October 18, 2006JOE MILUTISVirtual Literature 57In 1957, Marguerite Duras gave a definition for virtual literature that seems to me the best. At the time, “virtual literature” could not have had anything to do with data gloves, caves, and hyperlinks, yet her description was unwittingly prescient and futuristic. I’ll talk about the history of this particular kind of virtual literature, from the data of the damned (Charles Fort) to the dynamically damned world of spam and its discontents. Included will be stop-overs in the netherzone between metafiction and metadata.Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Visual Art at Brown University. He is the author of Ether: The Nothing that Connects Everything (2006).www.joemilutis.comimpossibleobject.blogspot.com