The Progressive Dinner Party is a collection of 39 works selected from Carolyn Guertin’s Assemblage, a showcase of new media art by female artists from around the world. The Assemblage contains works with a variety of genres, tones, schools and generations, though they all seek to use traditional narrative forms or language in innovative, non-sequential ways. But just as importantly, Assemblage also acts as a union of the languages, skills, visions, art, and voices of women, which were not often heard. At a time when women were rarely acknowledged for their participation in computer technology, the Assemblage was critical for featuring digital-born works in the 1990s for women who contributed to the art of writing during the earlier stages of the World Wide Web. 


Celebrating 39 women selected from this collection, The Progressive Dinner Party presents many unique takes on electronic art and literature. These include popular works such as “my body: A Wunderkammer” by Shelley Jackson, and works that were previously lost, like “Light/Water” by Christy Sheffield Sanford. Other artists include Claire Dinsmore, Stephanie Strickland, Jennifer Ley, Sue Thomas and Lehan Ramsay. E-lit artists Carolyn Guertin and Marjorie Luesebrink chose these 39 authors to highlight various pioneering works of electronic literature during the momentous transition from print to digital media. This idea was inspired by Judy Chicago’s piece The Dinner Party, which celebrates the contribution of women to art throughout history. Included in Chicago’s work are important women like Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf, Sacajawea, and Empress Theodora of Byzantium. Like Chicago’s piece, the goal of The Progressive Dinner Party is to preserve the memory of these impactful female digital artists and prevent them from being lost to history. This took the form of a virtual three-sided table with 39 place settings linking to different’ “plates,” each displayed in a theme particular to the artist being celebrated. The Progressive Dinner Party has received positive critical response from postmodern literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles and digital author Talan Memmott, both of whom have written essays and commentary regarding the piece. These essays are currently housed in the site for anyone to view.


The Progressive Dinner Party was published in Riding the Meridian in 1999, an online journal founded by Jennifer Ley that showcased 262 works produced by many well-known artists and writers from around the world. Riding the Meridian was collected in the ELO repository in 2019. The repository contains metadata of over 3000 works from 22 collections of electronic literature owned or managed by ELO. The journal is valued for being one of the earliest spaces on the internet for sharing new forms and approaches of creative expression that were made accessible to all. Among these works were Mark Amerika’s Grammatron, Bobby Arellano’s Sunshine ‘69, Strickland’s The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, and Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia.

Although a number of the works within The Progressive Dinner Party can still be found on the web, many others link externally to sites that no longer exist, were missing media, don’t function in modern browsers, or all the above. As time goes on, more of these works are lost-- sometimes for good (such as Diana Slattery’s Glide, a gorgeous multimedia piece reflecting the fluidity of language and storytelling.) Many of the women in The Progressive Dinner Party helped revolutionize and broaden the field of electronic art and literature.  And unless preserved, these 39 pieces would no longer be accessible. Therefore, the goal of my project is to keep these works alive so that the study of women’s early contributions to electronic literature are available to the public.


To accomplish this task, I used Rhizome’s Webrecorder archiving tool to capture their performance and functionality by converting the pages to .WARC files. To locate missing works, I would either use the Wayback Machine or seek it out in other locations, such as the author’s website or in online journals. If the files could not be found, Dene Grigar, my faculty mentor and Director of the Electronic Literature Lab, and I contacted the artist for a link to the work or for the local files. A spreadsheet was made to keep track of links, creator names and contacts, and other relevant metadata I found to aid my research. I then put my findings into this Scalar book, which was chosen due to being multimedia and interactive in nature like The Progressive Dinner Party. I also wanted the work to be open-source and easily accessible as time went on. Scalar is made with non-proprietary software and code (such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript), making its lifespan much longer than if it were made with other tools. In addition to converting the 39 works to .WARC files and creating a book regarding the project, I also updated The Progressive Dinner Party website with the new links generated by the Webrecorder. The website can be found at the following link to the Electronic Literature Repository, which collects and manages online journals, works of electronic literature, and other digital materials for preservation and public accessibility: http://elo-repository.org/progressive-dinner-party/index.htm


It should be noted that along with the 39 artists, several other key people were involved with the original site’s creation. Carolyn Guertin devised and curated The Progressive Dinner Party site based on her collection Assemblage: The Women’s Hypertext Gallery. Her work skeleton sky: a millennium poem is also featured in both sites. With a focus on feminist literary avant-garde and electronic work, she had created Assemblage for trAce Online Writing Centre, a digital archive of international new media art by women on the World Wide Web. She has written several books, including Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art and three other textbooks regarding digital media. She has taught at universities in Canada, Europe, and the United States. Guertin has also been a member of the Electronic Literature Organization and served on the Organization’s Board of Directors.


Another important contributor is Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink (M. D. Coverley) who co-curated The Progressive Dinner Party. A writer of hypermedia fiction, she is also a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization and served as the Organization’s second president. She has been writing digital-born fiction since 1995, which has been published in Cauldron and Net, Riding the Meridian, Beehive, The Iowa Review Web and more. Luesebrink has also written critical articles regarding e-lit and worked as editor for Word Circuits, The Blue Moon Review, Inflect, and Riding the Meridian.

Critical Resources