Published on the Web (online gallery)

The poem 'Bijenkorf' by Annet de Graaf spoke to me because it uses minimal interventions to give another meaning to words. As i interpret it, the poem is about someone who is seeking a person, but this person has changed so much that only the memory remains. I have chosen to make an animation which is a literal as well as surreal quest for words of the poem. The animation consists of a lot of articles you could find at a department store, but also a few objects that do not belong there at all. The reader/viewer uses the cursor to search for invisible buttons which lead to the next sentence. The location of the buttons is only clear because the cursor changes into a hand when the reader moves across it.

(Translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

Ah articulates a simple paradox of reading animated digital literature, which is that the eye, and by extension the mind, often has no sense of the future of a sentence or line of text and, more importantly, is not given the chance to retread an already witnessed word or phrase. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's Dakota is a perfect illustration of this principle. In Ah, the central object of rumination is Einstein, but just as the physicist pondered the numberless variations between the presence of a "1" and "0," this Flash animation brings us back and forth between clever articulations and the ambiguous expressivity of single letters and syllables.

This animation made by Pascale Brinkel is based on the poem 'Aftelversje' by Judy Elfferich and was created in fall 2009 in the e-poetry [digidicht] workshop at the AKI in Enschede.

The poem tells about a person who wants to leave someone and because of that spews a tirade of made-up curse words. I have translated this by making the words surround the text "I accuse you": when you read the poem you feel as if too many things are thrown at you resulting in an unclear situation.

The game has 2 ends:
The last line of the poem by Ad Poppelaars
A poem written by Vera in which all bad words are taken back and you are praised instead.

(translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

This work is an arkanoid game with words instead of blocks and the word 'ik' (I) instead of a ball. Your goal is to knock down the words, thus creating different texts.

This hybrid print- and web-based work work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not. Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services. The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste. (Source: Author's description)

Oczy Tygrysa

(Eyes of the Tiger) is an example of an online flash adaptation of the poems of an avant-guard poet (formist) from the interwar period, Tytus Czyżewski.The authors of the adaptation, poet Łukasz Podgóni and electronic literature researcher Urszula Pawlicka chose to adapt Czyżewski’s pieces that speak explicitly to issues of mediation and mechanization. Czyżewski’s poetry serves as a precursor to the forms of aesthetic experimentation now common in electronic literature, anticipating hypertextual, interactive, generative, and kinetic forms of writing. The inspiration for this adaptation was the paraphrased words of Mark Amerika “What would Czyżewski the Formist do with new media?” Oczy Tygrysa shows how interwar poetry complements the language of new media both in terms of composition as well as semantics.

(Source: ELO 3, editorial statement)

Working within the early netart aesthetic of the popup, hypertext, and digital automation of sound, my hands/wishful thinking produces an online memorial to the tragic death of Amadou Diallo, a twenty-two year old immigrant from Guinea who was shot forty-one times based on a case of mistaken identity and police overreaction in 1999. In this piece by Mendi and Keith Obadike, the blinking, repeating hand of Keith Obadike grasps a wallet purchased from the same store on 125th street in Harlem where Diallo worked. Perhaps this is even the same brand of wallet that Diallo held which the NYPD claimed was a gun. Recalling experimental photographs like Glenn Ligon’s Hands (1996), my hands/wishful thinking draws together the hand of the artist, the hand of Diallo, and the hand of the user navigating the web page. Mendi and Keith Obadike begin with the premise that "thoughts are things" and for every shot fired a thought has been written down as an act of poetic resistance. Released in an age before social media, my hands/wishful thinking exemplifies the transformative potential of the Internet at the turn of the millennium. Rather than an expression of trauma, loss, and violence, this deeply moving work of netart activism places hope in the power of collectivity and a future without racist violence. Authors' statement: my hands/wishful thinking is an internet memorial piece for Amadou Diallo. Diallo was killed by new york city policemen on february 5, 1999. the four policemen involved claimed that they thought Diallo's wallet was a gun and fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times. most of the information we received about Diallo's death was mediated by the internet and filtered through the lens of our browser. we thought it fitting that we mourn and make art in this public/private digital space. keith's wallet, seen in the image, was purchased on 125th street in harlem where Amadou Diallo worked as a vendor. in this piece there is one thought to counteract each bullet fired. the words are wishful thinking in the present tense. these thoughts reject the negative forces directed against us, the survivors, african people in the united states. making this work is an enactment of our will to survive. (Source: ELC 3)