Narrated by Robert Kendall. Designed and directed by Michele D'Auria
Faith is a kinetic poem that reveals itself in five successive states. Each new state is overlaid onto the previous one, incorporating the old text into the new. Each new state absorbs the previous one while at the same time engaging in an argument with it. The gradual textual unfolding is choreographed to music.
(Source: Author description.)
A suite of a dozen kinetic poems programmed in Apple BASIC. Later, as the first versions became inaccessible, the works were recreated in HyperCard in the early 1990s (after bpNichol's death), and then in 2007 recreated in javascript for the web, and simultaneously the original BASIC and Hypercard files were republished for download.
"The Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder has two 5 ¼-inch floppies with incomplete versions of First Screening on them (along with the requisite Apple IIe for viewing them). These beta-phase versions of First Screening not only differ from each other and from the published version (which is available online as an emulation of the software running on an Apple IIe) in content, but also in metadata (Katherine Wooler in: "from Apple Basic to Hypercard, or, Translating Translating bpNichol" (MLA-blog).
Recreated in various contemporary media by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi and Dan Waber.
Author description: Translation (version 5) investigates iterative procedural "movement" from one language to another. Translation developed from an earlier work, Overboard. Both pieces are examples of literal art in digital media that demonstrate an "ambient" time-based poetics. As it runs the same algorithms as Overboard, passages within translation may be in one of three states — surfacing, floating, or sinking. But they may also be in one of three language states, German, French, or English. If a passage drowns in one language it may surface in another. The main source text for translation is extracted from Walter Benjamin's early essay, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." (Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. 1979. London: Verso, 1997. 107-23.) Other texts from Proust may also, less frequently, surface in the original French, and one or other of the standard German and English translations of In Search of Lost Time. The generative music for translation was developed in collaboration with Giles Perring who did the composition, sound design, performance, and recording of the sung alphabets.
Instructions: To hear the sound, turn on the computer's speakers or plug in headphones. Translation is intended, primarily, simply to run in ever-shifting patterns of language, though you can hold down key combinations to produce a limited range of effects, as follows (you will need to hold the keys down for 3-5 seconds before the effect begins) — Shift-S: restart the quasi-randomization of verse states (resume normal ambience of the piece). Shift-D: Surface in German. Shift-F: Surface in French. Shift-E: Surface in English. Shift-Q: Fade to black.
music by Giles Perring
An email novel that forms a sequel to Rob Wittig's Blue Company, originally sent out in emails to a small group of readers over the course of the summer of 2002, and later published on the web as an archive of emails in August 2003 by frAme Journal of Culture and Technology.
Scenario and characters based on Rob Wittig's Blue Company. Some writing and images contributed by Rob Wittig.
In slippingglimpse, we model a ring in which the roles of initiator, responder, and mediator are taken by all elements in turn. Our mantra for this: water reads text, text reads technology, technology reads water, coming full circle. Reading then comes to mean something different at each stage of the poem, in all cases involving sampling. Ryan reads and captures the image of 'chreods' (dynamic attractors) in water. Strickland's poem text, by sampling, appropriating, and aggregating artists' descriptions of processes of capture, reads this process of capture. And the water reads, via Lawson Jaramillo's motion-capture coding, by imposing its own sampled pattern. A variety of reading experiences are enabled: reading images while watching text; reading in concert with non-human readers, computer and water; reading frame breaks (into scroll or background); or reading by intervening. For instance, reversibility and replay are available on the scroll, as are reading in the direction and speed you wish; while, in the water, regeneration of text is available, as are unpredictable jostling and overlays.
(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Videographer: Paul Ryan
A longer description, with reading options described: Human language struggles to credit the capability of the other-than-human. Even as praise and description flow freely, human speakers reserve agency and judgment to themselves. Writing that honors the agency of animals does so in terms that disallow machine or mineral intelligence. In attempting to know, humans slice arbitrarily through entangled wholes. slippingglimpse, by contrast, reconstitutes an entangled whole. slippingglimpse is a collaborative interactive piece made with Flash software incorporating ocean videos shot off the coast of Maine. In this poem, water waves “read” words of text, words of text “read” the state of technology, and video technology “reads” patterns in the waves, coming full cycle. slippingglimpse credits the ocean with language, “understood in the broadest sense as a semiotic system through which creatures ‘respond’ to each other,” in the words of Cary Wolfe. In the FULL-SCREEN opening mode, phrases of poem text are “read” by the water; that is, they are mapped to its patterns. These patterns are called chreods and are the words of the water’s language. (For more about words in a multi-dimensional environmental language, see René Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis.) Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo’s programming here adapts the text to the water rather than for human reading. In SCROLL TEXT mode, text appears at human scale; it “reads” technology by sampling and recombining words from four sources: 1) artists interviewed in two issues of YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology; 2) Hildegarde of Bingen; 3) a Silesian folktale, The Passion of the Flax, which explores ancient technologies of harvesting plants for food and flax for paper; and 4) Strickland’s own words. In HI-REZ VIDEO mode, the chreod patterns are most easily grasped, as captured and “read” both by the camera and by the videographer. Paul Ryan’s technical interventions are guided by long apprenticeships in ecology and topology. In SCROLL TEXT mode, readers coming to the piece may contribute their own readings by using the sliding pointer to control speed and direction of scrolling. They can choose to view images, read text within images, read text breaking across the frame of the video out into the blackness or down into a column of scrolling text, or they may read text of either column in any order they wish, pausing (freezing) or rewinding the scroll at will. They can read in concert with the water or read by intervening; they must continuously decide how to direct their attention. In all video modes, readers can click “regenerate” to swap new random selections of text from the scroll into the water. Questions asked implicitly here: Where does exploitation (of earth, of cosmic, resources) begin? How do humans “read” it, justify it, and to whom?
CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop's Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA). Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities.
requires quicktime plug-in, requires internet connection
Author description: ppg256-1, the first program in the ppg256 series, was Montfort's new year's poem for 2008. It is a Perl program that generates poems without recourse to any external dictionary, word list, or other data file. It was written, in part, to determine the essential elements of a poetry generator. The program itself is shorter than this description.
(Description from the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2)
Perl scripts.
Flight Paths: a networked novel seeks to explore what happens when lives collide - the airplane stowaway and the suburban Londoner. A supermarket car park lies directly beneath the flight path into Heathrow Airport. On at least five separate occasions the bodies of young men - stowaways - have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this place. This project explores the lives of one stowaway and the woman whose car on which he lands. The authors create multimedia elements that illuminate the story while readers are invited to contribute texts, images, sounds, memories, ideas, and stories. The project grows and changes incrementally. There is a long history of electronic fiction works that include user-generated content. But there are very few fiction projects that from the earliest, research phase attempt to harness participatory media as well as multimedia content in the way that Flight Paths does.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Flash
"Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capliano Review is a work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter, curated by Kate Armstrong, commissioned by The Capliano Review. In February 2007 The Capilano Review published an issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar. Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capliano Review is a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays by J. R. Carpenter. In this work, Carpenter explores the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism. Over a four-month period Carpenter read and re-read the essays, parsing them into fragments, which she then annotated, marked-up, tagged and posted. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments could then be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that opened up new readings of the essays and revealed new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach is part blog, part archive – an online repository for the artifacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving. Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary feeds into a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source."
