Two internationally renowned scholars will spend the 2020-21 academic year at WSU Vancouver as research affiliates in the Electronic Literature Lab. They are Astrid Ensslin, professor in digital humanities and game studies, and director of media and technology studies at the University of Alberta, Canada; and Mariusz Pisarski, of the Department of Media Communication and Journalism at the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów, Poland.
The two will collaborate with ELL Director Dene Grigar on such projects as live-streamed performances of born-digital narratives originally produced on floppy disks and CD-ROMs from 1988 - 2000, and an open-source multimedia book documenting early works of computer-based literature.
Ensslin has published several books on gaming and media, including, most recently, "Literary Gaming" (2014). She is principal editor of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds.
Pisarski is author of "Xanadu. Hypertextual metamorphosis of fiction" (Kraków, 2013). He has presented digital literacy projects at contemporary art spaces in Paris, Warsaw, Bratislava, Kosice and Vancouver and has translated American digital literature. He also serves as the chief editor of Techsty, a journal on new media and literature, and as creative director for multimedia in Korporacja Ha!art from Cracow.
The Electronic Literature Lab was founded by Grigar in 2012 at WSU Vancouver. As one of a handful of media archaeology labs in the United States, it is used for advanced inquiry into the curation, documentation, preservation and production of born-digital literary works and other media.
