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 or web art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance o ...

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature ar ...

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

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

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 application software, software application and software development kit, development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard com ...

, Eastgate Systems' 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, ''An Mosaic for Convergence'' (1997 original publication, 2019 re-imagined) * Richard Holeton, '' Figurski at Findhorn on Acid'' * 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'' (1991), whic ...

, ''Victory Garden'' in 2022 * David Kolb, ''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 * Richard Holeton * Micheal Joyce * Robert Kendall * David Kolb * Deena Larsen * Marjorie Luesebrink. 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. * Cathy Marshall *

* Jason Nelson * Alan Sondheim * Sarah Smith * Stephanie Strickland * Rob Swigart * Helen Thorington * Jody Zellen

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 Web (1999-2008) BeeHive (1998 -2004), Cauldron and Net (1997-2002 founded by Claire Dinsmore), Poems That Go (2000-2004), Turbulence.org (1996-2016 co-founded by Jo-Anne Green), and The New River (1996 - present).

Academic publications

and Dene Grigar 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 organizations