I ♥ E-Poetry

When this narrative hypertext poem was serially published from 1996 to 1999 it must’ve been a different reading experience from the site that we now have before us. The layering of narrative and poetic elements accumulating over time, shifting under the weight of memory and forgetfulness, with echoes and links to guide new and experienced readers alike, is an experience that is difficult to recreate. The closest thing to it is to read the lexia in numerical order, whether by going to the directory listing (http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/roarofdestiny/) or by changing the number of the lexia in the address bar). However, reading the complete work with the tools provided is a rich undertaking in and of itself.

Malloy offers her readers several interfaces to explore this web of 232 lexias, the most important of which is a textual map that consistently contextualizes the poem within a field of experiences and provides thematic links to other lexia, much as she did with Uncle Roger. The surrounding texts enrich the indented and in boldface narrative, allowing for multiple readings of the poem.

Follow the multiple paths of this engaging story about Gweneth (from l0ve0ne) and transport yourself to a vibrant time when the boundaries between the natural and virtual worlds started to liquefy.

This hypertext narrative poem from 1994 was serially published on the early Internet, as described by Malloy.

In the spirit of the Internet, in the spirit of the web, portions of L0ve0ne originally appeared in different forms in servers all over the country — Sausalito, California; Palo Alto, California; Arlington, Virginia; and the Massachusetts North Shore. The story began on the Interactive Conference on Arts Wire. It was continued on the Arts Conference on the WELL. (notes)

The serial publication of this born digital narrative was also the first selection for the Eastgate Web Workshop in 1994. Eastgate Systems was the premier publisher of hypertexts before the World Wide Web, and it still offers a sophisticated set of tools for linking and mapping hypertexts.

The Web version is elegant in its simplicity, offering three navigational interfaces to experience the work: a list of links that reads like a poem itself, pure poetic text with links for the user to explore, or a framed version which combines the two. The link lines and background colors are linked thematically, allowing the reader to instantly and intuitively recognize certain moments in the narrative.

What jumps out of this engaging poem is its interweaving elements: a love story, a trip through Germany, computers, programming, disguises, barns, and the autobahn. And the 1s and 0s in its title are so well placed….

This pioneering hypertext narrative poem was originally written in 1986-1987 in UNIX and BASIC (for floppy disk distribution) and was published as a Web version in 1995. The first of these, “A Party in Woodside,” offers two navigational options for readers to explore: a set of icons to the left of the poem which allows readers to read the work as it was serially written and published in 1986, or by following links from a textual mapping of the narrative:

jenny puffy uncle roger dreams and nightmares jane jeff jack family tom dorrie men in tan suits louise rose chips mark laura food and drink miss gorgel caroline david the house in woodside

Whenever a node contains one of the elements listed above, the element appears as a link, which allows readers to follow thematic or character driven sequences, which allows for multiple reading paths to experience this work.

Part of what has made this such an endearing and enduring work is Malloy’s instincts for structure and humor, pacing and plot. She chose to write a fragmented story about non-linear and associative things: parties, dreams, human interactions, food, the comings and goings of a cat, and more. She populated this world with a few memorable characters, but none more so than Uncle Roger himself, an always amusing trickster. The smoothly flowing prosy free verse foregrounds the narrative yet it finds moments to punctuate a situation with a well placed line break.

Now go explore this funny, sexy work and find out for yourself who ate the wrong bit of salmon roll.

Afeeld is a collection of playable intermedia and concrete art compositions that exist in the space between poetry and videogames.

One cannot do better in defining this collection of whimsically hip works by Liszkiewicz, a 2011 graduate of the M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from SUNY Buffalo (home to the Electronic Poetry Center). I will briefly comment on its different parts, each of which has its own look and feeld:

• “Alphabet Man” is a sequence of 12 images built from letters of the alphabet, featuring the adventures of the iconic Alphabet Man as he explores the materials of writing (letters) in order to create new structures, some of which could be considered words.
• “Feeldwork” presents the reader with 6 visual fields composed of letters, words, and characters, which respond to mouseovers and clicks to produce new words and meanings.
• “Count as One” is a fascinating set of 15 drawing/writing tools, which invite the reader to click on the screen multiple times to create a work of letter art which the reader can save. The most interesting aspect about this work is the insight it provides on the psychogeography of the screen, shaping our interaction as a kind of dérive. Do several (or all) the pieces and think about how the graphical information he provides on each piece shapes where you click on the screen.
• In “Concrete Games,” Liszkiewicz continues to transform our awareness of our screen interaction by using the visual structure and game dynamics of two videogames, Minesweeper and Asteroids, to guide us towards different types of artistic composition and play.
• The provocatively titled work “This is Visual Poetry” makes very little use of language and doesn’t look like what most people would define as poetry because it is the result of “glitches created and controlled with computer game software.” You be the judge…
• “Coda: I/O” presents the output of some of the above mentioned works, and are the result of an interaction and process rather than the process itself.

These works sit right in the middle of graphic art, poetics, and ludology and invite us to come and play.

