Published on the Web (online journal)

written in java this applet gets a lot of rss feeds (in the french zone) in real time and composes, in real time also and as a work in progress, with them visual poems; each of the results are exported to my local computer in order to finally get, at the end of the 2013 year, some kind of archive of the "news" by which we are invaded each day---- and that we very often forget the day after! - it 's a kind of work about our "media-collective-memory". The words are treated in relationship with frequency in the news: the biggest are the most frequents. But not allways the most importants...

The Karl Marxov Chain responds to a word that users (or Pereira) seed it to guide its search through Karl Marx’s publications, as described. When it gets the seed word, it finds it in the text and takes not the next word, but the next two words. The first two words of this 3-gram are first two words of the tweet. It then takes not the last of these words, but the last two and searches the text for that pair of words. Then, of all of the times that those words appear together, it picks one at random, adds the last word to the chain, and then moves up a word. The result is that the probabilities are a bit more constricted, meaning that the tweet conforms a bit more closely to the original text, meaning it ends up sounding a bit more like normal English. The bot also cheats a bit and tries to make “complete” sentences (start with a word that has an initial capital in the source text and end with a period), but it’s not always successful. The source texts are also not the cleanest in the world, so it sometimes hiccups and tosses out typographical gibberish. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This video poem created in Flash is a meditation on the word game Hangman. The Western banjo rock music— a clip from Modest Mouse’s “3 Inch Horses, Two Faced Monsters“— evokes the American “wild west,” reminding us of its improvised deadly justice system that often resulted in hanging. This cultural backdrop enhances the poem’s ruminations on what would otherwise seem like an innocent little word game. Its scheduled presentation of language appropriately conforms to the game mechanics, placing blanks and filling in all of one letter at a time until the complete phrase is readable. The animation centered on the letter “O” is a pictorial analysis that cleverly leads to the poem’s title. Its use of color is not only a reminder of the imaginary stakes in the game, but also shapes the reading in some of the poem’s stanzas. As you watch and read this short e-poem and appreciate its deconstruction of the game, consider what it has to say about the real and imagined human body and that of language.

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

This work prompts readers to write according to a set of poetic constraints, offering original, famous, and obscure forms and examples. The interface offers a series of virtual pages floating in fixed positions in space, and allowing readers to tilt them, zoom in and out, and flip them over to read the examples on their verso. A close examination of its yellowed pages reveals barely perceptible ink marks from handwriting on the other side, but that information is missing when one flips the page.

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

This scheduled poem plays like a silent video composed of a series of photographs of a wheat field in the background and kinetic language in the foreground. The text unfolds through a series of transformations of words by moving letters around into to form other words, and letter substitutions that create rapid word sequences. Timing is all in this poem, which could be organized internally by the speed at which its words are transformed and the means by which they change from one to the next. Notice the speed at which a sequence of four letter words change through letter substitution, forming a stream of associations, and the emphasis this gives to the pause at the end. Contrast this to the longer words that transform into other words by moving letters around, emphasizing each word and its meaning as moments with a thematic charge that punctuates the poem.

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

This “psychometric trial” prompts readers to explore their sacred name through manipulation of the “lettered sieve” an infinite set of language constructed as follows:

For the following trial, imagine the alphabet, followed by, in alphabetical order, all permutations of pairs of letters of the alphabet, followed by all permutations of triples of letters of the alphabet, followed by quadruples, and so on for quintuples, sextuples, and so on. Let us call this infinite set of letters a ‘Lettered Sieve.’ Possessing a working concept of the Lettered Sieve is essential to completing the first seven parts of the trial.

The procedural construction of this kind of data set that dates back to antiquity and proliferated among monks in the Middle Ages, who used them for reflection on mystical topics. This work’s design evokes that frame of reference with rich details, such as background images of old paper, fully capitalized text with variable letter size and evenly justified margins, words arranged to form shapes, and more. The language choices also evoke mysticism and even self-harm, all while challenging the imagination with language procedures that might give even Oulipians nightmares to carry out.

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

This responsive visual poem is a study of writing technologies and the word, whether it’s “ink sunk into fibrous paper” or “light through liquid crystals.” Inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s poetic and theoretical writing as studied by Kittler, Trettien’s JavaScript (& JQuery) work explores the range of shades between the white page and the black sky as backgrounds against which writing can occur with light or ink.

Designed not only for unresponsive screens or pages, this poem is written in code to display and behave in environments that allow for readers to provide input that the words react to. As the reader interacts with the language on the screen through the two interfaces she provides, the text hovers between readability and an illegible typographical overload. And the source code offers no shortcuts, since each letter is separated by extensive code that positions it on the screen. You have to get inside the page and navigate it with the tools offered by your platform.

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

This award-winning responsive poem focuses on the Australian ghost town Wittenoom, abandoned due to toxic dust caused by asbestos mining. Each of its nine parts focuses on an aspect of the abandoned town and consists of an image from Wittenoom, generally portraying urban decay, an brief looping instrumental audio track, links to other parts of the poem, a title for the section, and a text accessible through different responsive interfaces. A brief parenthetical help text near the bottom left corner of each screen provides encouragement that hints at the interface, promting readers to explore the interactivity and intuit its internal logic. The thematic focus and consistent visual design pull the work together, while the varied interfaces lead to new explorations of the spaces, together producing an experience both jarring and immersive. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This elegant hypertext poem consists of 28 links arranged on an excerpt from a book on bone biology. The links are barely distinguishable from the rest of the text, yet lead to poetic language that forms a distinctive contrast to the scientific text in the paragraph. The relation between the two texts isn’t simply tonal counterpoints: they are deeply interconnected, metaphorically and especially thematically.

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