Mandarin

In Velo City typography and movement of the words connect with the messages and feelings expressed. It is a kinetic and hypertext poem, similar to El rumor de los álamos by Óscar Martín Centeno. The poem has been online since 2000 and is one of the first known poems of Spanish kinetic poetry. It follows the tradition of creationist poetry by Spanish poets like Juan Larrea and Gerardo Diego because of a new use of typography and emphasis on visual effects. Technology provides the interaction between reader and poet because of the messages that the author transmits to the reader who chooses hyperlinks and perceives the different degrees of excitation of the poet through the movements of letters as well as the directions where the poet wants to take the reader: rising (feeling joyful), falling down (descending to subconscious thoughts), choosing colored words and paths, leaving empty spaces between words (creating mystery, giving new meanings to words). (Source: Maya Zalbidea)

Wandering Meimei / Meimei Liu Lang Ji is a bilingual interactive fiction app designed for mobile interfaces for the Chinese market. This story is an intertext to the traditional Chinese comic strip, Sanmao Liu Lang Ji (Wandering Sanmao), a homeless boy. Meimei, meaning little sister, is an allegorical character and contemporary representation of the largest migrant population the world has ever seen: the migrant female factory worker. Through the app, you can make contact with the character Meimei who works in a smartphone factory in the Pearl River Delta city Guangzhou. Meimei's only technology and access point to the outside world is through her own phone. The social media hub and interface enable you to enter and become a part of Meimei's story.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Flash poem about a tree.

"The Clown" by Shaolian Su, who is a modern poet from Taiwan, is a Flash poem about clowns. Su is the author and designer of this Flash poem. He wrote this poem for clowns in order to illustrates their true value to the audience and society in general. The true value of clowns is that they try to give the audience pleasure but always hide their sadness. A white clown is also a highlight of a drama. The design of it is very simple. There are four rows of clowns’ profiles show on the blue background which looks like a theater. Only one clown’s face can be seen clearly among them. The reader can click the image to start the poem. The content of this poem describes how clowns give the audience pleasure and never show their sorrow. The poem begins, “The clown never died, he left his smile on our faces.” The poem continues, and each line begins with the following sentence: “The clown never died.” Through this poem, Su tries to tell people by this poem that even though the clown will die physically, his soul will exist in audience’s heart forever. (Source: ELD; unreviewed)

Amor-mundo, ou a vida, esse sonho triste [World-love, or life, that sad dream] is an animated text which proposes generative schemes of both visual and audio animation. Building on metaphors and images from the works of the Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca, and using as its starting point the Actionscript code of Jared Tarbel, this work includes five poems: Part 1 - Deixa-me ser a tua mais triste mágoa; Part 2 - Eu queria ser o mar alto; Part 3 - Passo no mundo a ler o misterioso livro;  Part 4 - Sou o vento que geme e quer entrar; Part 5 - Horas mortas. The reader can add to these poems random spatial layers that allow the creation of multiple constellations of meaning.

