Presented at conference or festival

This poetic experience uses Twine and operates like a hypertext choose-your-own-adventure. The player must navigate a map to unlock clues about the nature of the landscape - a process called "medicating." Throughout this hellish roadtrip, the player's navigation depends on choices in cardinal directions, character interactions and even dictionary definitions. This work was created as one half of my graduate thesis. Collectively, the work on the page and the hypertext poem is known as Educational Materials for Mostly Mitigated Maidens. I completed this graduate program in 2019, obtaining a Masters in poetry. Since then, I spend my time writing, exploring other digital spaces, and teaching college composition at Solano Community College. Here is the link to Directional Pilgrim. It will launch in your browser and, for the full experience, requires speakers or headphones. Use the mouse to click and point - no other buttons are required. Google Chrome is recommended browser.

Utopia is a state which allows for a certain amount of resolution - a period or space which exists in equilibrium. Dystopia, then, is a state in which nothing can be resolved. A solution is needed, but every effort to balance opposing forces results in a renewal of already overbearing systems in control. To me, it is this repetition of effort that characterizes a dystopia. Landscape comes as an afterthought, and can take many forms. In 2018, fires ravaged the state of California. This was the space that I began my work in. Although the natural world around me expanded in all directions, the feeling was one of claustrophobia. Our yearly cycle revolves around our wildfire season - there is no way to avoid it, and each year it gets worse. This, coupled with my own anxieties surrounding mental health and addition, inspired the dystopian space of Directional Pilgrim. Just as medieval pilgrims circled Jerusalem, hitting holy waystations and reading (and therefore reenacting) the Bible passages relevant to the particular place, so does the player as pilgrim revisit the passages in this apocalyptic landscape. By redoing (and often repeating) these experiences, the player may come to find meaning in the journey itself - even though the resolution to the narrative remains elusive.

Big Data is a term used to describe, in general, the gathering of vast amounts of digital information and its subsequent processing, through sophisticated computational techniques, with the purpose of obtaining knowledge. In the case of Big Data, the poem, the term refers to the massive collection of personal information communicated online and its processing for commercial purposes, especially for-profit endeavors related to a persuasion achieved through the detailed knowledge of individuals, a persuasion aimed to be invisible. The poem is not situated in the present but in the near future, when the collection of personal information will be achieved by individual activities online, by the contributions carried out by other people and by sensors that are part of the Internet of things. The personal data, aggregated, will be processed at very high speeds with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The combination between the massive collection of personal data and its subsequent statistical processing, with that emphasis on inferential statistics to achieve persuasive objectives, will lead to a terrible reality. In general, the logic of statistics will be used to define human existence individually and socially in a deterministic way. Big Data's resulting knowledge, the poem suggests, is equivalent to the omniscience generally attributed to deities.

While the advertising industry heralds the use of digital communication technologies as a form of individual empowerment and self-efficacy, people’s interactions with their devices are proving to also have significant negative effects on society. The poem is situated in the near future, when the collection of personal information will be achieved by individual activities online, by the contributions carried out by other people, and through sensors that are part of the Internet of Things. The personal data, aggregated, will be processed at very high speeds with the assistance of artificial intelligence. As it happens in this generative video poem, unique pieces of audiovisual media will be created on-the-fly to achieve persuasive objectives based on individual profiles. The combination between the massive collection of personal data and its subsequent statistical processing, aimed at achieving persuasive objectives, will push us towards a terrible reality. Ultimately, the logic of statistics will be used to define human existence individually and socially in a deterministic way and, unfortunately, it will be guided mostly by commercial interests.

A Web Odyssey deals with the navigation on the Web. It is based on "The Odyssey" by Homer and the figure of Ulysses trying to navigate back to Ithaca.

This interactive narrative features the different episodes of The Odyssey (the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso...). The goal of the user is to reconnect to the e-thaca network. Parallels are then drawn between the oblivion caused by the lotos flowers and the infinite scrolling of social networks, the eye of the Cyclops and the webcam which monitors the Internet user (and which must be blinded or disabled), the Underworld and the Dark Web... The ecological question is also addressed through the Sirens, who feed on human flesh, and the streaming platforms which consume a lot of energy and data and feed on the resources of our environment.

The Greeks associated a mythological divinity with each phenomenon. They accepted not to be able to understand everything, and the gods often served as an explanation. Centuries later, don't we have the same relationship with digital technologies? Are human beings free to make their own choices or do they have to obey their Fate, the Greeks wondered. Are human beings simple pawns, constrained in their choices, or sovereign creatures with free will? When we navigate on the Web, especially on platforms, we can often feel the same tension as the one felt by Ulysses during his perilous journey…

This narrative, which articulates literary, educational and recreational dimensions, is available in French and English. It invites us to reflect on our digital milieu, social media, platforms… and more broadly on digital technologies.

