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.
White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a digital poem, which includes a mixture of primarily the English language with some instances of Spanish. In this work Glazier explores alternatives to our customary experiences, through the use of a generator which changes the text of the poems every 10 seconds, turning it from it’s traditional static state to one with movement and change. Furthermore, the evocation of traveling through the images and anecdotes, provides an exploration of a multilingual and multicultural experience. Additionally, the presences of the HTML code leads to a work with multiple possibilities, primarily on how the reader perceives and experiences the work due to the possible technical reading of the code and the multiple possible poetic readings.
Author description: White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a JavaScript investigation of literary variants with a new text generated every ten seconds. Its goals are as follows. (1) To present a poetic evocation of the images, vocabulary, and sights of Costa Rica's language and natural ecosystems though poetic text and visuals. (2) To investigate the potential of literary variants. Thinking of poems where authors have vacillated between variant lines, Bromeliads offers two alternatives for each line of text thus, for an 8 line poem, offering 512 possible variants, exploring the multi-textual possibilities of literary variants. (3) It explores the richness of multiple languages. (4) It mines the possibilities of translation, code, and shifting digital textuality. Having variants regenerate every ten seconds provides poems that are not static, but dynamic; indeed one never finishes reading the same poem one began reading. This re-defines the concept of the literary object and offers a more challenging reading, both for the reader and for the writer in performance, than a static poem. The idea is to be able to read as if surfing across multiple textual possibilities. Such regeneration allows traces of different languages to overwrite each other, providing a linguistic and cultural richness.
Blending Spanish and English and offering a sort of postcard prelude to each of its constantly changing stanzas, White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a poem that explores alternatives and crossings. From line to line the reader can enjoy the turns of phrase but then must figure out how to deal with their constantly turning nature. Options include waiting for the line that was being read to re-appear, re-starting from the beginning of the line that just appeared, or continuing from the middle of the word or phrase.
White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares es un poema digital, originalmente escrito en inglés y español. Después la obra fue traducida completamente al español. La obra de Glazier explora los varios alternativos a nuestras experiencias habituales, a través el uso de un generador que muta el texto del poema cada 10 segundos, resultando en un poema dinámico y cambiante, en contraste a su forma tradicional, estático. Además, las imágenes y anécdotas dentro del poema evocan una esencia de viaje, proporcionando una experiencia de la multilingüe y multicultural. Por último, el uso del código HTML convierte la obra en una de múltiple posibilidades, no solo por su generador, pero por su capacidad de ser experimentada y percibida por el lector en distintas formas, como una lectura técnica (de código HTML) o poética.
Author Reading notes: Allow [title] page to cycle for a while, so you can take in some of the images and variant titles. When you are ready, press begin. Once there, read each page slowly, watching as each line periodically re-constitutes itself re-generating randomly selected lines with that line's variant. Eight-line poems have 256 possible versions; nine-line poems have 512 possible versions.
This paper examines Minna Sundberg’s ongoing and award winning digital web comic Stand Still. Stay Silent as a type of e-literature increasingly found in the “gap” between digitized comics and graphic novels on the one hand and born digital e-lit on the other. While the Sunberg’s process of production will be briefly noted, the main focus explores how the comic thematizes modes of interactivity that Sundberg also encourages in her readers/followers via forms of social media. Set in a post-apocalyptic world , the comic is an ongoing tale of exploration and discovery, where a group young explorers have left the havens of plague-free safe zones in order to see what is left of the rest of the world. The supernatural elements associated with the plague, or “the illness,” are also associated with a past that somehow went wrong. Writing of “Beasts, Trolls, and Giants,” the narrator explains, “They are a shadow of our past, a distorted echo of what once there was.” Avoiding the shadow of the past and the monstrosities it has produced is a powerful theme, carrying an implied social critique that deserves examination. In an environment divided into safe areas and the Silent World, the first rule beyond safe zones is avoidance of beasts, trolls and giants: “do not run or call for help but stand still and stay silent. It might go away” (Sundberg, 2013: 68). While Christensen insists that Stand Still Stay Silent’s themes of isolation and fear of contagion fit formulaic plague narrative perfectly, my paper argues that this is only in the exposition of the story world. The governing principle of the comic, both structural and thematic, is transgression.
