This introduction to the Letterist poet Isidore Isou was published in a journal on whose editorial board I serve, E.R.O.S.: A Journal of Desire (2012). The introduction accompanied a selection of Isou’s poems that I ‘translated’.
(Source: Author)
A review of Spy EYE, the fourth story in the series, Mrs. Wobbles & the Tangerine house.
The gist of the story is challenging, though it’s wrapped in some playful fantasy imagery. The parents in this story are not dead, but they’re going through some things that make it impossible to take care of their children right at the moment. Can our protagonists accept that fact, and wait, and at the same time hold onto the faith that their family isstill a family? It’s a situation that asks these children for a degree of empathy and long-term perspective-taking well beyond their years: even adults may have trouble realizing that their parents are limited and human, and forgiving them for it.
Since I have been asked to present my website Permutations at this conference, this
paper will first tell what the site is about and then address the issues it might bring up for
the discussion of a poetics of digital text.
(Source: Author's quote)
Although it is difficult to distinguish a combinatory literature from other forms of literature ever since linguistics defined language as a combinatory system itself, combinatory poetry nevertheless could be formally defined as a literature that openly ex-poses and addresses its combinatorics by changing and permuting its text according to fixed rules, like in anagrams, proteus poems and cut-ups. Frequently, written combinatory literature does not denote the generated text itself, but only a set of formal instructions with perhaps one sample permutation.
An extended and illustrated version of a talk at the Decade of Web Design Conference in Amsterdam, January 2005
When I started to work on the World Wide Web I made a few nice things that were special, different and fresh. They were very different from what was on the web in the mid 90's.
I'll start with a statement like this, not to show off my contribution, but in order to stress that -- although I consider myself to be an early adopter -- I came late enough to enjoy and prosper from the "benefits of civilization". There was a pre-existing environment; a structural, visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you could break. There was a world of options and one of the options was to be different.
So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end?
To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
Creating collections and archives of all the midi files and animated gifs will preserve them for the future but it is no less important to ask questions. What did these visual, acoustic and navigation elements stand for? For which cultures and media did these serve as a bridge to the web? What ambitions were they serving? What problems did they solve and what problems did they create? Let me talk about the difficult destiny of some of these elements.
I made my first web-based art work in 1995. It’s still online, it still works. The internet has changed a lot since then, but the DIY aesthetics and practices of that era have by no means disappeared. In today’s highly commercialised web of proprietary applications, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers, it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects. Drawing upon Olia Lialina’s essay “A Vernacular Web” (2010), this paper makes correlations between the early ‘amateur’ web and today’s maker and open source movements. Examples of the persistence of Web 1.0 are presented, from the massive Ubu Web site which its founder boasts, ‘is still hand-coded in html 1.0 in bbedit, from templates made in 1996,’ to the tiny anti-social network TILDE.CLUB, where small experimental websites are hosted on one ‘totally standard unix computer.’ In addition to the slow writing of the web through hand coding, the practice of appropriating existing source code is discussed in relation to Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2008), which has been remixed dozens of times. And, drawing upon Lori Emerson’s book Reading Writing Interfaces (2014), it is argued that experimental web-based works such as Daniel Eatock’s The One Mile Scroll (2008), which transforms virtual space into an actual, physical distance, force slow reading by challenge conventions of web design.
Handmade objects are objects made by hand or by using simple tools rather than machines. Whether the object is homely — as in a child’s clay ashtray — or exquisite — as in a pair of bespoke brogues — the term ‘handmade’ implies a slowness in making and a unique, rare, or irregular result.
I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which in some way challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.