Published on the Web (individual site)

Textual engine, with sound, from Fernando Pessoa's translation of "The Crow", by Edgar A. Poe. Retextualization to HTML + CSS + XML + JS of poems originally created in Flash / ActionScript (2009).

Textual engine based on ‘Húmus’ by Herberto Helder (1968) and Raul Brandão (1918). Retextualization to HTML + CSS + XML + JS of poems originally created in Flash / ActionScript (2008)

Textual engine, with sound, text created from the short story "Amor", by Clarice Lispector, with lexicon from the book "Laços de Família", by the same author. Retextualization to HTML + CSS + XML + JS of poems originally created in Flash / ActionScript (2008)

Textual engine, animation, based on texts by Salette Tavares and lexicon by Salette Tavares and Fernando Pessoa. Retextualization to HTML + CSS + XML + JS of poems originally created in Flash / ActionScript (2010)

Retextualization to HTML + CSS + XML + JS of poems originally created in Flash / ActionScript in 2008 and published on CD-ROM in 2012

Generative textual philosophy based on four fundamental propositions by René Descartes

Simulating computer-mediated environments that dominated our lives in 2020, in merged with the screen for days, computer-generated stanzas that move across a four-array structure play unpredictably together -- allowing, if the reader generates several versions, multiple views.

The history of generative poetry is referenced in the background by Jonathan Swift's Lagado Engine from Gulliver's Travels. (the drawing probably did not appear until the 1727 third edition). Swift imagined this engine as a satire that predicted where literature, art, and science would go astray centuries later. But for years, I have been haunted by the beauty of his illustration. 

In the first column, backgrounded by the Lagado Engine, some of the texts are taken from The Roar of Destiny, a work I began in 1995, while I was working full time online for Arts Wire. In The Roar of Destiny, I wanted to simulate the merging of real life and online life that occurred when at least half of one's life was spent online. I recall that we thought that many other people would soon be working in this way. But that did not happen until 2020, when it was mandated by an epidemic. 

The other columns were written in response to COVID-isolation. The title, merged with the screen for days, is taken from a line in The Roar of Destiny. 

My work with computer-mediated generative literature began in 1988 with the generative hypertext system that I devised for the third file of Uncle Roger and subsequently used to create its name was Penelope in 1989. In my creative practice, a literary "engine" -- that I design, code, and write -- seeks to fulfill an individual vision that would be difficult to convey in print. 

merged with the screen for days is available at https://www.narrabase.net/merged/merged_cover_index.html 

(Source: Author's abstract)

RE\VERSE: an elegiac e-poem (2020-21) results from the collaboration between cyberliterary artist collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 and visual artist Daniela Reis during the first 40 days after the Covid-19 pandemic status (March – April 2020). Following a random plus (pre-)combinatorial logic, 40 textual verses and 40 pictorial fragments intertwine in order to provoke a self-reflective reading of the verse(s) and reverse(s) characterizing the first quarantine period of pandemic confinement by COVID-19. On one side, a painter making use of the sparse materials she had at home, locked up in a small apartment and without access to her studio, dividing her attention between two children, a husband and a dog; on the other side a poet ekphrastically writing a verse per day as suspended portraits of a collective experience of fear, uncertainty, and emptiness that assaulted the whole world. Combined, in the sum of their verses and reverses, image and text (un)veil a dialogic path that, although necessarily entropic, is made of continuous renewal.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona Based on Sonnet Corona by Nick Montfort December 2020 

Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the curtal sonnet, a 3/4 abbreviation of the Petrarchan sonnet in which each section of the form is proportionately shortened: the octave becomes a sestet, the sestet a quatrain with an extra tail. In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nick Montfort published “Sonnet Corona,” a tiny program that can generate a crown of 3^14 or 4,782,969 potential sonnets. Its 14 monometer lines evoke the enclosure and uncertainty of the early lockdown. “Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona” utilizes Montfort’s code to generate 4^11 or 4,194,304 curtal, 11-line sonnets with 4 variables per line. The abbreviated form felt appropriate to my feelings about this moment at the end of a very difficult year, but one illuminated by hope, as my son, due in January 2021, decided he couldn’t wait and joined our family in the final weeks of December. "Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona" is dedicated to Dorothea and Dashiell. The generator is available at amaranthborsuk.com/curtalcorona. 

Sample poems: 

1. we ask in mind one shot a dash deadlines for naught 

so long we sigh fine wrought our hope— starbright . starbrought 

2. we thrash resigned uncaught held fast fault lines drawn taut 

so long entwined one thought keep on— our light . our lot 

3. we thrash still blind a dot at last headlines in knots 

headstrong we sigh unknot our hope— forthright . forethought 

4. we ask resigned a dot a dash deadlines drawn taut 

heartstrung we sigh unknot new song— our light . our lot 

(Source: Author's abstract)

"Lost Inside: A Digital Inquiry" is a COVID-era digital journal inspired by J.R Carpenter's "Entre Ville" that assumes depths of hypertext, intimate entries, and personal and visual perspectives that highlight a state of stasis due to the quietude and uncertainty of the outer world. The purpose of this work is to create an intimate space for rumination on the experience of life under quarantine and a pandemic. While it does not necessarily comment on politics and the status of the pandemic, except slightly, it mainly highlights the states/stages, metaphysically and emotionally speaking, which we as individuals tend to undergo due to the circumstances COVID has provided us. These stages, such as hopelessness, concern, distraction, connection, fantasy, reflection, and questioning, are expressed in the journal through images, text, drawings, audio, and video accumulated during the period itself. While it is mainly told through a perspective that is personal and from a character who is largely based on my person, or explicitly "me", the author, I believe the musings of this work are largely prolific and universal in the emotions and viewpoints they present. The journal is prone to updates and additions, as the theme is based on COVID, therefore as long as the virus persists, the digital journal will as well.

(Source: Author's abstract)