Williams used an IBM 1070 to identify the 101 most common words from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and used them to create a series of computer poems. Williams borrows a condensed verbal framework from Dante, which is mechanically represented into lines that diminish, in relation to the number of times they appear in Divine Comedy, until a single word remains.
(Source: Chris Funkhouser, "Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry")
How does a town just disappear?
What does it feel like to be cut off from your roots in a digital age where people have so many tools for recording and documenting their lives?
How do those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age recover and maintain a sense of belonging that is becoming increasingly so hard to hold on to?
'In Search of Oldton' is an attempt to use other people's digital documentary in order to recapture and re-invent my own personal history.
Tim Wright will be touring the UK during 2004 in search of Oldton his lost place of birth - and uncovering along the way the possible causes of its demise and the subsequent loss of his past.
Working with groups and individuals Wright wants to build up a substantial online archive showing people taking their leave of a place or a person - a range of personal stories about saying goodbye and moving on.
Through texts, pictures, videos and oral testimony, he will build up a digital archive of fictional remembrances, tributes to numerous places and situations left behind.
And ultimately (he hopes!) his own digital story of memory and loss will emerge.
(Source: Project description, Incubation3 site, trAce Archive)
Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House is the story of a poor suburban family told interactively through text.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
A three-chapter game (with an epilogue) in which you're a different character in each chapter. The twist is that each chapter covers roughly the same space of time, and you interact with the other two characters, to varying degrees, when you're in each pair of shoes. The gameplay is a bit restrictive--the game doesn't allow for a lot of variation--but the characters themselves are well developed and the interactions feel reasonably realistic. The game even does a passable job of recording the actions you take when you're one character and playing them back when you're a different character, observing the antics of the first. Very short--20-30 minutes to play through at most--but worth playing; it largely eschews puzzles in favor of character interaction in a way that little IF attempts.
(Source: Review by Duncan Stevens, BAF's guide to the IF Archive)
Lo·go·zo·a n [fr. Gk logos word + zoia animals] (2005) 1 : word animals : textual organisms 2 : a phylum or subkingdom of linguistic entities that are represented in almost every kind of habitat and include aphorisms, anti-aphorisms, maxims, minims, unapologetic apothegms, neokoans, sayings, left-unsaids, shamelessly proverbialist word-grabs, epigrammatological disquisitions, lapidary confections, poemlets, gnomic microtales, instant fables, and other varieties of conceptual riffs
Words change everything. We create poems and stories to free the world from itself, to reveal the many feral faces of life. But ironically these liberating words are usually imprisoned on the page or computer screen. Out in the “real” world of day-to-day activity, we use words more bluntly. We put labels and signs on things to tame them—identify, categorize, explain, instruct, proclaim ownership. What if instead the labels could liberate the everyday world from the literal, proclaim rather than cover up the mysteries? What if they could become Logozoa—textual organisms that infest the literal with metaphor and give impetuous life and breath to meaning?
Adopt-A-Zoa
Find out what happens when you let word animals infest your daily life. Download Logozoa, print them onto your own stickers, and let them loose in your home or neighborhood. Bring a little metaphor into your routine. Keep them around the house and discover why they make fascinating pets or release them into the wild. You have 379 different creatures to choose from.
E-Dopt-A-Zoa
E-dopt a Logozoan and add it to your Web site. Your Logozoan will change every time it’s viewed, taking one of 379 different forms.
Logozoo
The next best thing to Logoz in your own hood is a visit to the Logozoo. Here you’ll see Logozoa in a natural-habitat preserve made from the nooks and crannies of daily routine, the unexpected exoticisms of everyday life, the out-of-the-ordinary often lurking in ordinary places. No bars and cages here. From the safety and comfort of your own browser, you can witness one of Nature’s true spectacles—the figurative overrunning the literal. Our zoo contains 1153 photos of 629 inhabitants, with more arriving almost daily from the US, Europe, and South America. One made it all the way from Hell. Another came from a place even more frightening—the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles in Waltham.
