“Him” is a hypertext poem where the lines lead to different aspects of male identity cut out of magazines and the reader becomes lost in the permutation.
(Source: Author's description in State of the Arts CD)
Flash
Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from the internet into a live action comic strip. From the time of its launch in 2005 to the end of 2008, the work used a live feed from social networking site LiveJournal. The work is currently using a feed from Flickr. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.
(Source: Project site)
A simple kinetic poem, in which the vowels move on a recombinatory wheel.
Simple kinetic poem, in which paddle, piddle, and puddle shift.
Dim O’Gauble follows the glimpsing story of an elderly woman reflecting on her grandson’s nightmarish – possibly paranormal – visions of the future. Told through a densely textured, mouse-responsive graphical environment, the work presents the user/reader with a series of transient texts, some of which change/mutate or float/disappear over time, intending to reflect the very nature of the hazy/difficult memories being uncovered. Progression through Dim O’Gauble is achieved by clicking on the various arrows visible in the graphical backgrounds, which quickly shift the viewport around the ‘canvas’ of the piece. In addition, various sub-sections of the narrative can be discovered by clicking on hotspots in the text. The final scene reveals a video sequence of a tunnel/subway with text super-imposed at different sizes over the top of it. The sketches/drawings used in the work were created by the author when he was 8 years old.
The glimpsing story of an elderly woman reflecting on her grandson’s nightmarish – possibly paranormal – visions of the future.
This work requires Flash Player 9 or higher.
Writer, coder, designer
The viewer is inside a kind of cube, an infinite cube that can be rotated endlessly without returning to the same view. Between I and you and we flows a river of verbs. The piece can be manipulated by clicking or dragging, or will move on its own if left still for a few moments.
(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1.)
Landscapes presents five animated canvases which together comprise a dreamscape of anarchic play, urban order, and media saturation. Each landscape pairs a short Biblical proverb with a series of images taken from street protests, multimedia conferences, Hollywood films, and other private and public sites. The proverb in each of the landscapes scrolls on a loop across the screen and is "locked" in position behind a viewing portal. To read the proverb is to make do with the fractured characters visible through small holes in the portal.
(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1).
Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hidden voice-activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the summer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day. Soliloquy was first realized as a gallery exhibition at Bravin Post Lee in Soho during April of 1997. Subsequently, the gallery published the text in a limited edition of 50. In the fall of 2001, Granary Books published a trade edition of the text. The web version of Soliloquy contains the exact text from the 281-page original book version, but due to the architecture of the web, each chapter is sub-divided into 10 parts. And, of course, the textual treatment of the web version is indeed web-specific and perhaps more truly references the ephemerality of language as reflected by the book's epigraph: "If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard." In order to achieve this effect, the web version is available only to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape 6+. Unfortunately, none of the prior versions of Netscape support the CSS tag used here: "a { text-decoration: none }" ; to view the piece in web form without this function enabled would be to ruin the intended experience of this work.
(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1)
What the fuck do I want that book for?
Well, we cant' do that until we straighten out your memory problem.
My mother has Band Aids, they're not a rare commodity.
If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard.
Look at all this is non digital technology. Pretty amazing, isn't it? Everybody's just tossing it.
Here's a woman who's really on the cutting edge of literature but she's not up on contemporary art criticism.
She was like well it's got new technology.
Instructions: Select a day by clicking on it. Move the mouse to reveal one sentence of the text at a time. Click on the links at the top to choose a different one of the ten sections for a day, or to choose a different day, or to search the text. Those reading this piece from CD will need an Internet connection to use "Search." Note that if you use the search function, the results will direct you off the Electronic Literature Collection site to the version of Soliloquy hosted at the Electronic Poetry Center.
The Internet Text is a continuous meditation on "cyberspace," emphasizing language, body, avatar issues, philosophy, poetics, and code-work. It is written daily and presented on several email lists including Cybermind and Wryting. Many of the pieces within it were created through CMC, interactions with computers and online protocols, and programs.
(Source: Author description, ELC 1).
Almost all of Internet Text is in the form of "short-waves, long-waves."
Is it true that most users on the chat-lines are men? As with short-wave or citizens-band radio, the maternal or spectral mother is everywhere apparent.
Instructions: Internet Text consists of text files which are not themselves interactive. Search or browse through the files. They were created in the order Net0 — Net* text, then a-*.txt, then alphabetic; the current file is om.txt. Sondheim writes: "One 'reads' within the files which form an archeology of thinking the 'real,' the 'virtual,' and their deconstruction — any reading in any order is therefore as good as any other."
[theHouse] is a digital poetry piece which takes the form of computer-based spatialized organism.world. Through the process of enacting texts within, alongside, and outside of the text of computational code, this autobiographical work is regulated by the computational process of the sine wave. Here, the text is written upon "rooms," and these rooms emerge to create "houses" next to and among the intermingling text. As in much of electronic literature, the experience of the work as an intimate, interactive, screen-based piece is essential to understanding and appreciating it. Indeed, the work is only realized through user interaction and navigation. How does everyday spatial practice bring into focus the relationship between code, language, and relationships? What are the key characteristics of digital relationships as seen through this light? Does the recurring emphasis on process, chance, and interactivity also function as an indicator of larger questions about the chance writing of the text? The poem presented is autobiographical in nature yet engages the conceptualization of both language and embodiment as the text creates its own types of organism.
(Source: Author description, ELC 1.)
