dreams

Rendered in realtime 3D and using fragmentation and particle effects, Stasssis explores the patterns and complexities of manipulative human behaviour. Click and drag with the mouse to circle around the scene - or swipe your touch screen. Use the mouse wheel - or pinch in/out - to zoom. A sound-toy, digital poem and interactive art installation, Stasssis features animated texts and slowly exploding chess pieces alongside a code-warped soundtrack by Barry Snaith.

Digital materials protrude into the most intimate corners of our lives, are part of the architectures that shape our dreams and desires. Yet the modes of their production are comparably poorly understood. In the described talk, I provide a discussion of the status of concrete poetry as a tool for practice-based research into the characteristics of digital materiality. As long as we allow code to slip through the cracks of the collective imaginary, it remains easy for corporate actors to misrepresent the character and influence of coded infrastructures: It is imagined to exist elsewhere, in server farms, on the quantum physical plane of the infinitesimal, within the disembodied sphere of formal logic, but not among us, not as part of everyday reality.

While its effects, social media platforms, word processors, smartphone applications, are part of everyday reality, its digital substrates seem not to be. Resultingly, code is allowed to have unobserved social effects. Those who control the conditions of its production and operation are free to deploy this invisibility for any strategic goal they see fit.

At the same time, digital materiality in itself is not as abstract as it might seem:Its effects are felt in real life, in the ways people move through urban space, are hired and fired, in the cost of products and mortgages, in the manner news items are distributed through social media.

Electronic poetry constitutes an especially interesting medium for exploration of the characteristics of digital materiality: It allows expression of both everyday realities and the abstract formal structures of the digital. Its self-reflexive nature invites the recipient to reflect on the effects of its elements both on the level of language and technology.

Conceptual point of departure for this talk is the classical notion of the poetic "constellation", as introduced by Gomringer and others [1]. Building on this conceptual base, historic and current examples, together with some of the author's texts are discussed in order to elucidate possible avenues for researching digital materiality through poetry.

"Velvet" is an interactive artwork involving sound and image that is highly personal in nature and which immerses a user inside the mind and identity of the artist for the exploration of states of mind, dreams, and memory.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

An elderly man keeps a surreal record of his dreams as he is slowly poisoned by his gas fire leaking carbon monoxide.

A schoolgirl who has narrowly escaped death hides and reflects beneath a roadway tunnel. Her scattered thoughts manifest against the grotty concrete walls before fading away again into nothing. Soon she realises she's been hiding herself away for days. How the hell did she end up here in the first place? Contains strong language and references to violence.

A mouse-responsive exploration of the final nightmarish dream of a blind old man. Contains a transient narrative and basic interactive problem solving puzzles. Created using a combination of photography and 3D animated renders.

 Dim O’Gauble follows the glimpsing story of an elderly woman reflecting on her grandson’s nightmarish – possibly paranormal – visions of the future. Told through a densely textured, mouse-responsive graphical environment, the work presents the user/reader with a series of transient texts, some of which change/mutate or float/disappear over time, intending to reflect the very nature of the hazy/difficult memories being uncovered. Progression through Dim O’Gauble is achieved by clicking on the various arrows visible in the graphical backgrounds, which quickly shift the viewport around the ‘canvas’ of the piece. In addition, various sub-sections of the narrative can be discovered by clicking on hotspots in the text. The final scene reveals a video sequence of a tunnel/subway with text super-imposed at different sizes over the top of it. The sketches/drawings used in the work were created by the author when he was 8 years old.

In this Flash hypertext, Coverley weaves a tapestry of text, image, and sound, telling a California story that many readers can relate to. In this piece, the sky itself is the center of a meditation on memory and loss across decades of human experience. The same "blue sky" that often refers to people's wildest dreams now comes to represent boundaries and fears.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1.)