication for most people, artists developed ephemeral objects for teaching the public about electronic art: a shower curtain to demonstrate hypertextual links (re: Deena Larsen), a pinwheel etched with lines of a poem to show what interactive poetry can be (re: again Larsen).

All of these objects, individually, are important artifacts in that they are proof that the art, an artist, and a scholar once existed. Together, however, they tell a lot of stories: about the rise of computers for the purpose of human expression that occurred in the 1980s onward; the laborious effort some artists undertook to maintain their art as technologies became outmoded and the artist’s art became inaccessible; the busy schedules artists and scholars kept to promote their work and the work of others at performances and readings; the growth of professional organizations that formed around the art and the demise of those organizations; the rise and fall of online journals devoted to the art form; the methods artists used when planning their work, such as sketching, doodling, mapping; and the efforts to draft version after version of a work until the artist felt they finally had gotten it right.

The Method to My Madness
At this point, I return to my original two questions: What story do I tell at this showcase? And what materials will produce a cohesive narrative?
Among the 110 boxes of archival material at The NEXT that accompany the 3000+ works collected at this virtual museum and library, I have chosen to relay the story of the development of the Electronic Literature Organization as it has risen to become the hub of activity for electronic art, artists, and scholars. I have chosen this story because I care deeply about the organization, doggedly so, that I have dedicated my career, practice, and personal resources to it.

For my story I am using close to 100 different artifacts drawn from The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection, The Electronic Literature Organization Collection, The Deena Larsen Collection, The Stephanie Strickland Collection at The NEXT, as well as material from my own personal collection.

A word about the collection method and the state of those collections: Margie was, and I am very diligent about what we collect, which is just about everything   related to ELO and electronic literature. Years before Margie died, she had sent me the digital files of her art so that we could hold them in The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection at The NEXT. She also shipped me boxes of physical artifacts that she put together from everything she had held on to and neatly organized in steel cabinets in her garage. Having served on the ELO’s Board of Directors early on until her death in 2023, presided over the organization as the ELO’s second President, and was the catalyst (with Kate Hayles) for moving ELO from Chicago to UCLA and, thus, providing much needed support for ELO at a time when the U.S. economy literally tanked, Margie had acquired an awe-inspiring collection of material. After she died, her sons gave me access to her entire server space and invited me to her home to go through the rest of the archives she was holding. So, I can tell you with all honesty that Margie was sitting on a wealth of history, which we now hold at The NEXT––and I am sharing a very, very small portion of it with you at this showcase.

As for myself, I have already sketched out my collection history a bit. I will add that what differs between Margie’s and my own practice is my fascination for non-paper archives—that is, the cups and pinwheels and beach balls and Spam cans and brooches. They charm me, and I own a lot of them.

ELO’s collection habit was spotty for a good reason––the office moved around a lot, going to the location where the President was located (Nick at MIT) or where someone who valued electronic literature pledged support for it (Matt at MITH). From Chicago to Los Angeles to Baltimore to Cambridge to Vancouver, WA, which is where I am located. The ELO office and its archives were not housed anywhere longer than three or six years at the other locations until I moved it to Washington State University Vancouver a few years after I was elected ELO President. With the financial support of my, then, Chancellor, Mel Netzhammer, and other donations, I have been able to maintain the ELO archives for close to 10 years now. That stability has made it possible for me not only to hold on to the ELO archives, but also to organize, catalog, exhibit, and continue building them. For this showcase, for example, I chased down ephemera related to the ELC4 (thank you, Rui!) and all our conferences (thank you, Philippe!). I can now say we have archives related to both important activities of ELO. The obvious lesson in all of this is that disruption is the enemy of archives.

Frankly, we need to maintain our archives because it represents our history. It tells the story of who we are and what we made. A showcase of ephemera like this one, additionally, tells the story of how we positioned ourselves and our art, how we valued it to the extent that we killed a lot of trees to do it. Ephemera, like the art it reflects, are a form of human expression and, so, valuable in and of itself. And frankly, some of it is just dang pretty.