While the characters often go where they are not supposed to go, a central feature of the social interaction of those on the mission is debate about what to do and how to interpret their experiences. Lingustic, cultural, and interpretive gaps are evinced throughout the comic by the language difficulties of the characters: some only speak Finnish and others only Norwegian or Swedish (this is indicated by a drawing of each country’s flag); a few are multi-lingual; in order to communicate, they must cooperate as a group. These moments in the plot invite readers to also engage in debate in the comments feature available through the comic’s platform, to offer solutions and plot suggestions in between postings of the new panel(s), a feature Sundberg herself wrote about in her undergraduate thesis. A key means of building a readership, she writes, is to create, via a comments section, a means for readers to build a personal connection with the world of the narrative and the author; social media is another (2013: 17). The capacity for, and the necessity of, interaction is emphasized by both the plot and the digital affordances of the comic, and is set against expectations that the characters (and readers )might bring concerning the safety of isolation and fear of others.
(Source: ELO 2018 Conference: Gaps in the Gavas: Digital Comics: Opening up the Silent World: Narrating Interaction in a Digital Comic)
While Christensen insists that Stand Still Stay Silent’s themes of isolation and fear of contagion fit formulaic plague narrative perfectly, my paper argues that this is only in the exposition of the story world. The governing principle of the comic, both structural and thematic, is transgression.
Projected on a grid of particles that at times seem ordered, while sometimes chaotic and always in flux, Ormstad's constructed language poetry is exposed and read by the author while performing to Mashtalir's pulsating music and Vojjov's atmospheric scapes in the first two works LONG RONG SONG and NAVN NOME NAME. The first is based on Ormstad's language research project from his second book of concrete poetry from 2004. Here he creates words that may exist or not in any language, and this is related to Vojjov's creation of numbers, geometric forms and abstract shapes. The second work is made from Ormstad's collection of poetic family names used in Oslo, Norway, also here accompanied by Vojjov's world of cosmic shapes. The last track, kakaoase, is based on a printed picture by Ormstad, made of sound poetry where he's playing with the Norwegian language. Most of the words have no – or almost no – meaning, and here Mashtalir's music makes this an exceptional possibility for participating and dancing to concrete poetry! 3 CONCRETE are the first works of a collection created by the Norwegian–Russian duo OTTARAS (Ottar Ormstad and Taras Mashtalir). Alexander Vojjov has created the two first videos. The tracks exists in different versions made for screening and live performance. Raising awareness of electronic poetry and sonic ecology, attracting new audiences to a potent yet to come genre is the inspiration for this collaboration. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)
In the video lyms (which is a non-semantic word), I have solved the question of translation in a special way: words in different languages like spanish, french, german, english and scandinavian are put together. None of them have the same meaning, the viewer may just taste on the words. In the first part of the video all the words are starting with f. In the beginning the f's are exposed in a way they constitute different pictures. The system of the expositions are based on how I made concrete poetry in the sixties. Instead of repeating them differently line by line, the new technology allows me to expose them differently through time. Then more and more letters are shown, until all the words are exposed.
Each viewer will have a different experience dependent upon their language background, and the ability to enjoy the poetic combination of the words and the visuality together with the music.
The second part is different. Here I use a combination of photos and pictures I have made just out of letters. (I’ve done the photowork in the darkroom, and then scanned). Some of the letter-pictures are from an exhibition of digital prints I’ve had in Oslo. Most of them are just made out of the sounds and the visual aspect, some are meaningful in a way, like the page with spanish words starting with a.
Duration: 7:40
(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI)
Animation: Vibeke LutherMusic: Hallvard W. Hagen and Jens Petter Nilsen (“Xploding Plastix”)
Film made by Ottar Ormstad (incl all photos and pictures)