Published on the Web (online journal)

"OK Texts" is a series of linked animated gifs that explores the noton of textuality and texts.

The Required Field is an expansive interactive digital poem exploring the impact of policy documents, bureaucratic forms and the river of applications on our lives and our daily culture. Using twenty found and remixed government and corporate documents, the work poetically translates those overly complex and confusing forms. For example, a Tax Form for farmers will be recontextualized through an interactive image-­‐map tour, transforming specific sections of the forms into poetic text and animated elements. Or a page from a Work Visa application will be created into a platform game, where the reader/player triggers poetry blasting bureaucracies through their game play. And in the end, The Required Field, builds from and then poetically destroys the bureaucratic cultures and their fields of red-­‐tape, laws and policies for the sake of policies, the sub-­‐section to a sub-­‐section, part B stroke 9 for breathing.

As interactive writing and digital art are relatively emerging fields there remains considerable research areas to explore. One of the most pressing is the examination of how to re-think, translate and remake older creative works into new cultural and language contexts. This work was create for BleuOrange in Canada. And is an entirely new work loosely based Jason Nelson's This is How You Will Die generative fiction,  rethinking all aspects of the work in a French context.

Working with translators, Ariane Savoieand Lisa Tronca at BleuOrange in Quebec, the work developed new methods for rethinking and translating everything about a digital writing artwork. Specifically examining how the images, the motion, the interface, the animation, the sounds, and the interactivity, as well as the words, have to be re-created.  So once those models and methods were developed, an entirely new work was created, based loosely on This is How You Will Die, which comprised of re-combining 15 different stories through an interactive game engine, as well as numerous additional sections, graphic and audio work.

On January 12th, 2017 there were 113983 files on Piotr Marecki's laptop. This digital work is an attempt to lift them one by one – which takes several minutes. The work was first presented as a wild demo during the Synchrony/Recursion demoparty (NYC–Montreal, 27th–29th January 2017) and was not voted last in the competition.

Richard Holeton’s gleefully, not to say Gaudi-ly, illustrated glidepath through the remnants of language that trail beyond the (littoral, literal) “postmodern” like the tail of a forlorn freeform comix comet, manage—as the Oulipo poet Michelle Grangaud might have said in her own Formes de l’anagramme à faire plusieurs fois des Temps rondo, in an eschatological imagetext mashup of demon storm troops, pert rodents, and skidrow resident poets, porn purveyors, and sperm donors via Flickr borrowings, Wiki burrowings, and whole tons of homebrew images bluesily rendered ala twerk.

(Source: Vassar Review introduction)

The Truelist is a book-length poem generated by a one-page, stand-alone computer program. Based around compound words, some more conventional, some quite unusual, the poem invites the reader to imagine moving through a strange landscape that seems to arise from the English language itself. The unusual compounds are open to being understood differently by each reader, given that person’s cultural and individual background.

The core text that Nick Montfort wrote is the generating computer program. It defines the sets of words that combine, the way some lines are extended with additional language, the stanza form, and the order of these words and the lines in which they appear. The program is included on the last page. Anyone who wishes is free to study it, modify it to see what happens, and make use of it in their own work.

The Truelist is part of the series Using Electricity. A complete studio recording of the book by Montfort is available for free (either for online listening or download) thanks to PennSound.

Rob Swigart’s “Seeking” is a clever and funny story whose roots lie in the materialization of internet interdating connections. Moving through the technological and media reductions of desire, Swigart parallels the overarching theme of “seeking” with a form that is itself punctuated with questions.