Final Argument (which I hope I do not have to make but am making anyway)
I think about Shakespeare’s will. It is a legal document, and like other wills could have been tossed long after the goods mentioned in it were assigned to the recipients. It’s just stuff, right? But it states that Shakespeare’s “second best bed,” would be left to his wife Anne. An inside joke between husband and wife? Literary scholars continue to ponder this possibility. Certainly, Will’s will wasn’t forgotten and destroyed and, instead, remains today an example of ephemera of great mystery and value. Who is not to say that the book, State of the Arts: Proceedings of the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2002 Symposium, with the accompanying CD-ROM from the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards we are holding in The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection will not be of interest to a future audience interested in the hybrid practice of packaging physical media within a print book? Already my students do not know what floppy disks are.

My job as an archivist, as I see it, is to hold on to as much of what I can collect of electronic literature as humanly possible so that a future audience can have access to the information it needs to make sense of the field as it has been growing and developing over these past decades. ELO, as the international organization of electronic literature that promotes the form, the artists, and the scholars, offers the ideal starting point of such a study. I hope you enjoy this showcase that celebrates the organization’s amazing story.

VIRTUAL INTRIGUE & EPHEMERAL RUPTURES:  Curated by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning and Mary Bunch
Sponsored by Connected Minds

Virtual Intrigue & Ephemeral Ruptures is an exhibition featuring works in digital media and electronic literature that activate the poetics of fractured worlds.  The artists invite spectators to move between worlds of enchantment and horror, virtual and real, static and ecstatic. These fissures arrive from somewhere else, the past, the future, or some imaginary place and time. Like Marx’s poetry from the future, their “content goes beyond the phrase,” hinting at new worlds yet to come, while the dead stir in their graves. This collection of sensory digital poetry, immersive and interactive art works experiment with disruptive and emergent technologies. Fittingly situated in the Foster Performance Studio, the boundary between spectator/participant(s) sensing moving bodies and the artworks is breached. The exhibition is sponsored by, and features works by artists affiliated with Connected Minds, their students and collaborators. The Canada Research Excellence Fund (CREF) project titled Connected Minds is a multi-year joint York and Queen’s University research initiative that aims to address societal challenges of intelligent technologies.

ARTIST STATEMENTS

Alam-e-Alam (The States of Worlding): Tilism Sazi
By Sana Akram

Alam-e-Alam (The States of Worlding): Tilism Sazi is an interactive mixed reality experience that positions the participants as Tilism Saz—conjurers of an enchanted world of wonder and relationality that lies beyond a veil (Tilism: an enchantment/vast enchanted worlds; Saz: maker, instrument, conjurer; Tilism Sazi: the act of conjuring an enchantment/enchanted worlds). They must use their gestures and voice to activate and sustain a series of transformations to finally cross the veil and enter the tilism itself. In doing so, the experience aims to explore the worlding potentialities that emerge from an assemblage of the elemental body in performance, the conjured image of the story-world through devices of wonder, and the spirit activated within the performative space.

The project draws on Akram’s ongoing doctoral research-creation focus on the historical Urdu language oral storytelling tradition and performative art of Tilismi Dastan from South Asia, which is uniquely coloured by Islamicate aesthetics along with Indic performance. This work is the first in a series of XR interactive experiences that reimagine the Tilismi Dastan with emergent media technologies and XR, and realize its transformative, generative, and creative potential for immersive storytelling, performance, and worldbuilding in the 21st century.

Under the Greenlights (UTGL)
By Ivan Cerla

Under the Greenlights (UTGL) is an exploration of the northern lights and liminality. The participants become the spiritual subjects under the green light interactive visuals. Under these greenlit, passed, spirits, we experience an emotional and dreamy sense of in-between of our current bodies on this earth, and what will be our future auras above us. This installation does not expect its participants to understand the significance of their own auroras or the bigger picture of the northern lights. Rather, the hope is to convey the otherworldly experience of our northern lights by inviting participants to interact with the in-between of their current bodies and their aurora counterpart. Whether it is experienced as one passes by, dances, or tells others of this piece, Ivan hopes that participants can share their expressions of light, create their own artistic narrative, and let the participatory nature of light speak for itself. Liminality is a core theme Ivan has gone through over the past decade, basking in the emotional “in-betweens” of moving from city to city, parent to parent, and teens to twenties. This, alongside his ever-changing relationship with light growing up in Yellowknife, solidified his desperation for summer’s eternal sunsets – especially during winter’s 3 PM nighttime. Despite winter’s hardships, its northern lights serve as a reminder that light prevails in complete darkness. The stories of the Dene and Cree of the territories say that these lights in the sky are the spirits of those who passed, dancing to communicate with loved ones on earth (Legends of the Aurora).