Logoshow
Some Logozoa display a remarkable ability to slip the bonds of textual stasis and achieve flights of logomotion. Come enjoy the animated show.
Save-A-Zoa
Stickers in the wild face numerous man-made and natural threats. Determined preservation efforts are necessary to ensure that these unique creatures do not go the way of so many once-endangered, now-extinct species. Photograph your Logozoa and send these offspring to us where they will find a happy, safe home in our Logozoo.
Soothbooth
Bring those vexing questions to the Soothbooth and let us turn them into vexing answers. We have a unique colony of Logozoa on duty here that responds to any sort of question you might want to pose.
Soothcircuit
If you want deeper, less direct answers than those offered at the quick-service Soothbooth, take your questions to the Soothcircuit. The Logozoa here are guaranteed to provide insights and prognostications of the most thought-provoking quality.
(Source: Author's descripiton on the project site)
In January 2001 we started sharing our personal computer through our website. Everything was visible: texts, photos, music, videos, software, operating system, bank statements and even our private email. People could take anything they wanted, including the system itself, since we were using only free software. It was not a normal website, you were entering the computer in our apartment, seeing everything live. It was a sort of endurance performance that lasted 3 years, 24/7. Previously we were re-using and mixing other people’s work, while now we were sharing everything with everybody. Working with a computer on a daily basis, over the years you will share most of your time, your culture, your relationships, your memories, ideas and future projects. With the passing of time a computer starts resembling its owner's brain. So we felt that sharing our computer was more than sharing a desktop or a book, more than File Sharing, something we called Life Sharing. No social network existed at the time, and Life Sharing felt rather absurd, if not plain wrong. (Source: http://0100101110101101.org/home/lifesharing/index.html)
November of 1960, date of the “Electric Poem”, by Albertus Marques (1930-2005), can be considered as the pioneering time of a poetic experience with the electronic media. It is
"one electric poem, in which the energy is supplied through piles. The reader pushes a button and it appears in the center of the screen - white field - the word END. Until the moment that the person completes the action of pushing the contact, anything is revealed, or else, the possibility and the power of an action. As soon as the reader releases the button, the word disappears, therefore its emergence and permanence depend exclusively on the action of pushing the contact." (MARQUES, 1977, p. 156).
To the similarity of the future electronic poetries, and reminding the 0 and 1 of the binary system, the poem demands the reader's interaction that will produce meanings starting from the white field, button and of his/her initiative of pressing it.
(Source: Jorge Luiz Antonio, 2008: 19)
one electric poem, in which the energy is supplied through piles. The reader pushes a button and it appears in the center of the screen - white field - the word END. Until the moment that the person completes the action of pushing the contact, anything is revealed, or else, the possibility and the power of an action. As soon as the reader releases the button, the word disappears, therefore its emergence and permanence depend exclusively on the action of pushing the contact. (Marques 1977: 156)
To trail DADA traces on the net is a possibility to look up loose text satellites on a short-term and to bring singular DADA groups and sources to level a structural gap. Here, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about DADA per se, as approaches to and updates of DADAism as a historical phenomenon are too diverse: for instance, virtual identities settle in – present (babel, hugo baron, frieder rusmann, dadasophin) and historical ones (duchamp, tzara, serner, ball, schwitters), bananas are traded (anna banana) and indexed, art’s and the artist’s death is given shape (kunsttot.de), virtual countries are built (bananaland, rongwrong puppet empire) and, sometimes, even the audience is happily dispensed with (neumerz, dadasophin).
