Print publication

Fidget is a transcription of writer Kenneth Goldsmith's every movement made during thirteen hours on June 16, 1997 (Bloomsday). This online edition includes the full text, a self-running Java applet version written by programmer Clem Paulsen, and a selection of RealAudio recordings from Theo Bleckmann's vocal-visual performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Bloomsday 1998.

Fidget attempts to reduce the body to a catalogue of mechanical movements by a strict act of observation. Goldsmith aims to be objective like the photographer Edward Muybridge. In Fidget, Goldsmith reduces language to its basic elements in order to record and understand movement in its basic form. Despite these aims, the dictates of the work like the self-observation and the duration of the act, create a condition of shifting referent points and multiple levels of observation that undermine the objective approach.

Goldsmith and Paulsen's collaboration has reconfigured the text of Fidget to substitute the human body with the computer. The Java applet contains the text reduced further into its constituent elements, a word or a phrase. The relationships between these elements is structured by a dynamic mapping system that is organized visually and spatially instead of grammatically. In addition, the Java applet invokes duration and presence. Each time the applet is downloaded it begins at the same time as set in the user's computer and every mouse click or drag that the user initiates is reflected in the visual mapping system. The different hours are represented in differing font sizes, background colors and degree of "fidgetness", however, these parameters may be altered by the user. The sense of time is reinforced by the diminishing contrast and eventual fading away of each phrase as each second passes.

Fidget was originally commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris as a collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann. The live performance was at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris on June 16, 1998 at 8p.m. Bleckmann's vocal interpretations of Fidget are available here in RealAudio. A gallery installation of Fidget opened at Printed Matter in New York City. Printed Matter featured Goldsmith's collaboration with seamstress Sydney Maresca. The exhibition ran from June 11-September 4 1998.

(Source: http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/fidget/about.html)

Jackson Mac Low’s Barnesbook: Four Poems Derived from Sentences by Djuna Barnes utilizes the computer program DIASTEXT developed by Charles O. Hartman. The program was first sent to Mac Low for his use in 1989. DIASTEXT automates Mac Low’s “diastic reading-through text-selection method” initially employed by Mac Low in January of 1963 (Mac Low 47). The process uses a “seed” text (an index-word or -phrase) which is then applied to a corpus of text as a sort of acrostic, where letters and their order in the seed determine words selected from the corpus and outputted by the program. As Christopher Funkhouser notes in Prehistoric Digital Poetry (2007), “translating Mac Low’s arbitrary method into a program was not difficult because the process itself is algorithmic and does not involve random elements” (68). Hartman's DIASTEXT appears to have been written in C and distributed as a DOS executable file (versions of which can be found online as of this writing). Though DIASTEXT played a fundamental role in the composition of the poems of Barnesbook, the result is a printed book and not a work made to be read on screen.

(Source: John Vincler, ELD, 2010: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/320)

permafrost is a poetry chapbook by Álvaro Seiça. permafrost launches ‘The Proposal Series,’ a collaborative editorial project by Bypass Editions and Flatland Design.

On September 15, 2008, the newspaper Público published an article about the world’s most northern town, Longyearbyen, Norway, which chronicled the unusual life and habits of the researchers that study the Arctic and its permafrost, the permanently frozen subsoil.

Inspired by this text, Álvaro Seiça wrote a series of sms poems with 140 characters, challenging not only the boundaries between informative text and fictional text, but also the meaning of poetic text, poem, poetic sources, and line break.

(Source: Bypass Editions)

Series of traditional Portuguese aphorisms appropriated and recreated by Pedro Barbosa. The aphorisms were developed in BASIC with two programs written by Barbosa, AFOR-A and AFOR-B. The series were published in the third volume of the cybernetic literature series, Máquinas Pensantes (1988).

Series of aphorisms developed in BASIC with a program written by the Barbosa, ACASO. The series were firstly published in the newspaper Jornal de Notícias (1984) and then in the third volume of the cybernetic literature series, Máquinas Pensantes (1988).

Series of aphorisms appropriated from a fragment (“matrix-text”) by Nietzsche and recreated by Pedro Barbosa. The aphorisms were developed in BASIC with a program written by Barbosa, RE-TEXT. The series were published in the third volume of the cybernetic literature series, Máquinas Pensantes (1988).