E-Lit Periodicals in the Age of AI
Proposal Type
Panel
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Computational creativity, as editors Montfort and Bertram show in OUTPUT, stretches from the 1950s to the present. Where the anthology ends, 2023, coincides with the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product. Several magazines emerged less than a year after ChatGPT’s release that deal directly with computer- and AI-generated texts, and other recent periodicals invite Game Poems, HTML (Taper), Scrollimation, Instapoetry (FilterZine), only AI work to be judged by AI (The Fathoms) and onwards. What do we make of all these publications? What do this bunch of small, maybe ambitious, maybe anxious, collaborations of electronic literature editors and artists mean? How much does “AI” really take up space in these magazines, or is the explosion of AI just making space for computer-assisted or digital or e-literatures more broadly? The goal of this panel is to take a snapshot of the moment in Electronic Literature’s periodicals and wonder: instead of what we can take away (it may be too soon for that), what’s being brought to the table?
E-Lit Periodicals in the Age of AI
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Computational creativity, as editors Montfort and Bertram show in OUTPUT, stretches from the 1950s to the present. Where the anthology ends, 2023, coincides with the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product. Several magazines emerged less than a year after ChatGPT’s release that deal directly with computer- and AI-generated texts, and other recent periodicals invite Game Poems, HTML (Taper), Scrollimation, Instapoetry (FilterZine), only AI work to be judged by AI (The Fathoms) and onwards. What do we make of all these publications? What do this bunch of small, maybe ambitious, maybe anxious, collaborations of electronic literature editors and artists mean? How much does “AI” really take up space in these magazines, or is the explosion of AI just making space for computer-assisted or digital or e-literatures more broadly? The goal of this panel is to take a snapshot of the moment in Electronic Literature’s periodicals and wonder: instead of what we can take away (it may be too soon for that), what’s being brought to the table?
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/13
Bio
P.D. Edgar (MFA, MA) grew up between central Florida and Managua, Nicaragua. He’s now a Texts & Technology PhD student at the University of Central Florida, and he recently founded re•mediate, a magazine for computer-assisted creative writing; his previous work is available at SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, and OROBORO.
Kavi Duvvoori is a writer and PhD candidate in English at UWaterloo, with an MFA from UCSC, researching how algorithms mediate communication. Other interests include experimental and constrained literature, birds, borders, speculative fiction, lists, linguistics, limits of language, math, worldbuilding, the search for ways of living that reject domination, sauteing, and maps. They are an editor for Taper magazine, have shared writing in various publications, and fear the enclosure of language. See https://titleduntitled.name/
Kiera Obbard (she/her) is a poet and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo. Her current research explores the historical denigration of women’s writing, cultural production, and associated publishing technologies from the 19th-century poetess tradition to contemporary social media literature. She has a monograph underway with Wilfrid Laurier Press which examines the social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions and ramifications of Instagram poetry in Canada.