Published on the Web (online journal)

A hypercube is a work of electronic fiction based on the structure of a cube. It comprises six pages, each of which links to four others. Letter to Linus uses the form of a hypercube to explore, through six points of view, the politics of electronic literature.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2)

Brainstrips, a series of comic strips for the web, explores key concepts in philosophy, science, and math. Each work is created in Flash and includes text, animations, audio, and video. "Deep Philosophical Questions" (2008), answers six important questions that slip between the cracks of serious philosophy, into a place where logic and pedantry have no play. This work uses copyright-free comic strips from the Golden Age of Comics (American comic books created in the 1930s and 1940s). The strips have been re-colored and digitally edited to enhance their clarity and to accommodate new dialog boxes and Flash animations. "Science For Idiots" (2009), explains some of the greatest science puzzles of our time. This work uses comics and clipart images that have been digitally edited and then animated to create a multimedia story event for the viewer. Sound is also an integral part of the story, and it has been layered into each segment of the piece. The final result is a dynamic visual and auditory experience for the reader, and a closer look at the potential within animated strips on the web. "Higher Math" (2009), examines key concepts in math: addition, subtraction, irrational numbers, multiplication, geometry, and the Googolplex. Each concept has a human element, and their commonality, a bridge between math and ethics. These three works use images, video, and audio files acquired online, and modified by the artist. A credits page is included in the work.

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

in absentia is a site-specific web-based writing project which addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, where the author lived for seventeen years. J. R. Carpenter writes, "Faced with imminent eviction, I began to write as if I was no longer there, about a Mile End that was no longer there. I manipulated the Google Maps API to populated "real" satellite images of my neighbourhood with "fictional" characters and events. in absentia is a web "site" haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. in absentia was created with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. It was presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal. It launched June 24, 2008. New stories were added over the summer, in English and French. A closing party was held in conjunction with the launch of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, (conundrum press), at Sky Blue Door, November 7, 2008"

Entre Ville was commissioned in 2006 by OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montréal, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal. J. R. Carpenter writes: "Although I had lived in Montréal for 15 years at the time of the commission, Entre Ville was my first major work about my adopted city. It took me that long to learn the vocabulary. I don’t mean French, or Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Yiddish or any of the other languages spoken in my neighbourhood. I refer, rather, to a visual, tactile, aural, sensorial vocabulary. My home office window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards, gardens and alleyways. Daily my dog and I walk through this interior city sniffing out stories. Poetry is not hard to find between the long lines of peeling-paint fences plastered with notices, spray painted with bright abstractions and draped with trailing vines. Entre Ville is web-based heat-wave poem presented in the vernacular of my neighbourhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time." Entre Ville was launched at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montreal April 27, 2006.

V: Vniverse is a textual instrument for exploring a sequence of poems that also appear in a double invertible book. Navigation/performance possibilities provide a micro-texture of interplay between patterns and their activation, both within the alphabetic forms and in relation to the diagrammed constellations. Programmed all in its original frame, the piece gives the illusion of words moving directly in and out of the sky. Thus all the time resources of the piece go toward responsiveness and production of language, rather than visual display. Here space is fashioned to amplify the sense of resonance that internal timings create.

(Source: Author's description)

Early web hypertext that combines links with text that automatically refreshes, sometimes faster than the reader can follow it.

Note: The New River published Hegirascope Version 2 in October 1997.

Author's description, from The New River:

WHAT IF THE WORD STILL WON'T BE STILL?

This is an extensive revision of a Web fiction originally released in 1995. The current text consists of about 175 pages traversed by more than 700 links. Most of these pages carry instructions that cause the browser to refresh the active window with a new page after 30 seconds. You can circumvent this by following a hypertext link, though in most cases this will just start a new half-minute timer on a fresh page.

The best way to encounter this work is simply to dive in, though some may prefer a more stable reference point. For these readers, there is an index to particularly interesting places in the text. You may want to go to that page and bookmark it.

