Published on the Web (online journal)

Description (in English)

Reagan Library is an odd mixture of stories and images, voices and places, crimes and punishments, connections and disruptions, signals on, noises off, failures of memory, and acts of reconstruction. It goes into some places not customary for "writing." I think of it as a space probe. I have no idea what you'll think.(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1)

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 The piece seems to become more and more confusing as the writing continues. Demonstrates certain aspects of the writings becoming more incoherent, showing older graphic pictures of areas that seem lost, and bizarre, regarding the context of Reagan Library. The texts describe certain scenarios as well such as the Doctor asking what appears to be a patient to perform tasks involving one of the graphics, the piece goes on from the doctor's narration of the person's ability to perform the given tasks involving the image.

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Some of the innovations of Reagan Library are immediately apparent in the combination of navigable Myst-like landscapes with linked texts. Others can only be read through repeated encounters with the four fictional systems of text that correspond to four "worlds." Mingling instructions, stories, and "nonsense" texts (which can be eliminated by re-visiting and re-reading), Reagan Library is a meditation on forgetting and loss in which text and image work together interactively in an intricate and compelling way.

(Source: Editorial description, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1) 

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Pull Quotes

What if I were to ask you in intimate detail about the way your eyeballs move, or what muscles you use when you swallow, or how the air goes in and out of your lungs?

This is your brain off drugs. Are you with me, doctor?

Churning and churning in the thickening mire. Please disregard. Will this ever make sense?

Are we reading yet?

What don't you understand? Stolidity silently contemplates the ramifying hours. Had this been a virtual emergency you would have been.

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Technical notes

Each page contains an image and some text. The image is a QuickTimeVR panorama. Dragging the mouse within the QuickTime window moves the virtual camera. Certain images within the panoramas are cues for hypertext links. The cursor takes on the image of a globe when it encounters one of these. Generally, clicking on an object moves your viewpoint close to that object by replacing the current panorama. Occasionally you'll click on an object and find yourself in a different space, marked most notably by a change of color and lighting. There are four spaces in this version of the Library. The texts that accompany the images are also multiform. Pay attention to the small squares or color bars that mark the end of each passage. They're not entirely decorative. If you visit a page more than once, you'll notice the text has changed. The text should become more coherent (if not more sensible) on repeated visits. Simply re-loading a page does not constitute a new visit. You must leave and land elsewhere before you can return. Most pages contain several text links in addition to the graphical links in the QuickTime movie. Lines entirely in italics represent important messages from the Library. More information is available in the introduction and in Reagan Library's "red zone."(Source: Instructions from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1)

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The work was adapted from Quicktime VR in 2009 and re-released in Flash.

 

Description (in English)

Author description: Stud Poetry is a poker game played with words instead of cards. Your goal is to build as strong a poetry hand as you can and, of course, to win as much money as you can. Stud Poetry is a game of courage and faith, and a bit of luck too. To become a great master of Stud Poetry, you need to believe in the power of words, their magic capability to move mountains, minds, and souls. Surely it won't be easy, but when you finally have won all the money with your wonderful five-word poetry hands, you'll know it's worth it.

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

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Pull Quotes

Paul Valéry wins with his two pairs.

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Technical notes

Stud Poetry is a version of the poker game, "Five Card Stud," played with words instead of cards. All players start with 100 chips, and may bet, call, raise, check, and fold throughout the rounds of betting in accordance with the normal rules of poker. The relative value of the words is randomly assigned each time Stud Poetry is started.

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Description (in English)

N_o_o_n Q_u_i_l_t is an assemblage of patches submitted by writers from around the world. Together they form a fabric of noon-time impressions. The quilts were stitched over a period of approximately five months during 1998-1999. Each contributing writer was asked to look out their window and describe what they saw. (Source: Noon Quilt site)

Technical notes

Noon Quilt has been designed for Netscape Communicator/Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 4 with javascript enabled. The quilt is best viewed on a 800x600 screen with 32 bit color without the browser toolbar. When you move the mouse over a patch the writer's name will appear in the status bar. Select the patch and a smaller window will open with that writer's noon-time writing. From this window you can navigate the site via the stitches. Once again, pass the mouse over a stitch and the path name will appear in the status bar. It is important to refresh/reload the noon quilt page to see the most current patches. (Source: Noon Quilt site)

Contributors note

Noon Quilt was designed,'stitched' and maintained by Teri Hoskin from an idea by Sue Thomas. Ali Graham wrote the perl scripts needed to frequently update the quilt.

Description (in English)

Sea and Spar Between is a poetry generator which defines a space of language populated by a number of stanzas comparable to the number of fish in the sea, around 225 trillion. Each stanza is indicated by two coordinates, as with latitude and longitude. The words in Sea and Spar Between come from Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Certain compound words (kennings) are assembled from words used frequently by one or both. Sea and Spar Between was composed using the basic digital technique of counting, which allows for the quantitative analysis of literary texts.

