Rob Swigart has produced a wide range of writing over his career, from traditional print-based forms—including 14 novels, short stories, and poetry—to video games and hypertext narratives. With a keen interest in archaeology, Swigart’s works explore the past across cultures and the potential futures born from them. Satire also plays a role in his writing. His interactive novel computer game, Portal (Activision, 1986), received much praise by critics for its far-thinking vision and experimental approach to video games. A pioneer of born-digital fiction, Swigart also produced two works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in the 1990s: Directions (1994) and Down Time (2000). As for his print writing, his second novel, A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable, was nominated for a BSFA Best Novel Award in 1979, and Mixed Harvest won a Nautilus Gold Award in 2019. He served on the Board of the Electronic Literature Organization at the organization’s founding.
Rob Swigart sent Dene Grigar the sound cassettes in 2021. In 2022 he followed that donation with a box of floppy disks and CD-ROMS of his works of electronic literature and those by other artists, as well as copies of video games he had collected in the 1990s and 2000s for research. The final materials were donated in 2023.
