Rockface II revisions the classic landscapes of the Canadian Rockies, using transition to systematically deconstruct and recombine the mountain scenery. In the process, the work explores concepts of pictorialism, scale, time and metamorphosis. At the same time, it examines liminality of narrative through the introduction of subtly embedded human imagery.
A generative poem where each screen shows four lines of poetry, sometimes only a word in each line, and a black and white image beneath the words.
A poem told through photographs of posters pasted on street corners and lamp posts, with the sound of a night time crowd as accompanying soundtrack.
This multimedia poem is about how saturated we have become with media coverage and how damaging that is. De Barros’ approach in this work is to also saturate us with sound, images, formatting, and color to make us realize the excessive amount of information we are constantly receiving. Each of the four parts of the poem uses multiple layers of color, still and moving images and text, looping and single-playing sounds, and responsive elements. Moving the pointer over the image of a man in the first part of the poem, for example, triggers a sequence of images that show how overloaded he is with visual information, to the extent that he needs to blindfold himself or avert his eyes. The narrative in the second part, and the images and words in the third and fourth parts all portray pain, damage, scarring, even murder, to demonstrate how damaged we have all become. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
This work uses the same basic structure as the author's earlier "Book Unbound".
"Reveal Code" takes a hidden text corpus and creates a "generative performance" based on a collocation algorithm. The audience can then choose phrases from the generative performance and set them aside on pages labeled Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, where they can be edited freely. Selections will also become part of the hidden corpus; the text will, over time, evolve to the audience's taste.
More information can be found in the author's article "Pressing the 'Reveal Code' Key", EJournal, March 1996: http://www.ucalgary.ca/ejournal/archive/ej-6-1.txt
Similarly, "Potentialities of Literary Cybertext" (April 1996, Visible Language) also explores this hypertext more deeply.
Requires OS 8.x+ and HyperCard Player.
Ah articulates a simple paradox of reading animated digital literature, which is that the eye, and by extension the mind, often has no sense of the future of a sentence or line of text and, more importantly, is not given the chance to retread an already witnessed word or phrase. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's Dakota is a perfect illustration of this principle. In Ah, the central object of rumination is Einstein, but just as the physicist pondered the numberless variations between the presence of a "1" and "0," this Flash animation brings us back and forth between clever articulations and the ambiguous expressivity of single letters and syllables.
This piece takes us inside the brain and mind of a speaker in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Bigelow roughly maps the initial four parts of the poem on a superior view of a human brain: “My Brain Is” on the frontal lobes, “What My Therapist Said” on the parietal lobes, “The Metaphor Room” on the temporal lobes, and “How to Dream a Suicide” on the occipital lobes. The final section (verse? movement?) focuses on different types of treatment: religion, medication, therapy, and exercise. Overall, the work is richly layered with video clips, language, sound, and minimalist interactivity to examine the speaker’s mindset as a biological, psychological, and social subject. The combination of fact, dream imagery, and creative exploration of suicide all showcase Bigelow’s expert hand in crafting blended metaphors and balancing the tone with delicately understated humor.
(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
In this work, Bigelow takes everyday objects (stapler, chair, spoon) and elevates them to archetypal status through several strategies:
* short, looping background videos (with audio) of natural scenes, usually focused on animals or plants, intercut with brief images of the object being discussed.
* A poetic description of the object, using metaphor, personification, and other figurative language to highlight their function or role.
* A scheduled set of fake historical events involving the object, often absurd and hilarious, including the location and the date in which they happened.
This level of attention to everyday objects is parallel to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, but with a different approach to its language choices. While Stein chooses language that belongs to the same semantic frame of the objects she describes, Bigelow breaks (or blends) the frames to take a twist towards the absurd. These objects become archetypal because they are presented as tools that shape their creators as much as the world around them, connecting them to nature and humanity at a global level.
The final choice given to the reader is a surprisingly effective Turing Test.
(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
"Lord's Prayer, The" (2007) takes the original English version of "The Lord's Prayer" (in this case, a variation of the King James Version) and, using the same words, creates an entirely new poem.
(Source: Artist's description, 2008 ELO Media Arts show)
