Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a constr ...

based in

Bergen Bergen (), historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. , its population is roughly 285,900. Bergen is the second-largest city in Norway. The municipality covers and is on the peninsula of ...

, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He leads the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence from 2023 to 2033.

Scholarship

Rettberg is a professor of Digital Culture in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of the book ''Electronic Literature'', which won the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature in 2019, described by Kathi Inman Berens as "a definitive overview of electronic literature". He has co-edited a number of academic collections, including ''Electronic Literature Communities.'' Rettberg was the project leader of the HERA-Funde
ELMCIP
research project (2010–13), and is the director of th
ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base

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. It was also featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2, and has been analysed by a number of scholars. Rettberg's cinematic collaboration with Roderick Coover,
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project
', received the Robert Coover Award in 2016. The annual award is given by the Electronic Literature Organization each year in recognition of an outstanding work of electronic literature. 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"

The Electronic Literature Organization

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

Selected bibliography

* ''Electronic literature,'' (Basingbroke: Polity, 2018. )

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rettberg, Scott American digital artists Living people Academic staff of the University of Bergen Date of birth missing (living people) American expatriate academics American expatriates in Norway Electronic literature writers Year of birth missing (living people) Electronic literature critics