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 or seen in their area of expertise. At a time when women rarely participated in computer technology, the Assemblage was critical for housing digital-born works in the 1990s for women who contributed during the earlier stages of the World Wide Web. 

The Progressive Dinner Party celebrates 39 women selected from this collection, each with their own unique takes on electronic art and literature. The collection is comprised of a wide array of works, containing popular ones like “my body: A Wunderkammer” by Shelley Jackson and rarer ones such as “Blood Puppets” by Mez Breeze. Other artists include Claire Dinsmore, Stephanie Strickland, Jennifer Ley, Sue Thomas and Lehan Ramsay. Elit artists Carolyn Guertin and Marjorie Luesebrink chose these 39 creators to highlight various pioneering works of electronic literature during the momentous transition 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 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”, which are 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 uploaded to the ELO repository in 2019, which contains metadata of over 1500 works from 11 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 Alenano’s Sunshine ‘69, Strickland’s The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, and Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. 

The Progressive Dinner Party by Carolyn Guertin and Marjorie Luesebrink is another such work, though it is incomplete. Most of the works link externally to sites that no longer exist, are missing media, don’t function in modern browsers, or all of 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 will no longer be accessible.

Kathleen Zoller, an Undergraduate Researcher attending Washington State University and currently working in the Electronic Literature Lab, has taken The Progressive Dinner Party and preserved it. Funded by the Summer Mini-Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at WSU Pullman, she has spent the summer of 2019 making the site available through her open-source Scalar platform book Preserving the Progressive Dinner Party. She used Rhizome’s Webrecorder, an archiving tool that converts pages to .WARC files, to preserve the performance and functionality of each of the 39 works and the site itself. To locate missing works, Kathleen would either use the Wayback Machine or seek it out in other locations, such as the author’s website or in another online journal. If the files could not be found, Kathleen Zoller and Dr. Dene Grigar 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 she found to aid her research. Kathleen then put her findings into this book, including screenshots she had taken of the works. Scalar was chosen due to being multimedia and interactive in nature, just like The Progressive Dinner Party. Kathleen also wanted the work to be open-source and easily accessible as time went on. In addition, 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.

Along with the 39 artists, several other key people were involved with the project. Jennifer Ley, for instance, founded Riding the Meridian in 1999 where The Progressive Dinner Party was featured. She also created, co-founded and edited the poetry journal Perihelion in 1998, and hypertext poetry and graphics site The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks in 1996. Ley has worked with a diverse range of media for over forty years with an interest in community building and social activism. She has worn many hats including artist, filmmaker, hypertext writer, and editor. This wide array of skills is partially owed to her schooling, which have earned her a B.S. in Art Education, studio concentration in ceramics and photography from the University of Wisconsin Stout, a background in film production from NYU, and post graduate experience in ceramics and oil painting. Her poetry has been featured in websites and magazines including Salt River Review, Beehive, Poetry Magazine and Poetry Cafe, among other places.

Carolyn Guertin has also played a key role in The Progressive Dinner Party, having devised and helped curate the site based on her collection Assemblage: The Women’s Hypertext Gallery. With a focus on feminist literary avant-garde and electronic work, she had created Assemblage for trAce Online, a digital archive of international new media art by women on the World Wide Web. She has written a number of books, including Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art and three textbooks regarding digital media. She has taught at universities in Canada, Europe, and the United States.Guertin is also a member of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink (M. D. Coverley) was a co-curator of 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 has been writing digital-born fiction since 1995. Her works have been published in Cauldron and Net, Riding the Meridian, Beehive, and The Iowa Review Web, among other places. In addition to creating hypertexts, she has also written critical articles regarding e-lit and worked as editor for Word Circuits, The Blue Moon Review, Inflect, and Riding the Meridian.

Talan Memmott wrote a comprehensive essay of commentary on The Progressive Dinner Party (specifically on the nature of web-specific hypermedia and hypertext literature) which the site includes. Having a background in electronic writing and digital art, Memmott has shared his extensive knowledge in universities around the globe including the University of Bergen, University of California Santa Cruz,  Rhode Island School of Design, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. Memmott obtained a PhD in Interaction Design/Digital Rhetoric and Poetics from Malmö University in Sweden, and an MFA in Literary Arts and Electronic Writing from Brown University, Rhode Island.

N. Katherine Hayles also offered her commentary on The Progressive Dinner Party, sharing her thoughts on how the term “open-work” could be used to describe electronic pieces such as those contained in the collection. Hayles is a prominent literary critic and theorist who writes and teaches on the relations of science, literature, and technology. Her insights come from a background in the sciences and in writing, having received her M.S. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1969 and her Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Rochester in 1977. Over time, Hayles has focused her writings on electronic textuality and literature, posthumanism, technocriticism, and American postmodern literature. Additionally, Hayles has shared her teachings at the University of Iowa, University of Missouri-Rolla, the California Institute of Technology, Darmouth College, and the University of California, Los Angeles.