Curlew is an interactive, multimedia poem about one man's encounter with the forces of nature. The narrative centers on Catsinas, a fisherman living alone in a makeshift shack on Curlew, one of several barrier islands in the Gulf Coast known as the Chandeleurs. Based on a true account, the story chronicles the man's futile attempt to save Curlew's shoreline to a storm's destruction of his adopted home.
The work entails the use of a Kinect Game System that allows for the audience to interact with the poem and participate in the narrative.
A video installation.
Zoe Beloff’s "Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A." is a Flash adaptation of a multimedia installation of the same name created by Beloff in 2001. This web-enabled version combines video, text, audio, and animation to tell the story of Natalija A., a psychiatric patient who was unable to communicate except through writing. Natalija believed that she was being controlled remotely by an “influencing machine,” a mechanical model of her body created by a doctor in Berlin which could be manipulated to control her telepathically. Based on an actual 1919 account of Viennese psychoanalyst Victor Trausk, Beloff’s work contains passages from Trausk’s notebooks, simulated effects of the “diabolical machine,” surrealist footage of medical procedures, and video clips of the actual broadcast technologies that emerged during the early twentieth century to influence populations worldwide.
(Source: Davin Heckman's description in the Electronic Literature Directory)
This project was created in Flash MX. It is 3MB. Playing it requires the Flash 6 plug-in and the QuickTime plug-in.
View in Internet Explorer 5.1 or greater. Netscape Navigator 6. 2 or greater.
"Presenting the results of a data search sure to strain the capacities of any computer, Milutis proceeds to give an exceedingly close reading of what he modestly calls 'the fundamental core of all literature.'"
"this is a piece of literary minutiae, which, while straining the capacities of any search engine, has had a profound effect on literary experimentation. . . . "
"In 1968, Marvin Spevack developed the first computer-assisted concordance to Shakespeare, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. Only then were we able to get a full sense of the statistical array of the bard’s this. But the data, while revealing, is still indiscriminant, conflating artistic uses of this with more utilitarian ones. The human operators of this mainframe—an IBM 7094 that was fed punch cards and recorded on magnetic tape—could have treated the output as mere system noise rather than significant information. But Spevack wanted pure data laid out 'in as direct and uncluttered a manner as possible, and yet as seen from different angles, to avoid editorial tinkering and conjecture.' And so this was not filtered from the results."
A harrowing alphabetical excursion into the world of the rolled r. Milutis tracks—and, through sounds and videos, shows—the primal violence and utopian trill of 'the most rrresilient of locutions' in sound poetry, regional dialects, and televisual affects, from Kurt Schwitters to Georges Perec to Rodgers and Hart to Charles Bernstein.
This site between what Agamben calls "the infinite sea of mere sound" and articulate speech is the particularly generative, albeit ambiguous, site of sound poetry, if not of poetry itself. Yet sometime around 1950 (for poet Steve McCaffery), or even at the turn of the twentieth century (for media theorist Friedrich Kittler), something happened to take poetry away from the word, and by extension the letters that compose it, as recording technology allowed for an aestheticization of “mere sound.” Indeed, the rolled r—puncturing the line through its pure sounding—promised this return to the infinite sea of the real, presaging more effective disruptions of symbolic networks by way of the proliferation of reproduced sound.
F2F might seem retro to you. It struck me as very 1991. The idea of a hypertext that is heavy on the text seemed to lose its charm as soon as images, moving animation, video and sound could also be included. One of the downsides to the speed of the evolution of hypertext, is that whole possible genres and subgenres were not given the chance to grow. What happened to the web-film-essay? Well, it never happened. Sure, there are some text-book-market CD-ROMs and the like that do something similar, but they use video more as mere illustration. What about a film essay that would incorporate the mystery the moving image rather than try to compete with it? What about utilizing images and sounds that potentially resist the text? What about playing with the clips like a video artist would?
F2F gravitates towards Deleuze's theories of framing and the face, and brings into alignment filmmakers who, unwittingly or not, deconstruct the face. But it also spins off into links on Robert Smithson, mirrors, Issey Miyake, creative urbanism, Max Ernst, romance . . . . One of the plusses about doing this essay in hypertext form, is that it allowed me to incorporate or even memorialize various ambivalences I had while writing these ideas down in linear form. There were clearly at least two essays that could come of it all. But, rather than pairing up with one and bumping the other off, we're all still here.
"The city's relation to the face, the major trope of which is 'the faceless crowd,' is productive of one of the great cliches of the movies. . . ."
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"Planting Trees out of the Grief" is a lyrical essay, or work of creative non-fiction about mourning. "Planting Trees out of the Grief. In Memoriam Robert Creeley" is a ficticious story that mirrors the psychological processes of coping with mourning described in the essay.
The hypertext will lead you through both texts as same as one goes through the process of mourning. You will go further and sometimes you realize you just stepped backwards finding yourself at the same point you were once before.
Being at the same point (textpassage) you were once before you'll have the choice to follow new paths - or you have to go through the same until a new path (link) reveals. Sometimes people forget they were in grief and then, suddenly, they face their loss again. Therefore, I am dealing with intendend moments of recurrence. By this, you are forced to find new paths and follow other links.
