Presented at conference or festival

Paths of Memory and Painting is a three part work of narrative new media poetry that is composed of composite arrays of hypertext lexias. Parallel trails of lexias lead to different parts of a narrative told by a Bay Area Figurative painter. The main narrative thread takes part in the San Francisco Bay Area in the years beginning with World War II. But the narrator also relates other aspects her life and work, and recollects the lives of California artist adventurers. Composed with multiple paths  through narrative information,  the work creates a reading experience of successive text-paintings that chronicle the changes in a painter's work.  Created with an array of interlocking lexias that the reader shuffles and reshuffles until a narrative emerges, Part I, where every luminous landscape, (2008)  was short listed for the Prix poesie-media, France. It was featured at The Future of Writing, UC Irvine; on Cover to Cover on KPFA radio in Berkeley; and at the 2009 E-Poetry Festival in Barcelona.  Part II, when the foreground and the background merged, (2009) is a filmic, intimate conversation that is represented with parallel lexias.  The interface for part III, (2010) which has the same name as the whole work, paths of memory and painting, is an array of three side by side lexia trails that, like a trio sonata, advance polyphonically. The entire work was introduced at at the UC Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable in 2010, and exhibited at the 2010 Electronic Literature Organization Conference at Brown University.

Intermission is a performative redadaction of the poetics of cinema. The performance and media platform utilizes René Clair’s short film Entr’acte (1924, a collaboration with Picabia and Erik Satie) as a starting point, reimagining cinema as if the Dadaist vision for the medium had become the prevalent form.

A "degenerative discourse generator" dedicated to the city of Karlskrona, Sweden.

Along the briny beach a garden grows. With silver bells and cockleshells, cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh. A coral orchard puts forth raucous pink blossoms. A bouquet of sea anemones tosses in the shallows. A crop of cliffs hedges a sand-sown lawn mown twice daily by long green-thumbed waves rowing in rolling rows. The shifting terrain where land and water meet is always neither land nor water and is always both. The sea garden’s paths are fraught with comings and goings. Sea birds in ones and twos. Scissor-beak, Kingfisher, Parrot and Scissor-tail. Changes in the Zoology. Causes of Extinction. From the ship the sea garden seems to glisten and drip with steam. Along a blue sea whose glitter is blurred by a creeping mist, the Walrus and the Carpenter are walking close at hand. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk along the briny storied waiting in-between space. Wind blooms in the marram dunes. The tide far out, the ocean shrunken. On the bluff a shingled beach house sprouts, the colour of artichoke. On the horizon lines of tankers hang, like Chinese lanterns. Ocean currents collect crazy lawn ornaments. Shoes and shipwrecks, cabbages and kings. Water bottle caps and thick white snarls of string. At dawn an ancient tractor crawls along the briny beach, harvesting the tide’s leaves. The world’s plastic, the sea’s weeds.

This subtly haunting poem tells the story of how each letter from the alphabet disappeared, or was made to disappear, by corporations obeying a secret agenda. The conspiracy theory overtones are underscored by the use of sound, a short loop of metallic whispering wind or water and a handful of soft musical notes. Clicking on each letter on the left hand column will take you to the corresponding letter and narrative of its disappearance, with the large letter disappearing as you read the accompanying text, but it also starts a slower, almost imperceptible, fading process of those letters in the entire work. If you click through quickly and read the whole poem you may not even notice, but step away for a minute and you’ll find that the letters you have read have disappeared from all the language in the poem and the result may be challenging to read (see image below). This more than anything provides a visceral impact, as we try to read a barely functional language mutilated by loss of letters.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

The story starts in 1928 with the finding of Uranium in Colo- rado, and ends in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It tells the adventures of a man, Tulse Luper, a writer and project-maker who spent his life “under lock and key” in several parts of the world and archived his life in 92 suitcases. Tuned to the author’s characteristic style, it is an encyclopedic project, but one that responds in a unique way to the stimuli of new visual languages and narrative formats. Because of this, it is accomplished in different media (a television series, numerous DVDs, movie trilogy, VJing performance, web site, online game, a library of 92 books, various theater events and exhibitions).

(Description from Giselle Beiguelman, "The Reader, the Player and the Executable Poetics: Towards a Literature Beyond the Book")

Prosthesis is a set of live vocal performances addressing complicities inherent in the use of digital technology and emergent artificialities in cognition, language, and the physical body. It consists of nine main sections, including readings augmented by projections and recorded voice, and concludes with a song.

(Source: Author's site)

This highly professional video documents a live performance of this poem, which uses primarily three materials: speeches by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Google Earth. These works are brought together in a political and economic mashup that incorporates texts read aloud by Portela in English and translated to Spanish and Portuguese, voice recordings of the speeches, and a large projected video of Google Earth navigating to parts of the world that resonate with the poem. Portela intervenes upon these materials in a variety of ways, defamiliarizing them towards the poetic, emphasizing particular words or passages by isolating and repeating them, and placing them in conversation with its other materials through juxtaposition and superposition. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

David Jhave Johnston’s video-based "Interstitial" is a meditation on terminal anxiety. The title of the piece, which refers generally to that which occupies an “empty interval,” takes on a specific connotation when one considers its popular use in web development contexts for the commercial “pre-loaders” that hawk their wares while one waits for the site to open. The video, which is minimally edited, features three views arranged in triptych form: a cat decomposing in a river, tidal pools, and a bug undergoing metamorphosis. These events, as witnessed by Johnston, are unaltered and unmodified, simply captured where they occurred using handheld equipment. According to an artist’s statement published on Tributaries and Text-fed Streams (http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/2008/02/22/interstitial/), the web presentation of the files was formatted through the process of naming the discrete video, audio, and poetic text files and allowing software to assemble these pieces into an endless loop. Variations in the piece are a product of technical differentials—processing speed, bandwidth, and computer to computer interaction—rather than human interaction. The grand result is a provocative juxtaposition of contrasting phases of life and death, ebbing and flowing, in the interstice created by the poetic process.

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Davin Heckman)

10:01 is the complementary and complimentary hypermedia version of Olsen's avant-pop novel 10:01 (Chiasmus, 2005) about what goes through the minds of the audience in an AMC theater at the Mall of America ten minutes and one second before the feature film commences.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One.)