(Source: Authors' abstract at Dear Navigator)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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HTML 5 Canvas

Description (in English)

It's a live writing performance over the net combining 1) keyboard writing, 2) machinated, algorithmic writing, and 3) feeds from the processes surrounding the writing (like system monitoring, net connection monitoring, ftp log, etc). All in realtime and plaintext. It was performed live at the BIOS symposium, Center for Literary Computing, West Virginia University, September 2006, with a unix ytalk session as a sideshow. The static version shown here is based on the exhibition "e and eye - art and poetry between the electronic and the visual" at Tate Modern, London, October 2006. It's part of a series of work called "protocol performances". 'Protocol' is meant both as a lower level set of rules of the format of communication, and as statements reporting observations and experiences in the most fundamental terms without interpretation, relating it to phenomenological 'noemata' - thought objects, and thus identifying a data stream with a stream of consciousness. 'Performance' is meant both as a data protocol's physical performance as much as its play on the meaning as an artist-centric execution of work. A later version, called "chyphertext performance", is more interactive, allowing users to write directly into the live execution, making it more of a decentralized 'happening'.

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

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Pull Quotes

digitalized desideratum

there's only digressions

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Requires a web browser with javascript function turned on.

Description (in English)

A satirical take on the Wikitorial debacle, when the Los Angeles Times opened up a wiki for opinions and letters to the editor and opinion pieces.In this Bunk Magazine feature, The Los Angeles Times decides to repair the damage by going whole hog -- in an entirely wiki form, giving the paper to the people and demonstrating their web-savvy might.

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Los Wikiless Timespedia
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Los Wikiless Timespedia
Description (in English)

"Stravinsky's Muse" is a flash-based hypertext that offers a lexical sphere as a set of dials for accessing the narrative via the semantic constructs in the mind of its protagonist, Stravinsky Jones.  Each segment of narrative is complemented by a definition of one of the chosen terms in the form it takes in Jones' lexicon.

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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Flash-based animation

Description (in English)

"Marginalia in the Library of Babel" presents a metafictional, metahypertextual narrative about one man's discovery of his ability to write in the margins of the Internet, to finally make his marks on the infinite network, marks that will ultimately lead to his erasure.

The piece is written through annotations written upon web pages archived from the Internet all related to Borges and the many implementations of his work, partial and abandoned though they be, that litter the Internet.

(Source: Author's description)

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Technical notes

The piece is written in HTML with JavaScript annotations. All but the first web pages were saved from the Internet and re-uploaded to be archived with the piece.

Contributors note

Design and text, Mark C. Marino, Pop-up annotations, Keith Gustafson

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Description (in English)

L0ve0ne (Eastgate Web Workshop) was first told as an additive social networked story, on the Interactive Conference on Arts Wire, beginning in the fall of 1994. Each lexia was posted as a separate entry on the conferencing system. Portions of L0ve0ne were ported in different forms in servers all over the country, including the Arts Conference on The WELL. The story integrates hacker culture, early Internet technologies, a German "road trip"; and a love story that continues in Malloy's The Roar of Destiny.  The first person is used, as it is in many of Malloy's other works, as a narrative device that not only effects the telling, in that it allows the writer to disclose the details of the main character's life in an intimate way, but also effects the reading, in that it situates the reader directly in the main character's life and environment.

Using HTML on the fledgling World Wide Web, Malloy designed an interface that allows access to the narrative in several different ways, including hypertext linking, a visual array of "lines" from of each of the 129 lexias; and a "frames" interface that uses  the "lines" as linked glosses.

L0ve0ne was the first work published in the Eastgate Web Workshop.

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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Technical notes

Using HTML on the fledgling World Wide Web, Malloy designed an interface that allowed access to the narrative in several different ways, including hypertext linking, a visual array of "lines" from of each of the 129 lexias; and a "frames" interface that used the "lines" as linked glosses. 

Description (in English)

Talking Cure is an installation that includes live video processing, speech recognition, and a dynamically composed sound environment. It is about seeing, writing, and speaking — about word pictures, the gaze, and cure. It works with the story of Anna O, the patient of Joseph Breuer's who gave to him and Freud the concept of the "talking cure" as well as the word pictures to substantiate it. The reader enters a space with a projection surface at one end and a high-backed chair, facing it, at another. In front of the chair are a video camera and microphone. The video camera's image of the person in the chair is displayed, as text, on the screen. This "word picture" display is formed by reducing the live image to three colors, and then using these colors to determine the mixture between three color-coded layers of text. One of these layers is from Joseph Breuer's case study of Anna O. Another layer of text consists of the words "to torment" repeated — one of the few direct quotations attributed to Anna in the case study. The third layer of text, which becomes visible only when a person is in the chair, reworks Anna's snake hallucinations through the story of the Gorgon Medusa, reconfiguring the analytic gaze. Speaking into the microphone triggers a speech-to-text engine that replaces Anna's words with what it (mis)understands the participant to have said. What is said into the microphone is also recorded, and becomes part of a sound environment that includes recordings of Breuer's words, Anna's words, our words, and all that has been spoken over the length of the installation. Others in the space observe the person in the chair through word pictures on the screen. Readers move their bodies at first to create visual effects, and then to achieve textual ones, creating new reading experiences for themselves and others in the room. Movements range from slowly moving an extended arm in order to recreate left-to-right reading, to head or hand rotation seeking evocative neologisms at the mobile textual borders within the image. The video processing technique was created by Utterback, and has been exhibited separately as Written Forms. The sound environment was designed and implemented by Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin implemented the speech-to-text. Talking Cure was first presented at the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization symposium at UCLA. I have also presented it as a performance/reading, cycling verbally between the layers of text while my image is projected as a different textual mixture on a screen.

(Source: Author's website.)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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Contributors note

with: Camille Utterback, Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin. The video processing technique was created by Utterback, and has been exhibited separately as Written Forms. The sound environment was designed and implemented by Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin implemented the speech-to-text.