Print publication

How It Is in Common Tongues was composed by searching for the text of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is using a universally accessible search engine, attempting to find, in sequence, the longest common phrases from How It Is that were composed by writers or writing machines other than Beckett. These phrases are quoted from a portion of the commons of language that happens to have been indexed by a universally accessible engine.

In this dazzling exploration of contemporary human feelings, digital whiz kids Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris use their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape. Armed with custom software that scours the English-speaking world's new Internet blog posts every minute, hunting down the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling," the authors have collected over 12 million feelings since 2005, amassing an ever-growing database of human emotion that adds more than 10,000 new feelings a day. Drawing from this massive real-world stockpile of found sentiment, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents the best of the best -- the euphoria, the despair, the passion, the dreams, and the desires that make us human. At turns touching and thought-provoking, humorous and heartbreaking, We Feel Fine combines the words and pictures of total strangers to explore every corner of the human experience. Packed with personal photos, scientific observations, statistical infographics, and countless candid vignettes from ordinary people, We Feel Fine is a visual, fiercely intelligent, endlessly engrossing crash course in the secrets of human emotion. Are men or women happier? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? Is beauty the bridge between happiness and negativity? How do our emotions change as we age? What causes depression? What's sexy? What's normal? What's human? We Feel Fine finally provides a way to answer these questions that is both quantitative and anecdotal, putting individual stories into a larger context and showing the stories behind the statistics -- or as the authors like to say, "bringing life to statistics and statistics to life." With lush, colorful spreads devoted to 50 feelings, 13 cities, 10 topics, 6 holidays,5 age groups, 4 weather conditions, and 2 genders, We Feel Fine explores our emotions from every angle, providing insights into and examples of each. Equal parts pop culture and psychology, computer science and conceptual art, sociology and storytelling, We Feel Fine is no ordinary book -- with thousands of authors from all over the world sharing their uncensored emotions, it is a radical experiment in mass authorship, merging the online and offline worlds to create an indispensable handbook for anyone interested in what it's like to be human.

Amazon: "This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title"

Every Word I Saved (Book) is the second in a series of works based on a database of every word that the artist has written saved in his various computers since 2002. In this work, the database is printed in its entirety, in a format that vaguely resembles a ledger. Words are keyed for their origin, and they are accompanied by a time stamp that reflects when they were saved. The 11x17in. book contains over 300 pages, and it is fully navigable. By hand.

(Source: artist's description on project website)

Perl poetry generator that can produce a hundred thousand billion sestinas. Readers can purchase a collection of sestinas, from one to the maximum, online.

With the exception of this introduction, the writing in this book was all done by a computer. The book has been proofread for spelling but otherwise is completely unedited. The fact that a computer must somehow communicate its activities to us, and that frequently it does so by means of programmed directives in English, does suggest the possibility that we might be able to compose programming that would enable the computer to find its way around a common language "on its own" as it were. The specifics of the communication in this instance would prove of less importance than the fact that the computer was in fact communicating something. In other words, what the computer says would be secondary to the fact that it says it correctly.

(Source: from Bill Chamberlain's introduction at Ubuweb)

Coupling the physicality of the printed page with the electric liquidity of the computer screen, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between the characters P and S while taking the reader into a wondrous, augmented reality. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that—when seen by a computer webcam—conjure the written word. Reflected on screen, the reader sees himself with open book in hand, language springing alive and shape-shifting with each turn of the page. The story unfolds through a playful and cryptic exchange of letters between P and S as they struggle to define their turbulent relationship. Rich with innuendo, anagrams, etymological and sonic affinities between words, Between Page and Screen takes an almost ecstatic pleasure in language and the act of reading. Merging concrete poetry with conceptual art, “technotext” with epistolary romance, and the tradition of the artist’s book with the digital future, Between Page and Screen expands the possibilities of what a book can be. Writer and book artist Amaranth Borsuk and (her husband) developer Brad Bouse, have created a magical space for the reader to discover what lives in the “in-between.”

(Source: Publisher's description)

Breeze developed, and continues to write in, the hybrid language mezangelle. Her unorthodox use of language demonstrates the ubiquity of digitization and the intersections of the digital and the real that are increasingly common in 21st century life. As well as creating static literary texts using mezangelle, Breeze also creates multi-disciplinary multimedia works online, and participates in online happenings that blur the lines between on- and off-line behavior.

(Source: Traumawien publisher's catalog).

In 1993 the first Italian hypertext novel, Ra-Dio, was published on floppy-disk along with a print
edition. Lorenzo Miglioli aimed to break traditional schemes of Italian literature exactly as Sex
Pistols’ punk renovated musical panoramas in the 70's. Thus, this work has not been corrected on its
orthography aspects and it has some obscene and disturbing content, that had their ultimate success
in the group of Italian writers named “Cannibali”, founded later on.
“RA-DIO, 1993, was thought as a readymade […] Ra-Dio has to be kept closed, in its cellophane,
that one is the exhibited work. Literary, construction of fiction and theory-fiction, parallel worlds
and often alternative words [...] doesn't try to express the unexpressible. In case, to unexpress the
expressible.”
The Great Hypertext Swindle, «Neural», 1994

An American Life In Writing is a re-contextualization of the words used in the first fifty-two poems of Ted Kooser's column, American Life In Poetry. Each poem is alphabetized and made mobile through the use of Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets. Users are invited to click words within a list, and then to drag them using a mouse in order to (re)organize, score, visually depict, and otherwise create a new work. The code employed in the project allows users to deal in more than one graphic plane by piling language on top of itself and by offering shifts in perspective through an uncommon juxtaposition of words. Side by side, these two curations of language present both the traditional editorial model of print and a newer model based within the decentralized context of networked culture.