Presented at conference or festival

This presentation will explore random e-poetry and interspecies based on two electronic works: one that intersect humanity and insect-like robotics titled “Robot-poem@s”, and an eproject/poem based on a performance with sheep: “Negro en ovejas/Black on Sheep.” Robotpoem@s consist of insect-like robots (five quadrupeds and a bigger hexapod) whose legs and bodies are engraved with the seven parts of a poem written from the robot’s point of view in bilingual format (Spanish and English). Binary constructs such as creator/creature are questioned by these creatures purposely chosen from open-source models resembling insects and spiders, thus emphasizing anxiety and removal from humans while underlying the already problematic relation between humans and technology. The final segment of the poem, number VII, rephrases the biblical pronouncement on the creation of humans, as perceived by the robot: “According to your likeness / my Image.” With this statement, the notion of creation is reformulated and bent by the power of electronics, ultimately questioning its binary foundations. An interface to explore these robopoem@s can be found at tina.escaja.com (requires Flash): http://www.uvm.edu/~tescaja/robopoems/quadrupeds.html. This interface shows the original quadrupeds with options for listening to the poems in three different languages (English, Spanish and Chinese), interacting with 3-D models of the quadrupeds, and experiencing Augmented Reality components triggered by the panels that served as matrix of the robot-poets. On the other hand, “Negro en ovejas” is a digital “ovine poem” which intersects words and sheep in an interactive poetic project that allows random poetry as created by the sheep as they graze in the pasture, a performance enhanced and extended to the possible variants created by a digital interface: https://www.badosa.com/obres/ovino/index.html This project includes, therefore, various levels of poetic action and interaction. First there is the process of constructing the text, the base-poem formed by words which have meaning in and of themselves, but also acquire new meanings by contacting with other words (the noun “Sol” - “Sun”- and the verb “Es” -“Is”- become the plural “Soles” -“Suns”- through proximity or contact). Once the written pieces are constructed, they are assigned to sheep who will freely form poems in a performance of movements and bleating which will become its own entity. Finally, when the event is transferred to the digital artefact, any web surfer can access and reproduce the process in a cybernetic interaction and in an exchange which affords them creative authorship: the web user, just like the sheep, creates the poetic experience, joining forces with  the sheep as well. The presentation of the interface at ELO2019 would potentially capture some of the verses in a suggestion and proposal of new interactive dimensions. Both e-lit projects allow for a questioning of binaries and media-assumptions based on electronics, interspecies and random poetry.

This collaborative project brings together the narrative practice of Joanna Howard and John Cayley’s digital language art research on the reading of subliteral differences. Particularly in certain fonts, differences of less-than-a-letter distinguish certain pairs of English words – hearing/bearing, litoral/literal. Howard composes brief narratives laced with words from these pairs such that, when the subliteral differences are realized, the narratives are developed, subverted, folded in on themselves: bearing the literal traces of narrative experiences within which tiny formal differences, actualized by digital affordances, generate aesthetic and critical reading.

There are six distinct micro-narratives in this piece, tagged as: "lascaux", "ars", "murder", "mars", "order", and "noir". Arrow keys or mobile device gestures can be used to move through the work and from one narrative to another. For each, an intertitle is shown and then the narrative itself which oscillates slowly, back and forth, between its two narrative 'phases' or (subliterally differing) 'states.' If a keyboard is linked, and while a narrative is being shown, it is possible to use the 1 thru 6 keys to access one of the others according to the order of 'tags.'

Dairbhre is a lyric poetry project about attempting to know a desired place by walking the roads of that place in that place, in memory, and most accessibly/obsessively, in Google Street View. There are many walks. “One Walk,” a poem in 7 sections, goes from Knightstown to a specific house in Upper Tinnies on Valentia Island. Although the project is intended to be about place and displacement, it manifests currently as being about metaphor, a form of transport I find particularly challenging. And they’re all challenging. The poem is composed primarily in Google Street View, but also on the actual road, and allowing memory. Its intended form is audio-visual recording but at the ELO, I will simply read several sections, without the video

"Using both the Amazon Atlas (www.wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas) and the AWS infrastructure map (www.aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure) as starting points, I will track and identify new AWS data centres around the globe. I also hope to initiate contact and dialogue with artists/activists within specific AWS regions in order to promote and develop tactical, subversive and creative interventions within these systems of corporate networked power."

Digital Fiction Curios is a unique digital archive/interactive experience for PC and Virtual Reality.

The project houses works of electronic literature created in Flash nearly two decades ago by artists Andy Campbell and Judi Alston of Dreaming Methods, One to One Development Trust‘s award-winning in-house studio.

Dreaming Methods is responsible for some of the internet’s earliest media-rich digital fiction. Much of that work was created in Flash, a technology that will be removed from all major web browsers in 2020. Curios archives and re-purposes three of our Flash works originally made as far back as 1999 and makes it uniquely possible to explore them in VR.

From fragments of words held in glass bottles to sprawling apocalyptic dreamscapes, Curios offers an immersive glimpse into Dreaming Methods' signature world of dream-inspired narratives, living texts and lost realities. 

“Sometimes I am ...” is an interactive text/audio poetic that explores how language shapes our identity, how it can bring us together, and how it can set us on the periphery. How language and can make people and events visible and not visible. It asks the viewer/reader to consider both “What is invisible?” and “Who is invisible?”A beta version of “Sometimes I am …” was built in the summer of 2019 and was presented at the Media Festival and Conference of Electronic Literature in Cork, Ireland. The beta version can be viewed at http://bit.ly/iamyouare. The work was conceived of by Leanne Johnson (leannej) in collaboration with artist My Name Is Scot (audio) and Kevin MacMillan (developer).

Eververse is a project which synthesises perspectives from disciplines in the humanities and sciences to develop critical and creative explorations of poetry and poetic identity in the digital age. Eververse sends biometric data from a fitness tracking device worn by the poet to its custom-built poetry generator. This generator utilises NLG techniques to output poetic text published in real time, and 24/7, on the Eververse website.

Questioning the notion of cybertext from Espen Aarseth (1997), beginEnd presents itself as a reflection on the mechanisms and materialities inherent in the book as an object. Beginning with the retelling of Finnegans Wake and the notion of intercircularity that characterizes this singular work of James Joyce, beginEnd is a combinatorial and continuous poem online, which reconverts in a digital transcoding the possibility of containing at one time two distinct moments.

“The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the searcher. – Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou whilst find.”

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

[(DES)CONEXÃO (2018), by artist collectivewreading digits, in collaboration with media artist Pedro Ferreira, is a cyberpoetic artifact developed under the artistic residency “Realtime Runtime People”, promoted by the INVITROgerador (Universidade Aberta). Having its first instantiation [realtime], in July 2018, at Atelier Concorde Lisbon, as a #cyberpoetic installation complemented with #livecoding #liveremixing#performance, (DES)CONEXÃO was also presented at ARTeFACTo 2018, without its digital component. The intention at stake here was to reinforce itsinitial questioning – a reflection on the ways technologies alter our perception of time –, by giving visibility and expressiveness to textual and poetic layers behind the surface of the artifact. In dissecting the machine and its fragmented layers of different data, certain experimental writing techniques used, that allow us to extend the word, and therefore the text,  – such as combinatorics, literary cut-ups, or fold-ins – are cut wide open. Beyond the circular walls of its anatomical theatre, the remains of these mediated and transmutated philosophical stone(s), once modified, filtered, sublimated, multiplied, and sometimes even self-generated were revealed. In runtime.