May 2013
11 posts
2 tags
Rio Grande Review: Electronic Literature Dossier →
This is a link to a special collection of previously unpublished electronic literature, guest edited by Scott Rettberg, Juan Pablo Plata, and myself. This dossier is collection of previously unpublished e-lit, with editorial statements, and an essay on Ana María Uribe.
Share and enjoy!
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CFP: The E-Lit I Love
This is an invitation for writers and scholars of electronic literature, in all genres, shapes, or forms.
I ♥ E-Poetry seeks entries about a work of e-lit that:
inspired you
influenced you
that you love
that you admire
that you wish you had written
that…
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I ♥ E-Poetry Reviewed in Proxecto Le.es:...
I ♥ E-Poetry Reviewed in Proxecto Le.es:Literatura Electrónic en España. #elit #dh Reviewed on May 7, 2013 in Proxecto Le.es: Literatura Electrónica en España. Review is in Catalán.
http://proxectole.es/2013/05/i-%E2%99%A5-e-poetry-un-novo-espazo-para-a-analise-da-poesia-dixital/ View Post
Call for Contributions
I ♥ E-Poetry makes its first open call for contributions. #elit #poetry #dh Have you ever wanted to write an I ♥ E-Poetry entry?
Well this is your chance.
I ♥ E-Poetry invites guest contributions from its readers and the e-lit community.
Read the Submission Guidelinesand use the form below to send me a brief description of what… View Post
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I ♥ E-Poetry has a new home →
In preparation for its next stage of development, this blog is moving to a new URL and platform, as described below.
The shift in domain name from leonardoflores.net to iloveepoetry.com represents two things:
A broadening of the project’s concept from an individual’s performance to many individual performances. In its first stage, the “I” in the title meant me, Leonardo...
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"@ILoveEPoetry: A Break Bot" by Leonardo Flores →
This Twitter bot has has been designed to automatically post an I ♥ E-Poetry entry every hour at the 1/2 hour mark. If you’re interested in exploring other works reviewed or reliving the excitement (!!!) of each entry, then this is the account to follow. It should take this bot about 21 days to tweet the whole project— which is just right for my current needs.
After 500 consecutive...
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I ♥ E-Poetry: 500 Entries Later →
This word-frequency visualization is generated from the 100 most commonly used words in the first 500 consecutive daily entries of this scholarly blogging project.
Launched on December 19, 2011, I have been writing this blog every day, without fail, until today. That means I have written over 141,000 words— the equivalent of 564 pages of pure text (at 250 words per page), more if you...
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"Into the Green Green Mud" by Eric A. Meyer →
This work in progress is a wonderful example of how digital media can be used in an integrated way to create art that transcends traditional media and genre distinctions. As Meyer describes the concept best in this artist statement.
I wrote a novel, and it was a poem, and I called it Into the Green Green Mud. But coming from an experimental theatre background, where script and performance are...
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"Circle" by Caitlin Fisher →
This augmented reality (AR) work tells the story of three generations of women through a series of short poetic videos organized spatially on a table top installation. In the version documented in the video, the work used a printed out marker system and a webcam connected to a computer to move from one marker to another. As the camera is able to identify the markers, the software replaces them...
April 2013
31 posts
7 tags
"There Are Many Detours Between Information And... →
This poem may seem like a simple slideshow that combines text and images but it is built with born-digital materials that have little to do with print culture. The background images are taken from sprites—graphical objects that form part of a program visual design and contain programmed behaviors. Both in its choice of sprites and fonts, the work favors an 8 and 16 bit videogame aesthetic,...
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"Working Memory" by Ian Hatcher →
This minimalist scheduled poem engages our ability to hold language in memory in order to act upon it. The text is displayed on two spaces simultaneously, though the header stream begins first before the second one in the box begins to compete for our attention. Each text is displayed one word at a time at a rapid rate, faster than we have grown used to with works by Young-Hae Chang Heavy...
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"Algorithmic Poems" by Chris Funkhouser →
This suite of four poems based on W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” was written using GTR Language Workbench— a kind of textual Photoshop that allows users to algorithmically select and transform a text. This free and downloadable Mac & Windows software tool created by Andrew Klobucar and David Ayre can be used to analyze and transform texts, generating new ones using new and historical...
