Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo are two of the most distinctive makers in electronic literature—artists whose work treats language not as a static surface, but as something you enter, navigate, and feel. Strickland, a poet long associated with mathematically inflected imagination and cosmological scale, has spent decades pushing lyric form beyond the page. Jaramillo, a digital artist and programmer with a deep sensitivity to motion, interface, and embodied experience, builds the systems that let a poem behave like a world. Together, they’ve helped define what collaboration can look like in born-digital writing: not a neat division of labor, but a shared attention to how text, code, and readerly movement co-compose meaning.

Their collaborations—most notably slippingglimpse and Vniverse—are frequently described less as “works to read” than as environments to inhabit. These pieces invite the reader into a slow, exploratory mode: hovering, drifting, clicking, lingering, returning. The result is poetry that unfolds through interaction, where the interface is not a wrapper but part of the poem’s intelligence. In a cultural moment that increasingly rewards speed and frictionless consumption, Strickland and Jaramillo’s projects insist on a different ethic of attention—one in which curiosity, patience, and perceptual play are not extras, but the core of the aesthetic experience.

In this conversation, they walk through the practical realities and philosophical stakes of making digital literature together: how authorship blurs when process becomes a “mind meld,” how platform affordances shape the artwork, and why trust matters when the work resists closure or linear sense-making. They also reflect on what has been lost as tools and platforms disappear, what remains essential about collaboration even as technologies change, and why the future of electronic literature may depend less on new devices than on artists’ willingness to protect time, depth, and shared thinking. What emerges is a portrait of partnership as a creative instrument—one capable of expanding not only what a poem can be, but what reading itself can mean.

slippingglimpse and Vniverse both feel less like “co-authored texts” and more like shared environments. How do you divide—or dissolve—authorship when working together?

Stephanie Strickland: Mind meld.

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo: Our collaboration started with Stephanie’s text, which she had published. I had the experience of moving from engineering to the arts, with a great interest in interactive media and in text. Stephanie had thoughts on how she envisioned the text, and I would create prototypes via code (at the time, using Macromedia Director). We had a back-and-forth between what we wanted and what could be done. The prototypes would lead us to a next version of the code, which we would consider and interact with for a while. For instance, the early spreading out of key words on the screen, hidden behind dots over which one could hover with a cursor, turned out to be naturally read—by us and others—as stars in a sky.

SS: Hover was a very important point, which we lost when Director was no longer supported. Often, the coder ended up creating more than they had imagined possible, while what I wanted often wasn’t fully realizable.

In only one case, creating Sea and Spar Between with Nick Montfort, did I experience a dueling or debate-like environment. In that case, we made a second piece, Duels—Duets, describing our process. Nick was, and remains, a very close friend, so it was not temperament, but rather mindset, that was at issue.

For slippingglimpse, I had seen Paul Ryan’s videos at a conference celebrating Mary Catherine Bateson. The videos reminded me strongly of the written slippingglimpse. The text of that poem came from sampling, recombining, and even quoting verbatim from YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology (2002). I approached Cynthia about creating a work with the text and videos. It turned out she had taken a graduate class with Paul, who was currently her colleague at The New School.

Your collaborations often hinge on tension: text versus motion, structure versus drift, control versus emergence. How consciously do you design for those frictions, and how much do you allow them to surface organically?

SS: Almost any digital piece can be described this way. Text will be in motion, drift is easily introduced into the structure, and what emerges is either a product of control and randomness or not. We do not design for friction, and we do allow for things to surface organically.

CLJ: We were exploring the affordances of the platform (Director or Flash), and that would lead us in new directions.

SS: The affordances are a diving platform for the text.

How do your respective strengths—poetic language, visual systems, interaction design—reshape each other over the course of a project? Can you point to moments where one of you pulled the work somewhere unexpected?

SS: I wanted the font in slippingglimpse to be sea-weedy, and we finally found one! Basically, we wanted the same things, but Cynthia had to manage the difficulties of using Paul Ryan’s videos and making the text-speed-dial scroll backward and forward at various rates. We found a lovely handmade paper to use as a background for the words. Some things there was no time for—for instance, a variety of ways for the water to read the text, not just one.

CLJ: We spent a lot of time looking for that font. Once we found that typeface, that really pulled the project in a new direction.

From reading Paul Ryan’s book, Video Mind, Earth Mind, we were drawn to his concept of a threeing loop and understood it to be what our piece was really about: water reads text, text reads technology, technology reads water.

Collaboration requires a shared tolerance for uncertainty. What does trust look like in your process, especially when the work resists closure or linear meaning?

SS: Digital work requires tolerance for uncertainty, sometimes appearing as delightful surprise. I trusted Cynthia from the moment I met her. We felt joint enthusiasm for our final choices.

CLJ: There was great trust in the delegation, because we each had completely distinct roles. It was interesting to talk to each other about how to implement the vision. My clear sense is that part of the ease of collaborating stemmed from Stephanie’s work being deeply connected to math, which made her a quick learner of the challenges and opportunities of the code.

SS: It was the technology I distrusted—especially finding a way to get the bells to ring, in a long-established 17thc. bell-ringing pattern, to generate the computational architecture for my print book Ringing the Changes.

