Since 2002 the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University has offered fellowships for writers concentrating in Digital Language Arts within its two-year graduate program leading to an MFA in Literary Arts. The program is able to provide financial aid to all accepted students, and allows students to take electives from any department in the university, as well as from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), allowing for a wide range of collaboration in the various domains of digital multimedia art. The program also provides strong teaching experience in the second year.
Since the early 1990s, Brown has been at the forefront of what is widely known as Electronic Writing, or, in other contexts, Electronic or Digital Literature, or Literary Hypermedia. Today we acknowledge that all writing practices are reliant on the support of new technologies and that certain, increasingly prominent, practices of language art are profoundly influenced and changed by networked and programmable media. Digital Language Arts discovers and explores practices of aesthetic writing that emerge when digital technologies and digital cultures allow writing to work with other artistic media across disciplines, such as those offered by Brown’s music, visual art, Modern Culture and Media, computer science, and Theater and Performance Studies departments, and by RISD, especially its Digital+Media graduate program.
While our students are encouraged to work in mixed hypermedia, including aesthetic computation, creative hacking, computer graphics, animation, electronic music and sound art, digital video, and even artificial 3D audiovisual environments, the focus is still on writing, and on taking the writer/language artist’s commitment to language-as-medium seriously. Working in an artificial 3D audiovisual environment (known as a CAVE or ‘CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment’) is one of the Brown Literary Arts Department’s specialties; with the support of Brown’s Center for Computation and Visualization, we regularly teaching ‘Cave Writing’ in the highly collaborative context of the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. Digital Language Arts works to facilitate all kinds of collaborative projects.
We are also open to students who already hold an MFA, in order to allow writers to take significant experience one step further into Digital Arts.
Our past graduates include: Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Sefans, Daniel C. Howe, Aya Karpinska, Justin Katko, Samantha Gorman, Ian Hatcher …
John Cayley directs Digital Language Arts at Brown and Robert Coover is emeritus faculty. Details of other faculty in Literary Arts can be found here.