NYU
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permafrost is a poetry chapbook by Álvaro Seiça. permafrost launches ‘The Proposal Series,’ a collaborative editorial project by Bypass Editions and Flatland Design.
On September 15, 2008, the newspaper Público published an article about the world’s most northern town, Longyearbyen, Norway, which chronicled the unusual life and habits of the researchers that study the Arctic and its permafrost, the permanently frozen subsoil.
Inspired by this text, Álvaro Seiça wrote a series of sms poems with 140 characters, challenging not only the boundaries between informative text and fictional text, but also the meaning of poetic text, poem, poetic sources, and line break.
(Source: Bypass Editions)
Illya Szilak interviews J. R. Carpenter in her on-going series of posts on E-Lit for Huffington Post Books.
In much of her work, writer/artist J. R. Carpenter fabricates hybrid places that are both "virtual" and attached to real world locales.... these online spaces contain objects whose appearance together makes sense only in the context of the artwork, in Carpenter's case, multimedia stories. Combining intimate details, both autobiographical and appropriated, of characters' lives with real-world maps and photo and video "documentation," Carpenter's works are narrative landscapes through which the reader meanders.
DESCRIPTION FROM CRITICAL COMMONS: The materialization of text in an urban landscape is nowhere more in evidence than in French designer Antoine Bardou-Jacquet's video for Alex Gopher's The Child. Bardou-Jacquet's all-textual rendering of New York city borrows its basic concept from Jeffrey Shaw's Legible City project from the late 1980s, while stripping narrative volition away from the viewer. Whereas Shaw's project allows reader-users to simulate moving through geographically and architecturally correct streets of Amsterdam, Manhattan, or Karlsruhe on a stationary bicycle while reading the text of a story mapped onto buildings in the city, The Child delivers a high-speed chase through the streets of New York City with both landmarks and people rendered as all text. The tension that exists in these works hinges on the conflict between real and constructed environments, as well as the insistent interplay of surface and depth.
Alex Gopher: music. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet: design and vision.
The complete title for this multimedia poem is “Last Words (Ordinary People Speak at the Moment of Death / In or Around the New York City Area)” and it is both descriptive of the poem’s theme and suggestive of a key strategy. Organized around eight characters’ final words and the contexts in which those words were uttered, each one is represented by a brief “slice of death” narrative, and a poetic voice from beyond that provides an ironic counterpoint, full of Bigelow’s characteristic darkly understated humor. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop’s Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA). Lynne knows everyone knows it’s supposed to be the other way around. Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. Meanwhile, the real city fish lie in scaly heaps on long ice-packed tables in hot and narrow Chinatown streets. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities. http://luckysoap.com/cityfish
"What fish they must have been, fishes' fish, blue and wall-eyed in deep cold water. Fishs' thoughts inside their heads: everything food or death, for food is living. Never still, until netted and hauled in. Until then, whole lives in motion." CityFish, J. R. Carpenter
"CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. A big fish story swallowing a small tale’s tail. A rhizome, a fable, an urban legend. Like an old wives’ tale, it’s long been told but is never quite finished. In its latest incarnation, CityFish is a web-based hypermedia panoramic narrative. Completed in November 2010, with the support of a new media creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, CityFish was presented in Beta at “Archive & Innovate, The 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization,” at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, June 3-6, 2010. CityFish was also presented as a work-in-progress at “Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering,” at The Banff Centre, in Banff, Alberta, Canada, February 18, 2010. The Coney Island videos were shot on location in 2005 and edited during the “Babel Babble Rabble: On Language and Art” thematic residency at The Banff Centre in 2006. A very, very, very early web-based iteration of CityFish was presented in an exhibition called IßWAS, at the Bavarian American Hotel in Nuremberg, Germany, July 1998. That iteration incorporated a series of photographs shot on 35mm film in Chinatown, Toronto, circa 1996; a line drawing of a fish with a tall building for a tail, drawn at around the same time; and a very short story of the same name written in 1995 from the first-person point of view of a fish." CityFish, J. R. Carpenter
CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop's Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA). Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities.
requires quicktime plug-in, requires internet connection