Cityscapes is an exploration of how to integrate e-poetry into the realm of social and urban poetics. This work began to germinate in 2002 during my artist's residency in Tokyo at the time. Immersed in a world of moving/electronic signs, ever changing, flickering and in flux, I wanted to be able to reproduce this experience of linguistic signs devoid of semantic meaning –as a non Japanese reader- and consequently transform them into textual images, by use of digital technologies. I became excited by the idea of a new calligram, the calligram of the city, and how this would change from city to city; what poetics every city would offer?In western culture, the realm of media and advertising has absorbed the language of Visual Poetry, and calligrams have become another official way to engage people in the selling of their products. Reciprocally poetry has also been influenced by this exchange and has moved to other domains away from the page and into the public display. My interest therefore, was to use the language of advertising to create poetic/artistic public work in urban spaces and in so doing to explore the new calligram, that of social poetics, of the neon lights, flickering letters, moving messages and public textualities of city environments. I had the opportunity to go to Melbourne, Australia, and put this idea into practice. Research ProcessThe multicultural characteristic of Melbourne prompted me to enquire into this calligram of natural language sounds , the visual/textual signs from many different cultures encountered in the city as one walks around, the reasons for this diversity of cultures, why immigrants move to other places* how these cultures evolve and mix and the idea of interactivity between the many cultures and the city. It became a new calligram, which engendered a poetic space of the language of intercultural exchange ; of travelling words (to other languages) and the 'in-between' communicative area generated by the visual and audible qualities of these forms and with the recurrent question of how Image-Sound-Text interlace to create new languages. This new kinetic, nomadic, ever-changing calligram of the city became that of broken human voices, fragmented realities and the composition of different languages encountered in these cityscapes in flux.Extracting visual text from the city environment, deconstructing it and re-mapping it into a different context has been part of the process of this investigation and creation of the digital piece. I worked with cultural community groups to gather and develop soundscapes from their natural languages in the form of phonetic sounds. As there are more than a hundred and forty languages spoken in Melbourne, I chose some of the most prominent ones. The languages included in the project are: Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, English, Spanish, Hindi and the aboriginal language Wathawurrung. The last one, being a language, which used to be spoken in Melbourne and currently taught to children by Bruce Pascoe with the hope of bringing it back to life. I documented the groups participating with the sounds and walked around, reading the city: visually, textually and phonetically.Interface LayoutIt is about the process of exploring and creating. It consists of a blank screen and it is not until the participant begins to explore, that the work exists. This is a concept I enjoy in digital works as I find it, as a user, to be both provocative and inviting to get involved in the performing of the artwork. The performance of the user with the piece is produced by rolling the mouse. As the user explores the surface, the palettes (images of Melbourne, animations, interactive scrolls, sounds, transitions) appear, and, by dragging, image size manipulation and roll over of the mouse, the user can create sound and image compositions. The more exhaustive the exploration, the more intrinsic the compositions which can be produced. It simulates the process of my investigation, in the way of finding images and sounds in the city, appropriating them and creating compositions. Participants are invited to do the same, to explore the city, producing, editing, in a word; creating.

(Source: Author's description from her site)

Interactive piece that enables the user to create drawings and sounds compositions. The audio background is created by the phonetics sounds of multiple languages such as English, Mandarin and Arabic in the form of musical notes. It is a piece that was produced with the idea of linking it to the Eyemouse produced by John Tchalenko, Research Fellow at Camberwell College of Arts. In his research he is looking at cognitive ways for learning to draw, while I am interested in communicative processes using text-sound and image. For this piece and taking into consideration Tchalenko's idea of learning to draw with your eyes. I used 'meaningless' phonetic sounds as the basic elements used in speech to learn to speak, conceiving in this way both parts of the brain: the linguistic and the visual.

(Source: Artist's description from her site)

Interactive piece made in Adobe Flash, it consists of three different layers: the user can travel from one surface to another by clicking on the buttons: A (for Arabic), C (for Chinese) and E (for English). When choosing the languages, I was interested in the differences of their visual element, reading patterns (right to left, left to right, top to bottom) and linear and non-linear qualities. Notions analysed in Visual and avant-garde poetics. Each surface is blank until the user rolls the mouse over it, revealing still and moving images, which appear and fade away, and triggering phonetic sounds from each respective language.The images are related to the visual representation and cultural background of each language. The sound layers are formed by the 'meaningless' phonetic sounds of the three different languages. They were created by speakers of these languages, who sang and pronounced combinations of phonetic sounds commonly used in each linguistic system.The notion of meaningless phonetic sounds interested me, since, according to Saussure, these sounds are not supposed to have any meaning. Their function is to differentiate two words, they have a differentiating/distinguishing value. I find this paradoxical, signifying aspect of phonemes fascinating. They are the key signifying units and yet they don't have any intrinsic value. With them I am questioning the semiotic and symbolic aspects found in this process of signification where they refer to language and yet are outside language in their isolated units. I try to shift them into a different semantic context to transform them into entities with the potential for full linguistic and emotive signification. It is as if I want them to be recognised for their important function in the signifying process; to raise them to the level of appreciation they deserve; transforming 'meaningless' phonetic sounds into full entities in the non-linear structure of the communicative process.(Source: Artist's description from her website)