myth

Our deeply ingrained need to trust language enables Feed to generate an endless simulacrum of social commentary cum mythopoeic narrative spontaneously from largely random associations of charged words. It presents cultural observation through the blind eye of chance. The blank passing moment becomes the creator of mythos. It allows us the opportunity to turn ambiguity into poetry, absurdity into satire, unexpected fortuitous alignments into insight. Feed chronicles the mechanisms of the chronicle rather than its subjects. It removes “realism” from the equation, flirting with the meaningless and parading arbitrary associations before the reader under the banners of archetype and metaphor. Feed historicizes, editorializes, moralizes, sings, dances, and wears funny hats, all in the name of “analyzing” its own inventions.

(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI Conference)

The Wave Electronic Illuminated Hypertext is a multisensory etext derived from a series of new media performances. The work explores and articulates a collection of meditations on myth, metaphor, and digital embodiment.An interactive assemblage of images, videodance, sound, animation, iconography, and text, The Wave creates an electronic architecture of hyper-dimensional poetic language. This electronic architecture expands and redefines the dramatic text as a fluid, animated, interactive infrastructure that exists in a liminal hyperspace between text and performance. The work expands and redefines the dance as dynamic, sensate, experiential process of inner transformation integrating the mind, body, and senses in metaphorical movement.Cumulatively, The Wave is an original "posthuman myth" derivative of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The dancing body of a woman warrior embodies the fundamental metaphor. She encounters gods, goddesses, enigmas and archetypes, all of which are reflections of herself in virtual space. Her psyche is reflected, refracted, expanded, and transformed into vertical, virtual dimensions. She becomes a meta-body: an elusive, shape-shifting equation of light, intelligence, rupture, and complexity."The body is not just repositioned by new technologies but supplemented, extended, and remade into a material-information entity whose boundaries are continuously constructed and reconstructed in its interactions with instruments whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge." – Adalaide Morris, New Media PoeticsFinally, The Wave is an electronic exploration of the format of the illuminated manuscript, most commonly associated with poet/artist William Blake. In traditional illuminated manuscripts, gold ink was used to represent the "light of God" illuminating the text. In this work, the light is electronic and represents the force of contemporary mythic experience through the exponentially expanding apertures of the digital.

(Source: Introduction to the project from The New River)

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)

"The Way North" is a Digital Literary Art project that works its way through history, myths and motifs with regards to Inuit folkways and the disasters of global climate change.

Artist StatementEdited from an interview with Edward Pirot on "The Way North" . . .

The challenge of this project, as with several others, was to take an important, if not crucial, subject (in this case, the warming of the Arctic and the destruction of a way of life as symbolic of what's happening, and will happen, globally) and make a piece of Digital Literary Art that would be informative while advancing the medium's aesthetic possibilities

I always do research for a several months before beginning to write and design a project, so that by the time I began I already had a fairly large notebook from which to draw. But the research continued throughout the one and a half years, and, as usual, lead me in unexpected directions.

The original plan called for 35 screens, because that boxes the northern half of the compass. But I stopped at twenty-five and redesigned the contents page, not only because other work was beginning to develop, but because I felt the project was getting too large to expect people to consider the screens in any depth, and the depth, or density, of texts and images is always my prime consideration. Duration is to Digital Literary Art what size of canvas is to a painting. Thus, there are five screens linked to each button on the contents page, each thread a loose theme.

As to the level of detail I began with, that developed as I went along. But I did consciously balance the various inputs. I hope that part of the pleasure of viewing "The Way North" is not knowing what to expect on the next screen, whether it be a sound, animation, or a hidden link. Except for the excerpts from Glenn Gould's radio play, "The Idea of North," sounds were found on the Internet when needed, edited and sometimes collaged.

The textual splicing you speak of, I call "invaginations." My idea, which dates back to the early 1990s, was to have quotes within quotes, each in a smaller font, until they disappeared, and then returned back out, font by font, finally to continue the original sentence. Sort of like a whirlpool of information enveloped in the middle of an idea. But this didn't work because, functionally, it became too complex. So now I usually use a single interruption. Invaginations bug some people; but disruption of the text’s smooth line of flight is the plan, and also to inject fragments from the canon directly into the body of the text.

I don't remember exactly how invaginations came about. They just sort of evolved. I suspect my reading of Gregory Ulmer's essay, "The Object of Post-Criticism," had something to do with it. Probably, also, Edmund Jabes' poetry, which I was enthusiastically reading during the mid-1980s. Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, all contributed. Intellectually, that was an exciting time! Then the availability of wordprocessing programs finally made the trope technically viable.

