Presented at conference or festival

These two video poems integrate four elements: Natalia Fedorova’s voice reading silky lines of her sonorous poetry in Russian, a Mac Os text to speech voice reading a translation in English, Taras Mashatalir’s haunting musical soundscapes, and Stan Mashov’s conceptual videos. The contrast between Fedorova’s voice, even though it’s been transformed through sound engineering, and the mechanical reading provided by the software emphasizes how much meaning inheres in breath, tone, and intimacy when performed “in your voice.” The video is composed of fragmented flowing surfaces which contain images that enhance the experience of the poem, while the music helps shape the tone and pulls the work together by situating the voices within the space evoked by the visuals. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Snow Queen, a debut videopoem by Machine Libertine, is a combination of masculine poetry «Poison Tree» by William Blake contrasted to mechanic female MacOS voice and Sever group remix of Souzfilm animation «Snow Queen» (1957). The cubist imagery of the Snow Queen's realm evokes parallels with the realm of the digital that is as unstable as the icicles that Key composes the word "eternity" from.

Soothcircuit is a large-scale work of Web poetry that relies on interactive mechanisms inspired by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle book. The work echoes the I Ching’s purpose of providing not so much glimpses into the future as insights into different situations. Each reader’s individual interaction with the work will produce a different combination of aphoristic stanzas. Each unique result can be approached as both a traditional poem and as a reflection upon the reader’s unique personal circumstances -- an oracular“analysis of the reader's current situation. If the reader addresses a question to the Soothcircuit, the reading can also be viewed as an (indirect) answer to the question.

Applying ancient oracle traditions to modern poetry puts a new slant on reader interpretation. Poetry often implicitly invites multiple alternative interpretations from readers. Many contemporary poets and critics contend that there is no fixed meaning inherent in any poem, but rather a “personalized” meaning is created by each reader as she brings her own experiences and biases to bear upon the text. Traditional oracle books present often prosaic lines of text to the reader as the result of a chance selection process and then explicitly require that these texts be interpreted in light of the reader’s personal situation. Soothcircuit combines an oracle’s explicit demand for custom interpretation with poetry's implicit need for subjective reading.

(Source: Author's description at Incubation3 conference site, trAce Archive)

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)

Some writers and theorists postulate that the most important literary art in the future will be translation. I believe that this translation is not simply between different global languages, for example, but between different manifestations of all expressive form, with a redefinition of what the expressive and the aesthetic fundamentally is. Translations: data into the verbal, the verbal into the visual, the visual into the audible, the audible into the tactile.

The theory and practice of poetry, concerning itself with such fundamental questions as what poetry is, what it does, and how it should be composed and "written," is known as poetics. Here I am concerned with the poetics of the computer-how form is transmutable, how tasks are multiple and fluid, and how to create with a machine that was intended primarily to number crunch. To this end, I am creating a virus which will explore a workstations architecture and will create a poetics of the computer as its own autonomous object, with guest data from users such as you or me.

First I am creating a virus that filters through all available material on a specified workstation and places it in an alternate context, such as a text file collage or a visual, spatialized world. Next I am taking that visible world and assigning audio elements and descriptors to the visuals. Finally, I am taking this world to a sensory environment of touch.

With this performance/installation project, I am examining the architecture of the computer as a space for examining digital cultural creation and the structures behind the myths of personal productivity. The installation is based on the spatial metaphors associated with the use of the computer hardware and software, and ultimately established a poetics of, for, and by the computer workstation. We should turn now to the machine's parts. Actual hardware and software components and functions are areas almost completely overlooked by scholars and theorists because the actual workings of computational machines is strategically mystified and misunderstood. The "space" of the hard drive is parceled out in divisions, sectors and can be mapped, imagined, and filled. What happens when the user types a text document or creates a graphic and saves it? The operating system chooses areas of the hard drive on which to write the data. Unlike the typical 3D game experience, the maneuverings inside the "world" of the hard drive are supposed to be entirely masked to the user. Yet the operation is very place-specific. This installation will ultimately allow users to feel and literally manipulate the data and come to an understanding that the workings of the computer are documentable and tangible, much like human's digestion of our lunch.

