Published on the Web (online journal)

A hypertext ballad metaphorically exploring the relationships between people (Harry Soot) and machines (Sand).

A changing and growing literary work or works published, performed and displayed between 2003 and 2007. The version referenced here was published by the Danish electronic literature journal Afsnit P. The works all explore the title word: "soldatmarkedet", which means the soldier market. Some of them simply repeat a single letter from the word over and over, in a dense form of concrete poetry almost divorced from meaning. An installation at Skulpturens Hus in Stockholm in 2005 included filing cabinets filled with printouts of 15000 unique, computer-generated permutations of 20 texts written by Aasprong.

Author description: Written in Spanish, Universo molécula is a work that links the molecular structure of matter (made by two or three atoms united by a force of electrical origin called link), with the working of the literary language (and, more specifically, poetic language). This molecular universe is inhabited by some different textual typologies (images, sounds and words), and we can go through different kinds of navigation, reader immersion and interaction. It is a rich and complex poetic system that, like molecules, uses different forms of representation to adjust to various complexities: from the most simple to three-dimensional models.

Author description: La casa sota el temps ('the house under time') is designed and programmed to immerse the reader in a virtual space, that plays off of the structure of conventional narrative in order to create a reading experience that includes a multitude of interactive possibilities. The reader is the main protagonist of a multimedia journey that gives her the freedom to explore and also to build the fictional universe that she desires.

Matsuo Basho, the inventor of Haiku, penned the following poem (translation R. H. Blyth): "The old pond / A frog jumps in / The sound of water." A few hundred years later, the concrete poet dom silvester houédard offered his rendition: "pond / frog / plop." Fifty years after that, a Zen video game appearerd celebrating one of the most famous haiku. Basho's Frogger was produced as a response to derek beaulieu and Gary Barwin's Frogments from the Frag Pool, a book of Basho translations. JABBER produces nonsense words that sound like English words, in the way that the portmanteau words from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" sound like English words. When a letter comes into contact with another letter or group of letters, a calculation occurs to determine whether they bond according to the likelihood that they would appear contiguously in the English lexicon. Clusters of letters accumulate to form words, which results in a dynamic nonsense word sound poem floating around on the screen with each iteration of the generator. JABBER realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules.

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

Pieces of Herself is an exploration of feminine embodiment and identity in relationship to public and private space. Using a drag-and-drop game interface, viewers scroll through familiar environments (e.g., domestic, outdoor, work) to collect metaphorical "pieces" of the self and arrange them in compositions inside the body. As each piece enters the body, it triggers audio clips from interviews with women, music loops, and sound effects, resulting in a layered narrative. The project, which was inspired by Elizabeth Grosz's theories about embodiment, comments on social inscription of the body. The environments are composites of more than 400 photographs; the pieces include 40 vector drawings, and the audio clips include segments from interviews with 10 women.

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

Author description: The expansion of the prison system is possible because it is a public secret - a secret kept in an unacknowledged but public agreement not to know what imprisonment really means to individuals and their communities. As the number of prisons increases, so does the level of secrecy about what goes on inside them. The secret of the abuses perpetrated by the Criminal Justice System and Prison Industrial Complex can be heard in many stories told by many narrators, but only when they are allowed to speak. After a series of news stories and lawsuits documenting egregious mistreatment of prisoners in 1993, the California Department of Corrections imposed a media ban on all of its facilities. This ongoing ban prohibits journalists from face-to-face interviews, eliminates prisoners' right to confidential correspondence with media representatives, and bars the use of cameras, recording devices, and writing instruments in interviews with media representatives. Women incarcerated in California are allowed visits only from family members and legal representatives. Inmates are not allowed access to computers, cameras, tape recorders or media equipment of any kind. Such restrictions preserve the public secret. For the past three years, I have visited the Central California Women's Facility [CCWF] as a legal advocate. I work with a non-profit, human rights organization, Justice Now (http://jnow.org/). Together we have been documenting conversations with women prisoners at CCWF, the largest female correctional facility in the United States in an effort to unmask the well known, yet still secret injustices that result from our society's reliance on prisons to solve social problems. Given the ban on conversations with the media, I would not have had access to the women who have contributed to Public Secrets without the support of Justice Now. As a "legal advocate" I am allowed to record my conversations with the women and solicit their stories, ideas, and opinions.

Author description: The Sweet Old Etcetera is an interactive web project based on the poetry of e.e. cummings. e.e. cummings' poetry is highly visual, playful and experimental. "The Sweet Old Etcetera" interprets selected poems for a new media context and introduces additional layers of meaning through the use of motion, graphics, sound and programming. The project hopes to offer a fresh response to the print poetry, aiming to release it from the confines of the physical page and bring it into a digital environment in a playful way.

Author description: The first part of the project, Tierra de Extracción 1.0, was begun in 1996 and completed in 2000 for the Multimedia Writing Seminar promoted by the Center for Communication Research at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas). In a quest for a multimedia rhetoric, we then began to develop Tierra de Extracción 2.0, which was completed and published in 2007. With 63 hypermedia chapters, the action takes place in the region of Zulia, in a town called Menegrande, the location of the first big Venezuelan oil well: Zumaque I, which started the commercial era of oil production in the country in 1914. The narration occurs in three distinct periods: the beginning and ending of the 20th century and a period in between. At a certain moment, which very well can be the beginning or the end according to the path taken by the reader, the stories break their natural timeline and are united in the same space.

Author description: 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) is an interactive, non-linear net.art piece that explores the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein through a series of animated vignettes created in Flash. Each of the 88 sections corresponds to one of the 88 constellations in the night sky. Each constellation becomes a navigation device for the viewer to negotiate the associative relationships between these vignettes. As well, viewers can interact with each collaged animation using their left hand to trigger events from the computer keyboard (in homage to Ludwig Wittgenstein's brother Paul (a concert pianist who lost his right arm in WWI but continued his career performing piano works composed for the Left Hand). This work considers questions that Ludwig Wittgenstein pondered in his career as a philosopher: logic, language, the nature of thinking, and the limits of knowledge -- all in relation to our contemporary digital world.