Seeing Through The Dark at East Beijing Road
By Haoran Chang

I am interested in exploring the liminal relationship between physical and virtual, fictional and factual, and the embodied experience with interactive media, using a wide range of media such as XR, video installation, digital print, physical computing, and game workshops. My artistic practice examines the notion of resilience on both macro and micro scales. On a macro scale, I reimagine traces in the urban landscape to tell unnoticed or forgotten pasts as a form of resilience. By reconstructing the past through artistic imagination or participatory gaming experiences with audiences, new “realities” that haunt between past and future are generated. This re-imagination with digital and analogue technology responds to the changing cityscape shaped by cultural, economic, and political contexts, with marginalized and repressed voices being concealed in the process. On a micro scale, I am interested in how the body can be healed with immersive digital technology through the lens of Daoist philosophy and practice. I am interested in imagining Daoist as an ancient immersive technology for self-cultivation.

Magpie Online
By Christina Dovalis

The language of cinema was born not out of static theatrical views but out of urban motions.
–Guiliana Bruno

Over the past two decades, gaming metaverses have expanded dramatically, reshaping the ways we interact and engage with digital space. As tech giants fuel this shift, public gathering places are increasingly migrating from physical plazas to virtual landscapes. In 2024, 3.2 billion gamers generated over $159 billion in revenue—an indicator of just how deeply online worlds have become sites for community-building, identity formation, and even governance. Virtual real estate is no longer just a novelty—it’s a new terrain of social life.  In Magpie Online, this migration is explored from material public spaces to online environments, focusing on a multiplayer platform called Decentraland. Much like “real” life, users create avatars and construct homes, parks, clubs, and other urban infrastructures. One user likens Decentraland to a magpie’s nest—an externalized archive of selfhood, where each collected object becomes a reflection of identity.  The installation weaves together interviews with four Decentraland users, platform footage, original animation, machinima, and archival imagery tracing the evolution of North American public space. Drawing from urban analysis, Magpie Online explores how virtual worldbuilding reshapes our sense of belonging, embodiment, language, and community. How is identity forged in digital realities? What do we gain—and lose—when our social lives are mediated through code? And, to what extent should we distinguish between “real” and “virtual” life? Magpie Online invites viewers to consider what it means to belong in a world increasingly built on-screen.

Fractalize III: Letters We Haven’t Written Yet
by Tony Vieira & Caitlin Fisher  

This sound-based narrative work is the third and final instalment in the Fractalize series, an ongoing meditation on intimacy, disconnection, simulation, and memory in digital and fractured worlds. Launched in 2016 with I’ve Loved You from Afar, the series follows the traces of a disintegrating relationship between Richard and Elizabeth—a connection shaped by absence, algorithm, and alternative realities. In this final piece, Letters We Haven’t Written Yet, Elizabeth navigates a post-social terrain where memory is no longer personal, and truth is encoded in layered digital archives, avatars, and bilhetos (tickets) traded on the Onion Route. What began as longing in the first instalment becomes elegy here—not just for love, but for an entire way of being in the world. Through sonic fragments and overlapping voices, the piece reflects the impossibility of resolution in a world where emotional entanglements persist across collapsed boundaries: real and virtual, dream and memory, gospel and free time. The voice that began by whispering “Do you ever feel alone?” is no longer simply asking. It’s listening. It’s trying to remember what it was like to swim, to bike, to love without metadata. In this fractal architecture of voice and noise, the listener is invited to feel the porousness of personhood, the strain of sustaining affect in simulated connection, and the ache of trying to let go when even your longing has been backed up in cloud storage.