Both projects ask readers to navigate rather than simply read. How do you think together about the reader’s role—as interpreter, co-creator, or even collaborator?

SS & CLJ: The readers complete the work because, without them, the work is off. You can’t have a digital piece without the reader navigating. The fact that two different readers won’t ever have the same experience in some ways positions them as collaborators—less so as co-creators, as their interactions generally do not remain in the piece for others to experience.

Looking back, how has your collaboration changed the way each of you thinks about time—both narrative time and the lived time of reading, clicking, lingering, or returning?

SS & CLJ: While our pieces both have an end, we definitely wanted to create pieces that would invite a reader to return, linger, and explore. We were not interested in “tricking” the reader. There were always many more ways to interact than one was likely to find at first glance.

SS: These pieces changed how I think about attention in electronic literature. The field soon moved from fiction to games and a gamer mindset. Even fewer longform poems were being made. Our pieces are not designed to frustrate; you can read them in their entirety; they don’t lead to a dead end.

CLJ: A throughline in my practice has been slowness. Looking back, I can see how our collaboration embodied my interest in slowness, both with how we worked (never rushing, taking lots of time to find the right font and the right paper background, for instance), and contrasting sharply with then-current digital art, which tended to promote swift, and quickly follow-on, interaction.

(For Stephanie) Your solo work consistently engages mathematics, cosmology, and poetic form. How do these conceptual frameworks shift when you move from print into digital or collaborative spaces?

I am a lone creator in ink. In code, I work only with trusted others, aiming to make humanly resonant, body-oriented poems. The final section of my poetry volume, How the Universe Is Made, explores the intent of all my born-digital work, with screenshots. I’m happy to send this volume to anyone who will pay postage.

When I work with coders, I do not know what is possible, so I ask for what I want, and together we find a way. A step too far was my wish for an installation of Vniverse where each star, hung from the ceiling, spoke its verse when people activated it by passing underneath as they walked through a Mylar pool where the stars reflected. On pedestals surrounding the pool were to be the V:WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una book and a laptop with the Vniverse project Cynthia and I made. The point was to be the severely contrasting experiences of those three kinds of interaction with text. And now, of course, a pedestal for the later iPad version, made with Ian Hatcher.

(For Cynthia) Your individual practice often foregrounds motion, interface, and embodied interaction. How do you think about the body—of the reader, the cursor, the device—as a compositional element?

CLJ: I’m reminded of the various readings we did of both pieces. While I was interacting live, and we had a plan, we weren’t necessarily walking in with a script. We always jointly read the works in alternating voices in front of audiences, with the poem projected behind us. The most enjoyable readings were at art schools.

When I was coding, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about the cursor and the device as elements. I was very much thinking that most readers would be positioned like me, in front of the screen, except that I was writing the backend to which they would not necessarily have access.

SS: When Ian Hatcher and I implemented a version of Vniverse for iPad, actions we could do in Director (like hovering) were no longer available. One no longer had the option to explore the screen in its entirety—not by brushing your hand across it with elements momentarily appearing, nor by hovering over a single element before deciding to choose it. What had been a matter of pausing, to contemplate or to understand your true curiosity, became gambling. Perhaps not surprisingly, we included an Oracle mode in this version.

Both of you have substantial solo trajectories. What is something you protect or preserve in your individual practice that collaboration cannot—or should not—replace?

SS: Collaboration doesn’t replace; it enlarges. You work to understand each other’s vision and then imagine how to expand the intent and desire of each collaborator. You learn new things. What I protect in my individual practice is time to do it!

CLJ: I have been part of several collaborations, including a current active photography project. Perhaps what I protect is my ethical commitments, in terms of the tools I will use or not, the contexts within which the work will be presented, and the purpose of the work (namely, non-commercial). Here is where there has always been great synergy with Stephanie.

When you step back from collaboration and return to solo work, what traces remain? Are there habits of thinking, designing, or listening that now feel irreversible?

SS: We live in a digital sea where many long for, and newly appreciate, the analog. Now, when you write with ink, you can’t escape digital influence. What was a choice in 1995 is no longer a choice. Many of the options of that early time were cut off by those who flattened digital communication with addictive profit-making algorithms. We will see what AI makes of it. We need to train our own LLMs on carefully chosen material.

CLJ: I don’t really distinguish between solo and collaborative work, but think more about media and themes. I love collaborating because of how much I learn from each person. In that way, I am certain there are traces of every collaboration in my solo work.

Looking forward, how do you see collaborative electronic literature evolving as platforms, attention habits, and technologies change—and what do you hope doesn’t change about how artists work together in these spaces?

SS & CLJ: Raising children—from babies through teenagers—on cell phones and social media has eroded the ability of an entire generation to actively attend. Attention is commodified. People lose older ways of spending attentive time with each other (and with the works they might create). As we say in question 6, Vniverse and slippingglimpse were slower, and asked more of readers, than many other pieces contemporary with them. In ours, calm, exploratory play is rewarded. We see even fewer pieces like this now. We hope future artists can spend time with each other, without the machine present, and think about their most difficult, ambitious, and resonant ideas—ones they will need to implement with code.