The Bug is a browser demo presented as a single page of HTML, with CSS, JavaScript, and a Base64 encoded image all part of that one page. It is a trilingual digital poem, with sound, that computationally glitches itself in different ways, transforming the background image, the text, and the music.
Camtasia Fantasy is a study on institutionalized tools for presenting information, featuring numerous forms of misreading and corruption native to those systems—including automated captioning and stabilization, noise removal, layers of lossy compression, and the broader assumption that a PowerPoint slide show can communicate any knowledge worth knowing—as well as the unintended poetics that emerge from such misreadings.
(Source: http://thenewriver.us/camtasia-fantasy/)
The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break. I argue that these poems, by breaking, challenge systems that support institutional racism, violence, economic disparity, and other unjust social phenomena. I then explore poetic breakage in live performance. I look specifically at the Black Took Collective, a group of performance poets who utilize digital media in live performance to subvert expectations that an audience might have regarding race, gender, and poetry’s place in the academy. The final chapter is a demonstration of practice-based research and a discussion of the role of this kind of research in an evolving English department. I offer two examples of practice-based research in literary studies: Poemedia 2.0 and The Denver Poetry Map.
This paper performs a reading of the ‘glitch poetics’ of Caroline Bergvall and Erica Scourti pivoting between analyses of their works via two specific contemporary technologies. As well as reflecting on the artworks themselves, the paper aims to show how the various of forms of error they employ, allow for new perspectives on conditions for contemporary textuality. Glitch poetics is a framework for reading and writing, it refers to a set of tactics in which errors are captured, mimicked or induced to produce moments of “critical sensory encounter” with the technics of language. This perspective on linguistic error is influenced by the ways that glitches and malfunctions have been valorised in media arts’ “glitch art” movement – particularly the way these practices reveal the formally withdrawn aspects of ‘black-boxed’ devices and software. But the glitch is a highly subjective categorisation, and new media – by their very newness – can also be said to constitute ruptures in what was formally inaccessible. Our encounter with new media, in this sense, is often indistinguishable from the unsettling encounter we associate with glitch.
(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)
Entropic Texts is an interactive html5 browser-based artwork co-authored with Jason Nelson. This piece debuted at ISEA2015 (International Symposium of Electronic Art) in Vancouver, Canada, as a part of the exhibition ‘New Text: An Exhibit about Literary and Artistic Explorations into What It Means to Read, Write, and Create’ Curated by Dene Grigar. The theme of ISEA2015, and thus this exhibition, was ‘disruption’.
The idea behind this artwork/digital poem/electronic literature piece, was to consider entropy through a variety of different means. The first way, was through creating an imaginary space where the entropy actually worked faster – imagining a world where there was a corner of the earth in which things aged and decomposed quicker. For this we chose a junkyard – a space of decay. Secondly we considered how entropy would affect certain types of data, and how it could be represented through data – both visual and textual. For this we decided to use a variety of glitching techniques. Finally, we considered how a conceptual entropy could affect a website interface, as the user moved through it.
What resulted, is a web space where the interface and the story are tied together. The interface scrolls through pages that open up like theatre curtains on a z axis, so there is only scrolling involved. The piece is visually set in a junkyard (taking the pictures for this is a story in itself!), and as the viewer moves further into the z axis of the work, the ‘decay force’ of the space becomes stronger, as measured by a graph that appears every few scrolls. As the decay force moves between the normal earth rate, and 100%, the images, text, and other elements of the interface become glitched, more difficult to read, and less user-friendly, until by 100% it is practically impossible to view properly. Throughout the piece, there are hotspots and other hidden elements for the viewer to explore, that pop up new pieces of poetic text.
This isn’t a fancy trick of code – we created each page/scroll/image with an intentional amount of glitch, and planned this out on a percentage scale. This allowed us to directly engage with the concept of how to represent glitch through text, and digital poetry.
Jason’s talents and my own complimented each other nicely in this piece (as they have in the previous work we have created together, Camberland). We are both keenly interested in science and natural phenomena, so entropy was always already a theme we could easily agree on. We both have creative writing backgrounds, and Jason was indeed at one time my professor for electronic literature and digital poetry. Glitch and sci-art are themes often seen in my work, and I like how beautifully broken data can be at once conceptually dense, academic, and poetic.
(Source: http://alintakrauth.com/entropictexts)
Interactive Depth Interface
Entropic Texts is an experiment in using text, image, and an interactive interface, to explore the notion of entropy. Entropy is nature’s tendency towards decay. Thus, it is entropy that predicts the arrow of time, and the length of the life of all things – living and material. As you scroll through this artwork, you are lead into a world where the ‘force’ of decay gets slowly stronger, to the point where text, images, and moving image, become glitched and decayed beyond recognition. This imaginary world of quickening decay is represented by the junkyard. What we often call junkyards are spaces that were once collections of adored or useful items, that have succumbed to entropy, thus they are both clear metaphorical and physical spaces of decay. Using a combination of the artists’ own poetry written while visiting junkyards, and generated text, we seek to experiment with the life and decay of digital data.
This work is intended to be read both ways. Once the end is reached – 99% decay force, the piece can then be scrolled back through, reversing the arrow of time, and thus reversing entropy.The act of creating a digital interactive artwork feels a lot like fighting with the forces of entropy – as an artist you are creating a work that is constantly attempting to break itself. Sometimes a large portion of the artist’s role is to resurrect broken data. This process of creation and destruction of data, while central to our theme, was also self evident in the creation of the work itself.
(Source: http://www.secrettechnology.com/)
An overview and explanation of glitch aesthetics.