The original "Hegirascope" was designed for Netscape Navigator 1.1 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0. This version adds no new technical features and requires no plug-ins, Java, or JavaScript.

My renewed appreciation to Nick Routledge of World 3 for providing the initial push for this project and to Ed Falco of New River for encouraging the revision. Likewise thanks to all the kind and critical readers who have contacted me about "Hegirascope," especially Espen Aarseth, who very early saw this for what it was. Changes and improvements to the initial version include the following:

* Several new story threads and about 50 new pages have been added.

* The number of links on each page has been doubled.

* The delay on most pages has been increased from 18 seconds to 30.

* The index table has been redesigned.

* Improvements have been made to the layout. Main font size has been reduced to better accommodate Windows browsers.

* "Web-safe" colors are now used throughout.

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This is a work of fiction for adults. Content and language in some places are not appropriate for young children. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is coincidental.

(Source: Author's description in New River)

"Book Unbound" is a "collocational cybertext," a self-assembling poetic collage that can be read in two ways: either automatically in the "bound" mode, or in an "unbound" mode that allows readers to extract and recycle words from its recombinant text stream. It is a HyperCard stack (Mac only, HyperCard program not required) available for downloading.

Author description: This work originated when I was invited to exhibit at the Medway Galleries. The most interesting features of the gallery were its high ceiling and three large windows, which I was inspired to use in the work. I wanted to explore kinetic typography, the animation of images and sound. I came across a transcription of birds' songs in the book The Thinking Ear. Suddenly, I was drawn to this transcription because of the similarities with the phonemes I was using in my other works. The repetitive aspect of letters and what looked like syllables reminded me of sound poems. So, I decided to ask some singers to sing their own interpretation of the transcriptions of the songs, in order to play with the interpretative process of these translations. Having been translated first from birds' song into linguistic interpretations, now the birdsongs would be re-interpreted by the human voice. The sounds that emerged from this study were later attached to the animated birds in the shape of calligrams. The outlines and letters of the text birds corresponded to the transcribed sound made by each bird, so making the birds sing their own visual-textual compositions. Nevertheless, the sound does not correspond to the real bird. The visual character of the typographical character was another important characteristic in the making of each individual bird, which leads to the matter of the materiality, virtuality, and movement of the letter. This work has shown an incredible versatility in reshaping itself into different forms of media and possibilities of presentation and thus of exploration.

(Source: Author's description from her site)

Inspired by Derrida's Of Grammatology, Mark Amerika experiments in GRAMMATRON with narrative form in a networked environment. Amerika retells the Jewish Golem myth by adapting it into the culture of programmable media and remixing several genres of text into the story's hybridized style, including metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk, and conceptual works affiliated with the Art+Language group.

Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story introduces readers to Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who creates Grammatron, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (as in the original myth) but with forbidden data—a specially coded Nanoscript—the creature becomes a digital being that "contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings." The Grammatron is the personification of the Golem, which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. While the Golem and its environment have been depicted in any number of literary adaptations and works, in GRAMMATRON, Mark Amerika creates a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in the electrosphere.

Throughout the story, Abe Golam searches for his "second-half," a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and readers through a multi-linear textscape (the Grammatron writing machine) where they search for "the missing link" that will enable them to port to another dimension of "digital being" the story refers to as Genesis Rising.

The project consists of over 1100 (partly randomized) text elements and thousands of links. It comes with animated and still life images, an eerie background soundtrack, and audio-files that sometimes provide a spoken meta-commentary on the work itself. The work consists of different text-layers the user is free to choose from, including a theoretical hypertextual essay titled "Hypertextual Consciousness," the animated text "Interfacing," and the main hypertext "Abe Golam."

GRAMMATRON (1997) was initially received as one of the first major works of Net art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. It was the first work in Amerika's Net art trilogy and was followed by PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002).

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Patricia Tomaszek)

Spawn is a mouse-responsive liquid poem that reduces its own language and content into chaos and symbols.