Application

//**Code_UP investigates digital images particularities and interrogates the role of the code in the meaning construction.

The research is based on a conceptual dialogue with "Blow up" (1966), by Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the deepest discussions ever made on the nature and the place of the image in contemporary culture, permanence and transitory, and on how we deal with the visible and the invisible phenomena.

The film tells the story of a photographer (Thomas, interpreted by David Hemmings) who may registered, by chance, a crime in a park. On developing his pictures he is startled to find what appears to be a man with a gun in the bushes and, in a later shot, a body.

Rushing back to the park in the middle of the night he finds the body, but on his return to the studio all his pictures have disappeared. When he returns to the park in the morning the body, too, has gone and Antonioni seems to say: It all might never have happened�

His investigation about the crime is made through successive magnifications of the photographic registers he shot accidentally.

In this process the picture appears in its essence, reduced to its materiality: nitrate of silver grains on paper. In other words, the image was not there and Antonioni now seems to ask us: what you see is what you get?

In short, we can say Thomas could not interpret images. His superficiality allowed him just to see photographies. He trusted the technical devices (which are tools), but could not deal with technology as production of knowledge.

In //**Code_UP I reproduced Thomas movements, working on the same images he developed in the film, blowing them up using programs that perform algorithmic zooms, allowing manipulation of the RGB values, exploration of the pixel and screen structure and their translation into different numeric systems and codes (hexadecimal, binary, ascii).

Reproducing Thomas' procedures in his investigation, but reverting his point of view, paying attention to the invisible dimension of the image, establishes the conceptual dialogue with Antonioni. At the same time it opens the possibility to interrogate the image construction in the context of new technologies of seeing and perceiving.

(Source: Author's description from the project site)

Afeeld is a full-length collection of playable intermedia and concrete art compositions that exist in the space between poetry and videogames. It was published as a 'Digital Original' by the Collaboratory for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech in 2017.

Content from Afeeld has been exhibited at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the 2013 Modern Language Association Convention in Boston, MA, the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Morgantown, WV, the Carroll Gallery at Tulane University, the Ellen Powell Tiberno Museum in Philadelphia, PA, the CalArts Library in Valencia, CA, the 2011 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Washington, D.C., the 2010 Post_Moot Convocation at Miami University of Ohio, and the Zaoem Festival of Contemporary Poetry in Ghent, Belgium. Excerpts have also appeared online in Abjective, Certain Circuits, London Poetry Systems, Otoliths #16, Oxford Magazine, and Word For/Word #14. Alphabet Man was published as a chapbook by Slack Buddha Press in April 2010, and was honored with an &Now Award for Innovative Writing in 2012. Count as One was published as a chapbook in the Fall 2009 issue of New River: a Journal of Digital Writing and Art. This is Visual Poetry was published in July 2010, as the 51st chapbook in Dan Waber's "This is Visual Poetry" chapbook series. Asterisk has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, through a grant made by the Humanities Gaming Institute at the University of South Carolina.

(Source: About Afeeld)

Spine Sonnet” (the app) is an automatic poem generator in the tradition of found poetry that randomly composes 14 line sonnets derived from an archive of over 2500 art and architectural theory and criticism book titles.

“Spine Sonnet” (the website) combines images of scanned book spines into stacks of 14 titles. Each time you refresh the browser you get a new combination.

(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Show)

This is a narrative running app, activated when you take your smart phone for a run. Players take on the person of ‘Runner 5,’ a scavenger in the app’s post-apocalyptic setting; their running playlist is sporadically interrupted by voice-recorded messages from other survivors, leading them to nearby supplies or warning them of approaching zombie hoards – so that half-hearted runners know that it’s time to pick up the pace. Narrative fragments are embedded between songs, and timed so that a story arc of 4-5 episodes will complete every twenty minutes, and that each subsquent fragment ends with a hook so the runner-reader will want to return for more. The narrative is locative but works anywhere, providing a fictional layer on top of an actual map of your surroundings where you can collect supplies and medicines, and where you must avoid zombies. The first season consists of 24 twenty minute episodes and there are plans for a second season. 

If the codes that make up digital images are unique like the people in the images are unique, then we might imaginatively think of these codes as a form of digital DNA. The Eden Database contains 32 detail plus 32 derived index records of digital image code samples taken from descendants of Eve in the summer and fall of year 2002. The Eden Database features dynamic record retrieval and reporting functions -- auto, select, scroll, and random. Users will choose these and related sub-functions to generate system standard plus recombinant code samples custom reports.

(Source:About page for the Eden Database)

Immobilité, the first feature-length film for a mobile device, is story of two women living in a dream-like state. The audio is that of great eeriness, but we are assured by the narration that the women are not here to haunt us. Soon after, we are presented with a very interesting question; a question that is left open to interpretation by an unknown being from the distant future. Annotated by Gary Nasca.

(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)

Text generator created by Jim Carpenter as part of his Electronic Text Composition (ETC) project which creates poetry under the pen name Erica T. Carter. The application is offline at the time this entry is written.