The NEXT: Museum, Library, and Preservation Space is a repository of

net art upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the phys ...

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 ...

and games. It is supported by Washington State University at Vancouver and the

Electronic Literature Organization The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of ...

. This is a digital museum dedicated to reviving and maintaining these works to make them accessible to all. Physical artifacts are held at the Electronic Literature Lab in Washington, US.

Electronic Literature Lab

The Electronic Literature Lab holds the hardware and software that the NEXT Museum depends on to show electronic literature works in their original environment. This lab is housed at the Washington State University at Vancouver Washington.

Dene Grigar Dene Grigar is a digital artist and scholar based in Vancouver, Washington. She was the President of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2013 to 2019. In 2016, Grigar received the International Digital Media and Arts Association's Lifetime ...

founded and directs this lab. The lab contains over 80 vintage computers from 1977 onwards.

History

This digital museum originally housed 30 separate collections of 2,500

works which had increased to over 3,000 works by 2022. The NEXT uses an Extended Electronic Metadata Schema (ELMS) to describe the complex and interactive digital works it holds. This metadata describes the work and alerts readers to potential reading issues such as fleeting text, color use, or requirements for moving a mouse or moving with a

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...

environment. The lab opened officially in 2011.

Reviving works

Electronic literature pieces have used software available at the time that are since obsolete, such as

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, fl ...

Eastgate Systems Eastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertext. Eastgate is a pioneer in hypertext publishing and electronic literature and one of the best known publishers of hypertext ...

' StorySpace, Director, ToolBox, and Flash. The NEXT has re-created these works by migrating them to newer systems. The NEXT Museum has re-imagined many individual works, including: *

Charles Bernstein Charles Bernstein may refer to: * Charles Bernstein (composer) (born 1943), American composer of film and television scores * Charles Bernstein (poet) Charles Bernstein (born April 4, 1950) is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary sc ...

, ''An Mosiac for Convergence'' (1997 original publication, 2019 re-imagined) *

Richard Holeton Richard Holeton (born December 28, 1952) is an American writer and higher-education administrator. Holeton's creative works are foundational in the hypertext and electronic literature genres. As a writer, his most notable work is the hypertext no ...

, ''

Figurski at Findhorn on Acid ''Figurski at Findhorn on Acid'' is a hypertext novel by Richard Holeton published on CD-ROM by Eastgate Systems in 2001 and republished on the open web by the Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University, in 2021. It is a work of inte ...

'' * Caitlin Fisher, ''These Waves of Girls'' * John McDaid, '' Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse'' in 2021 *

Stuart Moulthrop Stuart Moulthrop (born 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works ''Victory Garden'' (1992), whic ...

, ''Victory Garden'' in 2022 *

David Kolb David Kolb (born 1939) is an American philosopher and the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bates College in Maine. Kolb received a B.A. from Fordham University in 1963 and an M.A. in 1965. He later received a M.Phil. from Yal ...

, ''Socrates in the Labyrinth and Caged Texts'' in 2022 * Bill Bly, ''We Descend'' in 2023

Individual author collections

The NEXT Museum also focuses on collections for notable authors in the electronic literature field, which include their own digital works and other donated physical or digital materials. For example, the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection holds 66 works. Luesebrink created and published 27 of these works under the pen name M.D. Coverley--and the NEXT Museum re-imagined, migrated, and developed video playthroughs of these works as they were written on now-obsolete software. The other works in this collection were donated by Luesebrink and include her personal copies of other author's works. Author collections include: * Jo-Anne Green *

N. Katherine Hayles Nancy Katherine Hayles (born December 16, 1943) is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is the James B. Duke Di ...

* Micheal Joyce * Robert Kendall *

Deena Larsen Deena Larsen (born 1964) is a new media and hypertext fiction author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. Her work has been published in online journals such as the ''Iowa Review Web'', ''Cauldron and Net'', ''fr ...

Marjorie Luesebrink Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink is an American writer, scholar, and teacher. Writing hypermedia fiction under the pen name M.D. Coverley, she is best known for her epic hypertext novels ''Califia'' and ''Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day''. Her ...

. The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection at ELO’s The NEXT features 66 works created and collected by this pioneering digital literary artist who publishes under the name M. D. Coverley. *

Jason Nelson Jason Nelson is a digital and hypermedia poet and artist. He is Associate Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, where he was also a Fulbright Fellow from 2016-17. Until 2020 he was a lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital writ ...

Alan Sondheim Alan Sondheim is a poet, critic, musician, artist, and theorist of cyberspace from the United States. Biography Alan Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from Brown University. He lives with his p ...

* Sarah Smith *

Stephanie Strickland Stephanie Strickland (born February 22, 1942) is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And ...

* Rob Swigart * Helen Thorington *

Jody Zellen Jody Zellen (born 1961, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American artist and educator. Her practice, consisting of digital art, painting, video art, and drawing, has been showcased by way of interactive installations, public art, and curated exhibi ...

Online journal and publication collections

Online journals were founded by communities and individuals. The NEXT Museum has curated and collected works from these journals, including the

Iowa Review ''The Iowa Review'' is an American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. History and profile Founded in 1970, ''Iowa Review'' is issued three times a year, during the months of April, August, and December. Origin ...

Web (1999-2008) BeeHive (1998 -2004), Cauldron and Net (1997-2002 founded by

Claire Dinsmore Claire Allan Dinsmore (born 1961) is an American jeweller, designer and new media artist. Dinsmore was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1961. She began her artistic career as a jewellery artist, moving later to net art and hypertext. Her work is in ...

), Poems That Go (2000-2004), Turbulence.org (1996-2016 co-founded by Jo-Anne Green), and The New River (1996 - present).

Academic publications

and

co-authored two works to document The NEXT's Pathfinder project, which provided video and audio recordings of currently inaccessible works using historically appropriate platforms, termed "traversals": ''Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature'' (June 2015) and ''Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing'' (April 2017). Cambridge University Press, Digital Literary Studies, has released Dene Grigar and Mariusz Pisarski's work: ''The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction'' (March 2024), as a print work and as a multi-media online work.

Exhibitions

The NEXT Museum curates exhibitions, such as Vision Unbound for Women's History month (2024), Hypertext an art in Italy September 5-8 2023 in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext Conference, and AfterFlash.

References

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External links

Official website
Hypertext Virtual museums Hypertext fiction Electronic literature