I try to use the simplest digital tools that still give me the ability to carry out an aesthetically complex agenda. Just like I incorporate iterant voices into my writing, I move a project through several ancillary programs, each supplying its range of code, which builds into a complexity of words, images, and sometimes sounds. I think you're right that I don't want to be too heavily indebted to the technology because it can lead me away from the purity of the creative act. For example, hand-coding would be a waste of time for me. But we are all learning from each other's approach to this still nascent medium.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

Structured in four acts, Maguire offers a personal narrative reflecting Ireland, its culture, and its myths.

Nepabunna uses remote sensing data from the Landsat 5 satellite as the starting point, then progresses to a mythopoeia of contemporary technology (using Australian Aboriginal themes) and finally cites string theory as an example of the nexus between science/beauty/truth. Poetry and digital media combine to examine this nexus.

(Source: Author's description for the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards)

The Minotaur Project is a cluster of four poems fused with image, movement and sound. It is part of a hypermedia novel in verse that explores contemporary issues of identity using the framework of classical myth. Minotaur appears as a fragmented persona confined in the computer’s labyrinth. It attempts to understand self and others (specifically Kore, the main character in this verse novel) without that primary means of connection to the sensate world, the body.

A story of our far future, unearthed by a Scholar to whom it is the distant past. But for that far-off scholar, as for every reader, the paths followed and the connections forged among the diaries, letters, confessions, and artifacts lead only to further questions. Some documents speak to us of Egderus, a young boy at the isolated Mountain House. What -- or who -- lives in the rocky hills around him? What secrets bind his superiors in fear and silence? What is it that creeps out, undetected, to drive a man mad, or to tear him limb from limb? Why must Egderus later leave the Mountain House as amanuensis to the Good Doctor, interrogator and torturer? What intrigue surrounds one prisoner, the Historian, that makes the Good Doctor so relentless in his attack? Why, ultimately, is this Historian the one victim that Egderus attempts to rescue? Years later, as an old man at the Mountain House, Egderus uncovers only more mysteries. What did the Historian learn that drove him to his death? Does something live, still, in the rocks around him? And how shall Egderus pursue this disturbing legacy that could shake the foundations of his darkening world?

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

The generative hyperfiction its name was Penelope is a collection of memories in which a woman photographer recollects the details of her life.Like a photos in a photo album, each lexia represents a picture from the narrator's memory, so that the work is the equivalent of a pack of small paintings or photographs that the computer continuously shuffles. The reader sees things as she sees them and observes her memories come and go in a natural, yet nonsequential manner that creates a constantly changing order -- like the weaving and reweaving of Penelopeia's web.Begun in 1988, the work was exhibited in a computer-mediated artists book version at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California in 1989. It has been re-created through the years. Four versions have been identified by Dene Grigar, in Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media: Version 1.0: "The exhibition version." Created in 1989 with Malloy's own generative hypertext authoring system, Narrabase II, in BASIC on a 3.5-inch floppy diskVersion 2.0: "The Narrabase Press version." Published in 1990, this version is an extensive revision of the 1989 version and features a new cover and the edited text; it was released on a 5.25-inch floppy disk, self-published via Narrabase Press, and distributed by Art Com Software. She reports that she may have produced copies on 3.5-inch floppy disks for later requestsVersion 3.0: "The Eastgate version." This version is a retooling of Version 2.0 by Mark Bernstein from the original BASIC program into the Storyspace aestheticVersion 3.1: Published on 3.5-inch floppy disk for both Mac and PC formats by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1993 but copyrighted in 1992Version 3.2: Published on CD-ROM in 1998 with no changes from the original. This version does not appear on the Eastgate Systems, Inc. websiteVersion 4.0: "The Scholar's version." Created under the auspices of the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2016 from Jan 18 to Feb 14, 2016 as a DOSBox emulation of Version 3.0 and includes uses the new text and translations of the Odyssey by the authorA special note: An iPad version has been in development since 2012 by Eastgate Systems, Inc. It was designed with the same aesthetic as Version 3.0 but used the affordance of mobile touch technology for its functionality. To date, it has not been completed. its name was Penelope was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review,  Washington Post Book World, The Bay Guardian, Postmodern Culture, the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, American Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, among others.  It was exhibited at the 2012 MLA Convention, The Electronic Literature Organization Conference, the University of Nevada, Reno, The Space, Boston, MA, and the Richmond Art Center, and, among many other collections,  is included in the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archive (video of reading) and the NYC Museum of Modern Art's special collections. (1990 Narrabase Press edition)