Published on the Web (online gallery)

Web Warp & Weft was created with the support of East Midlands Arts and the backing of the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University.

This project aimed to explore the ways in which women and men have woven their own stories with yarn and thread, with rugs and quilts and textiles. The website was designed to thread the ideas together and work the threads [stories] into a hypertext with pictures, sound and animation, to create a bigger picture, an overall story.

The project was based in Nottingham, which has a particularly notable history of textile creation, including frame-knitting, lacemaking, and more contemporary manufacturing processes.

There are surprising and unusual resonances within the creation of what might on the surface seem very different products: both are concerned with frames, print, pattern, layers, colour, nomenclature, technology, narratives, commerce, leisure and much more. The Luddites in Nottinghamshire in the early 19th century rendered stocking-frames unusable as a protest about the terrible treatment of the workers. The industry then was in a difficult state, as it is now. The word "Luddite" has now moved from the textile to the computer industry, becoming a term to describe all those opposed to progress in computer and machine technologies. And most recently the fall of the dot.coms has mirrored the fall of the textile industries...

Web Warp & Weft also features a collaboration between Helen Whitehead and East Midlands-based poets Joyce Lambert and Jeremy Duffield, weaving their words into the bright colours of the web.

(Source: Helen Whitehead, http://webwarpweft.com/)

This is a lovingly researched homage to the Luddites, a group of artisanal English textile workers who fought back against the industrialization of their craft. A substantial hypertext poem, it is woven from documentary information on the Luddites, excerpts from their writings and stories, HTML, Java applets, JavaScript, history, myth, and Whitehead’s vision to lend it coherence. There is so much to learn, discover, enjoy in this piece and several ways to explore it in a carefully crafted interface.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This multimedia poem is an assault on the senses— visually, kinetically, and aurally— it bombards the reader with so much information, color, sound, and stimulus that it is difficult to process, much less read. The text is handwritten and moves, spins, changes around some boxes the reader can manipulate, moving each whirling cluster to a spot in the window where it might be legible. The music, noise, and speech loop loudly but barely understandably, much like the handwritten text. Even in the menu page the typed text is so skewed that it is barely legible.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

These three poems by Nick Montfort take an ancient literary and cultural tradition, the riddle, and brings them into the digital age by using CGI scripting to allow readers to guess the response without the riddler needing to be present. The poems provide a simple input cue: a text box where the reader can type in their guess and a button that submits that response to a script, which checks the answer for a match and sends a response, whether it was correct or not. This script was probably written in Perl, a programming language Montfort uses extensively, particularly in his “ppg256” series of poem generators. Part of the interest in this choice of scripting language is that he is able to keep the answer hidden from readers, even from those who like to take a peek at the source code (like me). It also means that he could design a riddle without a correct answer, enacting what Philippe Bootz calls “the Aesthetics of Frustration.”

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This is a poem that uses language and code in textural ways. The letters are arranged in a light grey color on a white background clustered so densely that only a few words that jut out are readable. Three squares trigger a dark grey image to appear under the words, which creates more contrast for increased legibility, but it is not a true improvement. The few words one can make out are snippets of code, which might be an invitation to see what is in the source code.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Created in 1995 and developed until 1997, Hypertextual Consciousness is a work of "online critifiction", another conceptual art experiment that tackled many of the themes/issues that Amerika found prescient during the course of developing GRAMMATRON.

Source: Author's abstract

This collections of four hypertext poems are organized around each of the four elements of old. The primary techniques that guides these works is collage and pastiche because each work is built from images (mostly by Dave McKean) and textual excerpts from other writers, with the exception of “Fire,” which Sanders wrote. The pieces are structured linearly, which means that each page has a link to the next until one reaches the end of the sequence. One piece, “Air” doesn’t have links, but uses the meta refresh tag to load the next page in the sequence every 5 seconds, perhaps to create the sense that one is being carried by a gentle wind from one page to the next. The combination of images and pithy lines and silky smooth prose poems create an oddly refreshing experience of the Web, as the minimalist design and sense of assembled Web objects— most of the texts are images of texts, which are computationally very different objects.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This hypertext poem examines language and instructions from help menus and other documentation in the Windows 98 operating system, juxtaposing it with texts and images from other sources (credited in “Windows”) as well as with original material. The formatting for the Windows texts is designed for readers to read them clearly, allowing for Microsoft’s prosaic, utilitarian voice to emerge clearly and deliver instructions for procedures that seem unnecessarily complex. The “Poem by Nari” texts (Warnell’s poetic persona) are made strange and poetic through visual formatting: primarily by eliminating spaces between words, arranging streams of texts in columns, and capitalizing by constraint rather than by convention.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This combinatorial poem uses random words arranged on a grid changing in seemingly random at different time intervals. The word in the center of the grid distinguishes itself, not only by position, but by its slight overlap with the word that is to replace it. This film technique known as a dissolve adds a layer of depth to the transition by having a 10th word juxtaposed (superposed, really) and by visually representing the time-based mechanism in the poem. The title plays with a double meaning: words that are culturally considered obscene or insulting, and with a constraint of using words with only four letters (see this Scrabble dictionary). Knoebel seems to be foregrounding the latter, thought initially the title points towards the former meaning.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This hypermediated hypertext suite of poems make excessive use of background images, animated GIFs, and messily redundant code to render them deliciously unreadable and inviting. Bell weaves a dense mesh of lines, background images, and code to produce surfaces that are difficult to read at times, making us wonder if he’s aiming for felt rather than the finely stitched fabric of verse. Bell’s lines are witty and full of wordplay, non-repetitive reiterations, alliteration, and an inviting awareness of his strategies and questions. Follow the links to discover many other poems, in some of which he has the design audacity of using animated GIFs as background images.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This brief video poem is delicately built from just a few simple elements: a guitar aria, five handwritten letters, simple animation, and a handful of words scheduled into the presentation. The poem explores different meanings one can arrive from the elements of the word aria, such as air and area. As the letters move and rotate around a common axis, they delineate a space for different readings, as well as the implied space of a relationship in trouble. The gentle reconfiguration of the two hand-drawn “I”s into two mathematical symbols suggest a resolution to the conflict implied by the text, particularly when juxtaposed with the final clustering of the letters.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)