image and text

Wish4[0] takes as its inspiration the perpetual tugging at a user’s consciousness by the digital. Each work takes as its immediate inspiration a headline (or item) drawn from the electronic news cycle of that specific day. The resulting block of poetic works: 1) Act as a digital and creative “literary snapshot” of a specific period. 2) Highlight the accelerated nature of an electronic/networked-based news cycle. 3) Illustrate the discrepancies – and perhaps similarities - between how a digital audience responds to items deemed newsworthy and creative responses to such items. 4) Echo (and partially emulate) elements of digital culture that have become seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives (including programs such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine, Snapchat and Instagram). This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

BEAST. The Web fosters, and depends on, utter transience of attention. Extending television's effects through its much-vaunted interactivity, it has reduced writing to "content" squeezed between gaud and flash and irrelevance. In Beast, the reader directs the progress of a single text by interacting with it and its interior world of fake-3-D images. Beast tries to tap the interactive possibilities of the medium while allowing the text to be seen as a whole; the eye is a hypertext engine more sophisticated than any we could devise. But Beast also subverts itself through jarring messages and the system's periodic takeover of its own functions. A nightmarish, superficially dehumanizing system, Beast decocts much that is terrifying and unpleasant about computer technology, and about society and ourselves as the computer has built us. But this monstrosity has a humanizing core, the text, that speaks to the anxieties the system produces. Beast attempts to highlight the dichotomy between the ugliness of computer technology and its almost medieval beauty, that archaic and authentically primitive quality of the Web-wide world that has erected itself among us so suddenly, and that rests on so little besides marketplace forces.

(Source: Author's description for 1998 Virtual Worlds conferenc)

Why Some Dolls Are Bad is a generative, permutational graphic novel which engages themes of ethics, fashion, artifice and the self, and presents a re-examination of systems and materials including mohair, contagion, environmental decay, Perspex cabinetry, and false-seeming things in nature such as Venus Flytraps.

Why Some Dolls Are Bad was originally launched on the Facebook platform but has been adapted for the iPhone and relaunched in 2010. The project collects images from a tag-constrained stream of public Flickr images and combines them with fragments from the original non-linear text. Once the application is downloaded, image and text come together into a frame which is read and then advanced, creating an ongoing dynamic narrative.

Readers can capture frames and send them to an archive, where each frame becomes a “page” in the novel. The collective archiving of iterative captures from the project means that a version of the book can be read in a linear order.

This collections of four hypertext poems are organized around each of the four elements of old. The primary techniques that guides these works is collage and pastiche because each work is built from images (mostly by Dave McKean) and textual excerpts from other writers, with the exception of “Fire,” which Sanders wrote. The pieces are structured linearly, which means that each page has a link to the next until one reaches the end of the sequence. One piece, “Air” doesn’t have links, but uses the meta refresh tag to load the next page in the sequence every 5 seconds, perhaps to create the sense that one is being carried by a gentle wind from one page to the next. The combination of images and pithy lines and silky smooth prose poems create an oddly refreshing experience of the Web, as the minimalist design and sense of assembled Web objects— most of the texts are images of texts, which are computationally very different objects.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

A mythic parody that challenges current genetic engineering techniques. After being considered a source of female evil for thousands of years, Lilith and Eve reinvent themselves by creating an ethical gene according to ancient Hebraic Kabbalah ritual. With this new gene they mold a golem, an artificial anthropoid. The kabbalah gene displaces the artist's gene that Eduardo Kac invented in his artwork, "Genesis."

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

A woman leaves her country. She tries to meet vacant spaces, to forget paths. She's considering the new territory. She's not stopping. A trip is more a seeking than an adventure. The decision to leave a country first comes from the will to break apart of the family circle, with the blind old uses, and over all, the will to get out from a cocoon, and take the way of self-modification.

Sequences are derogating, asking for answers, facing or not each other. A quest or an escape, or simply to be a Labyrinth, where images goes back to the target, in the central node of it's performance and its hopeless thoughts: the nude, the nude flesh of life.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

Post Modern Object attempts to explore the idea of the post modern utilizing technology which has been built and modeled in the wake of post modernity. Due the form in which it was conceived, the web has capabilities uniquely suited to presenting material on the subject. "Objective: Towards a new experience: Not a critical work, not a music video, not a novel, not a video game, but something from all. Utilizing multiple and ever more complex interfaces (ways of accessing the information), the user is invited to experience the chosen selections. Not only has the author died, but so has the author's pattern: What remains? A collection of narrative morphemes, quotations, images (textual and visual, titles, themes, character descriptions/identities, and critical analyses).

"This work attempts to engage with the process of structure: In this case, the structure of an academic text."

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

As a writer, I've always had a deep interest in the relations between words, and images. To me, they are the two members of an original sign which by itself was able to give things their meaning. Using the web authoring tools that makes mixing words and images easy, we can try to find this first means of representation again. But quickly this reasoning becomes invalid. We will never find this original sign again. We are, on the contrary, living in a world where words have been deprived of their power to name things by the abundance of images. This generates a misfortune that can be read in my Formes libres flottant sur les ondes.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

 "In this hypertext, I interrogate the language, imagery, and ideologies of cosmetics advertisements and related texts. Hypertext as a form lends itself to unorthodox juxtapositions, particularly through linkages based on associative logic (e.g., metaphors, puns). I invoke the feminist understanding that "The Personal Is Political," combining autobiographical reflections with an analysis of the discourse and industry of cosmetics. The personal dimension includes elements from my unconscious (following in the Surrealist tradition of automatic writing).

"The political dimension includes an examination of the political economy of beauty. Both levels include many kinds of images, such as family photographs, cosmetics advertisements, images from cosmetics industry journals, and images from books on makeovers and modeling. These elements are juxtaposed, sometimes in conversation, sometimes in "collision," to borrow a term Sergei Eisenstein uses to describe his method of montage in film. I do not approach my investigation of subjectivity, media messages, and political economy directly through theoretical analysis, but indirectly, through associative connections (reasoning through dream logic). In this text, I use the analogy of the cosmetics "makeover" as the frame that holds together my information. I take the conventions of the beauty makeover and apply them to the face, to the self (identity, experience), and to society as a whole. For each "step" of the makeover, I address both the literal instructions for making over a woman's face, as well as more figurative applications that come through reading this makeover process metaphorically. The thematic focus of the work is rooted in my urge to rethink the social--I ask, through the construction of this polyvalent (hyper)text: can we begin to invent a materially grounded utopian vision through the lens of contemporary female beauty?"

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)