“My Own Alphabet” is a motion poem about disorder, learning new things, forgetting details and seeing from new and different perspectives. The poetry may look jumbled to you, but the author does not see it that way. Aleatory Funkhouser is a ten year old student from the USA who is interested in experimental poetry.
Alphaweb is a hypertext consisting of poetry and ruminations, graphics, and fragments of the Coriolis Codex, suggesting (but hardly conclusively) a special relationship between angels and dragons. The work has at least three interpenetrating structures, approximately 250 areas and three times that many doors and passageways. The structure that is always present for orientation is the alphabetical structure; both the poems and the angels progress from A to Z, a comfort for those who like to proceed in an orderly fashion from A to Z, or at least to B. The stability of this structure is seriously compromised by built-in folds in the alphabet; because you can link to any letter from any area, the structure can be used to demolish itself at the behest of the traveler. A prolonged wander will reveal interior structures, jointly created by author and traveler, which are the work itself. The author suggests a dark room for optimum viewing of the graphics. --drs
Den arabiske skrift er omgærdet af mystik og uforståelighed, måske fordi den er udspændt mellem den største betydning og den rene abstraktion - gennemsyret af metafysisk betydning og fuld af ærefrygt. Samtidig har forbudet mod det figurative og repræsentationen avlet en ustyrlig vækst af mønstre og arabesker. Karen Wagner introducerer en række moderne kalligrafer: mellemøstlige, ofte eksilerede kunstnere, som skaber forbindelse til fortidens tradition, såvel som vestlige “asemikere”, for hvem kalligrafien åbner en alternativ indgang til skriftbilledet, oplevelsen af sproget, ja måske endda selve tanken.
Han, som underviste i pennens brug,
lærte mennesket det, det ikke vidste.
-Qur'an, Sura Al-'Alaq (96:4-5)
“Meditation no 4, by Tomasz Wilmański, an animated alphabet poem in Adobe Flash, shown as a one-off installation in a gallery space where it was projected on a screen (AT Gallery, Poznań 2004). As a tribute to Kenneth Williams and his series of concrete poems, Meditation no 4 relied not only on its visual but also aural aspect. The sound, embedded in a Flash file, played crucial role. [ Taken from Electronic Literature Publishing and Distribution in Europe, 2012 ]
In "The IBM Poem" (1966) twenty-six words are randomly chosen from a dictionary and each is associated in a list with a letter of the alphabet to form lines; the letters of words in one line are then permuted to make subsequent lines.
(Source: Chris Funkhouser, "Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry")
For this piece, Bigelow uses the most famous pangram in the English language, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” to structure a poetic narrative hypertext. Each letter contains a piece of a story about a relationship about to change, expressed by means of a poetic line that moves in meaningful ways over a brief looped video background. Not wishing to reveal more about the story, I will just say that Bigelow deftly maps the story onto the pangram several ways: chromatically, graphemically, allegorically, and cinematically. In the credits, he describes his role as “spun by Alan Bigelow,” an interesting choice of words in the context of his creative approach. Having read his delightful series of “Ten…” short list-essays on digital literature (positioned after the images in his site), and having read the credits to his works, I know that he uses royalty-free sounds, images, video, and occasionally language —modified as he sees fit— in the creation of his works. The English language and its alphabet are also “found” or ready made visual, aural, and semantic objects (thankfully FOSS) which can be combined in a variety of meaningful ways. In the textile world, to “spin” is to interconnect fibers into yarn— a frame of reference used by poets such as Yeats to refer to their craft (note the use of “stitching and unstitching” in “Adam’s Curse”). Thus Bigelow’s site is aptly titled “Webyarns.” So whatever else this might be, whatever else anyone might call it, it is poetry.
(Source: Leonardo Flores)
