Scott Rettberg


Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first Executive Director of the Electronic Literature Organization.
In June 2016, at the annual Electronic Literature Organization conference at the University of Victoria, Rettberg's collaboration with Roderick Coover, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, won the 2016 Robert Coover Award for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre.

Scholarship

Rettberg is a Professor of Digital Culture in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of the book Electronic Literature, which won the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature in 2019, and has co-edited a number of academic collections, including Electronic Literature Communities.
Rettberg was the project leader of the HERA-Funded ELMCIP research project, and is the director of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base.

Literary and artistic career

Rettberg became known as an author of hypertext fiction in the 1990s. His first major project was the collaborative web novel The Unknown, A Hypertext Novel, which was written in collaboration with William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton, and Frank Marquadt, and won the trAce/Alt-X Hypertext Competition 1998. It was also featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2, and has been analysed by a number of scholars.
Rettberg's cinematic collaboration with Roderick Coover, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, received the Robert Coover Award in 2016. The annual award is given by the Electronic Literature Organization each year in recognition of an outstanding work of electronic literature.