Presented at conference or festival

News Wheel, 2016 is an iOS app that explores the poetics of ever changing news headlines. It begins as a static disk divided into nine sections each representing a different news source. Tapping anywhere on the screen causes the wheel to spin. Another tap stops the wheel and suddenly a headline in one of nine pre-selected colors appears on the screen. This playful interface invites users to start and stop the wheel eventually filling the screen with a collage of current headlines. Individual words can be deleted and repositioned so users can create their own poems from this content. In addition, dragging one's finger across the screen creates an animated chain of fragmented and poetic text derived from today's headline news. News Wheel is a creative and poetic way to view, juxtapose and interpret world events. (Source: http://www.jodyzellen.com/newswheeltalk/)

Re:Activism is an analog game with direction provided through SMS and cell phone technology. Players race through neighborhoods to trace the history of riots, protests, and other political episodes in the history of New York City. Teams pit themselves against the clock and test their puzzle-solving skills to locate important sites representing acts of civic engagement and struggles for greater social justice. Activated by text messages from Re:Activism Central, teams reaching target locations respond to site-specific challenges that reinforce the historical content. Players must also activate strategic thinking by choosing to focus on racing or puzzle-solving, or a combination of both, to win points and become the most-active activists to win the game. Re:Activism was initially developed for, and first played during, the Spring 2008 Come Out And Play Festival. It has since been documented online and adapted into a downloadable kit to encourage redesign for use in other cities.

(source: Website PETLab)

Flocks of books open and close, winging their way web-ward. A reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by lines of longitude, of latitude, of graph, of paper. The horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean paragraphs. These fluid texts are continuously recomposed by JavaScript files calling upon variable strings containing words and phrases collected from a vast literary corpus – Deleuze’s Desert Islands (2004), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Bishop’s Crusoe in England (1971), Coetzee’s Foe (1966), Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973), Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries (1598–1600), Darwin’s Voyages of the Beagle (1838), and many other lesser-known sources including an out-of-date guidebook to the Scottish Isles, and an amalgam of accounts of the classical and quite possibly fictional island of Thule. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts a reader will never wash ashore on the same island twice… and by islands, I really do mean paragraphs.

(Source: Author's description)

This is a presentation with commentary of two experimental original, collaborative digital poems: one with variora in two voices; and the other somewhere between a translation and a multilingual composition in English, Italian and French. “Digital Poetry” is understood to be language-based, formally structured art to which the digital dimension is indispensable in at least one of the following elements: composition, performance, or reception. We are two published poets who have worked for many years with translation in literature. This collaboration takes us into an exploration of the continuous re-invention of the speaking Subject through traversing languages in digital space. It breaks new ground in opening on to potential poetic conversations across cultures, even where interlocutors are far from fluent in each others’ languages. It is potentially an immediate way in to the kinds of discovery that can make translation so rewarding, but that are not generally easy to access without relatively long experience, especially in a literary context. The poems in our presentation were/are being composed through an email version of the corps exquis, where we agreed some simple ground rules, and then sent each other a couple of lines at a time. The ground rules were not rigid, and we soon loosened our initial attempts to include formal frameworks such as poetic meter. The most enduring agreed rule was not to open an email until ready to read and respond, and then responding immediately. These poems form the source texts. They are being programmed by Penny in close consultation with Paolo by means of digital Readers, part of the Readers Project with which the ELO will be familiar, and within which Penny has presented several times with John Cayley. John describes the digital Readers that are the basis of the Project as “distributed, performative, quasi-autonomous poetic ‘readers’ – active, procedural entities with distinct reading behaviors and strategies”. “Inextrinsix” is the nominal form of the epithet Penny coined to characterize how she programmes the Readers. The reason we have called these digital poems “inextrinsix” is that the idea of the “inextrinsic” embodies a contradiction, or tension (“in-ex”). This is because it concerns an essential property of digital poetry, that of its capacity to go deeper into poetic language, and translation, than was possible before it (intrinsic), but also because it then moves to foreground associative, or metonymic, traces (extrinsic). To give an example of a related linguistic element: paranomasia, or punning, is a feature of much digital poetry. Punning is an inextrinsic figure because it works by taking the reader into a figure of language, the direction of which then goes outward. It is also useful as an example because it has a visual element that transposes to sound, an attribute much more foregrounded in digital poetry than in the generality of printed poetry. Lastly, it is right on the edge of consciousness, which is perhaps the most important when it comes to digital Subjectivity. To elaborate a little: innovative language is necessarily oblique in terms of what is currently known. The joke work, like the dream work, can enable perception of the unconscious or preconscious, or that in which reason or the Symbolic is embedded. This is the terrain of the speaking Subject in process, and this is where moving between natural languages in digital form opens on to new potential. The electronic, inextrinsic Readers work on this threshold. The “completed” texts on screen start with a static version of the poem, which serves as a frame, part of which remains on screen throughout. The human reader then interacts with the digital Reader by pressing specific number keys on whatever device s/he is using. These works take my earlier collaborations with John forward mainly in the following ways: they are original poems, composed collaboratively via email; translation is treated almost as part of syntax in the programming; and the same goes for multiple voices. That is, the analytic strategies according to which the movements and “Readings” traverse the source texts are treated as if there were no distinction between a change of speaker, a change of language and the kind of grammatical or structural move native to poetry. The effect, however, is to expose where they overlap and where they do not, thereby revealing a differential comparable to a partial palimpsest. Digital Reading is what creates and opens this space. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

