Published on the Web (online gallery)

A compilation of broken poems, P.o.E.M.M. Poems for Excitable [Mobile] Media is designed explicitly for mobile media. The poems cannot be read without touching the screen, an experience that creates excitable stimulation. The letters and words of the poems float in the background, waiting for the user to snatch them up with their fingers. One line at a time, the user can grab the words and align them on the screen. The lines can be arranged in any order, and so the user must piece together both their meaning and the structure. Lewis and Nadeau built the interface filled by these works and poets: “What They Speak When They Speak to Me” by Jason E. Lewis, “Character” by Jim Andrews, “Let Me Tell You What Happened This Week” by David Jhave Johnston, “Muddy Mouth” by JR Carpenter, “The Color of Your Hair Is Dangerous” by Aya Karpinska. Annotated by Greg Philbrook.

(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)

Statement

The P.o.E.M.M. Cycle (Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media) is a series of poems written and designed to be read across a number of media and surfaces, from large-scale projections to mobile screens. The texts in The P.o.E.M.M Cycle speak about making sense of crazy talk & kid talk, the meanings of different shades of purple, the conundrums of being a Cherokee boy adopted by a white family and raised in northern California mountain country, and the importance of calling a sundae a sundae. The works explore different strategies for both writing and reading using multi-touch and mobile devices, and how those strategies substantially expand the range of digital literature, visual art and performance available to us. Each piece in the series includes a large-scale interactive version for exhibition, a mobile interactive version for tablets and for smartphones, and one or more large-scale prints. The mobile versions are also used in augmented performances.

Bio

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media poet, artist, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research/creation projects on computation as a creative and cultural material. Lewis' creative work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and FILE, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, a Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and five solo exhibitions. He's the author or co-author of chapters in collected editions covering mobile media, video game design, machinima and experimental pedagogy with Indigenous communities, as well as numerous journal articles and conference papers. He is a Trudeau Fellow and University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. Born and raised in northern California, he is Cherokee, Hawaiian and Samoan.

Editorial Statement

Jason Lewis’ Poems for Excitable Mobile Media, the P.o.E.M.M Cycle (exhibited collectively as Vital to the Public Welfare) include several highly personal meditations on identity designed to be exhibited on large touchscreens or as experiences for tablets. These poems transform text into animated actors, focusing the reader's attention as words loop, plunge, and disperse. Kinetic poetry dances with the gestures of the hand as it too ripples across live screens. Depending on the stories being told, the words may follow a reader’s finger across the interface, reveal themselves upon pressure, or flee and scatter to avoid contact. Lewis’ P.o.E.M.M Cycle takes advantage of the haptic interface of phones and tablets in order to produce an embodied performance between reader and text.(http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=vital-to-the-general…)

In July 2007 I began saving the daily image from the online version of the comic strip "Real Life Adventures" removing the text from its panels, so all that was left were the empty thought bubbles. I think of this collection as "Empty Thoughts from Real Life." My reason for doing this was to create an archive of generic comic strip images stripped of their original text so that later both the text and its container could be used for other content. In addition to altering the comic, one of my other ongoing daily rituals has been to make hand-drawn tracings from the newspaper. In these drawings I bring elements from different pages of the paper together. I often trace what appears on the front and backsides of a single page by holding it up to a window and drawing over selected images and texts. My hand drawings are quirky and purposely imprecise. They become a distilled interpretation of the news. I have always been interested in how the computer can process an image or "trace" and how the computer's tracing differs from my own. By selecting specific photoshop filters I can make a news image look like a black and white line drawing. The computer's drawing uses an algorithm, whereas my drawings are based on subjectivity. "Without A Trace" is a project that brings together these disparate collections and through juxtaposition recontextualizes them. The website takes as its point of departure the idea of a daily ritual. The site is meant to change once a day. For each iteration (each day for a year) a comic image, a trace drawing and three words from the original strip will be randomly selected from the archive. These will be presented with a live news feed (RSS headline) and an image taken from the New York Times. As news is fluid during a given day the headlines and news images can change creating new juxtapositions. A screen grab will be generated at the same time each day creating a representational snap shot of the day. At the end of the project there will be an archive presenting the screen grabs for the year. While the main page of the site is this five part coupling, I have also included a way to view the juxtapositions using previously rendered news images. Under the random version link one can refresh the page collaging archived elements. Here only the headline is live. The title "Without A Trace" has multiple meanings. A trace references a memory. It is what remains when almost everything else disappears. A trace is an action. One traces an image or traces over something. 'Without A Trace' is also the phase we use to refer to something that has disappeared leaving no record. The news is ephemeral, as is the newspaper. It has a given structure yet its online content changes continually. In this project I have attempted to take these disappearing elements and bring them together for the time they are viewed on the webpage. However, like all web content these juxtapositions will disappear when the browser is closed. Only to live in memory--both ours and that of the computer-- challenging the title and the notion; without a trace. 