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"Any Vision" by Zuzana Husárová →
This work is published as a video documentation of a simultaneously analog and digital poem— an instance of extreme inscription as described by Matthew Kirschenbaum. Written on a semiconductor alloy with “a focus GA ion beam” at font sizes much smaller than a pixel, requiring an electron microscope with magnification “ranges from 400x all the way to 10000x.” The naked eye cannot read this poem...
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"Passing Through" by Alexander Mouton →
This multimedia hypertext work weaves together unpopulated images, ambient sounds, and the text of overheard conversations in several cities to produce an immersive experience of a journey. Best experienced in cinematic conditions (good speakers or headphones, large screen, dark room, no distractions, fullscreen browser window), this is a navigationally minimalist. Each image has an area you can...
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"Afghan War Diary" by Matthieu Cherubini →
This poetic Internet artwork makes a visceral connection between the documentation of frags in Counter-Strike multiplayer servers and the military actions documented in the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary database. As it connects the fake videogame death to military actions that usually resulted in the loss of one or many real human lives, it performs Google Earth searches to display the location of...
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"Alphabet of Stars" by Whitney Anne Trettien →
This responsive visual poem is a study of writing technologies and the word, whether it’s “ink sunk into fibrous paper” or “light through liquid crystals.” Inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s poetic and theoretical writing as studied by Kittler, Trettien’s JavaScript (& JQuery) work explores the range of shades between the white page and the black sky as...
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"Speaking of Rivers" by Jonathan Peter Moore and... →
This work is a kind of hypertext edition of Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” contextualizes the poem by placing it in conversation with historical and biographical events, culture, music, poetry, visual arts, and its publication history.
Its interface is simple (though unexplained): when you click on an image of a line from the poem on the ...
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"Cannibal Dreams" by Lacy Cunningham and Justin... →
This elegant hypertext poem consists of 28 links arranged on an excerpt from a book on bone biology. The links are barely distinguishable from the rest of the text, yet lead to poetic language that forms a distinctive contrast to the scientific text in the paragraph. The relation between the two texts isn’t simply tonal counterpoints: they are deeply interconnected, metaphorically and...
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"Wittenoom: speculative shell and the cancerous... →
This award-winning responsive poem focuses on the Australian ghost town Wittenoom, abandoned due to toxic dust caused by asbestos mining. Each of its nine parts focuses on an aspect of the abandoned town and consists of an image from Wittenoom, generally portraying urban decay, an brief looping instrumental audio track, links to other parts of the poem, a title for the section, and a text...
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"_:terror(aw)ed patches:_" by Mez Breeze and Shane... →
This collaborative work created in the now-defunct Google Wave is documented as a video which shows writing at different stages scrolling up the screen. Each screen-captured image scrolls upwards at a speed that allows readers to apprehend most of the work— less if you’re unfamiliar with mezangelle— visually enacting the wave metaphor. The music for this piece, “Something...
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"Real_Time_"1sts!" [or: PanoptiConned Imagery From... →
This work is inspired by the real-time events triggered by a fatal shooting incident in MIT and a manhunt for suspects allegedly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings as reported through social media, particularly Twitter. (Here’s a link describing the situation as I write this entry, followed by a snapshot of the #Watertown hashtag in Twitter. It is 6:00 am EST).
Part of the story...
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"Little Book of Prompts" by Sylvanus Shaw →
This work prompts readers to write according to a set of poetic constraints, offering original, famous, and obscure forms and examples. The interface offers a series of virtual pages floating in fixed positions in space, and allowing readers to tilt them, zoom in and out, and flip them over to read the examples on their verso. A close examination of its yellowed pages reveals barely perceptible...
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"Nomen Sacrum Trial" by Sylvanus Shaw →
This “psychometric trial” prompts readers to explore their sacred name through manipulation of the “lettered sieve” an infinite set of language constructed as follows:
For the following trial, imagine the alphabet, followed by, in alphabetical order, all permutations of pairs of letters of the alphabet, followed by all permutations of triples of letters of the alphabet,...
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"Essay" by judsoN →
This work of generative Internet art presents an essay to readers that reads like an essay written by a graduate student that has done nothing but read Postmodern theory for years. The result might be brilliant, nonsensical— perhaps both— but it exists on a different reality as the rest of the world’s and is likely to have little impact on anything. You might as well pump all...
