June 2012
2 posts
6 tags
"The Roar of Destiny" by Judy Malloy →
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...
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"l0ve0ne" by Judy Malloy →
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...
May 2012
31 posts
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"Uncle Roger, File 1: A Party in Woodside" by Judy... →
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...
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"Afeeld" by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz →
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...
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"The Great Migration" by Jason Lewis →
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...
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“Buzz Aldrin Doesn’t Know Any Better” by Jason... →
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...
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"What They Speak When They Speak to Me" by Jason... →
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...
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"Still Life" by Eric LeMay →
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...
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"Mondrian Mood" by Eric LeMay →
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...
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"Automatype" by Daniel C. Howe →
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...
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"In Your Voice" by Machine Libertine →
These two video poems integrate four elements: Natalia Fedorova’s voice reading silky lines of her sonorous poetry in Russian, a Mac Os text to speech voice reading a translation in English, Taras Mashatalir’s haunting musical soundscapes, and Stan Mashov’s conceptual videos. The contrast between Fedorova’s voice, even though it’s been transformed through sound...
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"Eight Was Where It Ended" by Jeremy Douglass →
This poem makes ingenious use of the folder list view in Mac OS X to structure a series of nested lines in meaningful ways. Each line of the poem is written on the name of the folder and the folders contain other folders with lines. This allows for the whole poem to be nested inside of a folder with the title, and up to 5 more levels of nesting within. The image above shows the first level of...
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"Tideland" by M.D. Coverley →
Originally published in BeeHive 3:4 (December 2000), this poem maps human experiences, narrative, weddings, funerals, and memory onto the ebb and flow of waters in tidelands— those coastal regions where rivers flow into the sea. The metaphorical relations between tidelands and individual and collective experience, past and present, knowledge and intuition are enacted in the use of...
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"TRANS.MISSION [A Dialogue]" by J.R. Carpenter →
This generative poem focuses our attention on several technologies used for transmitting and receiving messages, the perils of transatlantic crossings in the North Atlantic ocean, the missions sent to survey and map the land, and the need for communication to occur successfully across physical and historical distances. The poem is generated from 72 variables and a rich word data set for each...
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"Along the Briny Beach" by J.R. Carpenter →
For this generative poem J.R. Carpenter infused the Taroko Gorge source code with coastal language, and used the HTML marquee tag to insert other beach themed texts and images into the generated page (see the credits). What she assembles on the screen for us is an elegant pastiche of poetic and scientific texts, displaying on different schedules and layered to produce rich juxtapositions. The...
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"The Cape" by J.R. Carpenter →
This tersely prosaic hypertext poem tells a story about a young woman spending time with her grandmother and uncle in Cape Cod. Full of images, maps, and factual information, Carpenter develops a powerful sense of place, as its narrative unfolds, except not all is as it seems. In the credits, Carpenter states that:
Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are...
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“petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction" (“small... →
This narrative poem in French by Philippe Bootz is generated from constraints and possibilities, tapping into Jean de la Fontaine’s poetry, OULIPO, and the classical unities of Greek drama. Constructed around the concept of a domestic thriller, characters enter and leave a room, in which different events happen, leading to happy or sad endings, and a final comment on the story’s...
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"You’re lying and you filter…" by Paul Bogaert →
Between the disciplined dress, posture, and hair of the women taking dictation and the speaker’s tighly controlled voice as he savors every line, word, syllable, and phoneme in this video, this poem seems to be inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings. The video is built from short looping clips from a 1942 film titled “Nursing: Your Life’s Work” in which nurses are...
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"Opacity" by Serge Bouchardon, i-Trace Collective,... →
This poetic narrative examines the contradictory desires for transparency and opacity in human relationships. Each of its four parts examines different aspects of this idea with its own distinctive interfaces, all smoothly implemented using the canvas tag in HTML 5. The sections of the poem look at the inside of a computer, the speaker’s wife’s body, the language of relationships and...
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"ChangeEverything" by Serge Bouchardon and i-Trace... →
This elegantly understated work of generative poetry takes the words in a phrase and substitutes its nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with synonyms from an online dictionary. Its stylish interface blends the worlds of paper and digital media: a messy ink blot serves as background for white words, Internet icons, and switches that control the display of the text. The simplicity of the...
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"searchSonata 181" by Johannes Auer and AND-OR →
This generative poem is largely inspired by Kurt Schwitters and his Dadaist sound poetry, such as Ursonate (1922-1932). Free from the constraint of meaning, a sound poet is able to use language structured into units other than pre-established words to explore articulation, rhythm, sound combinations, rhyme, musicality, line lengths, the cultural associations of particular sounds, phonetics, and...
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"McLu-uhms" by David Jhave Johnston →
This poem showcases Jhave’s talent for delicately combining theory, science, and intensely personal material in a native digital multimedia poem. The subtitle for this poem is ” a confession of carnal confusion concerning an absence of cognition” which he explains is the result of encountering “The Medium is the Message” as a teenager and being sexually aroused by...