(Source: author's description)

Shy Boy is a Flash poem that uses movement, visual images, and sound to deep into the soul and life of one very shy boy. The monochromatic use of black, gray, and white suggest a child who calls no attention to himself and the vanishing text, his own lack of presence among his schoolyard peers.

(Source: catalog for Electronic Literature Exhibition)

Me, Mouchette, the online virtual character, I have an unusual status of existence. Regarding the art of my website (www.mouchette.org) I am the author and the creation at the same time, and yet through my remote internet life I remain invisible, anonymous, genderless, untouchable, neither alive or dead. Therefore participants of my interactive website confide in me in the most intimate way, as if were an imaginary being, living in their own head. Inside their own thoughts, no subject is taboo, fear, pain, life and death or even the temptation of suicide, and with me people feel free to talk about everything. With the reactions of the participants to my website I have composed animation films displaying many of the texts I received, spoken out by pixellated characters who tell their most private thoughts about their experience of surviving suicide, their own or someone else’s. My personality embraces all of my participant’s minds and together we form a collective consciousness pondering over questions of life and death in the digital era. And like in the famous Hamlet monologue, to be or not to be Mouchette, that is the question! The work has been exhibited first within the manifestation Knotenpuntke in Germany and was shown on screens in the museum of Siegen Germany in 2007.

(from Christian Leifelt's personal website)
The poem "Kompas" by Morten Søndergaard serves as a literary path for an interactive journey through odd maps, revealing landscapes, cut-up text-fields, fragments of memories, diary notes, snapshots from explored places and signs representing different virtual sights.

The inner sleeve from the cd-release serves as a fold-out-map/invtitation for the exhibition.

The LA Flood Project is a [work in progress] locative media experience made up of three segments:

1. Oral histories of crises in Los Angeles
2. A locative narrative about a fictional flood
3. A flood simulation

(Source: Project site)

An elderly man keeps a surreal record of his dreams as he is slowly poisoned by his gas fire leaking carbon monoxide.

A hypertext fiction using the Word Circuits Connection Muse. The story includes two alternate beginning chapters and two alternate ends.

Programmatic or computational art is often, although not necessarily, related to art in other media: visual, performative, conceptual, and so on. The art systems of The Readers Project relate to writing and to reading, to our encounters with literary language. This project is an essay in language-driven digital art, in writing digital media. The Readers Project visualizes reading, although it does not do this in the sense of miming conventional human reading. Rather, the project explores and visualizes existing and alternative vectors of reading, vectors that are motivated by the properties and methods of language and language art.

Visualization, especially as a function of computation, is now quite commonplace in artistic practice, but it has little culture moment unless it provides critique, and it is not art unless it conveys an aesthetic. The Readers Project is a visualization of reading but it is implicitly critical of conventional reading habits. Further, because the project’s readers move within and are thus composed by the words within which they move, they also, effectively, write. They generate texts and the traces of their writings are offered to the project’s human readers as such, as writing, as literary art; published as real-time streams of live-writing, available to anyone with internet access.

Computationally-engaged text generation has a significant, if marginal, history in literary art practice. The Readers Project is innovative, however, in having found a number of ways to display the primary source of a text generator’s inputs within this source’s typographically structured literary environment. A less obvious but equally important aspect of the project is its use of current natural language information—especially concerning the relative frequencies of words and phrases considered by the readers—culled from the largest corpus of human language that has ever existed, a universe of language no longer deep within or distant from us, but now made visible to all by the free demons of web indexing and, more recently, by active cells of the Natural Language Liberation Front (http://nllf.net/).

(Source: Artists' Statement from the project site)