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"Every Word I Saved" series by Cristobal Mendoza
This series of installations are poetic visualizations of a personal database, consisting of every word written in the author’s computers for a four year period (2002-2006). The database contains metadata, such as time-stamps for each word, capitalization, and its source. This allowed Mendoza to create software installations that lead us to pay attention to the language in through various...
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"Unravel" by Agnieszka Michalska →
This scheduled poem plays like a silent video composed of a series of photographs of a wheat field in the background and kinetic language in the foreground. The text unfolds through a series of transformations of words by moving letters around into to form other words, and letter substitutions that create rapid word sequences. Timing is all in this poem, which could be organized internally by...
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"Lollipop Noose" by Todd Seabrook →
This video poem created in Flash is a meditation on the word game Hangman. The Western banjo rock music— a clip from Modest Mouse’s “3 Inch Horses, Two Faced Monsters“— evokes the American “wild west,” reminding us of its improvised deadly justice system that often resulted in hanging. This cultural backdrop enhances the poem’s ruminations on what...
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"Face the Facts" by Dan Waber →
This poem is built on a two dimensional array with a simple interface that allows people to read the text horizontally and vertically. The position of the pointer (or a contact point on a touchscreen device) triggers which line or column of text is highlighted for readability. Extracted from an ambitious work titled Unbound, this interface illustrates some of the reading strategies necessary for...
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"No Choice About the Terminology" by Jason Edward... →
This new entry in the PoEMM series was recently published as a free iOS app, following closely a redesigned website and a booklet documenting the series. Designed for touchscreen devices, this poem fills the screen with its lines scrolling from one side to another at different speeds and in different directions. Readers encountering this wall of text may find it a bit overwhelming— too...
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"Memory" by Pedro Valle Javier →
This cleverly conceptualized poem engages the social media meme as an canvas, cultural construct, and writing constraint. Using a meme generating service to write the texts on the memes and publish them as images, arranging them in the page. As co-author of the webcomic The World According to Geek, Valle Javier could’ve easily arranged the images as panels on a horizontal comic strip, but...
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"Catharsis" by Pedro Valle Javier →
This hypertext poem takes a simple concept and makes it a tour de force. Each word is a link to an image, not of any image, but of photographs which use blurred motion and other effects to convey a sense of speed and evoke the speaker’s tone. The title suggests that either the speaker is in need of catharsis, or the poem itself is the cathartic artistic expression.
The spatial arrangement...
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"In a World Without Electricity" by Alan Bigelow →
This is a true story about the untimely death of someone close to the speaker, who seeks to reconstruct the story of her death in a way that can provide closure and hopefully justice. It is also a reflection on analog and digital storytelling and the objects that hold these stories.
The work’s interface displays each portion of this linear narrative as a kind of slideshow, sequentially...
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"How They Brought the News from Paradise" by Alan... →
This narrative poem tells the mock-heroic adventures of an unlikely antihero on an imaginary quest. As Bigelow describes the piece,
In “How They Brought the News from Paradise to Paterson,” a first-person speaker narrates his story (in heroic verse) as he swims from one end of a resort pool complex to another in search of what he thinks is more alcohol, but is in fact a journey to...
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"Marble Springs" NOT by Deena Larsen (part 4 of 4) →
This hypertext poem is open by design, with a long history of inviting participation from others. When it was first published in 1993 in HyperCard format by Eastgate systems (referred to in earlier entries as Marble Springs 1.0) it offered readers the ability to contribute their own writing to the work via annotations, as described in the publisher’s site.
Marble Springs joins reading...
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Close Reading "Marble Springs 3.0" by Deena Larsen... →
This hypertext epic about the lives of the inhabitants of Marble Springs, a fictional gold rush town in Colorado is an ambitious project 25 years in the making. For the past two entries, I have focused on issues of publication, obsolescence, documentation, and representation of her creative vision. This entry will examine a character’s page / lexia / node— Mandy...
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"Marble Springs 3.0" by Deena Larsen (part 2 of 4) →
This new version of Marble Springs, originally published in Hypercard in 1993 by Eastgate Systems (see yesterday’s entry for details), uses a contemporary authoring system that still can’t quite achieve Larsen’s vision for the work. Here’s Deena’s commentary in the “About Marble Springs” page, which also offers a detailed version history for the work:
...
