Published on the Web (online journal)

Description from artist´s website: This piece is based on a collection of poems by the Spanish poet Carmen Conde (1907-1996). I created an ocean journey with Conde’s words
as the white crests of waves crashing onto a new shore.

Author description: open.ended is an interactive three-dimensional poem experienced through the interplay of shifting geometric surfaces. Verses appear on the faces of separate translucent cubes nested within one another. The reader manipulates a mouse, joystick, or touch-screen to bring stanzas on different surfaces into view. As cubes, faces, and layers are revealed, dynamically updating lines of text move in and out of focus. The structure of the poem facilitates a multiplicity of readings: from single verses on cube faces, to sequential verses across faces, to juxtapositions of verses across multiple cubes. Meaning is constructed actively through collaboration between reader, author, and mediated work. An audio track of the authors' layered voices extends the experience, enveloping the reader in the atmosphere of the poem, organically complementing the visual and tactile components of the work.

(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1).

Leishman's playful retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale makes use of comic book vernacular, limited forms of explorative interaction, optional narrative paths, and a jazzy soundtrack. RedRidinghood is the type of Flash piece that suggests the potential for complex forms of interactive storytelling without typographic text.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)

The Set of U is a typical example of adaptive generation. It is an association of a combinatory generator of sound and a syntactical animation of text that changes its tempo according to the speed of the machine. So, it is not possible to synchronize the sound and the visual. But the reader often has the impression that the sound is designed for the visual process. This result is obtained by a programmed communication between the visual and the sound that uses programmed meta-rules in order to preserve the perceptive coherence. These meta-rules also create a new kind of non-algorithmic combinatory generator by focusing the attention at different moments of the reading. In this situation, the sense created by reading can vary slightly from one reading to another. The reader himself makes this combinatory by rereading. So, this work is interactive, not by managing input devices but through meta-rules. Meta-rules are not "technical rules," but the expression of a complex esthetical intention that lies in programming and can only be perceived by looking at the program. This intentionality is not addressed to the reader but to a "meta-reader": reading is a limited activity.

(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1).

One of the strengths of interactive fiction is that it is able to simulate a rich world, even one that has unusual physical and magical laws. In Savoir-Faire, the (usually cliché) elements of a treasure-hunt and a world suffused by magic are situated, unusually, in 18th-century France; a young man has come back to his childhood home to ask for a loan and has found it oddly abandoned. The special workings of Savoir-Faire's world open memories and unlock relationships between things, adding resonance to this intricate, difficult play of puzzles.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1).

Storyland (version 2) is a randomly created narrative which plays with social stereotypes and elements of popular culture. Each sentence is constructed from a pool of possibilities, allowing each reader a unique story. The reader presses the "new story" button, and a story is created for that moment in time. It is unlikely that any two stories will be identical. Storyland exposes its narrative formula thus mirroring aspects of contemporary cultural production: sampling, appropriation, hybrids, stock content, design templates. It risks discontinuity and the ridiculous while providing opportunities for contemplation beyond the entertainment factor.The computer-generated combinatorial story is one of the oldest forms of digital writing. Storyland, with its simple circus frame, plays with this tradition by performing recombination of the sort seen in cut-up and in Oulipian work. The system repeatedly plots amusingly repetitive stories, inviting the reader to consider, to read its scheme for composition.

(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. One).

The author quotes Jim Andrews's description: "Strings is a playful series of Flash pieces about relationships. It also raises questions about the presence/absence of the hand in this medium. Visual artists often criticise the lack of presence of the hand in digital art. In Strings, the hand is and is not present, is transformed, is transforming, is writing, is written, coded. Tis morphed." (Source: Author description, ELC, vol. 1).

White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a JavaScript investigation of literary variants with a new text generated every ten seconds. Its goals are as follows. (1) To present a poetic evocation of the images, vocabulary, and sights of Costa Rica's language and natural ecosystems though poetic text and visuals. (2) To investigate the potential of literary variants. Thinking of poems where authors have vacillated between variant lines, Bromeliads offers two alternatives for each line of text thus, for an 8 line poem, offering 512 possible variants, exploring the multi-textual possibilities of literary variants. (3) It explores the richness of multiple languages. (4) It mines the possibilities of translation, code, and shifting digital textuality. Having variants regenerate every ten seconds provides poems that are not static, but dynamic; indeed one never finishes reading the same poem one began reading. This re-defines the concept of the literary object and offers a more challenging reading, both for the reader and for the writer in performance, than a static poem. The idea is to be able to read as if surfing across multiple textual possibilities. Such regeneration allows traces of different languages to overwrite each other, providing a linguistic and cultural richness. (Source: Author description, ELC, Vol. 1)

From first glance, "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares" is described as a piece of E-lit that stands to meld the gap between spanish and english as languages into one. That in itself is very true and evident as you first click on the work and see spanish numbers, starting with uno of course, that bring you to a new section each time. From the ELD http://directory.eliterature.org/node/3940

Textual instruments make text playable in a new way. At first, as one encounters their workings, they are toys for exploring language — more flexible than link-node hypertext, more responsive than batch-mode natural language generators. With growing experience, these instruments can also become tools for textual performance. Regime Change begins with a news article from April 2003, following the bombardment that began the U.S. invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush cites "eyewitness" intelligence that Saddam Hussein was assassinated by targeted U.S. bombing and clings to the contention that the Iraqi president was hiding "weapons of mass destruction." Playing Regime Change brings forth texts generated from a document that records a different U.S. attitude toward presidential assassination and eyewitness intelligence — the report of the Warren Commission. This instrument operates using the statistics of n-grams, a technique used for textual games for more than 50 years, beginning in Claude Shannon's 1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication. These n-grams are chains of words, and this instrument uses shared chains between documents as "bridges," allowing movement from the text of one document into a body of text created from another and back. (Source: Author description, ELC 1).

My work generally references the histories of the avant-garde and popular culture. The starting point of this piece is the historical coincidence that "subliminal advertising" and "concrete poetry" were introduced as concepts at nearly the same time. The piece is, as far as I know, the first to use subliminal effects in a work of electronic literature. A fuller description/statement is incorporated in the work itself.

(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One.)

“Project for Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit]” consists of subliminal messages that seem to be attacking something—whether that is icons, corporations, pop culture, or something else entirely. In this piece, it is left up to the reader to determine its subliminal messages by creating different reactions to different readers. What helps create these unique reactions is the music and icons that appear in the background of the text. The icons are the main focus in this piece and what sets it apart from other readings like itself. Certain icons are displayed behind certain words thus creating an association between the words and the icon being shown. Leaving the message up to the reader is the most interesting fact of this piece because the images it creates in each reader’s mind and what they think the author is trying to convey really gets them into the piece; it makes them want to understand it and spend more time viewing it in the process.

(Source: Reviewer description, ELD entry)