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"Typeoms" by David Jhave Johnston →
This poetic sequence is built around 15 typos, a hilariously plausible definition for each, and spam. Every time one clicks on the button, the program generates two short poems that incorporate the typo and offers a definition for it, each framed by a box, positioned in visually diverse ways and shifting previously generated “typeoms.” It seems like the 3 or 4 word titles are generated...
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"Extinction Elegies" by David Jhave Johnston →
This poem by Jhave about the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster considers how humanity becomes extinct by destroying the environment so thoroughly that the world and we become unrecognizable. The speaker’s characteristically concise, witty, emotionally charged voice points out the attitudes, loss, and processes that bring about the end of man(un)kind. After reading the 27 short parts of...
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"6 Weird Questions asked in a Wired Way" by David... →
This poem is divided into 6 parts, each one a 4-line stanza that asks or answers a series of questions “in a wired way,” providing the linguistic text of the poems in a way that provides a traditional counterpoint to the presentation. This poem is “wired” in several ways:
It is scheduled perfectly synchronized to a minimalist musical score consisting of an alternation of...
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"Spam Heart" by David Jhave Johnston →
This generative poem is built from “spam, code, thesis work, and a little bit of language’s heart.” Each part of the poem is organized into three strophes: the first one uses a larger font, the second one consists of a single word, and the third uses three words. Upon opening the poem, the first strophe is selected randomly from a dataset, after which it begins a sequence that...
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"Reboot the Universe" by David Jhave Johnston →
This deceptively simple poem contains a limited number of verses scheduled to change from one to the next so rapidly that all but the unchanging final line is unreadable, unless you click and hold the mouse button, which stops the text. That is all the control one has, basically allowing random access to the verses. Fortunately for those who value closure, this is not a combinatorial work at the...
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"Sound Seeker" by David Jhave Johnston →
Who or what is David “Jhave” Johnston? He is a digital media artist and poet, certainly, but what exactly is “he?” William David Johnston is a human being, that is a biological, social, legal, (and spiritual?) entity— the kind Auden wrote about in “The Unknown Citizen”). He is also an artist that adopted a nom d’ordinateur, “Jhave,”...
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"Bathroom Sketches" by David Jhave Johnston →
From January to May 2008, Jhave produced a series of 30 sketches, experiments in motion photography, usually involving water, in which he tests out different ways of juxtaposing and superposing his poetic texts with video clips. Published as a blog, Jhave describes the project in the about page as:
I am making a film about god shot on location in my bathroom.
This site chronicles the various...
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"Thoems" by David Jhave Johnston →
The default display for this series of “THOught-poEMS” is a looped linear sequence of stanzas displayed in randomized fonts hovering in random positions over randomized video clips, while a cluster of words flock towards the pointer’s location on the text. Jhave provides the reader with control over several variables: videos, font, position, and gives him the ability to toggle,...
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"Teleport" by David Jhave Johnston →
This “tiny tale of tourism between bodies” is a poetic narrative about an alien being that teleports into a human body and what ensues. This poem is structured into 123 lines and 121 background images with titles, and allows readers to play through the work on a fairly rapid schedule or use arrows to navigate from line to line, image to image. Clicking on the screen repositions the...
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"Nomad Lingo" by David Jhave Johnston →
From April 1, 2000 to April 1 2001, David Jhave Johnston launched his career as a digital poet with a year of poetry experiments using Flash. Titled “Nomad Lingo,” he published several e-poems every month— producing a treasure trove of works that attest to his raw talent, whimsical style, and the ability to create a lyrical voice through lines that are both sensuous and...
April 2012
31 posts
8 tags
“Pangram (The Quick Brown Fox)” by Alan Bigelow →
For this piece, Bigelow uses the most famous pangram in the English language, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” to structure a poetic narrative hypertext. Each letter contains a piece of a story about a relationship about to change, expressed by means of a poetic line that moves in meaningful ways over a brief looped video background. Not wishing to reveal more about the...
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"He Said She Said" by Alan Bigelow →
This Webyarn frames an argument between husband and wife about having children. The wife wants to keep trying, while the husband doesn’t seem to want children at all. The piece is structured around a wedding: its imagery (cake, dancing, food), vows, institutions, and symbols. The surface of the text responds to the reader’s mouseovers, rewarding exploration by triggering multiple...
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"This Is Not A Poem" by Alan Bigelow →
In a move that echoes Magritte’s famous painting “The Treachery of Images” (see below), Bigelow uses a very traditional poem (“Trees” by Joyce Kilmer) to draw attention to the impact of media on a poem. Magritte’s realistic depiction of a pipe juxtaposed with the seemingly paradoxical statement “This is is not a pipe” led audiences to realize that...