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"Marble Springs 1.0 [Web Demo]" by Deena Larsen... →
This hypertext narrative poem was written in HyperCard and published by Eastgate Systems in 1993. Using multiple interfaces and links, it tells the interconnected stories of the inhabitants of this small town in Colorado opening spaces for the readers to weave in their own narratives into the work. Its free verse lines use unadorned diction, paying careful attention to the impact of line breaks...
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The I ♥ E-Poetry Guide to "Electronic Literature &...
Welcome to this guide focused on a key component in the Electronic Literature Showcase starting today at the Library of Congress. (Read Susan Garfinkel’s post at The Signal for more details on the event.) The exhibition, curated by Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens, is the heart of the Showcase, crafting enlightening experiences for visitors familiar and new to electronic literature.
...
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"Times Haiku" by Jacob Harris and The New York... →
This program mines articles in the New York Times home page, and using a dictionary and syllable counting algorithm and a few filters, discover sentences that can be cut into the shape of a haiku. The output of this generator is vetted by NY Times journalists, who identify the best ones for publication in the Tumblr blog, after generating background art based on the first line of the haiku. Read...
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"Ñao! [No!]" by Eduardo Kac →
This kinetic visual poem by a pioneer in electronic literature was initially written in 1982 to be displayed in electronic signboards and video monitors.The more recent Flash version replicates the signboard nicely, allowing each word to fit in the screen as it scrolls from right to left, the conventional way such signboards deliver texts for ease of reading. Kac doesn’t want to make...
March 2013
32 posts
4 tags
"E-Poetry in Social Media" Coda: Alan Sondheim →
(photo by Christopher Funkhouser)
This series of 41 entries on E-poetry in social media has focused on works that engage digital and social media’s affordances and constraints to produce works that push the boundaries of what is possible in print. For that reason, this blog isn’t particularly interested in traditional poetry published via online networks, as good as it might be,...
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Twitter Poetry by You
For the past 40 entries, I ♥ E-Poetry has been focused on poetry written using social media, and with the exception of a handful of works, the vast majority has been created with and for Twitter. In addition to Twitter fictions, three emergent genres have expanded the traditional scope of the poetic in this social network: bots, performance works, and netprovs. To explore abundant examples of each...
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"@Tempspence" & "#tempspencepoets" by Mark Marino,... →
This Twitter character came to life in the “Reality: Being @spenserpratt” netprov, was christened “Tempspence” by Pratt’s followers (as a “temporary” Spencer), and lives on in this Twitter account, along with a community called The Tempspence poets. Their symbiotic existence was sustained by social media interactions of a group of people that came together through this netprov, and extended the...
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"Reality: Being @SpencerPratt" by Mark Marino and... →
This Twitter fiction netprov is based on a simple enough premise: reality star Spencer Pratt lost his his cellphone while in London for Celebrity Big Brother, and it was found by a struggling poet who began to use it in whimsical ways to promote poetry. During the three-week performance, the poet prompted Pratt’s followers to write poems based on constraint he provided, was outed as an...
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"Occupy MLA" by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig →
Occupy MLA is back!
But don’t be alarmed just yet, since this resurgence of the controversial netprov, takes the shape of a published archive (linked to in this entry’s title). This documentation is exemplary, including a 3-minute introductory video, a link to an artists’ statement at The Chronicle of Higher Education (with a fascinating comment thread), an indexed and...
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"@Darius_at_GDC" by Darius Kazemi →
This bot is a stand-in for Kazemi at the Game Developer’s Conference happening at the time of this posting in San Francisco, because he will not be able to attend for the first time in 10 years. So instead of pining away on Twitter as #GDC tweets flood his stream, he created a bot so his friends could have the pleasure of his company in their own streams, which as we know, is almost as...
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"@tonightiate" "@MassageMcLuhan" by Matt Schneider →
These two bots generate short template based sentences and publish them on Twitter every 10 minutes. With them Schneider demonstrates some of the versatility of the same kind of device when applied to different topics.
His first bot, “@tonightiate,” uses a relatively simple template that produces an obsessive litany of consumption.
The opening constant phrase “Tonight I...
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"24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project" by Dene Grigar →
This constraint based fiction writing project focused on Twitter’s 140 character limit as well as a 24-hour period for performing them in social media, inviting and incorporating participation from others. Her artists’ statement provides
It took the discipline of Twitter and the tyranny of the 140 character rule to force me to cut stories to the bone. I have attempted to do so...
