Presented at conference or festival

Commissioned to work on as a digital engagement with Eugen Gomringer by the Poesiewerkstatt Berlin. Each browser has a function that can show the source text of every retrieved website. Thus, the internet user can always see how a specific website has been programmed. That’s what G-Linie HTML plays with. Websites are layed out with HMTL-Tags. This includes for example the tag-pair

in each paragraph. A website can be created with any ASCII-editor. In these editors (and the browser's view of the source text is nothing else) line breaks and the distance between words can be carried out. However, they only become visible in the browser window when they are accordingly tagged. In other words, if an ASCII-Text is reformatted without HTML-Tags in the source text, one sees it as a sequence of words and signs without a break or gap. JODI worked with this in the piece %locationi in a virtuous way. If one accesses the website in the browser, one only sees an unstructured, disconnected, blinking sequence of signs. If one switches to the source text, then one can see ASCII-graphics.ii This is exactly what G-Linie HTML refers to, whose subtitle is quelltext-hommage aah gomringer/jodi/la monte young. In the browser, the viewer only gets to see a horizontal line of words. If one switches to the source text, these words are displayed as ASCII-Art, as poems by Eugen Gomringer. Moreover, the viewer can replace words and signs in the browser-window with an immediate impact on the source text. As a co-writer, he or she has to employ a mental strategy to change the subtext that is hidden in the source text of the hidden poem by Gomringer. In this process, he or she can extend the structure of Gomringer’s poems − line breaks, blanks, the number of words can be expanded or reduced with some skills. Yet, they always remain the basis for the considerations. This demands a lot from the collaborative author und occasionally evokes destructive forces. The G-Line HTML is then rather turned into an interactive reload of my work Kill the Poemiii from1997. It is entirely up to my co-writer and how he or she deals with my offerings to act them out. “It is really not an issue whether the viewer understands the concept of the artist. (…) Once the piece of art is out of his hands, he no longer has any control over how a viewer processes it” [transl. MP], writes Sol LeWitt in his ″Paragraphen über konzeptuelle Kunst″ in 1967. Conceptual art is the third point of reference of G-Linie HTML. La Monte Young made the great call to action: Draw a straight line and follow it (Composition 1960 No. 10). In G-Linie HTML the co-writer can potentially construct an endless line of letter. This line can, however, just like La Monte Young’s direction only be executed in one’s mind.

searchSongs captures the stream of words of Lycos' live search. This stream of words might be understood as an expression of collective desire, as the net's melody of yearning, which is played by thousands of people, who at any moment try to reach the desired by means of a search engine. This melody of yearning is made audible by searchSongs. Words contain playable tones of the musical notation system (c, d, e, f, g, a, h, c, fis, ces ...). On one side searchSongs' web interface shows the stream of words of the live search, on the other side there are lines of musical notes below which transform playable letters in musical notes. Non-playable letters define the length of a tone. In ancient Greece there already was a notation system of letters which was used for indicating the pitch of a tone, and the length of a tone was marked with a symbol written above the letter. A traditioned example is the Seikilos epitaph dated from the second century B.C. The most well known example of a word set to music by a letter notation system is the B-A-C-H motif, which Johann Sebastian Bach repeatedly used in his compositions. searchSongs refers to traditional letter notation systems like the Seikilos epitaph and the B-A-C-H motif. searchSongs accentuates the correlation between letters and notes in a more determined and concrete way. Furthermore the theme of musical improvisation is juxtaposed by a random generator, and the strict rules of the musical notation system is antagonized by algorithme. In this respect at the end the subjective search is being objectivized by the melody of the searchSongs. However the searchSongs keep their personal momentum by making it possible for visitors and listeners to interactively insert own words into the stream of words and take part in playing music. SearchSong is a highly complex mesh of language and music interaction between human being, machine and net communication, between text input, musical notation, programming and a real-time stream of words of a live search.

Language is corrupt! The subject reignes over the alienated object! Language is the code of power! Therefore "smash the surface" and concrete it in a new way. The concrete_machine™ liberates the language from the dominating code into the pictorial concrete. It was already in the last century that language seemed suspicious to numerous artistic movements. The Cubists and Dadaists collaged text-fragments into pictures. Dada dissolved words into sounds. The Lettrists reduced language which they understood as aesthetically exhausted to the single letter. The concrete poets composed letter-pictures and the utopias of the 70ies tried to convert the ruling code. The concrete_machine™ will go on this road to the very end. Compute the text: give it to the concrete_machine™ and so make a free picure of it.

