Presented at conference or festival

A looping video (c. 20 mins – time could be adjusted) that both explores the world of “Monoclonal Microphone” and also reveals certain processes from its open-ended manufacture/generation. The video zooms in and out of a large field of generated poems; shows the underlying program running (generating verses and searching for them with internet search); and provides some expository captioning for the project. More information can be found at http://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php?p=works/monoclonal/monoclo… (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Everything disappears. Recordings of our voices will become archeological remains, and a spinning record yields fossil waves. Waves is based on three poems by Tor Ulven. Published as part 8 of the electronic poetry film series Gasspedal Animert, intended for electronic distribution through the internet, the film combines text, sound and digital animation. This particular film is a collaboration between the small press Gasspedal and the publishing house Gyldendal.

(Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Powieki (eng. “eyelids”, also a pun on “forever”) is one of the crucial examples of Polish electronic poetry, authored by Zenon Fajfer, a contemporary Polish avant-garde poet, and creator of liberature, a literary genre integrating text and the material shape of the book (http://techsty.art.pl/powieki/). His volume of poetry is both in the form of the printed book and the accompanying CD included at the end of the volume; its on-line version premiered a year later (Szczecin: Forma, 2013). Fajfer introduced into poetry an original, interactive form called “the emanational poem,” in which he creates invisible, simultaneously coexisting dimensions of text that can be actualized in their kinetic (electronic) versions. Powieki is a multimodal cycle of such emanational poems. This textual labyrinth can be entered through different entrances and explored upwards, downwards, left and right to discover passages and openings unavailable in its printed form. Densely hyperlinked and granting the readers considerable freedom, this digital collection of poems invites contemplation, fostering “slow” reading, exemplifying Jessica Pressman’s argument presented in Digital Modernism. As Mariusz Pisarski stresses in his review of the work, it is “an oasis of zen in the world of hysterical discourses, offering us a verbal therapy on the liberatic couch, the more valuable as it is carried out by the same liquid crystal display that usually attacks us with its chaotic scream.” According to the critic, using all types of hyperlinks, Powieki constitutes an almost optimal kind of hypertext. During the reading Zenon Fajfer will present one possible passage through Powieki/Eyelids on the screen, accompanied by the voice-over giving the English versions of the poems in Katarzyna Bazarnik’s translation. To demonstrate the intricate, emanational, i.e. multi-levelled acrostic structure of the original a sample poem in English will be also presented to the audience in “Ars Poetica” http://www.techsty.art.pl/magazyn3/fajfer/Ars_poetica_english.html (source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Live performance, with recorded elements, of an audio work that explores neutral voice, artificial voice, acousmatic voice, voice and its relationship to the reader. This performance will also incorporate quasi-algorithmic, appropriative microcollage (with results from network services) particularly in the recorded passages. The performance requires that the artist is able to connect his computer's audio interface(s) to a relatively high-quality stereo PA system. A number of sample development pieces and proofs of concept are available at: http://programmatology.shadoof.net?p=contents/auralityrecordings.html.

(Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

The lexias for The Not Yet Named Jig appear at the will of the computer, one at a time, or, most effectively, in pages of five, where their meaning is magically changed by the lexias that randomly frame them. Thus, in the generating of many small scenes, a mise-en-scène for a larger narrative emerges. The time is the morning of April 24, 1660. The place is “Mystick Side” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The question was: How could I create a world model of a time and place when many details were simply not available? The answer was to write all known details into lexias, fictionalize only when necessary, and allow the computer to bring up the lexias at will. Building on the authoring system developed for file three of Uncle Roger in 1987–1988, generative hyperfiction was used in Its name was Penelope to create a whole picture of a photographer’s life by accumulating details as seen through her own eyes. In The Not Yet Named Jig, it is used to create a world model of a certain place at a certain time by accumulating historic details of the people and the environment in which they lived. The writing was intense, requiring with each added lexia, a constant replaying/rewriting until the narrative worked. Yet every time a five-lexia page was rebuilt, the story became clearer. What seems to be important is that there is no authorial structure to constrain the changing juxtaposition of narrative information.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