DADA TO GO bundles these different traces in an audio text which lets the DADA groups act within an environment which refers to computer games and makes DADAism get a move on. For: Boredom was in the beginning of DADA …
(Source: kunstradio.at)
eft channel: hyper reader and writer hei+co@hyperdis.de (aka heiko idensen) says "live" what comes to his head ... (= SPEAK)
right channel: cut-ups and collages of historical/hysterical hyper texts (= LISTEN)
the mix is the bottom line:
who's sitting at the mixing desk? when is something faded in resp. out? which parameters and effects are used?
a hyper-text audio-book should definitely have a record button!
whilst hyper-text theorists and prophets predicted an exponential, uncontrollable increase of the electronic text rotation, publishing houses respond to the growing breakdown of the book market with audio books as a remedy.
as a consequence, in dealing with literature a revolution comparable to that in the music industry of the 1980s triggered off with the introduction of the walkman is finally happening: a mobilization of the listening situation taking the urban environment into account; the possibility to mix the internal listening space with any desirable external sound environment or everyday sound-scape.
and just as the text-message effect is introducing the mutation of cell phones into text tools (and, at long last, we can't only listen to our own music selection everywhere, but can also write texts at any time and place) ...
... hyper-listening is based on including tones, sound, the noise of different channels, the clacking of speaking tools and devices, the voice's scragginess ... in the electronic text rotation again:
classically, hyper-text has totally rid itself of the voice: as a topographical text, as a mapping of texts on books' pages (visual poetry) or monitors it rather performs a poetry of links and networking than of sound, of metrics, of the spoken word ... there is no story – not even to mention a narrator ... actually, hyper-texts are as unsuitable for speaking or reading aloud as source code ...
audio hyper-texts whispered into one's ear include dramatic scenes from hyper-text history; one can hear the clacking of the MEMEX's lever, and from far away foucault invokes the laughter of the chinese encyclopedia ...
...
it's not all about turning the audio-book into an mp3 audio-book, but to connect the production instruments and media of hyper-text (weblogs, text-message love stories, collective writing projects ...) with the worlds of sound and listening: web radios, experimental literature programmes, lectures, radio plays in and from the internet.
... to sing and orchestrate the old song time and again:
"to transform the broadcast from an apparatus of distribution into an apparatus of communication."
(bertolt brecht)
heiko idensen 2005
Since the founding manifesto of the French Oulipo Group in 1962, in which it proposed writing poetry in computer programming language, there have been forms of electronic literature that not only employ computers primarily as text generators or audiovisual media, but also use programming, command, markup, and protocol codes as their medium. Departing from popular forms of this literature in the computer hacker culture, network artists like jodi, antiorp, and mez have been developing new poetic and artistic languages since the mid-nineties, for which the artist and theorist Alan Sondheim has coined the name “Codework.” Codeworks are technically simple e-mails whose text, however, calls to mind associations of computer crashes and interferences, viruses and spam. Initially, they were sent via network art mailing lists as interferences; later entire forums dedicated to the genre, individual styles, and private languages by individual and often pseudonymous code artists began developing. This program attempts for the first time to transpose codeworks from the written source text to radiophony.
Participants:
Florian Cramer (editor), literary scholar, Berlin, Germany
Tsila Hassine, media-design student, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Alejandra Perez Nuñez, media-design student, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Sasson Kung, media-design student, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam
Fabian Vögeli, media-art student, HGK, Zürich
Alan Sondheim, Nnetwork and codework artist, New York
noemata , pseudonymous code artist, Norway
Further authors:
mez (Mary Anne Breeze), network artist, Sidney, Australia
Inke Arns , curator and critic, Dortmund and Berlin, Germany
Crossing borders, experiments, the appropriation of reality instead of a depiction of the world, dialogic art, the play with associations: this is Reinhard Döhl's work. His probably most famous work is his concrete Apfelgedicht (Apple Poem) from 1965. 30 years later it bites its way through an apple in Johannes Auer's net poem "worm applepie for döhl". „appleinspace“: a multi-layer-hommage experimenting with internet, reality, textual reality as well as with the complete text assemblage of Reinhard Döhl which plays with the unconscious, simularity, and volatility. As an extension of „appleinspace“, Beat Suter und René Bauer plan a multi-layered human-search-machine-cooperation.