Source: exhibition documentationPresentation: http://www.utc.fr/~bouchard/works/presentation-odyssey.pdf

This is the complete genome of the Covid-19-virus as a soundpoem, using the source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore?term=MN9089%E2%80%A63

"Sentenced to Covid: Voices of the Pandemic" displays our single-sentence responses to the pandemic. You can read the responses in either manual or auto mode (the latter which provides an endless looping display of the responses). If you want, you can write your own response for others to see.

Source: exhibition documentation

Breathing, video, 10 min. Based on Utterings' recorded live performance of the same title during the STWST48x6 MORE LESS festival in Linz Austria. Edited by Daniel Pinheiro. In this video through the mixing of six audio and video streams emerges an image of a phantomatic breathing, pulsing entity. An entity that thrives through affection, attention, glitches, delays and even voids in a connected environment mediated by machines, cables and compression algorithms.

Confinement Spaces is an existential visual narrative of living in the United Arab Emirates under lockdown from March-August 2020. The initial days of the lockdown, when work turned to Zoom-time and simple actions like grocery shopping became an exercise in epidemiology, created a mix of anxiety and ennui that led to scanning the environment with an iPhone and 3D scanning software, creating beautiful, glitched dreamlike landscapes. As time passed and restrictions eased, other spaces, like the Cultural Foundation and Louvre Abu Dhabi opened again, and the artist went out to progressively scan the pandemic landscape. Eventually restrictions eased to allow travel to the other Emirates, and sites in Dubai, Sharjah, and the legendary airplane from the movie Lord of War (in Umm al Quwain) were captured as an allegory for the universality of the isolation being experienced in the UAE and around the globe.

The result is a visual narrative of the glitched landscape of the pandemic UAE, six months collapsed into a single experience (following the author's work in Spatial Form), as a series of twelve interactive spaces rendered as pastiches of the 82 scanned spaces made during this time. The project proposed is an initial version created for The Foundry in Dubai, and the ELO version will incproporate deeper narratological structures in text, spoken word and video.

Source: exhibition documentation

The (auto)biography of 김정은 is a conceptual 'found' artwork in VII parts. It combines found code with found text. Multiple 'found' computational pieces have been modified with vocabulary drawn from multiple speeches delivered by the current North Korean Leader, Kim Jong-un/김정은. In addition, vocabulary and phrases from journalism critical of the North Korean regime are also incorporated into these generative works.This work represents a ‘dystopic platform’. On the one hand, this work is an experiment in propaganda delivery: it emulates the relentlessness of the North Korean indoctrination machine and shows how born-digital writing can be stolen and misused; in so doing, it reveals digital literature's power. As part of this process, a Kim Jong-un 'poetic robot' has been created to demonstrate how such propaganda might be delivered/forced upon a populace. This work also seeks to capture the perspective of a curious, intelligent yet powerless North Korean citizen and demonstrate how they might (struggle to) engage with local culture.

The Bug is a browser demo presented as a single page of HTML, with CSS, JavaScript, and a Base64 encoded image all part of that one page. It is a trilingual digital poem, with sound, that computationally glitches itself in different ways, transforming the background image, the text, and the music.

The Character Thinks Ahead (version 2) by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean is focused on the computerized generation of creative writing using deep learning neural nets. It knits together visual, sonic, linguistic and literary elements that all interact with each other. Of the three dynamically rolling columns of text in the upper part of the screen, the middle presents three pre-composed poetic texts that suggest ideas, feelings and contexts to do with war, hierarchy and competition respectively. The two columns on either side display text generation using deep learning nets: in the left column the text is generated by character, in the other it is generated by word. In the bottom part of the screen there are also three distinct elements to the display. An animated word cloud in the middle highlights features of the ongoing texts. To the left of it is a dynamic spectral visualisation of a (pre-recorded) rendering of the live speech: this is live-transformed to provide a sonic output visualized spectrally on the right. Besides the visual elements, the live speech and the live sonic transformation, there is also pre-formed sound — composed and improvised by Roger Dean, Sandy Evans (saxophone) and Greg White (computer). The spoken text (performed by author Hazel Smith) plays on different senses of the word character: character as part of a word, as a register of behaviour or as a fictional being. It also relates to “thinking ahead”, central to the predictive aspects of deep learning (or even “thinking a head”). Ideas of competition between word and character, which are a feature of the spoken text, are also a feature of the process of text generation. These ideas are further explored in the screened pre-composed poetic texts (middle text panel). Description by the authors adapted from Dean, R. T., & Smith, H. (2018). The character thinks ahead : creative writing with deep learning nets and its stylistic assessment. Leonardo, 51(5), 503-504. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01601