keyboard

"This poem from the Wordtoys allows any user to rewrite Don Quixote through its interface. As the famous Borges's Pierrre Menard would do, here, regardless of what a user enters into the word processor that is offered to us as the poem's interface, the program returns Cervantes's text. The keystrokes that one carries out on the keyboard stop corresponding to the output shown on the screen, this being totally out of the control of the now writer-creator."

-Alex Saum-Pascual

(S)PACING is a poetic performance piece that reflects upon the nervous habit of pacing and ideas of internal dialogue while walking as a source of poetic inspiration and contemplation, if not procrastination. The application for performance can either be played on the keyboard, or use live video motion tracking to access and combine screen-based still image, video, text, and audio content. The title of the piece refers not only to the act of pacing but also to pacing as a measure of time. The addition of the (s) at the beginning of the title, rendering the title spacing, could be said to refer not only to the locative and defamiliarizing spatial variations in the piece but also to formal aspects of poetry such as meter, feet, line breaks and stanzas. Though the performance, the actions of the performer may be fundamentally pedestrian they are put in contrast with mental and poetic machination in terms of the poetic output generated by the movement. In effect, the performer develops a system of, and has live action control over the scansion of the generated poem while handing over control of the vocalizations, imagery, and textual display to the application. The work made its debut at ePoetry 2009 (Barcelona), and was presented in installation form at ePoetry 2011 (Buffalo)

Goss went to an internet cafe in the lower east side on the winter solstice of December 21st and again on the summer solstice of June 21st."Solstice" is made from the words and phrases that appeared in Google on the cafe's computers on those days. The computers were set to "autoComplete" so by simply typing a letter, she could see all previous searches done beginning with that letter.The result is a combinatory found poem generator that the user configures by hitting individual keys to add phrases beginning with the corresponding letter.

(Source: Author's description)

"pianographique" is a "multimedia instrument" created in 1993 on CD-ROM and made available on the Web in 1996 by a French webarts collective. "pianographique" is a work of "programmatical literal art," a term coined by John Cayley. Letters are "literal" here: they tumble and morph automatically, and they can also be manipulated on occasion by the reader-interactor and/or generated by the program. The user of this work is presented with a keyboard on the screen that corresponds to the keyboard beneath her fingertips. Each letter of the user's keyboard, when pressed, produces a distinct sound score and an animation that can be displaced by the hand of the user working a mouse. Playing the "piano" of graphics and sound bites, the user can create an infinite number of verbal visual-aural collages, while hitting the space bar effaces all that has come before. The user can choose from a set of three sections to „write“ a story: "Sound System," Continuum," and "Pianoparole." Lamarque has programmed "pianographique" in such a way that the same constricted motions required to form a letter (curves and lines) are responsible, when digitally processed, for the letter's disfigurations. The swirling motions of the user's hand are mirrored on the screen only. These gestures render the letter illegible; its constituent marks are returned to protowriting, to the status of meaningless shapes and lines. Visually, "pianographique" becomes a work of post-concrete poetry accompanied by music. While the work is dadaistic and surrealistic, it also recalls dance and gestural movements or paintings by Cy Twombly and Robert Morris.

 (Source: "Digital Gestures" by Carrie Noland published in New Media Poetics.)