# text/sound-movies text/sound-movies are works of abstract poetry created with the means of digital video and audio. the image is extreme typography. the sound is digital sound poetry. each video is centered around a single topic or source material. please read below for a description of the 6 videos. ## vorsprung is a clip taken from the the video-performance spambot that dealt with propaganda and advertisment. ## sig all source material in this video originates from radio jingles of various broadcasting companies. ## broe sell a typographic video about stock markets. ## mmmatn a video about money and currency. ## ff oitl text and sound are taken from a sneakers commercial ## rr ii rr ii is visualized sound poetry or a sonified visual poem. the material of the acoustic and visual part consists only of electronically modified representations of the sound R. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Co-teaching an online course at UnderAcademy College, Chris Funkhouser and Sonny Rae Tempest co-authored the libretto Shy nag by applying a series of intensive digital processes to a piece of hexadecimal code (derived from a .jpg image). Shy nag, after a year of intensive deliberations with regard to media application in a performance setting, is now a multimedia, “code opera” that transforms (repurposes) the same piece of code to add visual display (scenery) audio component(s) to the work. In Shy nag, Microsoft Word and numerous other programs and processing techniques have a non-trivial presence in the composition. Software serves as a type of interlocutor that sustains the writers’ experimental objective – a time-consuming process blends creative and uncreative. The exercise also contains destructive qualities as the code migrates to language, image, and sound – although the authors prefer foregrounding its multi-level transformative properties. Allowing the software to dictate and steer the direction of this type of writing serves to endow the dialog with unexpected vocabulary and unforeseeable textual encounters in which compositional decisions must be made. Combining authorial rules with subjectivity, one “text,” through programmatic filtering, expands into another and is also applied to create media effects. Despite the use of software programs (and different versions of programs) to conduct text, the number of hours humans spent shaping it is extensive. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

