Published on the Web (online journal)

This hypertext work of poetry, theory, and narrative is exquisitely programmed in HTML 3.2 using JavaScript from 12 years ago, which means that it is currently best read in Internet Explorer, which retains its responsive elements. This DHTML piece uses JavaScript to modify the Document Object Model (DOM), which means that the document is the same, but once you activate certain parts of it, its rendering becomes modified with the addition of static or kinetic elements.

Memmott uses it in this poem to create layers of visual and textual information that is revealed as the reader interacts with different prompts. For example, the section titled “Sorts” allows for the reader to reveal texts by clicking on different parts of the image, seen below.

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

Hey Now is a collaborative experiment in New Media Poetry. It is minimally "interactive", requiring the reader/viewer to click on the pacing man whenever he appears. The piece began as an idea: following the artist Christo's work ("wrapped" objects like Running Fence, Wrapped Pont Neuf, etc.) -- what would wrapped language look be like? How would it look or sound? Our initial discussions revolved around thinking through the act of wrapping, covering or hiding language; the physical and metaphorical transformation of language while it is wrapped; the final act of unveiling language that has now acquired "full" or "new" meaning because it has been partially hidden.

Out of these discussions, over five months, came Hey Now. Hey Now was composed with a sense that the opportunities and demands of composing Web-based literature and art -- like many other New Media practices -- have their roots in the shared notion of community that was integral to the development of the internet. Collaborative work redefines artistic labor in complicated ways. It allows us to reconsider both our work and our identities as artists/writers/programmers -- to literally see them anew. The entire project was done via the internet: Swiss and Nakamura have not met.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

As a programmable writing project, Letters from the Archiverse can be considered both a visual poem and an application. Its most current version was composed (and continues to be developed) with architectural modeling space software AutoCAD. Combining methods and techniques drawn from traditional lineages of concrete poetry and ―open-field‖ composition with 3D image modeling, the poem offers writers and viewers alike the opportunity to engage in the materiality of screen-based writing, while exploring new directions and theories in visual language art. In the current phase of the project, readers are able to explore and manipulate the poem on the iPad, using a commercial architectural drafting app.

Our demo of the app will emphasize the Archiverse project as a working model as well as a critical interrogation of the general future of digital composition tools – in a manner not dissimilar to Microsoft Word’s current technological augmentation and extension of the typewriter. Within the Archiverse, writing re-emerges as a boundary-less, multidimensional, networked field, inviting the reader to assume a position of constant ―field‖ exploration. Here, she becomes something more than a mere text producer or consumer; she takes on the roles and responsibilities of a collaborator and co-creator of a vast multimedia, intertextual cosmos.

(Source: Authors' abstract from HASTAC 2013)

E:Electron is an extended structural analogy, using the periodic table of elements to muse on the life of a love affair and states of mind. Three pieces work together to create nuances of connections and relations. A poem hidden in the periodic table of elements leads to the stages of a relationship. Each element adds a new electron or word association, cumulating in a lifetime of memory. These connect to an intricate series of poems that fill each electron shell with musing.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

This modest work is an essay which engages non-linear narrative and includes multimedia elements such as sound and image. The title is taken from Gayatri Spivak's essay, "Can the subaltern speak?." Variously, postcolonialism and feminism as discourses of 'otherness' have addressed the notion of 'speaking' and 'speaking position', asking questions such as 'who speaks for whom?', 'who is authorised to speak'. Such questions displace the idea that the 'other' is absent or silent, or that the 'other' is indeed 'other'.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

"Training missions" employs a tabular-format, three-part poem as a gateway to discussion-demonstration of three online activities, so defined: imagining, imaging, and logging. Through the use of relatively simple graphics and a few carefully chosen links, the piece lampoons the functional overkill that often under- (and over-!) writes the wholesale use of imagining and imaging technologies. The final section, "logging," begins by foregrounding many of the semantic and syntactic disparities latent in our word processing age---an age in which grammatical niceties are often taken for granted---and concludes by exploring the more seductive implications of media (televisual and Hollywood) culture via a Flash sequence of loglines (with voiceover).

One aim of the work is to draw reader attention back to the title poem, with the hope that readers might spend more time with initial conditions (i.e., the tabular poem that serves as gateway to the piece) in order to think through the conceptual and often conflicting aspects of media work.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)