Approved record

Shadow Trees compiles and animates images of urban nature. Focusing on shadows cast by trees onto walls, buildings, pavement, and the trunks of other trees, Jody Zellen is able to investigate places where natural and built environments overlap and touch.

The short video disrupts audience expectations of nature films and photography, which are often framed to limit or erase the presence of humans, so that trees are shown to exist in forests, not in city blocks. In so doing, such photographic conventions comfort us by removing our role in the precariosness of their existence, particularly in large metropolitan places like Los Angeles where carbon emissions choke human and nonhuman life alike.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/shadow-trees/)

Work on We Descend began in 1984, when five words came unbidden into my mind: “If this document is authentic…” I had no idea what the phrase signified: Who’s saying this? What document? Why wouldn’t it be authentic? How would it be authenticated? By what authority? How would that authority be established? Where did the document come from in the first place? As I pondered these questions, a clutch of fragmentary writings began to appear under my hands — via the standard tech at the time: fountain pen, notebook paper, clipboard.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/we-descend/)

The larger project is my first foray into digital poetry that uses a relatively large data set, in this case, the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare.

In Volume 1, the user has the ability to stir lines from Shakespeare’s original 154 sonnets into their “own” creation and to render a screenshot of any particular stirring by pressing the “collect the ephemera” button. The user also has the option to “defeat the ephemera” and return the text to one of Shakespeare’s originals.

In Volume 2, the user does not have the ability to stir Shakespeare’s texts into their “own” creation as the texts are generative or “self-stirring.”  Instead, the user has the opportunity to “read the ephemera” by pressing the “Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die” button rendering a screenshot of any particular stirring. “Thou shouldst print more…” is the last line of Sonnet XI.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/95-2/)

“Stromatolite” is a dream/delusion/poem/shallow grave of language. As I say by way of introduction:

I was carving up _Was_, Michael Joyce’s “novel of internet,” feeding phrases to Googlemena, savage goddess, to see what she might throw back. Results fell mainly in three piles: interesting resonance (e.g.,”the lost what was” evoking notes on circumcision); incestuous loops (quotations from the novel in reviews, etc.); and most marvelously… THESE REALLY WEIRD HEAPS OF WORDS

(Source: https://thenewriver.us/stromatolite/)

Leveraging the Curveship-js system for automatic narrative variation (version 0.2) to regen~d~erate the lyrics of the second cut off The Velvet Underground’s debut album, after adjusting the street value of heroin on an annualized inflation rate, I then coded this updated and enumerated content into BBC BASIC II (1982) and emulated all that output as a series of twenty-something decidedly non-vector formats—subsequently renamed à la a Pixies tune 22 years removed from the late Lewis Allan Reed‘s original.

Camtasia Fantasy is a study on institutionalized tools for presenting information, featuring numerous forms of misreading and corruption native to those systems—including automated captioning and stabilization, noise removal, layers of lossy compression, and the broader assumption that a PowerPoint slide show can communicate any knowledge worth knowing—as well as the unintended poetics that emerge from such misreadings.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/camtasia-fantasy/)