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Mastering the Art of French Cooking explores variable communications platforms and randomly accelerated speeds of reading. The work projects a four-column machine-based mode of reading two works that are difficult to master: Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking, and a text by Niklas Luhmann on the subject of systems theory. The default speed of reading is set at 1200 words per minute but is variable and may be changed by adjusting the URL.

(Source: Author's Statement from ELC 3)

Two grand narratives of the mid-twentieth century—Niklas Luhmann's system theory and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking—are placed into an autopoietic dialogue with one another. Known for his experimental work in “ambient literature,” Tan Lin’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Systems Theory playfully juxtaposes two textual tomes known for their complexity against one another at supra-human reading speeds. The indigestible speed of this piece reflects the difficult and often inscrutable subject matter of the original works. Whereas Julia Child’s cookbook contained baroque recipes that exceeded the expectations of Americans accustomed to Betty Crocker basics. Luhmann's systems theory is itself written in deliberately abstruse language. Both works attempt to argue for the importance of interconnectedness, whether it’s the careful attention to complicated multi-step, multi-ingredient processes or a vast interconnected communication network. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Systems Theory, Tan Lin networks these two narratives together, hinting at larger forms of interconnectedness—a homology between the quantified abstractions of food recipes and the abstraction of cybernetics in a computational environment operating at the limits of human sensibility.

(Source: Editorial Statement from ELC 3)

“Memory” is an interactive digital poem composed by kinetic texts and speech sound programmed in Flash by Brazilian researchers and digital poets Alckmar Luiz dos Santos and Gilberto Prado.

The poem’s interface is presented as a grid with nine cells containing nine distorted images of some printed text. When the interactor rolls the mouse over the images, a short animation loop and a voiceover soundtrack are activated playing the verse printed on each image. The verses are set following an initial order, but the interactor may organize new possibilities of reading according to his will.

(Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This Twitter bot generates a metaphor every two minutes (in spite of its name, since Twitter places limits on automated posting), and it is more than sufficient. The constraint provides a little breathing room to consider the metaphor before facing a new one. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This bot use a Markov chain generator to produce tweets, but distinguish itself from other bots by responding to input from those who interact with it via Twitter. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The Karl Marxov Chain responds to a word that users (or Pereira) seed it to guide its search through Karl Marx’s publications, as described. When it gets the seed word, it finds it in the text and takes not the next word, but the next two words. The first two words of this 3-gram are first two words of the tweet. It then takes not the last of these words, but the last two and searches the text for that pair of words. Then, of all of the times that those words appear together, it picks one at random, adds the last word to the chain, and then moves up a word. The result is that the probabilities are a bit more constricted, meaning that the tweet conforms a bit more closely to the original text, meaning it ends up sounding a bit more like normal English. The bot also cheats a bit and tries to make “complete” sentences (start with a word that has an initial capital in the source text and end with a period), but it’s not always successful. The source texts are also not the cleanest in the world, so it sometimes hiccups and tosses out typographical gibberish. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This bot data mines a 1% sample of the public Twitter stream to identify tweets that could be considered haiku. It then republishes the result, formatting it as can be seen above, and retweets the original in its Twitter account. The page the haikus are published in uses random background images of nature, a nod towards the seasonal reference so valued in this poetic tradition. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This poem is built on a two dimensional array with a simple interface that allows people to read the text horizontally and vertically. The position of the pointer (or a contact point on a touchscreen device) triggers which line or column of text is highlighted for readability. Extracted from an ambitious work titled Unbound, this interface illustrates some of the reading strategies necessary for the larger work, which is implemented in a printable form.

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

This narrative poem tells the mock-heroic adventures of an unlikely antihero on an imaginary quest. As Bigelow describes the piece,

In “How They Brought the News from Paradise to Paterson,” a first-person speaker narrates his story (in heroic verse) as he swims from one end of a resort pool complex to another in search of what he thinks is more alcohol, but is in fact a journey to find his marriage
and himself. The poem plays with the epic and tragic within a setting stifled with consumerism and class separation.

The poem is structured as the monomyth, in which the speaker, while lounging at the Paradise pool bar in a 5-star resort in Barbados, overhears what he interprets as a call to adventure: the bar has run out of rum. Taking upon himself to embark upon a journey through the pool complex to find the god-like Concierge at the far end, whose “sage advice / and quick, imperious commands” would restore the flow of rum in Paradise.

This is a true story about the untimely death of someone close to the speaker, who seeks to reconstruct the story of her death in a way that can provide closure and hopefully justice. It is also a reflection on analog and digital storytelling and the objects that hold these stories.

The work’s interface displays each portion of this linear narrative as a kind of slideshow, sequentially presenting each piece of the argument and evidence in a way that makes a compelling and moving. In tune with its media, it is very “electric” with plus and minus symbols on the sides of the slideshow (in the shape of a battery) that serve as a navigation interface. The electricity in the title, the battery, shaped interface, the line of ooooooo’s at the base of the slides— which indicates one’s position in the narrative, all seem to symbolically suggest the energy required in a assembling materials and evidence to put together a compelling narrative, one that might lead to an official investigation.

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

This hypertext poem takes a simple concept and makes it a tour de force. Each word is a link to an image, not of any image, but of photographs which use blurred motion and other effects to convey a sense of speed and evoke the speaker’s tone. The title suggests that either the speaker is in need of catharsis, or the poem itself is the cathartic artistic expression.

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