Published on the Web (online journal)

Roulette is a work of recombinant narrative that offers a novel interactive reading experience. As lines of text shift and fade in response to user manipulation of the 3-D interface, a fractured collection of stories is revealed, shifting in mood and meaning with each reading.

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

Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies. Following in the tradition of Russian Futurism, the site adopts a "do-it-yourself," "art-in-the-streets" aesthetic that privileges ready-made code, found media objects, and thought and language games over high-tech wizardry.

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

Palavrador is a poetic cyberworld built in 3D (Palavrador comes from the Portuguese word palavra, which itself means "word"). Directed by Francisco Carlos de Carvalho Marinho (Chico Marinho), it was nonetheless conceived and implemented as a result of synergetic collective assemblage of ideas and activities of a wider group of authors with backgrounds in the arts, literature, and computer science. Six flocks of meandering poems autonomously wander through the three-dimensional space. The readers may choose how many flocks of poems they want to see wandering through the environment, and the poems (botpoems) are able to turn around obstacles to keep their unveiling cohesion while moving through the space. The logic of movements was implemented using artificial intelligence procedures based on swarm behavior and steering behaviors of autonomous locomotion agents. Among the virtual objects of the Palavrador there is a labyrinth whose architecture is generated by mathematical procedures (fractal). There are also video poems, the sounds from which are modulated in relation to the distance of the readers, thus creating an immersive journey with a musical dimension. Readers choose between two avatars to represent them inside the virtual environment, one of which flies, and the other which meanders through the space. Additionally, it is possible to make the avatars "throw up" flying poems by using the joystick. Palavrador implies action; the creative achievement of words in symbiosis with humans and the autonomous poems (bots) adding new perspectives to art and literature by incorporating ideas from others disciplines such as computer science and biology.

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

I probably encountered emblems first through the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Like much that I admire, emblems are really on the margins of art and literary history. Before the dot.com bust, so much that was written about the web struck me as wrong-headed. People imputed what I can only call 'magic' to web's feature set. Low-cost-per-million multimedia interactivity was going to change the world. I knew that people had said similar things about the emblem, and had offered, in outline, many of the same reasons for it. So the emblem, often literally magical, became a caricature of the web.

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

This text begins as a short memory, recalled and composed by the author. Periodically and involuntarily the words are replaced in real-time by synonyms and coordinate terms extracted from the Wordnet database. After a certain amount of time has elapsed the text enters a second state where it attempts to "remember" its original form, where the text longs to reconstruct the original memory as it was first remembered and composed. In this state (in which it ceaselessly remains), the text attempts to cycle back through the word replacements and is more likely to "remember" than "forget," although there exists the possibility that the text will drift toward new replacements, new significations. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, "Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre." Indeed, this text is an experiment in the involuntary performance of memory - forever departing from the moment of its inscription while forever attempting to return to the script and source of its unfolding.

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

Golpe de gracia is an interactive multimedia piece that combines text, illustration, audio, modeling, and animation and tells the story of a character who undergoes a "near death" experience; this particular situation also functions as a metaphor for the cultural transitions of the present moment. The text is comprised of three "narrative worlds": Cadáver exquisito, L'nea mortal and Muerte digital (Exquisite Corpse, Mortal Line, and Digital Death, respectively) and four "deepening rooms" (games, reading texts, study, and construction). The work offers several different degrees of interaction that range from taking decisions in order to follow the routes, all the way up to the collective construction of the text, along the way participating in several interactive games. Golpe de gracia also has an educative and communicative purpose, which is to make us aware of, and to contribute to, the development of collective knowledge. In this respect, each of the narrative worlds offers the development of one or several possible actions, different strategies to facilitate interaction, as well as offering a sort of "encyclopedic" environment that eases the process of contextualizing and in-depth search among the several topics particular to the actual narrative.

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

Game, game, game and again game is a digital poem, retro-game, an anti-design statement and a personal exploration of the artist's changing worldview lens. Much of the western world's cultural surroundings, belief systems, and design-scapes, create the built illusion of clean lines and definitive choice, cold narrow pathways of five colors, three body sizes and encapsulated philosophy. Within net/new media art the techno-filter extends these straight lines into exacting geometries and smooth bit rates, the personal as WYSIWYG buttons. This game/artwork, while forever attached to these belief/design systems, attempts to re-introduce the hand-drawn, the messy and illogical, the human and personal creation into the digital, via a retro-game style interface, Hovering above and attached to the poorly drawn aesthetic is a personal examination of how we/I continually switch and un-switch our dominate belief systems. Moving from levels themed for faith or real estate, for chemistry or capitalism, the user triggers corrected poetry, jittering creatures and death and deathless noises. In addition each level contains short videos from the artist's childhood, representing those brief young interactions which spark out eventual beliefs. Game, game, game and again game is less a game about scoring and skill, and more an awkward and disjointed atmospheric, the self built into a jumping, rolling meander of life.

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

The digital project Family Tree is conceived as a mobile responding to two forces: wind and gravity. The reader/listener conjures these at will by moving the mouse: left and right to create movement through wind in the horizontal plane, and up and down to apply the force of gravity and create a vertical movement along the family tree. In this way, the reader/listener shapes the reading experience, causing the text to move and rearrange itself on the digital page. Family Tree can be regarded as an exercise of memory, investigating stories told and our ever-changing recollection of them, as well as a path towards some kind of source DNA: stories mix, converse and change, as people from different places and times are faced with each other. This imaginary space is flexible and open to new possibilities.

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

The digital project Family Tree is conceived as a mobile responding to two forces: wind and gravity. The reader/listener conjures these at will by moving the mouse: left and right to create movement through wind in the horizontal plane, and up and down to apply the force of gravity and create a vertical movement along the family tree. In this way, the reader/listener shapes the reading experience, causing the text to move and rearrange itself on the digital page. Family Tree can be regarded as an exercise of memory, investigating stories told and our ever-changing recollection of them, as well as a path towards some kind of source DNA: stories mix, converse and change, as people from different places and times are faced with each other. This imaginary space is flexible and open to new possibilities.

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