Published on the Web (online journal)

synonymovie generates a sequence of images based on a single word: a "movie" that develops algorithmically through a chain of semantic relations. Initially, synonymovie asks the user to introduce a word, which will be the "seed" (as in "random seed," a number used to initialize a pseudorandom number generator) from which the image sequence will unfold. The sequence starts by finding an image related to the word, using an on-line image search engine. Then, a synonym for the word is obtained from a Web-based synonym server, together with its corresponding image, and so forth. The "movie" will end when a word without synonyms (or related images) is found.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Sooth is a set of love poems interactively triggered phrase-by-phrase to fly in flocks over original video. Sounds associated with each phrase are mapped to audio which pans and volume shifts in space as the phrase flies. Easing equations are randomly shuffled to create a sense of behavior to each phrase. Text-code-video-audio all original and released under a Creative Commons 2.5 License. It was created while I was artist-in-residence at La Chambre Blanche web-lab in Quebec city. Bilingual: French-English in same interface.

(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Chemical Landscapes is a series of photograms by Mary Pinto. The photos suggest landscapes but are created entirely in the dark room, using only chemicals and a flashlight. For this project, I've written a series of "digital tales" suggested by the particular chemical landscape. I hope the relationship of language and narrative to the "tale" parallels the relationship of light and chemicals to the "landscape." The piece begins with a title page that serves as a navigation page. By clicking at various places on the page you're taken to one of the eight chemical landscapes. Once you arrive at a landscape, the digital tale fades in and then out, and you may click on the screen at any point to jump back to the navigation page. I have tried to time the fading in and out of the text so that it is almost impossible to read it all before it fades away. My hope is that the reader will recognize the necessity of jumping around in the text, picking up pieces of the tale to read and ignoring other pieces, thereby creating a different experience with each reading. If you think of reading a traditional story as a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end, then reading a hypertext is like walking through a field: readers begin at any one of several different starting points, wander around as long as they like, and then exit wherever and whenever they choose. (Source: Author's description from ELC 1)

Still Standing is an interactive installation that invites participants to stay motionless and contemplate its poetic content, a poem titled “seeking sedation.” Nowadays, designs are created to be decrypted and enjoyed at a glance, requiring no attention span. The piece evolved as a response to the "collapse of the interval"; a phenomenon of fast pace culture that rarely allows us a moment to stop and observe; a habit that weakens the fragile approach towards design with dynamic typography. The installation consists of an amalgam of characters projected on the wall as if they were resting on the floor. When a participant walks in front of the projection, the first reaction of the text is to act as if it was being kicked, pushed by the person's feet. When the participant stops for a short moment, the text is attracted towards his position and moves up, like water soaking his body. The participant can then enjoy a motionless moment and contemplate the textual content that becomes more and more legible. When the user is done and decides to start moving again, the text falls back to the floor and wait for a new interaction.

(Source: Authors' description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Carving in Possibilities is a short Flash piece. By moving the mouse, the user carves the face of Michelangelo's David out of speculations about David, the crowd watching David and Goliath, the sculptor, and the crowds viewing the sculpture.
(Source: author's description in ELC 1.)

Bad Machine is codework that works. It presents a surface of text that blends English with structures and tropes from programming languages, database queries and reports, error messages, and other forms of machine communication. But it is also a functioning interactive fiction, capable of accepting commands and being figured out by the assiduous reader. The machinery of program and language is at work here, as those who are up to the challenge of Bad Machine can discover.

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

Venice. The tight winding alleys and long dirty canals. Easy to become lost here, where every street emerges somewhere unexpected. In the central square a scaffold has been erected for your neck, and if only you can escape for long enough you might survive, but in this city all roads lead back to Piazza San Marco and the Hanging Clock.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1)

In this Flash hypertext, Coverley weaves a tapestry of text, image, and sound, telling a California story that many readers can relate to. In this piece, the sky itself is the center of a meditation on memory and loss across decades of human experience. The same "blue sky" that often refers to people's wildest dreams now comes to represent boundaries and fears.

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

Reinforcing changing attitudes and roles toward art, religion and technology. Experimental research using Google search results. Textual fragments found on the Web are programmatically rearranged, deformed or crushed, deconstructing and re-contextualizing the actual text. By applying this strategic process new, dismantling and reorienting contexts arise, not directly conforming to the mundanity of the original result listings. (Source: author's description.)

Screen is an alternative literary game created in the "Cave," a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins with reading and listening. Texts, presenting moments of memory as a virtual experience, appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that does not settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster; struck words don't always return to where they came from; and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. (Source: authors' description.)