Dutch

"Je veux" is a collection of poems written in 1997/1998 directly accessible through the authors' website by clicking "Being Human 1997/1998". Access to the text is through a menu offering a choice between "Je veux" , "tendresse easy easy", "a kiss" and "more". In the three poems the reader/visitor is invited to click on either "tu" or "you". The narrator's voice appears in the forms of "Je", "me" as well as in expressing his/her desire in "je voudrais".

In the poem "a kiss", the visitor "engages" with the narrator when s/he encounters a dialogue box and is asked to enter his/her name - the narrator only kisses people whose name s/he knows. The visitor then has to confirm if he or she wants a computer kiss. There are four different languages: German, English, French and Dutch. If the visitor responds in the affirmative in a language, oui, ja or yes, the screen is emblazoned with monochrome flashes of orange, red, pink resembling lipstick kisses. There is also a sentence in the middle of the screen saying how many times the narrator has kissed, reminiscent of the number of visitors to a website. The visitor returns to the menu and finds it changed. S/he now finds "a kiss" replaced with "we could meet again?" This new link brings the visitor to an error page. The question remains as to whether this is intentional or a reminder of the ephemeral character of electronic literature.

If the visitor responds "no", another scenario is launched. The narrator asks for the visitor's name, and reveals the number of times s/he has kissed up to that point. The moment the visitor responds "no", s/he is left with the return response of "Then, I will leave you" as well as the "threat" of the closing of the window. The window closes automatically after a few seconds and the visitor is out of the website completely. There is a possibility to keep the window open, which mirrors an ultimatum in a real relationship - underneath "Then I will leave you!" which is presented in bold letters, in fine print is "If you don't want the window to close click here". The program playfully mimics a relationship. The personalized reaction of the program to the visitor's answer suggests artificial intelligence.

In the poem "je veux", the words "tu", "me" and "respectes" in white appear on a black background. These form to read "je veux que tu me respectes" (I want you to respect me); "you are loved", "you loved me". Some words are underlined in the poem, and if those words are clicked, they freeze. After clicking several more times on different words, the visitor is returned to the initial menu.

In the poem "tendresse", rectangles and squares form across the screen in different colors. Seven screens follow in succession in different colors and containing different words for each. The words appear in English, French, Dutch and in German. The seven screens represent the seven days of the week, and those words are written in English and in French moving from top to bottom of the screen. The days of the week are associated with emotions and feelings and also have different sounds for each one. This collection of poems blends visual, plastic and textual art, and animated poetry shows how well this relationship works.

(Source: Iona Wynter Parks)

11 Ways to escape the Symbolic Field is a hybrid work consisting of various Internet accessible pieces in which texts found on the Internet are combined with original digital art works. The texts are presented on the screen in different, mostly hermetic ways, to emphasize the eroding effects the internet has on the literacy of the ‘general audience’. The author intends to question the ‘authority’ of the found texts by deforming them and to render them illegible. Together with each – projected–piece is a sound track with recordings of spoken poetry in English and Dutch from the artist. The poems juxtapose each piece with political driven subjectivities. This series of work is building upon previously created works such as Semantic Disturbances (2005) and La Resocialista Internacional (2011) by the same author. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)

Reading Club is a project started by Emmanuel Guez and Annie Abrahams in 2013. Eleven sessions were organized with more than 40 different “readers” in English and/or French based on text extracts from Raymond Queneau, from Mez and the ARPAnet dialogues to Marshall McLuhan, Michel Bauwens and McKenzie Wark. Guez and Abrahams experimented with different reading and writing constraints (color, duration, text-length, number of “readers”, etc.) and different performance conditions (online vs. live performance, with and without sound, etc.). In a session of the Reading Club, readers are invited to read a given text together. These readers simultaneously write their own words into this text given a previously fixed maximum number of characters. The Reading Club can be seen as an interpretive arena in which each reader plays and subverts the writing of others through this intertextual game.

A creative website that contains more than can be easily labelled as poetry, art, or narrative, though it certainly contains that and more. Launched in 1998, the site incorporates multiple Web technologies in very coherent fashion to create a hypertext of musings, anxieties, joys, searches for companionship, yearnings, and more navigable through interfaces populated by a variety of insects. Each page in this hypertext is a discovery: a thoughtful exploration of an idea through art, language, and metaphor. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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“Blind Side of a Secret” consists of three audiovisual variations, created individually by Mühlenbruch, Sodeoka, and Nakamura, on words written by Thom Swiss. The work could be considered remix culture in action, overlaying and cutting up an underlying tale—which is never given entirely as a whole, though many sections are held in common—about the unspoken parts of relationships, of coming and going. In all three pieces, alternating third-person voice-over narration by a man and a woman forms the bulk of the audio portion, and it includes parts in English, French, and Dutch. The three collaborators approach the material in sharply contrasting ways: the horizontally scrolling, black-and-red fluidity of Nakamura's animation tells the tale in the most linear fashion, with no interruptions or breaks in the audio and no interaction; Sodeoka takes a DJ's approach, carving up the audio into rhythmic segments and pulsating images that recall song more than narrative; and Mühlenbruch turns it into an interactive flash animation, where an image based on the narrative forms a template that a user can click on to follow the individual narrative threads of the voice-over or run them over each other concurrently. Taken together, and given the absence of the source text in the final presentation, the work suggests that the plethora of angles from which to approach the idea of remix in digital art need not conflict, while at the same time suggesting that nostalgia for an “original work” is perhaps secondary in some respects to the artistic potential of collaboration and redistribution.

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Rob Schoenbeck)