Hapax Phaenomena is a collection of historically unique images discovered by Google image search from collaborators Clement Valla and John Cayley. The fragile and tenuous Phaenomena are organized into subcategories within the five folders; 1_discordant_wonderfulness; 2_nondurable_megabyte; 3_inventive_monetarism; 4_patriotic_leaseback; and 5_diatomic_roach. Each Phaenomena is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, a screenshot of its moment of global and historical singularity taken by one of the artists.

(Source: Rhizome project description at The Download)

Nonce.Executor is a video poem.

"Viz Études" is a series of performances that present a reading and projection of a number of visual, kinetic, text, and Java-based compositions for electronic space, works which mine the more pliant possibilities of e-poetry and explore the material dimensions of writing in electronic space through the use of elements such as moving text, imbedded sound files, and Java-layered text as properties of writing. The language of "Viz Études" is one in which ideation cannot help but be colored by implications of the very vocabulary of the electronic possibilities for new writing. An installation of "Viz Études" for magnetic media was included in the "The Next Word" Exhibit at the Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, Fall, 1998. This performance is part of a series, individual iterations of which have been performed in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, London, Buffalo, and, a week before its performance here, in Mexico City. See also With Code in Hand: an Inventory & Prospectus for E-Poetics, a paper also being presented at this conference.

[the perpetual bed] is an online, virtual VRML world in which users can interact with each other from within a navigable, surrealistic narrative. A hybrid between video, interactive art, installation, and animation, the piece is based on my own and my grandmother's experiences within transparent yet tangible beings and places discovered when hospitalized. My creative concerns in creating this piece are numerous, but I am trying to create a new media from the temporal and motion imaging elements of film and video, the accessibility of the internet, the user-centered narrative form from interactive art, and elements of choreography. The interaction will take place through a technology I have designed called Navigable Chat. Users can percieve each other through their textual presence. My goal is to tell a story in an altogether new way -- that of allowing the user to move through a story, to "happen" upon a scene, and to find their own meaning in this ever-enacted place. Users can then leave their mark and become part of the story--leave hints, impressions, etc--for the next viewer.

Rockface II revisions the classic landscapes of the Canadian Rockies, using transition to systematically deconstruct and recombine the mountain scenery. In the process, the work explores concepts of pictorialism, scale, time and metamorphosis. At the same time, it examines liminality of narrative through the introduction of subtly embedded human imagery.

C()n Du It is a volume of poetic audio-videoclips, presenting the most important phenomena of visual culture and asking questions about a man’s place in the online sphere and about identity in the era of avatars. Intense, expressive and ironic pictures, show in an epigrammatic form our daily internet ‘rituals’, like clicking, posting, chatting. References to animation, film, advertisement or video games create dynamic, expansive clips. No ‘dry bones’, using a metaphor from ‘logical poem’, but a truly ‘fleshy’ poetry, precise and firm. The style of the whole volume may be described as a ‘post-Atari’, with green color reminding of system commands and simple font expressing nostalgia for the uncomplicated, 8-bit world. The spectator is forced to simultaneously cope with the picture and sound and experiences a true stereophonic reality. In so uncertain 20th century a man is a constantly reborn avatar, a pixel or just a printed circuit on the motherboard of society.

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl is a work of digital fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, persons, places or texts is entirely intentional. Details from many a high sea story have been netted by this net-worked work. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of sea voyages into the unknown North undertaken over the past 2340 years. At the furthest edge of this assemblage floats the fantastical classical island of Ultima Thule and the strange phenomenon known to the Romans as sea lung. Sprung from Edward Leer’s Victorian nonsense poem, a lazy and somewhat laconic owl and a girl most serious, most adventurous, most determined, have set sail toward this strange sea in a boat of pea-, bottle-, lima-bean- or similar shade of green. The cartographic collage they voyage through collects the particularities of a number of fluid floating places - as described or imagined in sources as diverse as Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries and the children’s poem Wynken, Blynken and Nod - and reacontextualizes them in an obviously awkward assemblage of discontinuous surfaces pitted with points of departure, escape routes, lines of flight.