Flash

Martín’s multimedia poems take part of his poetry readings. They are not video poems, they are not thought to be visualized in an autonomous way, but to take part of a show of live music, scenic presence and interaction with main elements. However, the author intends to get the users closer to the symbiosis of artistic languages that this poetic genre provides. Cuando enciendas los párpados -When you light your eyelids- is a multimedia poem which includes music, computer animated poetry, images and the voice of the poet reading the poem. The verses, music and video have been made by the author himself. In the poem words move in spirals and there are lights that appear in the corners, there are shadows of people who look like the audience who is watching the multimedia. The poem is about love, hope and the sea, there are fish dancing in the water when the poet mentions the sea. This poem belongs to the book of poems Je suis le diable - Las Cántigas, published by Ya lo dijo Casimiro Parker. Versos, música y vídeo: Óscar Martín Centeno (Maya Zalbidea Paniagua 2014)

"Psyco" by Felix Rémirez is about the conversation between a psychiatrist and a patient who suffers from schizophrenia. In this hypermedia the hypertext appears automatically without the reader's intervention in the reading process, the images and hypertext change rapidly and in some sequences the reader does not have enough time to read the whole story. The only option the reader can choose is clicking on underline sentences which give the reader descriptions of medical terms and information about a woman the patient was in love with. The patient explains that he is scared of some people who are at the back of the psychiatrist, the latter tries to distract him asking him to talk about the period in which he studied music. There is an open ending and the reader does not know if the patient attacks the nurse, the psychiatrist or himself at the end. This hypermedia has been programmed with Flash CS5 and the narrative is told in different shots: two shots show the characters' conversation, other shots show what they think at the same time and there is another shot in which images move to create a mysterious and frightening atmosphere accompanied with Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Béla Bartók (Maya Zalbidea 2014)

According to its author, Agnus Valente, “Uterus therefore Cosmos” is a kind of work in progress developed during the years 2003 to 2007. In this project, several e-poems created by Valente and his twin brother, Nardo Germano, explores the expressive and conceptual potential of the World Wide Web. “Uterus therefore Cosmos” brings together in one digital environment, works by visual artists, poets and musicians from different eras. Valente proposes a dialogue between his poems authored with his brother and the work of brazilian poets and visual artists. ”Uterus therefore Cosmos” is metaphorically a project of astronomical dimensions. Conceived as a trilogy, the project presents in one website its three stages of creation: “Online Pregnancy” (2003), “Constellations” (2005) and “Expansions” (2007). A keyword to analyze this work is “hybridization”. In this context, the term refers to the ability of mixing signs, senses, media and languages and where all this mixing occurs is undoubtedly the digital medium. Based on the theoretical concepts of “intertextuality” and “Intersemiotic translation” Agnus Valente sets the DNA of his poetics. (Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

“Two matchsticks” (2008) is the title of an e-poem by short story writer, Samir Mesquita based on “Two matchsticks,” a popular saying in Brazil. The origins of this Brazilian folk expression are difficult to determine, but its significance indicates the rapid execution of a task. The matchbox is a Brazilian’s old friend. Even with the absence of musical instruments several sambas have been created accompanied only by the cadenced rhythm of these improvised little rattles. Today, in the Internet and microblogging age, the matchboxes inspires new literary genres.

(Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

“Memory” is an interactive digital poem composed by kinetic texts and speech sound programmed in Flash by Brazilian researchers and digital poets Alckmar Luiz dos Santos and Gilberto Prado.

The poem’s interface is presented as a grid with nine cells containing nine distorted images of some printed text. When the interactor rolls the mouse over the images, a short animation loop and a voiceover soundtrack are activated playing the verse printed on each image. The verses are set following an initial order, but the interactor may organize new possibilities of reading according to his will.

(Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

“Paperwounds,” is an intimate look into the sometimes-surreal, often-manic realm of the suicidal and depressed. It is an intense snapshot of the numerous facets that go into the decision of taking one’s own life, each of its disparate parts aligning to form a piecemeal narrative readers may only ever really guess at in its entirety. Presented as a crumpled up piece of paper, readers “unwrap” the suicide note by clicking on the highlighted/pulsating words within its folds. Doing so exhumes other, shorter notes the writer placed within the virtual letter, each one a different illustration of–perhaps–what drove the fictional victim to this ultimate negation of self. The interface, technological sounds, and brief animations when you mouse over certain texts combined with the ruined state of the materials create a forensic tone for the work, casting the reader in the role of an investigator. The poem may be zoomed in on, zoomed out from, flipped, rotated, dimmed, and made completely invisible–though doing any of the aforementioned does not seem to change the nature of the text at first glance. (Source: Ian Rolón, I ♥ E-Poetry)

At the heart any scandal is a story, or a thing of many stories; sc4nda1 is even more peculiar, but also begins with a telling. What you have before you started as an essay (or intent to rant) about an observation I kept reading in recent criticism, that electronic writing has not been properly dressed for the serious table. Where, the questions ran, are the publishers, the editors, the established and establishing critics? In a time of intense experiment and innovation, who says which textual deviations make real difference, and which are just bizarre? More ominously: where are the naive, casual readers, the seekers of pleasurable text who ought to move design's desire? To spin an old friend's epigraph, just who, exactly, finds this funhouse fun? ...And so to the thing itself: probably more exploration than investigation, though who knows what offenses may come to light. You may find it (inevitably) a post-serious entertainment for hand, eye, ear, and brain, other organs optional. If the thingy deserves a generic name, try arcade essay, a cross between philosophical investigation (well okay, rant) and primal video game. Duly object-oriented, the work no doubt inherits bad attributes from both parent classes, but hopefully some virtues as well. There is one sure way to find out. (Source: Author's description from website)

An adaptation of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.