It is overly simplistic to state that my digital poems come entirely from building/discovering interfaces. Any artist’s creative practice is a merging/melding mix of fluid events and inspirations. But with all my digital poems there is one commonality, the emphasis on interface. Rarely do I even reuse interfaces, and when I do it is only as one section of a larger work. This continual drive to create new ways to rethink the structure, organization and interactive functionality of my digital poems comes from a variety of internal influences. Most importantly is how these interfaces are not just vessels for content, they are poems in themselves. In the same way digital poetry might be best defined by the experience, rather than a description. Or similar to a digital poet and their works being described by the events and stories surrounding the creation and building process, an interface is the life, the body, and a poetic construction in itself. And through the artist performance I will explore/perform numerous of my interfaces, discussing/reading from them, eluding to how they were made, their inspirations and my thoughts on how they could be reused by other poets. But how is this a performance? This will not just be your typical reading and/or artist talks. While nearly all my digital poetry/fiction performances are highly theatric and, dare I say, engaging, I want to involve the audience more than I have in the past. Therefore, I will be shifting from interface to interface based on the audience’s commands. On the screen will be a series of titled links, around 20 total. The audience will choose which the title I read from. They can change those numbers at any time, and as often as they want. Choosing the links will happen via an ipad, being passed around the audience. The camera from the tablet will also be projected on the large screen in a small corner box. Then as the audience member changes the work, I will start reading it. And much like many of my works, the performance will be highly interactive, engaging, strange and a bit chaotic, driven, in part, by the audience’s commands. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Big data is a buzzword, as is cloud computing. But the data science and network-clusters behind both of these terms present extraordinary viable unprecedented computationally-tractable opportunities for language processing and radical poetry generation. In the summer of 2014 I took an intensive 11-week course in data science programming using Python. Based upon this theoretical and practical coding knowledge, I produced http://bdp.glia.ca, research where I apply a combination of data visualization, language analytics, classification algorithms, entity recognition and part-of-speech replacement techniques to a corpus of 10,557 poems from the Poetry Foundation, 57,000+ hip-hop rap songs from Ohhla.com, and over 7,000 pop lyrics. Currently the poems generated lack thematic structure. I propose to read extracts and reveal intricacies from http://bdp.glia.ca/ Including rapi improv-free-styling from the real-time output of the system (SPREEDE https://vimeo.com/105819691) Roland Barthes famously predicted the death of the author: yet I do not think he foresaw the cause of death as big data. And I doubt Barthes intended to imply the irony that from every death there springs new life. It seems plausible now to suggest that writers are sets and repertoires of techniques and preoccupations. And each writer writes within a cultural context, a time, a vocabulary, and a tradition. Once these traditions are mapped, propensities or paths for future writing will be either generated or grown as variations to assist authors in exploring creativity that conforms to their innate self while at the same time assisting them to see opportunities. The author will not die but expand to explore more of their potential using a computational symbiont. Data science algorithms are capable of finding topological patterns within languages, and thus poetry. By examining which patterns fit cores of genres and which are outliers, notions of creativity and modes of writing will necessarily shift: exploratory writing will swiftly outgrow the uncreative mode of pure appropriation and move toward nuanced expressive augmentation of the writer’s own persona. Big data, I claim, has equivalent power not just to depersonalise but to repersonalise.

(Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Written for the opening of the Stavanger Concert hall and its custom built organ, the poetry film The Pipes is an ode to the industrial history and former backbone of the city. Published as part 9 of the electronic poetry film series Gasspedal Animert, intended for electronic distribution through the internet, the film combines text, sound and digital animation. This particular film is a collaboration between the small press Gasspedal and the publishing house Gyldendal. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This 8-10 minute performance will feature two persons reading from a selection of bot generated output. The readers will choose several bots to read aloud, and will read them back and forth to produce a conversation between bots, much as might happen on Twitter. The resulting juxtapositions should be both humorous and thought-provoking, with the individual readers’ voices lending continuity to the bots. For variety and emphasis, there will be a few moments in the performance in which one reader focuses on the text generated by a single bot, in the tradition of a solo riff. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Concept "The End of the White Subway" is a strange little text-game that bears some resemblance to a text adventure or interactive fiction... more or less the way a toadstool resembles a geranium. Is this a game? If being a game requires consequential decisions, controllable actions, differential outcomes, and quantification (score), then it's a game. If your definition includes fun, well... This project is really more like a time simulator -- though in some ways every game is that. It invites you to think about the passing of time (all those moments you'll never get back), the way things change even as they stay the same, what you think you are doing when you can't do much of anything, and how you know when it's time to leave the train. What You Can Do Ride the train from station to station: either click Continue or simply press any key while you are in Train mode. (You'll need to click once in the text window, or use the Continue link initially, in order to set focus.) Each station of your passage comprises a screenful of text. The text is always different, or perhaps always the same. Look at things: The Earth is full of them. Examinable objects show in red when under the cursor. Click to inspect. Some objects are described in text, some with images. Collect things: You may add objects to your Inventory after you inspect them. Clicking the Inventory link at left shows you what you have. You are only allowed to hold seven things. The system will automatically delete the oldest item if you exceed the limit. Delete or Expend things: Every item in your inventory is preceded by an X. Click here to remove the item. Some items go quietly. Others perform certain actions before they disappear. Read (or not) a story: Occasionally the view will change from Train mode to something more coherently narrative. Read (or not) and then follow the link to return. This story has a beginning and an end, and a beginning and no end. Ask for help: Use the Help link at left. Ask for as much help as you can stand. Exit: Use the Exit link whenever you feel you are ready. Leaving the train ends the game. Technical Notes The game is built entirely in Javascript and plain-vanilla HTML/CSS. This means it is stateless, so remember that leaving the page means wiping out your game. Recommended browser is the current build of Firefox (Mozilla). The game will run in Safari with minor visual glitches. Internet Explorer doesn't recognize keystrokes to advance the game, but seems to handle all other aspects. I haven't even started debugging this thing, so expect trouble. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)