I ♥ E-Poetry

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.

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.

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 (see lines 37-109 in the source code) to produce more versions than anyone should really need to calculate because the total number is beyond the scale of thorough human readability, as proven by Raymond Queneau in 1961. The trick is to “try again” and read multiple generated versions— which happens automatically every 80,000 miliseconds (about 1:33) or you can refresh the page— and intuit the ideas, structures, tensions, relations, and variations each version gestures towards.

J.R. Carpenter’s poem is very coherent, thriving in its permutations to reconfigure multiple human experiences, anxieties, needs for communication, and technologies across time and space.

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 banality or unbearability, leading to the conclusion that one shouldn’t reread it. Ironically enough, the words
“Une autre!” appear in a large, insistent red font, inviting the reader to click on it and generate a new story. Since the story is obscured by dust, the reader must move the pointer (or finger on a touchscreen device) over the text to “brush” it off for enough time to read the text in the layer underneath.

Note: Here’s a suggestion for those who can’t read French to access the work. Generate the poem and save the page. Then reopen the saved HTML page, which will contain a generated text you can cut and paste onto your favorite translation software. I like Google Translate. But don’t stop there. Do this several times so you can read some of the variations. The pleasures of this text arise from the multiple generated narratives.

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 interactivity is inviting: readers can simply click on words to have them replaced, click on the refresh icon to change all the words, explore sets of sentences or adages, and write their own— which can have the most impact because the writer is invested in what they write, and can see it transformed away from their intended message.

Like Eugenio Tisselli’s “Synonymovie,” this work leads us down a path of signification that provides insight on the denotations, connotations, frames of reference, and other textures of words, but in this case, working at the level of phrases and sentences. The initial set of sentences (with the exception of a Shakespearean quote) seem to have a consistent voice from a speaker who yearns to achieve things, yet the mechanism of the poem deconstructs those expressions— a theoretical move gestured at by the repeated use of the word “trace.”

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 more.

The poem generates sound poems by processing words entered by the user generated and search engine results with the FIPS 181 Automated Password Generator algorithm, which produces a pronounceable encrypted set of sounds. The Web version has a machine read the syllables aloud, but this has also been used to generate scores for live performances, as seen in the documentation page.

I’m fascinated by how a word or phrase is “read” by the poem into such a different set of sounds transformed by contradictory human desires: to reveal (by searching and finding) and to conceal (through encryption and passwords).

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 from the same Spam site as used in “Spam Heart,” and the poems are generated on a handful of templates and line structures, inserting and featuring the typo in boldface.

The amazing thing about this whimsical piece is how well it all holds together. These typos seem quite at home in their short generated poems, perhaps because a century of Modern and Postmodern poetry has trained readers to take interpretive leaps on seemingly non sequitur juxtapositions. And while most readers won’t read on randomly generated works closely, Jhave provides enough structure and enough of a guiding mind to make it worth the leap.

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 the poem, hovering over beautifully desolate videos, Jhave inserts a little mutability into the poem, a slow accumulation of random words replacing words randomly, increasing by a factor of one word substitution per mutation level. The image above shows the title with a level 2 mutation, while the image below shows mutation level of 20.

Rereading the poem with its slow incremental mutations yields interesting variations on the original theme while it slowly loses its voice, coherence, emotional charge, and humanity. Or for more visceral effect, make a leap in mutation level— I stopped after over 200— to see how far humanity and poetry can descend into “untenable bloated nonsense.”

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 a low and a high note played in a guitar in equal time intervals. To keep things interesting, the note is sometimes played as a chord or brief sequence, with variations in volume, but keeping time like a metronome. Don’t forget that a guitar is a set of taut wires of different widths that produce musical notes when strummed.
• The text is synchronized to appear with the playing of each note, one word at a time. It starts in the center of the line and then adds a word to the left and one to the right of the growing phrase until the line is complete. Reading the text as it appears creates a new line, adding meaningful texture to the poem.
• After the initial display, Jhave inserts minimalist variations in the scheduled text, extending the range of meaning of the original text. The variations are subtle but meaningful, as Jhave adds, removes, or substitutes a letter from one or two words in the poem, and occasionally replaces a word for its antonym.
• There are 6 background videos, some of which have kaleidoscopic effects that match well the duality of musical notes, which the user can change to create juxtapositions between them and the words. The mirror images of the kaleidoscope videos emphasize thematic dualities in the poem.

The dualities expressed in this poem manifest themselves in so many ways, from traditional to electronic poems, low to high notes, static to scheduled kinetic texts, yes and no, all the way to the presence and absence of marks on a page (ink on paper) to the combinations of an and off electric signals— the ones and zeroes of binary code.

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 reads coherently from one textual generation to the next. The second and third strophes are always independently randomly selected from their datasets, creating new textual combinations with the constant sequence in the first strophe.

If you focus your reading on the first strophe and read it sequentially, you’ll get a strong sense of what the poem is about, but you’ll be missing some of the wildly creative combinations that result from Jhave’s word choices and generative algorithms. So while this poem never really ends (by itself), you can get a sense of closure by sensing the logic behind the word choices and phrases generated. And there is just enough of a predetermined logical path to keep us from getting lost in the poem’s “infinite inbox.”

P.S. I received a note today from Jhave about this poem: “To give a bit more info: middle word is from thesis, bottom cluster is from a Russian spam site that auto-harvests words, it has in my mind one of the richest ecosystems of multi-syllable words online.”