scheduled

By Alvaro Seica, 4 September, 2015
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Abstract (in English)

In the 1980s, the world saw the introduction of personal computers (PCs). While the first creative stage of electronic literature took advantage of mainframe computers, only accessible in institutional environments, the context in which Silvestre Pestana created his first computer poems was totally different – a new wave Pedro Barbosa sarcastically calls “poesia doméstica” [domestic poetry] (1996: 147). With personal computers, Silvestre Pestana programmed in BASIC, first for a Sinclair ZX81, and then, already with chromatic lighting, for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, three poems respectively dedicated to Henri Chopin, E. M. de Melo e Castro and Julian Beck, which resulted in the Computer Poetry (1981-83) series. Pestana, a visual artist, writer and performer – who had returned from the exile in Sweden after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 – brought diverse influences put forward with photography, video, performance, and computer media. From his creative production, it should be emphasized the iconic conceptual piece Povo Novo [New People] (1975), which was remediated by the author himself in the referred series of kinetic visual poems, “video-computer-poems” (Pestana 1985: 205) or “infopoems” (Melo e Castro 1988: 57). By operating almost like TV scripts, the series oscillates between recognizable shapes – such as the oval and the larger animated Lettrist shapes, formed by the small-sized words “ovo” (egg), “povo” (people), “novo” (new), “dor” (pain) and “cor” (color) – and the reading interpretation of the words themselves: “ovo,” the unity, but also the potential; “povo,” the collective, the indistinct, the mass; “novo” and “cor/dor.” This play of relations translates the new consciousness, although painful, of a “new people” in a new historic, social and artistic period, one of freedom and action. In an interview, Pestana (2011) claimed having researched more than thirty languages, only to find in Portuguese the possibility of traversing the singular and the plural, the individual and the collective, the past, present and future, by just dislocating a letter: ovo/(p)ovo/(n)ovo.

(Source: Author's text)

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According to its author, Agnus Valente, “Uterus therefore Cosmos” is a kind of work in progress developed during the years 2003 to 2007. In this project, several e-poems created by Valente and his twin brother, Nardo Germano, explores the expressive and conceptual potential of the World Wide Web. “Uterus therefore Cosmos” brings together in one digital environment, works by visual artists, poets and musicians from different eras. Valente proposes a dialogue between his poems authored with his brother and the work of brazilian poets and visual artists. ”Uterus therefore Cosmos” is metaphorically a project of astronomical dimensions. Conceived as a trilogy, the project presents in one website its three stages of creation: “Online Pregnancy” (2003), “Constellations” (2005) and “Expansions” (2007). A keyword to analyze this work is “hybridization”. In this context, the term refers to the ability of mixing signs, senses, media and languages and where all this mixing occurs is undoubtedly the digital medium. Based on the theoretical concepts of “intertextuality” and “Intersemiotic translation” Agnus Valente sets the DNA of his poetics. (Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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“Walt Whitman” isn’t a bot, it is a constraint an anonymous scholar took on: to tweet a portion from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (almost) every day, sequentially from beginning to end, over and over. I use the word “scholar” because of the foregrounding and choice of edition (which edition of Shakespeare is Strebel using?) and the method of the constraint which forces the scholar to read each line when cutting and pasting it. This discipline has the powerful impact of keeping the scholar’s mind focused on this poet’s work on a daily basis, re-discovering Whitman’s poetry over time, and gaining insight in the process. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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“Willy Shakes” was programmed by Joshua Strebel in 2009 and set into motion publishing the complete works of William Shakespeare on Twitter, calculating that “every 10 minutes a new line, 24/7/365. Should take about 2 years, 13 days… and finish around August 24th 2011.” (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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This work is a series of live Twitter performances of characters, each of which has an account and interacts in this social network to form what Breeze describes as a “socumentary.” “A “socumentary” is an entertainment form that merges Choose Your Own Adventure /Alternate Reality Drama/Social Game and Social Networking conventions. The result is a type of synthetic mockumentary that exists entirely within social media formats.

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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Schneider’s artist’s statement, offers the source code in addition to this description. I created @massagemcluhan, a bot that would “massage” McLuhan’s quotes—work them over completely, as McLuhan would say. I’ve noticed McLuhan’s penchant for reworking and revisiting phrases (“the medium is the message” and “the medium is the massage” being the most famous), and thought it would be interesting to rework some of these phrases by substituting various nouns into them. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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This bot generate short template based sentences and publish them on Twitter every 10 minutes. With them Schneider demonstrates some of the versatility of the same kind of device when applied to different topics. The bot “@tonightiate,” uses a relatively simple template that produces an obsessive litany of consumption. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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This bot is a stand-in for Kazemi at the Game Developer’s Conference happening at the time of this posting in San Francisco, because he will not be able to attend for the first time in 10 years. So instead of pining away on Twitter as #GDC tweets flood his stream, he created a bot so his friends could have the pleasure of his company in their own streams, which as we know, is almost as good as his being there. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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This scheduled poem plays like a silent video composed of a series of photographs of a wheat field in the background and kinetic language in the foreground. The text unfolds through a series of transformations of words by moving letters around into to form other words, and letter substitutions that create rapid word sequences. Timing is all in this poem, which could be organized internally by the speed at which its words are transformed and the means by which they change from one to the next. Notice the speed at which a sequence of four letter words change through letter substitution, forming a stream of associations, and the emphasis this gives to the pause at the end. Contrast this to the longer words that transform into other words by moving letters around, emphasizing each word and its meaning as moments with a thematic charge that punctuates the poem.

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

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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This award-winning responsive poem focuses on the Australian ghost town Wittenoom, abandoned due to toxic dust caused by asbestos mining. Each of its nine parts focuses on an aspect of the abandoned town and consists of an image from Wittenoom, generally portraying urban decay, an brief looping instrumental audio track, links to other parts of the poem, a title for the section, and a text accessible through different responsive interfaces. A brief parenthetical help text near the bottom left corner of each screen provides encouragement that hints at the interface, promting readers to explore the interactivity and intuit its internal logic. The thematic focus and consistent visual design pull the work together, while the varied interfaces lead to new explorations of the spaces, together producing an experience both jarring and immersive. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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