Published on the Web (online gallery)

Channel of the North is a collaborative project by Jan Baeke and Alfred Marseille that combines data visualization, poetry, and telepresence through a series of poems that expand and contract based on the ebb and flow of the tides located in the Westerschelde river at the Dutch-Belgian border. Although a user may access this kinetic poetry anywhere in the world, the geological temporality of the poem is always rooted in a particular space and time in a way that sits in a tradition of artwork such as David Bowen’s tele-present water and tele-present wind. While the dissemination of text is not typically indexed to a physical referent, Channel of the North offers a contemplative moment when poetry becomes a vehicle for exploring the relationship between the flow of geological processes, the flow of networked computation, and the flow of language. Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network charts the long relationship between water and networked communication based on how the subterranean network of private undersea cables are connected to a history of empire, colonialism, and geopolitical conflict and commerce. These undersea undulations between channels of water and data find poetic expression in Baeke and Marseille’s work as the Westerschelde is made to flow through an interconnected network of oceanic and electric currents.

(Source: ELC 3)

The Brain Drawing the Bullet takes as its point of departure William S. Burroughs’ infamous murder of his wife Joan Vollner as a means to explore the multi-voicedness of editorial intervention. Recalling works like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves which depict a series of editors whose insertions trace their psychological deterioration over time as they fall victim to the hermeneutic black hole of their subject matter, The Brain Drawing the Bullet tells the story of an ersatz editor who invests so deeply in his research that he is led down the same violent path. The body of the text and the text as body chiasmatically intersect to produce an uneasy alignment between author, editor, and reader. Not only is Burroughs’ cut up method a textual ancestor to the aleatory and hypertextual processes of electronic literature, but the footnote and editor’s annotations are also a print precursor to the hypertext node. Trotter’s piece is elegantly simple, yet takes advantage of the medium-specific affordances of working with the digital screen rather than printed page. The series of first-person accounts of the shooting interleaved with editor comments not only unfold through this mode of hypertextual annotation, but the writing on the screen does not remain fixed. With each click forward, marking a passage through 110 days of increasing mania, small yet significant mutations allegorize the unreliability and capriciousness of memory. Sigmund Freud famously described the mind as a “mystic writing pad” and this text draws and redraws Burroughs’ bullet, each insertion simultaneously marking a point in time and rewriting the past through the distorted focus of an obsessed editor.

(Source: ELC 3)

The hypertexts of this project were written by interns from the psychiatric building Emil Kraepelin. These real stories are distributed in four sections: past, future, darkness and light. The genre is hypertext fiction, it is made of hypertextual confessional fragments like Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls (2001) with interactive elements like Belen Gache’s Wordtoys (2006). In the section named “darkness” the mouse is used as a lantern which lights up only parts of the text, a technique also used in Speeches and Poemas (2006) by Félix Rémirez. Yolanda de la Torre organized a literary workshop in which she explored with the patients the therapeutic possibilities of writing. References to God are common in the patients’ confessional texts, a sign of the importance of religion for many Mexican people. The technique of changing the text allows the reader to make up different stories, drawing makes the reader a participant of the story who can draw his/her own future like another patient or character and the audio effects recreate the sounds of a psychiatric hospital making the reader feel as he/she was in the place the patients were. (Source: Maya Zalbidea)

An animated gif poem which visually plays with the letter "g."

eclout: an ocr-generated reading is a gif-poem created by Loss Pequeño Glazier on top of a source text by Caroline Bergvall.

Glazier states in his website that the UNIX grep commands used to create these grep poems were written in 1994-1996. However, most of the greps, according to the author (2001: 100-102), were generated during 1996-1997.