animated poetry

A snowstorm of letters coming your way, forming words as they reach you. Thoughts with a short lifespan, generated in collaboration with the city. For a short moment, mainly in transit, you are visiting somebody else's head. 

'Lijn 3' is a poem that you can travel through when using tram line 3 in Amsterdam, traveling from the Concertgebouw in the direction of Zoutkeetsgracht. Lieke Marsman wrote the poem, International Silence created the setting. Sometimes the poem references the surroundings, other times it muses on other subjects.

Aphiddd was inspired, rather fittingly, by another poem I wrote many years ago about a friendship that I felt had become dependent, even parasitic in nature, largely without me even noticing.

The work developed as if the older poem were the ‘host’, the plundered source material – which made for an interesting writing and editing process. 

The idea to use photo-scanned plants and materials as part of the work came from spending time outdoors during the autumn/winter months and seeing plants, leaves and barks deteriorating. The colours at times were spectacular and beautiful, despite the nature of what was happening.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/aphiddd/)

“Sometimes I am ...” is an interactive text/audio poetic that explores how language shapes our identity, how it can bring us together, and how it can set us on the periphery. How language and can make people and events visible and not visible. It asks the viewer/reader to consider both “What is invisible?” and “Who is invisible?”A beta version of “Sometimes I am …” was built in the summer of 2019 and was presented at the Media Festival and Conference of Electronic Literature in Cork, Ireland. The beta version can be viewed at http://bit.ly/iamyouare. The work was conceived of by Leanne Johnson (leannej) in collaboration with artist My Name Is Scot (audio) and Kevin MacMillan (developer).

Vocable Code is both a work of “software art” (software as artwork, not software to make an artwork) and a “codework” (where the source code and critical writing operate together) produced to embody “queer code”, examining the notion of queerness in computer coding through the interplay of different human and nonhuman voices. Collective statements and voices complete the phrase “Queer is…” and together make a computational and poetic composition. Through running Vocable Code on a browser, the texts and voices are repeated and disrupted by mathematical chaos, creating a dynamic audio-visual literature and exploring the performativity of code, subjectivity and language. Behind but next to the executed web interface of Vocable Code (13082018), the code itself is deliberately written as a codework, a mix of a computer programming language and human language, exploring the material and linguistic tensions of writing and reading within the context of (non)binary poetry and computer programming.

Vocable Code was first released in Nov, 2017 as part of the Feminist Coding Workshop organised by !=null. Conceptually, the artwork was, in part, inspired by Geoff Cox’s book titled Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression. In the early 2018, Winnie Soon has collaborated with Geoff Cox to produce a lecture-performance on Vocable Code as part of the International Conference on Artistic Research: Artistic Research Will Eat Itself, where both the source code and concepts were read aloud to exemplify the speech-like qualities of a computer program. Vocable Code (13082018) expands with the web version and the book in collaboration with Anders Visti from ‡ DobbeltDagger.

:: Voices’ contributor ::

Polly Poon, Søren Pold, Magda Tyzlik Carver, Sarah Schorr, Elyzabeth Holford, Gabriel Pereira, Annette Markham, Anna Brynskov, Geoff Cox, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Sabrina Recoules, Tobias Stenberg Christensen, Sall Lam Toro, Anders Visti, Google Algorithm, AhTong, Melissa Palermo, Joana Chicau, Erin Gee, Vasudevan Roopa, Winnie Soon

I am continuously looking for contributors, please see the instruction for voice donation and get in touch if you would like your voice to be part of this work.

‘Zonder Handen’ (No Hands) is an immersive 360° installation in which you can experience the philosophical poem ‘Zonder Handen’ written by Micha Hamel for and about the experience of virtual reality. Studio APVIS director Demian Albers visualized this poem in an Oculus Rift environment.

‘Zonder Handen’ is part of Literature on Screen. This is a program in which digital designers and writers jointly develop narrative productions for the tablet or smartphone and centers on the creative interaction between the author and the designer.

(Source: http://apvis.nl/zonder-handen/)

‘Lure’ is a poem composed in 360 degrees for and about the virtual reality of the Oculus Rift. In ‘Lure’ the problem concerning the phenomenon seduction is expressed. The immersive experience is shaped into a journey, which has a forceful character. A lovable female voice subjects the attention of the spectator to its own regime and drags it into a sensual experience until it slowly turns into something more sinister. In the end there is one escape left: true reality.

  (Source: lure-vr.nl)

[Screening] Rules that order the reading of clouds’, 2016 is a screen-based work that explores the process of constructing meaning using line. According to Laurent Jenny, the intention of the artist/writer Henri Michaux’s early graphic work was ‘to reconcile writing and drawing, which after all are both attributes of the same line.’ In this new work, the medium for Sally Morfill’s and Ana Čavić’s dialogue is the nomadic line that traverses visual and literary fields as it moves between drawing and poetry. Our starting point is a single digitised sketch selected from a series of quickly executed line drawings of a landscape with clouds. The image is gradually deconstructed and recomposed as a poem, then in turn, the poem is deconstructed and reconfigured as a drawing, emulating the movements of clouds. We set in motion a call and response between drawing and writing, as each new configuration of lines, conjuring new meanings, emphasisesthe fluidity of communication.

Source: ELO Conference 2017.