Published on the Web (online journal)

Megan Sapnar’s Pushkin Translation, published on Poems that Go presents a poem by Aleksandr Pushkin in Russian, translated by Dimitry Brill. As the reader moves the cursor over the poem, the text is revealed in English and read aloud in Russian. In the background, a Russian folk song recorded by the Ospipov State Russian Folk Orchestra plays. The work includes a long titles sequence that gives credit not only to the author, the translator, and the musical performers, but also FreaKaZoid, a Flash programmer from whom Sapnar got some help on the actionscript implementation. The designer Sapnar responded to Pushkin’s work by remixing his text with the work of several other authors and performers, both remediating the original poem and creating a new work in the process, that provides a new way of reading the original.Megan Sapnar’s Pushkin Translation, published on Poems that Go presents a poem by Aleksandr Pushkin in Russian, translated by Dimitry Brill. As the reader moves the cursor over the poem, the text is revealed in English and read aloud in Russian. In the background, a Russian folk song recorded by the Ospipov State Russian Folk Orchestra plays. The work includes a long titles sequence that gives credit not only to the author, the translator, and the musical performers, but also FreaKaZoid, a Flash programmer from whom Sapnar got some help on the actionscript implementation. The designer Sapnar responded to Pushkin’s work by remixing his text with the work of several other authors and performers, both remediating the original poem and creating a new work in the process, that provides a new way of reading the original.

(Source: "Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature" by Scott Rettberg)

This whimsical poem invokes one of the masters of idiosyncratic poetry, E. E. Cummings. Cummings used capitalization, spacing, punctuation, letters, and words in very unconventional ways to craft off-the-beaten-path poetic experiences. The speaker’s dream taps into this idea, by having e.e. rearrange the furniture in counter-intuitive ways. A simple interface for navigation from side to side presents different items of furniture, which reveal texts and brief animations towards new images when the reader places the pointer over them. Perhaps this is a metaphor for Cummings’ poetics, who rearranged letters and words to lead to new perceptions of ordinary things.

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

“Blind Side of a Secret” consists of three audiovisual variations, created individually by Mühlenbruch, Sodeoka, and Nakamura, on words written by Thom Swiss. The work could be considered remix culture in action, overlaying and cutting up an underlying tale—which is never given entirely as a whole, though many sections are held in common—about the unspoken parts of relationships, of coming and going. In all three pieces, alternating third-person voice-over narration by a man and a woman forms the bulk of the audio portion, and it includes parts in English, French, and Dutch. The three collaborators approach the material in sharply contrasting ways: the horizontally scrolling, black-and-red fluidity of Nakamura's animation tells the tale in the most linear fashion, with no interruptions or breaks in the audio and no interaction; Sodeoka takes a DJ's approach, carving up the audio into rhythmic segments and pulsating images that recall song more than narrative; and Mühlenbruch turns it into an interactive flash animation, where an image based on the narrative forms a template that a user can click on to follow the individual narrative threads of the voice-over or run them over each other concurrently. Taken together, and given the absence of the source text in the final presentation, the work suggests that the plethora of angles from which to approach the idea of remix in digital art need not conflict, while at the same time suggesting that nostalgia for an “original work” is perhaps secondary in some respects to the artistic potential of collaboration and redistribution.

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Rob Schoenbeck)

JABBER produces nonsense words that sound like English words, in the way that the portmanteau words from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky sound like English words.When a letter comes into contact with another letter or group of letters, a calculation occurs to determine whether they bond according to the likelihood that they would appear contiguously in the English lexicon. Clusters of letters accumulate to form words, which results in a dynamic nonsense word sound poem floating around on the screen with each iteration of the generator.JABBER realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules.

(Source: Author's description at Poems That Go)

This literary game which can be equally used to create prose and verse is a tribute to the Surrealist parlor game known as the “exquisite cadaver” and the paper-based Mad Libs created by Roger Price and Leonard Stern in 1953 (for more details, read Montfort’s introduction to the Literary Games issue of Poems that GO). This program originally created in Perl allows people to create texts and tag words to become “dreamfields.” When someone blindly fills in the dreamfield, it reconstructs the text with the reader’s input. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)