critical new media

Fugues, a project of the NT2 Laboratory at the Université du Québec à Montréal, is both an hypermedia adaptation of the poem Piano published 2001 by Quebec author René Lapierre and a literary critical analysis of that same poem. The Fugues Project originally came about when Bertrand Gervais asked NT2 Lab students to think about how to read and to analyze a paper-published poem through hypermedia. Instead of writing a dissertation as one usually does when reading a text in a literature classroom, participants were asked to adapt Piano through hypermedia. The goal was to think about new ways of reading printed text using electronic tools. The participants came up with an associative way of exploring this particular poem. This experimental project was designed not only to build an audience for new media literary works and writing by just presenting existing hypermedia works, but also to ask these literary scholars to think how they would go about writing a paper about a poem in a non-textbook manner. The idea behind this was to put theory into practice. Or rather: to create a hypermedia work allows for a literary audience not only to read new media literary works but it also allows practices in writing new media and thus, familiarizing the literature class to hypermedia and how students can now add associative audio, video and graphics interpretations to their written text-analysis.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

The crux of my work two artist/poets, William Blake (1757-1827) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1919), is in how they expanded the definitions of the man/nature relationship through mythology and spiritual exploration. In addition to audio recordings of readings of the poets' poetry that accompanies their artwork and selected words for emphasis, which I composed in a movie format, I created a podcast discussing my critical and analytical study of the influence of Blake's writing on the increasingly well-studied Modernist, Rosenberg. The exploration of Rosenberg is benefitted by a recent and first scholarly edition of Rosenberg's poems by Vivien Noakes in 2004. While Noakes' edition of his poetry is in itself important, little critical exploration into the influence of Blake on Rosenberg's poetry has occurred, although it is often mentioned in brief. Indeed, not much critical exploration into Rosenberg's poetry has occurred whatsoever. The natural elements of Blake's and Rosenberg's poetry and especially the difference in the ways they presented nature compared to their contemporaries, will stand foremost in this study. A discussion on how the poetic form is brought forward through their experimentation with spirituality and nature also figures prominently in this discussion. Both sought to redefine the specific understandings of personhood, states of mind/soul, virtues and vices, and relationships of man to the natural world. Each staunchly rejected all that was not included within their vision, however nonsensical to others, and neither artist could be bothered with the rationality of the absolutes of their age. 

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)

For one of my courses this fall, my first semester in the new Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University, I created a short Flash piece on medium and a hypertext project on medium as metaphor, looking at eight texts—four print authors and four new media works. This presentation focuses on these projects.

Digital Oracles" is a work that intends to cause awareness and reflection about the influence and power that the search engines on the web exert in our daily lives—not only online, but also offline—in determining our choices and paths. Privacy, control, trust, where the answers come from, the top10 dictatorship, existence, local filtering, utility and manipulation are among the raised issues.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)