Published on the Web (online journal)

Work on We Descend began in 1984, when five words came unbidden into my mind: “If this document is authentic…” I had no idea what the phrase signified: Who’s saying this? What document? Why wouldn’t it be authentic? How would it be authenticated? By what authority? How would that authority be established? Where did the document come from in the first place? As I pondered these questions, a clutch of fragmentary writings began to appear under my hands — via the standard tech at the time: fountain pen, notebook paper, clipboard.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/we-descend/)

The larger project is my first foray into digital poetry that uses a relatively large data set, in this case, the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare.

In Volume 1, the user has the ability to stir lines from Shakespeare’s original 154 sonnets into their “own” creation and to render a screenshot of any particular stirring by pressing the “collect the ephemera” button. The user also has the option to “defeat the ephemera” and return the text to one of Shakespeare’s originals.

In Volume 2, the user does not have the ability to stir Shakespeare’s texts into their “own” creation as the texts are generative or “self-stirring.”  Instead, the user has the opportunity to “read the ephemera” by pressing the “Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die” button rendering a screenshot of any particular stirring. “Thou shouldst print more…” is the last line of Sonnet XI.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/95-2/)

“Stromatolite” is a dream/delusion/poem/shallow grave of language. As I say by way of introduction:

I was carving up _Was_, Michael Joyce’s “novel of internet,” feeding phrases to Googlemena, savage goddess, to see what she might throw back. Results fell mainly in three piles: interesting resonance (e.g.,”the lost what was” evoking notes on circumcision); incestuous loops (quotations from the novel in reviews, etc.); and most marvelously… THESE REALLY WEIRD HEAPS OF WORDS

(Source: https://thenewriver.us/stromatolite/)

Leveraging the Curveship-js system for automatic narrative variation (version 0.2) to regen~d~erate the lyrics of the second cut off The Velvet Underground’s debut album, after adjusting the street value of heroin on an annualized inflation rate, I then coded this updated and enumerated content into BBC BASIC II (1982) and emulated all that output as a series of twenty-something decidedly non-vector formats—subsequently renamed à la a Pixies tune 22 years removed from the late Lewis Allan Reed‘s original.

Camtasia Fantasy is a study on institutionalized tools for presenting information, featuring numerous forms of misreading and corruption native to those systems—including automated captioning and stabilization, noise removal, layers of lossy compression, and the broader assumption that a PowerPoint slide show can communicate any knowledge worth knowing—as well as the unintended poetics that emerge from such misreadings.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/camtasia-fantasy/)

My work explores translation, transformation, personal memories, and the creation of fragmentary states of being through the reverence for colors and shapes found in Mola textiles made by the Kuna women native to Guna Yala, Panama.

The mola is a product of acculturation, the balancing of two cultures while assimilating to the prevailing culture of the society, and continues to exist because of tribal tradition. These textiles could have never developed without the cotton cloth, needles, thread, and scissors acquired by trade from ships that came to barter for coconuts during the 19th century.

The materials I am attracted to using in my work have vibrant, vivid colors and bold, graphic prints reminiscent of the Mola textiles that also consist of acquired commercial fabrics. The coming together of many different materials is an integral part of my work. Not only because the materials I work with are in limited quantities but also because this process is reflective of my upbringing in Miami, where I was surrounded by a variety of cultures and people living together.

(Source: https://thenewriver.us/memorias-construidas-constructed-memories/)

Objects is a series of digital literary art (using Processing code, video and gif animation). The different pieces have the common theme of addressing issues concerning domestic violence and constitutional rights, prejudice and behaviour towards women, questions of sexual identity and social roles.

In “Flight of the CodeMonkeys,” you play a servile programmer who must correct code for a tyrannical AI.  In this futuristic dystopia, the AI System has control over everything — everything, that is, except its own code. To make necessary corrections or changes to its code, it needs an army of codemonkeys following its directions to the last bit.  However, as you sweat, attending to its many requests, you begin to wonder if the code you are correcting is all that benign.  When you are contacted by the Resistance, an anonymous faction poised against the System, your suspicions grow.  On the other hand, all you really want is to finish your code work so you can start your vacation with your romantic interest: marta. With each coding error you make, your vacation moves further and further away. It has been said that code holds deep meaning for its readers. This code is as meaningful as it gets, for it holds the fate of its protagonist codemonkey.In this interactive story, readers change the outcome by changing the very Python code upon which it runs, choosing whether to follow the dictates of the System (and more quickly reach a much-needed vacation) or to follow the instructions of the Resistance and attempt to bring down the System.

“Flight of the CodeMonkeys” runs on Google’s Colaboratory, which is an instantiation of Jupyter Notebooks. The code of the story is “live,” meaning it can be compiled and run. You can also download the Jupyter Notebook to run it locally. Though no programming background is required to read the story, a little literacy might just mean the difference between a life of mindless servitude and making the world anew.

(Source: Author's description on The New River)

Earlier this year, I started corporate poetry as an exploration into how corporate language related to that other corpora that is our body. Through a series of interactive “rooms,” this work aimed to repurpose the language of a variety of familiar online forms and platforms (Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Zoom and Qualtrics, among others) in order to domesticate the neoliberal intent of these data gathering technologies.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/room-1-and-room-2/)