visual poetry or narrative

A mash-up of Dadaist technique and VJ stylings, this Flash movie is the product of an "antagonist remix" by babel vs. escha. Seven scenes provide enigmatic observations on the nature of contemporary life, on seeing and being seen, understanding and miscommunication, destruction and creation. The texts in the piece are generated randomly as the piece runs, so the reader's experience of the piece is never exactly the same twice. 

(Description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.)

synonymovie generates a sequence of images based on a single word: a "movie" that develops algorithmically through a chain of semantic relations. Initially, synonymovie asks the user to introduce a word, which will be the "seed" (as in "random seed," a number used to initialize a pseudorandom number generator) from which the image sequence will unfold. The sequence starts by finding an image related to the word, using an on-line image search engine. Then, a synonym for the word is obtained from a Web-based synonym server, together with its corresponding image, and so forth. The "movie" will end when a word without synonyms (or related images) is found.

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

The digital project Family Tree is conceived as a mobile responding to two forces: wind and gravity. The reader/listener conjures these at will by moving the mouse: left and right to create movement through wind in the horizontal plane, and up and down to apply the force of gravity and create a vertical movement along the family tree. In this way, the reader/listener shapes the reading experience, causing the text to move and rearrange itself on the digital page. Family Tree can be regarded as an exercise of memory, investigating stories told and our ever-changing recollection of them, as well as a path towards some kind of source DNA: stories mix, converse and change, as people from different places and times are faced with each other. This imaginary space is flexible and open to new possibilities.

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

It may seem paradoxical to create an online work on touching. One cannot touch directly: in this case touching requires a mediating tool such as a mouse, a microphone or a webcam. This touching experience reveals a lot about the way we touch multimedia content on screen, and maybe also about the way we touch people and objects in everyday life. The internet user has access to five scenes (move, caress, hit, spread, blow), plus a sixth one (brush) dissimulated in the interface. She can thus experience various forms and modalities of touching: the erotic gesture of the caress with the mouse; the brutality of the click, like an aggressive stroke; touching as unveiling, staging the ambiguous relation between touching and being touched; touching as a trace that one can leave, as with a finger dipped in paint; and, touching from a distance with the voice, the eyes, or another part of the body. This supposedly immaterial work thus stages an aesthetics of materiality.

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