stretchtext

The Stir Fry Texts are interactive texts that twitch and change as you move the mouse over them. Each stir fry consists of n distinct texts. Each of the n texts is partitioned into t pieces. When you mouseover any of the t parts of a text, that part is replaced with the corresponding part of the next of the n texts. Each stir fry contains a graphic that, when clicked repeatedly, lets you cycle through the n texts. I did the programming of the stir frys and did the texts of the first couple. Later, "Log" was done in collaboration with Brian Lennon and "Blue Hyacinth" with Pauline Masurel. The project also includes two essays. "Stir Frys and Cut Ups" relates these forms, and "Material Combinatorium Supremum" discusses the combinatorial form of the stir frys. The stir fry texts are steeply combinatorial. I did the programming in DHTML. I am indebted to Marko Niemi for his upgrading of the programming in 2004. Now they run OK on both PC and Mac and most contemporary browsers on both platforms. (Source: Author description, ELC v.1)

The Mandrake Vehicles consists of three "vehicles," each one surfaced with a large text block concerning the biological development, folklore, occult ritual, magical association, and homeopathic usages of the mandrake plant. The surface text blocks can be read linearly from one to the next. However, each surface text also conceals a depth of two additional poems (as well as liquid layers, when the letters are in a transitional state). In each vehicle, both of these inner poems have technically been visible all along in the top layer, but remain undetected because of the presence of the other letters and characters. The inner poems of each vehicle are unearthed as letters drift off the surface of the poem and the remaining letters solidify into new poems. In addition to the relationships created between the contents of the three poems of each vehicle, relationships are also forged between words of the different layers that share the same letter(s). In the liquid layers, letters cast off scales of themselves which fall down the screen, colliding with other cast-off scales to form the detritus words, the trash cast off by the process.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

The Jew's Daughter is an interactive, non-linear, multivalent narrative, a storyspace that is unstable but nonetheless remains organically intact, progressively weaving itself together by way of subtle transformations on a single virtual page.

(Source: Authors' description from ELC 1.)