digital poem

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/)

Four monitors are placed in a row on the wall. As you walk closer an exhaled breath is heard, then a mouse click, a sigh. A voice commands, “then drag up”; a different voice, “like this”. Excerpts of Youtube typography tutorials populate the screens, complete with Photoshop, Maya, Illustrator, GIMP, etc. interfaces along with the type that is being carefully constructed. A rhythm emerges, “Rotate left, pull down, move forward, like that”. In this piece, a multimodal digital poem forms from the aural language of making visual language. Fragments of descriptive phrases are heard over looping patterns of mouse clicks, exhales, sighs and keyboard strokes amplifying the language of micro-gestures. The unseen role of the body in the circuit of human-computer interaction is ever present in this installation exposing the analog labor of creating digital type and the articulation of the physical process of making digital words. The work humorously explores the physicality of creating visual communication and calls attention to the human, social and cognitive labor behind the typography we take for granted in our daily lives. This digital poem employs a methodology and software developed over the last year as a Fellow in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. It is a methodology that enables linguistic analysis of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across multiple monitors. Using a corpus of over two hundred tutorial videos, the software parses user defined complex language patterns, parts of speech analysis and phonetic information, creating new aesthetic possibilities for digital poets working with a large corpus of multimedia files.

ZeroDeath is a digital poetry created by Yohanna Joseph Waliya, He uses HTML as his platform to potrai his poetry. Floating animations of binary code and colours are to be seen in the background.  

aimisola.net/hymiwo.po: a poemtrack for a yet-to-be-written dance piece departs from material produced by AIMISOLA, in respect to the project “voices of immigrant women,” and further research developed by Álvaro Seiça & Sindre Sørensen on immigration, Spanish immigration policies, cultural, social and political issues in Spain. The first-person poem addresses immigrant women in long-term unemployment living in Spain, and the social, professional, linguistic, and educational obstacles that they face. The poem intends to be a possible account and denouncement of immigration, migration, and dislocation aspects, in a broader global scope, though more specifically, in the European context: rootlessness, social and personal hopes, women’s rights, social, gender and sexual inequality and aggression.The poem starts with an onscreen display of keywords used to write the poem, some of which are hash-tagged. As the poem unfolds onscreen, displaying a fixed line at a set temporal interval, these recurrent keywords scrape real-time tweets. The resulting display is a poetic mash-up of collective text, composed of background and foreground. The combined text can act as textual and visual texture, or active multimodal reading. However, it functions as a timely snapshot of a certain collective consciousness or, perhaps better, it provides an update debate on topics related to the poem that are happening as collective discourse in social media.The coding mechanics create tensions by juxtaposing a fixed (non-)poetic text with an ever-changing social(-poetic) text, which might be further complicated by the way certain tweets contradict or amplify the lines, or even when the audience participates by inputting tweets as the poem is live performed. Furthermore, interactivity is keyboard-driven. Arrow keys control line display and the avatar (“silence”) progression, as well as a visual representation of duration. The reading progression through the language game questions modes and functions of reading, and roles and boundaries between viewer, reader, user, and player. The “intermezzo” game acts as a scene, or “poemscreen,” using the BSoD as glitch source. An error display screen, the side-scroll game thus critically dialogues with game mechanics, OS errors and factual ocean traversals in the Mediterranean Sea. The very act of reading/living continues only if the reader/player traverses the poemscreen.aimisola.net/hymiwo.po was originally written in Portuguese and translated into Spanish and English. The soundtrack is “Lighthouse” (2011), by the Swedish jazz band Tonbruket.Start work at http://aimisola.net/hymiwo.po 

(Source: Author's Website)

"Voices of Immigrant Women" is a digital project in which AIMISOLA project's members have developed digital poems written for the Web, based on the experiences of immigrant women in long-­term unemployment living in Spain. Their testimonies have been recorded as sound files, images, and videos. The work has been done in Portuguese, Spanish and English language.

This work was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize in 2016: http://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/past-winners/2016-shortlist/

(Source: Nina Kovolic)

A comparative presentation of a digital poem and a video poem, both composed as complementary translations and interpretations of Rilke’s 8th Duino elegy. The digital poem moves across English, French, Italian and German, while the video poem moves between live action and the paintings of Kate Walters. If anyone would like to volunteer to translate these lines into Portuguese, and to correspond with me about their translation, I’d be truly delighted. The exploration of plagiotropy is partly to be found in the movement across languages, and partly in tracking tropes across natural languages, programmed language movements and the paintings. I have only recently returned to video poetry, but you will be able to see Doaryte Pentreath from the 1980s on my website by late January. I will send the link. This work develops out of my ongoing collaboration with John Cayley. The element of direct translation will be of the following fiveand-a-half opening lines: Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang. Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers Antlitz allein; […] (Creatures see with their entire gaze wide open space. Our eyes alone seem trapped in reverse, focused on self, sealed without escape. Through animals’ faces only, we sense What exists beyond […])

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

“PONTOS” is an (im)possible attempt of approach between margins by means of intersecting visions. It is a process of alterity between two symmetrically opposed perspectives ((two poems written by two persons on each bank of the river Tagus), in a gradual endeavor of (self)reflection (a permutational poem aided by computer software) which will result in a continuous transmutation by an audience (a combinatorial text open to mutation by means of tactility). On one side, margin A, always more beautiful if seen from margin B; on the other side, margin B, offering a privileged space for the contemplation of its antipode, albeit its paradoxical non-existence. “What is the vision of the person that I can't see but that I know it is on the other side?” “With whose eyes would I describe my margin, from a side that I sense being impossible to reach for myself?” By trying to build a bridge, no more than a connection between points, “PONTOS” represents the experiment of being another, by means of words, always playing with the (im)possibility of fulfilling it.

Objects is a digital poem. It creates random combinations with the 27 seven names of the portuguese women killed by their spouses in 2015. The code is based on Silly Poet by Abe Prazos. 

(Source: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/244543)

Holes by Graham Allen is a digital poem which presents a new approach to autobiographical writing. Holes is a ten syllable one line per day poem which offers something less and something more than a window on the author’s life. Holes began on December 23rd, 2006 and is now in its sixth year of composition. Holes is a poetic vehicle for the exploration of chance, meaning, juxtaposition and language. (Source: http://holesbygrahamallen.org/about/)

The poem tantascoisasparadizer [somanythingstosay] is an electronic recoding of the visual poem with the same title, whereas in this version it has removed spaces that previously separated the words that hold its name. (Source: Author. Trans.: Seiça)