The theme of migration resonates powerfully through this poem because it can be conceptualized through so many different frames of reference. The most visual one is evoked by sperm-like word clusters swimming in the water-like screen space, a migration that results in death for most and survival through fertilization— which is also a radical transformation. When combined with the notion of human migration through history (and prehistory) that results in genetic and ethnic diversity, this work becomes very personal for Jason Lewis, who describes his ethnicity as “Cherokee, Hawaiian, Samoan, raised in northern California rural mountain redneck culture.” Another perspective on migration occurs as academics go towards employment opportunities and are shaped by the institutions that receive them, as was the case with Lewis joining the faculty of the Design and Computation Arts program at Concordia University in Canada and founding the OBX Laboratory for Experimental Media. From a more media-specific notion of migration, the shift from page to screen, not just of the word, but of individual and community identities echoes with the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace project.

So get the free iOS app, view the video documentation, or go see this work as an installation to experience the flow of objects and words, randomness and direction, rivers and seas, tap and trace, strings and constellations.

This poem evokes the attempt to make sense out of a conversation with a rambling street person in San Francisco, and its design and interface both contribute to that effect.

Lewis breaks up the line into words clustered together in a large font size to form a word cloud. The superposition of the gently rotating words create a dense, white, unreadable mass, which only makes sense around the edges as words are able to briefly break free into a space with better contrast. But just because you can’t read a word doesn’t mean it isn’t there: touching a word on the screen makes it appear along with the rest of the words in the line, by changing the font color to purple. One word in each line is a softer shade of purple and will follow your fingertip on the surface of the touchscreen.

The lines that emerge in this poem make sense in oblique ways and are held together more by physical proximity than by its non sequitur logic, yet they succeed in creating the voice of a character, one whose stream of consciousness patter can barely be guided by simply bringing up a word in their own speech.

With its word constellations, this second poem in Lewis’ P.o.E.M.M. project seems to be informed by a Concrete Poetry aesthetic, while the atomic deconstruction of the lines in “What They Speak When They Speak to Me” can be aligned with the Lettriste tradition.

Originally produced as an installation piece for large touchscreen monitors in 2007, this poem is now available as a free iOS App. This is the first of a series of poems that explore the expressive potential of touchscreen interfaces, called the P.o.E.M.M. project (Poems for Excitable [Mobile] Media). The Speak app features “What They Speak When They Speak to Me,” along with poems by Jim Andrews, J.R. Carpenter, David Jhave Johnston, and Aya Karpinska - each of which successfully capture each poet’s voice and poetics.

The Speak app turns all the letters of the poems into a kind of letter cloud or constellation but with the letters hovering over their relative position. When you touch the screen and drag your fingertip across it, the poetic line is reconstituted from that point onwards, following the trail left by your finger’s movement, and fading back into the cloud when you lift your finger. This allows for readers to experience incomplete lines and incomplete words, depending on where you’ve touched in the sentence. Lewis engages this computational structure in his poem thematically, because it is about miscommunication across language, culture, and identity. The snippets of comprehension one gets when hearing speech in different languages are echoed in the poem’s structure.

Here’s a suggestion for reading the poem somewhat systematically: after reading each line (or partial line), find a spot in the surface and make a little loop with your finger over it to concentrate the letters and allow you to visually clear the field, reducing repetition and providing a sense of completion, if not necessarily closure.

This ironically titled poem is inspired by Eadweard J. Muybridge’s studies in motion photography of living creatures. Muybridge experimented with different ways of capturing the motion of living beings using a variety of photographic technologies and joining individual photographs to create animated sequences. With the image rotation interface he creates for this poem, juxtaposed with the rhyming lines of verse that are displayed on a loop (a rotation in time), LeMay poem leads us to reflect on the stillness and motion, time and space, the body and its representation. The looping sounds of a heartbeat and the ticking of a clock triggered by mousing over images are a reminder that there is no such thing as stillness in life.

Inspired by and built on Piet Mondrian’s artwork, Eric LeMay writes a poem that reacts with the surface it is written upon. Different sections in the painting and color are used to structure lines of verse, in a way that represents two voices in conversation. One of the voices wants a heron in the work, while the other one is more concerned with the aesthetics of De Stijl, which don’t leave much room for natural elements, such as herons. The poem uses a restrained sense of humor to create play between meanings of words (such as “eye” and “I”), abstraction and representation, and the senses used to experience the rich textures of Mondrian’s paintings.

This is a fascinating poetic use of RiTa, a “software toolkit for generative literature” developed by Daniel C. Howe. The randomly selected words arranged on a 3x3 grid are transformed into other words over time by adding, subtracting, or substituting one letter at a time. Sometimes the path to a new word is through nonsense words, and these are part of the pleasure of this work. The abstracted typewriter sounds punctuate every letter substitution, and reaching a new word is rewarded by a “ding” sound and flashing brown highlight of the square in the grid where the newly completed word is. The cumulative effect is hypnotic, as one sees where the flashing cursor moves to, what words are created, and the entire piece transforms itself from where it began.

This minimalist poem is in the same generative and conceptual tradition as Tisselli’s “Synonymovie” and Buchardon’s “Changer Tout” because they all begin with a word or phrase and track its transformations as words become replaced by synonyms over time. In this case, the path of word relations isn’t semantic, but typographical.

I recommend setting this up as an installation piece, or placing it fullscreen, and letting it wash over you as you read and observe it. With the volume turned down a bit, it might even be a great aid to meditation.