The video-essay features interviews with 17 electronic literature scholars and practitioners including Mark Amerika, Simon Biggs, Serge Bouchardon, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Cris Cheek, Maria Engberg, Jerome Fletcher, Maria Mencia, Nick Montfort, Jörg Piringer, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, Christine Wilks, Jaka Železnikar. The production method for the video-essay is interesting in that the questions being asked of the interviewees are never explicitly pronounced. Rather, the video is divided into sections based on the general themes Futures and Foci, Platforms and Politics, The Human Problem, Senses and Screens, Reading and Writing. The answers given by the various interviewees are wide-ranging and address issues as diverse as the future of electronic literature, the ownership of data, the roles of author and scholar, and the issue of national models of electronic literature. What emerges from the video-essay is a sense of the dynamism and complexities that make up electronic literature as a field. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Kjell Theøry will be a site-specific mobile Augmented Reality poem mapped visually to geo-spatial coordinates in a public outdoor space in Bergen. The work responds to historical and fictive narratives of Norway as a landscape for exile and escape in conjunction with writings and memories from my residency as a Fulbright Scholar in Bergen last year. It will be accessible for viewing with internet-enabled smart phones and tablets throughout ELO 2015 and will be activated by a brief live event in which I manipulate and read from the virtual space and generate additional material by scanning augmented tattoos on the body of a local male performer. This work evolves out of my AR installation in June 2014 at the Bergen Bibliotek, The Empty House, but will be a substantially new iteration. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Projected on a grid of particles that at times seem ordered, while sometimes chaotic and always in flux, Ormstad's constructed language poetry is exposed and read by the author while performing to Mashtalir's pulsating music and Vojjov's atmospheric scapes in the first two works LONG RONG SONG and NAVN NOME NAME. The first is based on Ormstad's language research project from his second book of concrete poetry from 2004. Here he creates words that may exist or not in any language, and this is related to Vojjov's creation of numbers, geometric forms and abstract shapes. The second work is made from Ormstad's collection of poetic family names used in Oslo, Norway, also here accompanied by Vojjov's world of cosmic shapes. The last track, kakaoase, is based on a printed picture by Ormstad, made of sound poetry where he's playing with the Norwegian language. Most of the words have no – or almost no – meaning, and here Mashtalir's music makes this an exceptional possibility for participating and dancing to concrete poetry! 3 CONCRETE are the first works of a collection created by the Norwegian–Russian duo OTTARAS (Ottar Ormstad and Taras Mashtalir). Alexander Vojjov has created the two first videos. The tracks exists in different versions made for screening and live performance. Raising awareness of electronic poetry and sonic ecology, attracting new audiences to a potent yet to come genre is the inspiration for this collaboration. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

This is a performance by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, involving a strong sonic and musical element interwoven with text. It includes sampled text and sound, electronics and live coding of text and sound. The performance will include two pieces, Metaphorics and Bird Migrants.

These two works were performed earlier this year in the UK and Australia, but have undergone considerable development. Every iteration and performance of them (particularly of Metaphorics) is substantially different.

Metaphorics (2014) for voice and coded sound

This piece employs live voice, live-coded sound (using the platform Gibber by Charlie Roberts, University of California at Santa Barbara), and live algorithmic sound. It involves samples from a recording of parts of the text, together with electronic and sampled instruments.

The piece is about metaphor: it also employs metaphor while at the same time deconstructing it. Historically metaphor has been one of the main tools of poetry. Attitudes towards metaphor have been very important in contemporary poetry and poetics, but have caused divisions in the poetic community. Some poets have clung to metaphor as a traditional mainstay of their craft. Others have reacted against the idea of metaphor because they felt that it was always working at one remove, or was being used to stitch the different parts of a poem together into a fabricated unity. This piece works with that dichotomy.

The first section of Metaphorics, “metaphor”, takes a stance to writing a poem adapted from contemporary conceptual poetry. It was written by cutting and pasting from the Internet – with some modification – statements about metaphor. The other two sections, “the unanswered question” and “windfall”, consist of a short poem and a poetic monologue that are freely written. They employ different kinds of metaphor, but in ways that are somewhat unorthodox.

The live coding and live algorithms allow events to prefigure or react to the performed voice and musical components: this provides another layer of metaphor. Live coding is the process of constructing computer code to perform a task in real-time (in this case a range of sonic and text processing). Live algorithms on the other hand are preformed interactive platforms and, of course, they are written by the creators themselves; in our case usually in MaxMSP.

Metaphorics reacts against the idea that metaphors in a poem should be consistent and unified; the metaphors keep changing and there is no obvious through-metaphor (except, perhaps, metaphor itself).

Bird Migrants (2014)

Bird Migrants 2 is a piece for voice and through-composed electronics. It is a development of Bird Migrants 1 which was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for the Radio National Program Soundproof and is in podcast form on their website at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/bird-migrants/5…. Bird Migrants 2 adds some live performance, and visual images treated in Jitter/MaxMSP, so is substantially different.

The piece uses bird and environmental sounds, transformed voice samples and instruments. In Bird Migrants there is a cross-species evocation of voice. The piece is based on the poem by Hazel Smith, “The Great Egret”. The poem was inspired by the wedding scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s film The Suspended Step of the Stork, where a couple marry each other from the opposite banks of a river that flows through a divided country. The great egret can be seen to represent the tragic history of the country, but also the longing for flight and freedom. The poem was written for the Bimblebox project, a developing project around the 153 bird species that have been recorded on the Bimblebox Nature Refuge in central western Queensland. The home of these birds, and the ecosystems that support them, is in the path of a proposed coal mine.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)