This seemingly non-systematic activity-to manipulate the space of the machine-relies upon a range of potential truths relating to data and the manner in which the data is presented. It exposes the computer as our virtual palimpsest, the place where the residues and actions of our lives are kept, erased, partly recorded.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

"Inside Blackwell Mansion" is a historical-fiction digital narrative based on the life story of Sarah Pardee Winchester, the eccentric "haunted" widow of the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune. On advice from a psychic, Sarah Winchester built a sprawling mansion in San Jose, California, allegedly to avoid the vengeful spirits of the countless many who had been killed by the Winchester rifle. Building went on continuously for 38 years, without plan, and often without apparent purpose, until her death in 1922. Sarah Winchester's story is especially interesting, because it can be considered on so many different levels: spiritualism, skepticism, mythology, tourism, and feminism.

"Inside Blackwell Mansion" is a graphics-intensive, interactive application utilizing QuickTime VR, audio, and 3D graphics to unfold its narrative. The reader navigates through the mansion-museum of the late Abra Blackwell, accompanied by a tour group that serves as a multivoice narrator. The reader interacts with narrative-yielding elements in the house, such as books, furniture, or pictures, to gain insights into the many sides of the inscrutable Abra Blackwell. The reader's spatial progression through the mansion mirrors his or her attempt to gain access to the lost memories and hidden thoughts of Abra Blackwell.

(Source: DAC 1999 Artist's description)

"Opuscula" is a different interactive electronic poem which you may explore in several ways. Inside the poem you will find four different poems with various nodes of connections to each other: An interactive poem, a ParaPoem, and two poems to be read in linear form. The interactive Poem is an animated sequence of moving and floating words illustrated by graphical effects on the screen. You as the reader will interact with the poem, by clicking on words as they appear on the screen through your reading. When you click these words and lines, random text lines conceptually connected to the word/line you clicked will be sent to create your own poem, the ParaPoem, in a transparent field at the bottom of the screen. These lines are also links which (dependent on the meaning of the line) randomly may take you to a stanza belonging to one of the two linear poems (behind the interactive and the ParaPoem's interface), to a quote, or to a word definition which all will give new meaning to the link you clicked and the poems you read. The Parapoem will be different each time you create it and can be read alone, or as a part of the other poems.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

Mary Flanagan, State University of New York, Buffalo (USA)"[raveling]"

[raveling] is a poetry performance piece for machines and human about memory and communication which posits verbal communication and text as iterative rituals that can mutate and change over time, distance, and repetition.

Prior to the piece I produced a poem with my computer. This performance was a stream-of-consciousness spoken word event and was translated by the machine. My computer synthesized the words it recognized and I saved these words into a rough poem.

In performance I read this synthesized computer/human poem to the public and to computer #1. This first computer/performer will listen to the poem and after listening, read back the composition as it recognized aloud to the audience and to the second computer/performer. The second computer/performer will listen to the poem composed by the first computer and read back the poem it recognized aloud to the audience. Each computer and human has its own voice and vocal qualities including timbre, speed, etc. They work together to bring meaning to the piece.

This interpretation/reinterpretation creative loop is accompanied with text images on each computer that can be projected. The words twisting around will be projected so that the audience can listen and view the interaction.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

"noth'rs" is composed from transliteral morphs & based on: - Marcel Proust 'Du Coté de chez Swann' & the English translation by Montcrieff & Kilmartin - Jean Genet 'Miracle de la rose' & the English of Bernard Frechtman, - with additional texts from Virginia Woolf 'To the Lighthouse,' and Li Ruzhen 'Flowers in the Mirror' ('Jinghua Yuan' translated by Lin Tai-yi). - plus 'Sixteen Flowers' by Caroline Bergvall.

"Wax..." was my first feature, executed from 1985-1991 with a variety of arts funding, and a co-production commissioning from ZDF in Germany. The narrative is grotesque, an unresolved and unresolvable tragedy revolving around the perceptual and ethical misperceptions of one Jacob Maker, flight simulation systems programmer, and amateur beekeeper. Half-way between suspense and suspension, the movie moves through space, as the protagonist is translated from his home in Alamogordo out to the Army's Deseret Test facility, and beyond, to caves or the world of the dead, and perhaps even further, if his endless talking voice is to be believed (it should be). Dislocated, disoriented, fragmented, and finally flying, the hero and all those bees and other pictures accompanying him fly backwards and forwards through time. And in a sense the viewer does too.

"Waxweb" (1993-1999) is the hypermedia version of the project, available online and on CD-ROM. It is a hypervideo, clickable on a shot by shot basis; and it is literally spatial, recomposing the time of the movie in varieties of space (2d, 3d, wor-d space). The movie expanded into apparently infinite time (made of minor, interrupted epiphanies); a grotesque, miniature, and artificial world.

(Source: Abstract, 1999 DAC conference)