Published on the Web (individual site)

Space Invaders (Japanese: スペースインベーダー Hepburn: Supēsu Inbēdā) is a 1978 arcade game created by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed in the United States by the Midway division of Bally. Within the shooter genre, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the shoot 'em up genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible.

Space Invaders was an immediate commercial success; by 1982, it had grossed $3.8 billion,[7] with a net profit of $450 million, making it the best-selling video game and highest-grossing "entertainment product" at the time. Adjusted for inflation, the many versions of the game are estimated to have grossed over $13 billion in total revenue as of 2016,[7] making it the highest-grossing video game of all time.

Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games of all time. It helped expand the video game industry from a novelty to a global industry, and ushered in the golden age of arcade video games. It was the inspiration for numerous video games and game designers across different genres, and has been ported and re-released in various forms. The 1980 Atari VCS version quadrupled sales of the VCS, thereby becoming the first killer app for video game consoles. More broadly, the pixelated enemy alien has become a pop culture icon, often representing video games as a whole.

Designer Nishikado drew inspiration from games like 1976's ball-bouncing game Breakout and the 1975 shooter game Gun Fight, as well as science fiction narratives such as The War of the Worlds, Space Battleship Yamato, and Star Wars. To complete development of the game, he had to design custom hardware and development tools.

(source: Wikipedia)

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.'

In 2019, we have Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. A hundred years earlier, there were postcards. In the “Golden Age” of postcards (1902-1915), postcards circulated with the same fervor, if not speed, of images on popular social media apps today. The Suffrage Postcard Project looks back at the early decades of the 1900s in the context of the women’s suffrage movement, a movement that gained momentum in the same historical moment of the Golden Age of postcards and produced hundreds of pro- and anti-suffrage images. This project asks: How can feminist DH and data visualization approaches to over 700 postcards offer new perspectives on the visual history of the U.S. suffrage movement? Our methodology is inspired by Jacqueline Wernimont and Julia Flanders’ 2010 article, “Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives.” They argue that the “work of digitization and encoding also engages us in a reflexive process that forces us to interrogate those genres and any genre-tags that we may use in creating the textbase.” Within our feminist DH lab—made up of faculty, instructors, graduate students, and ELO2019 University College Cork #ELOcork 36 undergraduate students—images were collectively tagged through Omeka, a digital archive platform. Currently, we are using the API to export data to ImagePlot and Gephi for data visualization. We are also in the beginning stages of building a feminist data visualization tool for the Project, in collaboration with computer science and engineering faculty and graduate students. Using the Suffrage Postcard Project, this presentation reads the aesthetics of a digital archive and argues that the ideological aesthetic brought to the creation and development of a digital archive influences the way that archive is read. In this case, a feminist aesthetic challenges visual understandings of race, class, and gender within the suffrage movement; it uses data treated by feminist methodologies to raise questions critical to intersectional feminist analysis. The aesthetics of the archive asks: How do we organize our images, line-breaks, page-breaks, and written text within the digital archive to reflect a feminist aesthetic? How do we apply a feminist aesthetic to write machine-learning algorithms that highlight critical feminist concerns within U.S. visual history? How do we represent absence—the absence of women of color, immigrant women, working-class women, non-Christian women, and women without children—in data visualization? What do these visualizations allow us to see that we couldn’t see before? And finally, how do we make our feminist treatment of such data transparent to the archive-user? These questions frame the collaborative work done within the feminist DH lab that produces the Suffrage Postcard Project.

Aphiddd was inspired, rather fittingly, by another poem I wrote many years ago about a friendship that I felt had become dependent, even parasitic in nature, largely without me even noticing.

The work developed as if the older poem were the ‘host’, the plundered source material – which made for an interesting writing and editing process. 

The idea to use photo-scanned plants and materials as part of the work came from spending time outdoors during the autumn/winter months and seeing plants, leaves and barks deteriorating. The colours at times were spectacular and beautiful, despite the nature of what was happening.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/aphiddd/)

Ring™ Log is an experiment in speculative surveillance.

Amazon's Ring™ doorbells are motion-activated high definition surveillance cameras. Once triggered, Ring™ cameras transmit video to the Ring™ app and Ring™ servers, where the video footage is preserved for future viewing.

What happens when Amazon begins using AI object detection to identify, categorize, and report what the Ring™ camera sees?

Imagine a year from now, Halloween night, October 31, 2020. What would Ring™ see? What would Ring™ report? And what happens when the program fails, as programs always do?

"In Denial: A Further Redaction of the Mueller Report" is an "R-rated" blackout poem created from the redacted version of the Mueller report.

FBI special counsel Robert Mueller conducted a 22-month long investigation of whether President Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 Presentential elections. When the report of his findings was released to the public, significant portions were blacked out. The full report is 448 pages long. In total, approximately 7.25% of the text or 1 in 8 lines were redacted, with most of the censored text concentrated in the sections on Russian Hacking and Dumping Operations (Source: Washinton Post, Vox).

To create "In Denial," Holeton selected pages from the table of contents and the introduction and executive summary of Volume II of the report, the section which concerns obstruction of justice. About 80% of the document has been "further" blacked out. The remaining visible text describes lewd sexual acts, mostly involving Trump's rear-end. There are two versions of the poem: a 30-page version with the blacked-out sections included and a 6-page text-only version. In the latter, the censored parts are removed, so that the text appears without spaces or breaks; this version was also edited for punctuation and capitalization (Source: the Fictious Press: Select Web Publications by Richard Holeton).

"Do You Have Balls?" is a slideshow prose-poem by Richard Holeton that explores issues of masculinity and the body. The presenter muses about how the presence or absence of testes affects his feelings of self-worth and way of relating to others. Each of the section headings is an iteration of the Seussian mantra: "Yes, I have ___ ball(s), and you have ___" Holeton previously experimented with the slideshow format in his works: "Voyeur With Dog" (2009) and "Custom Orthotics Changed My Life" (2010). As with these other slideshow fiction pieces, "Do You Have Balls?" incorporates elements like: bullet points, large, easy-to-read text, still images, graphs and tables, a summary of key points, and even a closing Thank You slide.

"Thirteen Ways of Killing a Scrubjay" is a prose-poem in the form of a blog that explores the theme of modern violence. The work is a "playful" response to the Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1954). The journal entries detail ludicrously gruesome and elaborate plans to murder the helpless birds: from poison pellets to cyanide darts to water cannons.

The blog fiction was first published online in 2007. In 2015, it was exhibited at ISEA International. 

Afterwords(s): Take a Book/Leave a Book is a found poem series by Richard Holeton. As Holeton explained in his ELO 2019 presentation, the series was inspired by Joan Retallack's poem "Not a Cage" (1990), in which she recycled lines of text from books that she was discarding. Instead of using books from his personal library, Holeton sourced the texts from his local "take a book/leave a book" book sharing box. Each line of the poem is taken from the final passage of a different book. He completed the work over ten days, swapping out a new book each day, to create the finished 10-line poem.

The print version of Afterword(s) appeared in print form in Forklift, Ohio #37 and the multimedia version was exhibited at the &Now 2018 Festival of Innovative Writing.