Virtual Nightmare Gallery
By Mojde Kalantari

Virtual Nightmare Gallery is an interactive virtual reality (VR) gallery featuring six collage
artworks. Each artwork is accompanied by a compelling nightmare-themed storyline, narrated
through voice-over and enhanced with sound effects to create an immersive experience. As users
progress through the experience, the individual stories of each artwork come together to form a
cohesive narrative, ultimately concluding in the final artwork, where the core idea behind the
nightmares are revealed. This project created in Unity using the C# programming language.

How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music
by Luka Kuplowsky

A video companion piece to Luka Kuplowsky & The Ryōkan Band’s 2024 album How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music. Conceived as a record of adaptations and responses “to a millennia of poetry”, the album draws together the poems of Ryōkan Taigu, Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Rainer Maria Rilke, Yosana Akiko, Du Fu, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, W.W.E Ross, Li Bai, and La Fontaine, placing them within a dynamic environment of ecstatic and imaginative expression. This collection of music videos draws upon improvisatory videography, direct animation, dance-mime performance, and digital/analog glitch, continuing the project’s process of transposing poetry into an interplay of translation, response and invention.

Project Vitalis: Erased
By Sarah Monasar

Project Vitalis: A Lab Simulator highlights the relationship between the characters and world, exploring the way morality can change and shift as a person grows. As an artist, I often explore character-driven stories, forcing the player or viewer to put themselves in the shoes of a fully fleshed out character, allowing them to feel an emotional attachment to them. And as a woman of colour, I find it integral to showcase main characters that already have a story, in order to speak out about their struggle instead of trying to find neutral territory to appeal to everyone. I’ve always been fascinated by psychologically challenging stories, especially story-based games that are thought provoking and centre around a particular character.

Liver Transplant Manual
By Brad Necyck

This project began when I encountered a liver transplant manual—an institutional document meant to prepare patients for a profound and irreversible transformation. What struck me was the dissonance between the sterile, instructional tone of the manual and the chaotic, intimate reality of undergoing transplantation. I became interested in the poetic and symbolic tensions embedded in such texts: the limits of language in the face of embodied crisis, and the gaps between what can be prepared for and what must simply be endured. I have since transformed the manual into a series of generative artworks presented through an interactive website. Using AI as both collaborator and co-creator, I explore how systems can breathe new life into static text—disrupting, reconfiguring, and reanimating its contents. Each generative work becomes a speculative apparatus, asking how we might experience such medical texts not only as instructions, but as meditations, rituals, or intimate reflections. This project sits at the intersection of clinical protocol and poetic inquiry, blending computation with care. It invites viewers into a contemplative space where preparation becomes transformation, where bureaucratic language is given back its breath. Through this reimagining, I aim to offer not answers, but new surfaces of feeling—new ways of seeing, sensing, and reckoning with what it means to be a body rewritten by medicine. Ultimately, this work questions not only how we prepare for rupture, but how we might reassemble meaning in its aftermath.

Where You Came From
By Taien Ng Chan

Where you came from is a visual collage of a family visit to the village in China where my mother and my uncle are from, edited over audio of my mother trying to teach me a poem in Cantonese about leaving home, and many years later, returning.

Particulate Matter / Midge Swarm
By Christina Dovolis, Jorge De Oliveira, Luka Kuplowsky, Dolleen Manning & Mary Bunch

Two environments—Particulate Matter and Midge Swarm—are installed in proximity to one another. They clash and mirror each other in an uneasy conversation, evoking an inequitable alliance between toxin and cure found in environmental and economic development policies in Canada. This work asks audiences to dwell simultaneously in a thriving ecosystem and in a toxic landscape, as contrasting sites of restoration and complicity in the spoils of capitalist extraction. Interacting with this vile beauty implicates viewers in the catastrophe of modern life, as our everyday choices, needs, and desires seamlessly intertwine with the enterprise of capitalism, colonialism, and environmental ruin. By interacting with the work, audiences activate an ever-shifting poetic conversation between human and other-than-human vocalizations where industrial smokestacks and wetland landscapes and their inhabitants emerge and subside.