Published on the Web (online gallery)

Clues explores the nature of communication, knowledge, and identity through the language and postures of mystery fiction. It's a metaphysical whodunit that invites you to solve the mystery by uncovering clues linked to images throughout the work. The search becomes a game that leads you down wooded trails, back alleys, and empty hallways. Which characters should you pursue? Which objects should you investigate? To win the game, you must separate all the clues from the red herrings. Your final score determines the outcome of the text. But is the mystery really soluble? Is winning actually better than losing? Are the answers or the questions more revealing?

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

Aleph Null (2011) marks Jim Andrews’ return to open source work since he shifted to Macromedia (now Adobe) Director in 2000. His earliest works were written in DHTML between 1997-2000, a highly creative period in which he found his “voice” as a poet and programmer of electronic literature  with works like “Seattle Drift” and the “Stir Fry Texts.” The limitations of DHTML at the time prompted his move to Director, which allowed him to develop highly musical and visual pieces, such as “Nio,” “Arteroids,” and “Jig Sound.” During his Director period, Andrews started creating works as artistic tools rather than as end products (as was the case in his early visual poetry), as seen in “A Pen” and “dbCinema,” both of which are artistic predecessors to Aleph Null. “A Pen” is a software pen with four simultaneous nibs that offers simple tools that encourage both active play and contemplation to allow a textual and visual poem to unfold. “dbCinema” uses diverse shapes as nibs, the results of an image search as “ink,” a random path and rotation for the nibs, and highly elaborate tools to shape the results as they are generated in real time. Aleph Null continues in this tradition by creating a digital tool that allows users to create “color music” and still images, or simply step back and allow it to unfold as “painterly cinema.”Aleph Null is many things. It’s an exploration of JavaScript and HTML5. It’s a record of a creative process. It’s a set of digital tools created to produce artistic pieces and made available for audiences to explore their own creativity. But tools shape their users in subtle ways. To use Aleph Null is to enter Andrews’ thought process, poetics, and vision.

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

Afeeld is a full-length collection of playable intermedia and concrete art compositions that exist in the space between poetry and videogames. It was published as a 'Digital Original' by the Collaboratory for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech in 2017.

Content from Afeeld has been exhibited at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the 2013 Modern Language Association Convention in Boston, MA, the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Morgantown, WV, the Carroll Gallery at Tulane University, the Ellen Powell Tiberno Museum in Philadelphia, PA, the CalArts Library in Valencia, CA, the 2011 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Washington, D.C., the 2010 Post_Moot Convocation at Miami University of Ohio, and the Zaoem Festival of Contemporary Poetry in Ghent, Belgium. Excerpts have also appeared online in Abjective, Certain Circuits, London Poetry Systems, Otoliths #16, Oxford Magazine, and Word For/Word #14. Alphabet Man was published as a chapbook by Slack Buddha Press in April 2010, and was honored with an &Now Award for Innovative Writing in 2012. Count as One was published as a chapbook in the Fall 2009 issue of New River: a Journal of Digital Writing and Art. This is Visual Poetry was published in July 2010, as the 51st chapbook in Dan Waber's "This is Visual Poetry" chapbook series. Asterisk has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, through a grant made by the Humanities Gaming Institute at the University of South Carolina.

(Source: About Afeeld)

Intertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family memories in a work of polyphonic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata, the madrigal, streams and fountains, and Irish song, From Ireland with Lettersis an electronic manuscript of displacement, survival, and the role of art in the abolition of slavery.

The central place of Irish music, displacement, disrupted tradition in the work of contemporary Irish authors is paralleled in this polyphonic Irish American electronic manuscript. Each part is separate and written in a different structure and tempo, but the whole is integrated by themes introduced in the opening Prologue. Although the workings of each section are different, as a general rule, the work can be read either by waiting for the text to change on its own (as if watching a film or listening to a piece of music) or by clicking on any lexia, in which case the reader takes control of how the story is explored in the manner of hypertext fiction.

From Ireland with Lettersinterweaves the stories of Walter Power -- who came to America as an Irish slave on The Goodfellow in 1654, stolen from his family by Cromwell's soldiers and sold in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he was 14 years old -- and his descendant, 19th century Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers, who grew up on a Vermont farm and moved to Florence, Italy, where his work played a symbolic role in the fight to abolish African American slavery in America.

Currently, there are four files of the work available: Prologue, Begin with the Arrival, passage, and fiddlers passage. The Prologue, Begin with the Arrival and passage, premiered in June 2012 at the author's distance reading and retrospective at the 2012 Conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. And mid-summer 2012, From Ireland with Letters was on display on the plasma screen at FILE 2012: Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

(Source: Judy Malloy)

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a computer-generated dialogue, a literary narrative of generations of transatlantic migration, a performance in the form of a conversation, an encoded discourse propagating across, beyond, and through long-distance communications networks. One JavaScript file sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. The mission of this JavaScript is to generate another sort of script. The call “function produce_stories()” produces a response in the browser, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference; or: Strophe, Antistrophe, and Chorus; or Here, There, and Somewhere in Between.

From the author's website: 

PHON:E:ME is an “orchestration of writerly effects” contributed by network artists, writers, designers, DJs, programmers and curators. Their combined efforts created a transformational online narrative environment that tells the story of how net culture is altering our received notions of authorship and originality, and how emerging digital artists are helping to break down the boundaries between the virtual and the real, between art and non-art, and the various disciplines that have too often led to rigid compartmentalization and weak critical speculation. The project was promoted as “an mp3 concept album with hyper:liner:notes” that deeply explored the relationship of new media technologies, sound, and writing. The project was commissioned and exhibited by the Walker Art Center. Collaborative artists included Erik Belgum, Anne Burdick, Cam Merton, Tom Bland and Brendan Palmer.

PHON:E:ME investigates the way auditory media pervades our daily lives and how this in turn effects the way we experience what have become routine cultural practices such as reading, writing, listening to music, and surfing the Internet. With a multitude of viable media formats and cultural objects fighting for our attention, questions of how we choose to design our own interactive experiences come to the fore. By experimenting with both the design interface as well as the artistic content constructed especially for the PHON:E:ME web site, Amerika attempted to find ways of expressing the impact of this audio-visual “noise” we encounter in our everyday life while simultaneously inviting the participant — the artistic “co-conspirator” —  to create their own alternative version of the work within the programmed parameters the artist has constructed. The work has been exhibited in many international venues including Videobrasil in Sao Paolo, the Zeppelin Sound Festival in Barcelona, and the Walker Art Center’s “Art Entertainment Network” exhibition as part of the traveling “Let’s Entertain” exhibition.

PHON:E:ME was one of five works of art nominated for the prestigious International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Award in 2000.

Xylo is an animated poem.