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"My Nervous Breakdown" by Alan Bigelow →
This piece takes us inside the brain and mind of a speaker in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Bigelow roughly maps the initial four parts of the poem on a superior view of a human brain: “My Brain Is” on the frontal lobes, “What My Therapist Said” on the parietal lobes, “The Metaphor Room” on the temporal lobes, and “How to Dream a Suicide” on...
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"Archetypal Africa" by Alan Bigelow →
In this work, Bigelow takes everyday objects (stapler, chair, spoon) and elevates them to archetypal status through several strategies:
short, looping background videos (with audio) of natural scenes, usually focused on animals or plants, intercut with brief images of the object being discussed.
A poetic description of the object, using metaphor, personification, and other figurative language...
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"Brainstrips" by Alan Bigelow →
When I first encountered “Brainstrips, it was in the context of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, and because it was not identified as poetry in the collection, I chose not to cover it at the time. Now, having explored Bigelow’s work in the context of the ELO 2012 Media Arts Show, I return to this work because it challenges terms such as genre, form, and medium,...
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"My Summer Vacation" by Alan Bigelow →
This haunting narrative about a summer vacation turned tragic uses a slim strip of moving images as the background for a stream of language flowing from right to left as a series of voices tell a piece of the story. The sound of waves on the shore serve as a soothing aural backdrop to each character’s whispered voices, perhaps suggestive of what happens when the sea raises its voice. Each...
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"What They Said" by Alan Bigelow →
In this piece, Bigelow distills a series of messages that overtly (or covertly) came from the Bush administration after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The messages are delivered as short videos, one word at a time, interspersed and juxtaposed with images that illustrate their disturbing subtexts.
Its deceptively simple interface uses blended conceptual metaphors— combining radio with...
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"When I Was President" by Alan Bigelow →
With this poem, Bigelow’s flair for satirical humor is aimed at the world of presidential politics. Our speaker is a president who transformed the world through a series of measures in the areas of international relations, economics, health care, information science, language, race, government, and more. The measures and their outcomes were simultaneously idealistic, absurd, funny,...
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"Lord's Prayer, The " by Alan Bigelow →
This work consists of 4 anagram poems derived from The Lord’s Prayer that re-focus the prayer for artistic and humanist purposes. One could also read this as two texts: the prayer, Bigelow’s anagram poem, and three intermediate stages as they morph from one to the next. Each poem has its own distinct visual and aural background: the prayer is placed over an image of Christ appearing...
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"Because You Asked" by Alan Bigelow →
This poem is all about layering: words from a line randomly appear over a mask that obscures an image over words over a background. The “ink” for these words are simply spaces on that mask that allow the reader to see the image beneath and the image is revealed more as the density of randomly positioned words increases. At the same time each line contains a audio reading playing on...
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"American Ghosts" by Alan Bigelow →
This multimedia work contains monologues from present day “incarnations” of five American historical figures: Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, George Washington, Deborah Samson, and Thomas Paine. Each video shows a close up shot of a portion of the person’s body, accompanied by hip background music and a recording of a verbal performance, while beneath the video window, the words of...
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"Saving the Alphabet" by Alan Bigelow →
This subtly haunting poem tells the story of how each letter from the alphabet disappeared, or was made to disappear, by corporations obeying a secret agenda. The conspiracy theory overtones are underscored by the use of sound, a short loop of metallic whispering wind or water and a handful of soft musical notes. Clicking on each letter on the left hand column will take you to the corresponding...
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"Cyberpoetry Underground" by Komninos Zervos →
This hypertext journey mapped on London’s Tube, is a cinematic tour de force by a poet of the digital. It earned an honorable mention in the 2001 Electronic Literature Competition, and the following write-up by competition judge Heather McHugh:
KOMNINOS ZERVOS: cyberpoetry underground A perceptual joy-ride, full of visual attractions and sonic energies, cyberpoetry underground is notable...
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"Flash Poems" by Komninos Zervos →
The first two of this list of poems stand out because of their use of Flash. Komninos’ approach to Flash in his poem “Beer” is similar to the work he published in animated GIFs: a sequence of words, morphing from one to the next producing surprising and amusing juxtapositions. It is with “Love” (image above) that he took advantage of Flash’s strengths:...
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"The adventures of i" by Komninos Zervos →
This narrative “cyberpoem” started in 1995 with the goal of developing into a lengthy “soapie” about the life of i. The project obviously didn’t go on for a long time, though the 18 webisodes plus two alternate guest webisodes collected here are a testament to an ingenious exploration of the narrative potential of animated Concrete Poetry. Each piece is an ingenious...
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"Java Poems" by Komninos Zervos →
This trio of early e-poems were written in HTML and use Java applets to shape their linguistic texts with a careful touch. “Infinity” and “Internet Junkie” both change the color of the text over a schedule to shape readings and to imbue them with a nervous energy. In “Infinity” (displayed above) the rarely used <blink> tag reinforces the instability of...