animated gif

Let’s Play is part of an ongoing series of games based on ancient Greek figuresand their punishments. Sisyphus, Prometheus, Tantalus, Danaids and Zeno, thephilosopher known for his paradoxes, are represented by the CPU player, thecomputer’s Central Processing Unit. In this CPU edition, the computer does it allby itself, both simulating and playing the game, cutting out the player entirely.Every time the reload button is activated, the game starts afresh. It may seemlike watching an animated GIF or a video file, but it’s the computer playing,pushing a rock or having its liver eaten. Again and again. Let’s Play presents aworld closed in on itself, behaving according to its own logic, its own code. Aworld stuck in a frustrating loop.

(source: Description from the schedule)

An animated gif poem which visually plays with the letter "g."

This bot mines the Twitter stream for phrases starting with “when,” extracts the clauses, and joins each phrase with a randomly selected animated GIF in a Tumblr. Here’s a more detailed description from Parrish’s blog: A “#whatshouldwecallme-style tumblr” is one in which animated GIFs are paired with a title expressing a circumstance or mood—usually a clause beginning with “when.” I wrote a Python script to make these kinds of posts automatically. Here’s what it does: (1) Search Twitter for tweets containing the word “when.” (2) Extract the “when” clause from such tweets. (3) Use Pattern to identify “when” clauses with suitable syntax (i.e., clauses in which a subject directly follows “when”; plus some other heuristic fudging) (4) Post the “when” clause as the title of a tumblr post, along with an animated GIF randomly chosen from the imgur gallery. This is both a critique and homage of the #whatshouldwecallme tumblr and the meme it inspired. Memes are powerfully infectious prompts for creativity, and they are particularly interesting (from a poetic perspective) when they lead to constraint-based experimentation with language. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

“Internal Damage Data” uses the structure of a multiple choice questionnaire for self assessment of internal damage to shape the first part of the poem. For each question, Mez uses option C (maybe, unsure, other…) to develop her poem, seeking to transcend the traditional yes/no binaries in such questionnaires. In the part depicted above, she uses algorithms to structure her poem: using the logic and language of programming to guide the reader’s experience of the poem. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This selection of six poems built with a type of composite image known as animated GIFs used to create the earliest animations in the Web. In Zervos’ experienced hands (see his “Dimocopo” suite), this simple technology can be very expressive indeed, as can be seen in “Divorce” a kinetic concrete poem that uses moving typography to highlight some of the finer points in a divorce process. The narrative poem seen above, “A Kidz Story,” is best experienced in action because it is a story generator designed with nine animated GIFs, one per line, each with a different time interval between lines. This allows for different combinations to emerge over time, providing the illusion of variation in what eventually becomes very formulaic and repetitive— an incisive comment on the genre it represents. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This kinetic concrete poem, along with its companion piece “Paddle”, is a minimalist statement of how meaningful the movement of words can be. Using three words with simple animation, Hennessy is able to build a narrative of the formation of a puddle and what happens after. The timing and spacing of the downward flow of language in this poem sets up a variation in the final part of the poem, as we get a little bit of upwards movement, combined with an insight on the shared etymology (or orthography) of the first and final words in the poem.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

A creative website that contains more than can be easily labelled as poetry, art, or narrative, though it certainly contains that and more. Launched in 1998, the site incorporates multiple Web technologies in very coherent fashion to create a hypertext of musings, anxieties, joys, searches for companionship, yearnings, and more navigable through interfaces populated by a variety of insects. Each page in this hypertext is a discovery: a thoughtful exploration of an idea through art, language, and metaphor. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This fascinating poem is derived from Gertrude Stein’s poetry throughout her career and exemplifies the practice of what Kenneth Goldsmith calls uncreative writing. As he explains in his essay, Reed sought to map out a “landscape” of Stein’s practice, so he devised the following algorithm to generate nine texts from Gertrude Stein.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This hypermediated hypertext suite of poems make excessive use of background images, animated GIFs, and messily redundant code to render them deliciously unreadable and inviting. Bell weaves a dense mesh of lines, background images, and code to produce surfaces that are difficult to read at times, making us wonder if he’s aiming for felt rather than the finely stitched fabric of verse. Bell’s lines are witty and full of wordplay, non-repetitive reiterations, alliteration, and an inviting awareness of his strategies and questions. Follow the links to discover many other poems, in some of which he has the design audacity of using animated GIFs as background images.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)