critical/political/philosophical

“The End of Capitalism” is an interactive Flash movie compiled from a variety of sources—archival films, animated educational materials, televised interviews, and passages of text—all of which pertain to ideas and attitudes about capitalism, ranging from pro-capitalist propaganda reels from the American post-war period to the artist’s own provocative statements on the nature of life in a capitalistic society. Enhanced by an eerie sonic backdrop, the sequence of words and images are arranged through a movie engine which allows for viewers to end and initiate new segments as they click on the multi-colored buttons that appear as a recurring motif throughout the piece.

(Source: The Electronic Literature Directory, written by Davin Heckman)

The poem is an abstract rendition of the rotten silk that fetters us people to these our awful screens. The graphics were generated in the CAVE writing text editor, by taking an ill-performing video screen capture of a spectral tube of "O"s in the editor's desktop preview mode. The audio was separately generated by improvisations into a Max/MSP patch. The title is after the late 60s anarchist affinity group, Up Against the Wall Mother Fuckers. I was inspired by their dramatic final exploit: cutting open the fences at Woodstock. The phrase Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers started as the title for a CAVE piece, in which one thousand units of the people would enter the CAVE and break through its 4 screens to the vestibule holding the mirrors behind it.

The poem was composed between Paris and Cork, 1-5 July 2007. The media was generated at Brown University, October 2007 to June 2008. First screened in Providence at Couscous, organized by Mairéad Byrne

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Palavrador is a poetic cyberworld built in 3D (Palavrador comes from the Portuguese word palavra, which itself means "word"). Directed by Francisco Carlos de Carvalho Marinho (Chico Marinho), it was nonetheless conceived and implemented as a result of synergetic collective assemblage of ideas and activities of a wider group of authors with backgrounds in the arts, literature, and computer science. Six flocks of meandering poems autonomously wander through the three-dimensional space. The readers may choose how many flocks of poems they want to see wandering through the environment, and the poems (botpoems) are able to turn around obstacles to keep their unveiling cohesion while moving through the space. The logic of movements was implemented using artificial intelligence procedures based on swarm behavior and steering behaviors of autonomous locomotion agents. Among the virtual objects of the Palavrador there is a labyrinth whose architecture is generated by mathematical procedures (fractal). There are also video poems, the sounds from which are modulated in relation to the distance of the readers, thus creating an immersive journey with a musical dimension. Readers choose between two avatars to represent them inside the virtual environment, one of which flies, and the other which meanders through the space. Additionally, it is possible to make the avatars "throw up" flying poems by using the joystick. Palavrador implies action; the creative achievement of words in symbiosis with humans and the autonomous poems (bots) adding new perspectives to art and literature by incorporating ideas from others disciplines such as computer science and biology.

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

Golpe de gracia is an interactive multimedia piece that combines text, illustration, audio, modeling, and animation and tells the story of a character who undergoes a "near death" experience; this particular situation also functions as a metaphor for the cultural transitions of the present moment. The text is comprised of three "narrative worlds": Cadáver exquisito, L'nea mortal and Muerte digital (Exquisite Corpse, Mortal Line, and Digital Death, respectively) and four "deepening rooms" (games, reading texts, study, and construction). The work offers several different degrees of interaction that range from taking decisions in order to follow the routes, all the way up to the collective construction of the text, along the way participating in several interactive games. Golpe de gracia also has an educative and communicative purpose, which is to make us aware of, and to contribute to, the development of collective knowledge. In this respect, each of the narrative worlds offers the development of one or several possible actions, different strategies to facilitate interaction, as well as offering a sort of "encyclopedic" environment that eases the process of contextualizing and in-depth search among the several topics particular to the actual narrative.

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

Author description: Written in Catalan, The Fugue Book thematizes the mutability and precarious aspects of personal identity. Using "Facebook Connect," the story draws personal information about the reader and his friends (the main characters) from Facebook itself. The work combines a variety of modes, genres, and platforms: wikis, discussion forums, erotic stories, blogs, and social media. Most texts are actual email messages, which is to say that the real email of the reader is a fundamental component of the text. The multimedia structure is very simple in that it only integrates static images, parts of speech synthesis (adapted to the reader), and text. The languages of programming are ActionScript and PHP.

Author description: The expansion of the prison system is possible because it is a public secret - a secret kept in an unacknowledged but public agreement not to know what imprisonment really means to individuals and their communities. As the number of prisons increases, so does the level of secrecy about what goes on inside them. The secret of the abuses perpetrated by the Criminal Justice System and Prison Industrial Complex can be heard in many stories told by many narrators, but only when they are allowed to speak. After a series of news stories and lawsuits documenting egregious mistreatment of prisoners in 1993, the California Department of Corrections imposed a media ban on all of its facilities. This ongoing ban prohibits journalists from face-to-face interviews, eliminates prisoners' right to confidential correspondence with media representatives, and bars the use of cameras, recording devices, and writing instruments in interviews with media representatives. Women incarcerated in California are allowed visits only from family members and legal representatives. Inmates are not allowed access to computers, cameras, tape recorders or media equipment of any kind. Such restrictions preserve the public secret. For the past three years, I have visited the Central California Women's Facility [CCWF] as a legal advocate. I work with a non-profit, human rights organization, Justice Now (http://jnow.org/). Together we have been documenting conversations with women prisoners at CCWF, the largest female correctional facility in the United States in an effort to unmask the well known, yet still secret injustices that result from our society's reliance on prisons to solve social problems. Given the ban on conversations with the media, I would not have had access to the women who have contributed to Public Secrets without the support of Justice Now. As a "legal advocate" I am allowed to record my conversations with the women and solicit their stories, ideas, and opinions.