flash poem

Oczy Tygrysa

(Eyes of the Tiger) is an example of an online flash adaptation of the poems of an avant-guard poet (formist) from the interwar period, Tytus Czyżewski.The authors of the adaptation, poet Łukasz Podgóni and electronic literature researcher Urszula Pawlicka chose to adapt Czyżewski’s pieces that speak explicitly to issues of mediation and mechanization. Czyżewski’s poetry serves as a precursor to the forms of aesthetic experimentation now common in electronic literature, anticipating hypertextual, interactive, generative, and kinetic forms of writing. The inspiration for this adaptation was the paraphrased words of Mark Amerika “What would Czyżewski the Formist do with new media?” Oczy Tygrysa shows how interwar poetry complements the language of new media both in terms of composition as well as semantics.

(Source: ELO 3, editorial statement)

"ORATORIO – Encantação pelo Rio" was conceived in 2002 and made in 2003, as a project rewarded in the IV Sergio Motta Cultural Prize. It's a kind of "suite of poems" about Rio de Janeiro (the subtitle "Incantation by Rio" makes a refference to Khlebnikov's "Incantation by Laugh", wonderfuly translated by Haroldo de Campos). The work's start point was a set of 3 "conventional" poems (perhaps the first that I made without a "visual" intention) inspired by 3 locations in Rio: Rocinha (one of its biggest "favela"), the Corcovado (Christ) and the Sambadrome. Then I made a list of 64 rivers and mountains of the city, combining them in verses, playing with the "coincidence" that in Portuguese: "river" and "I laugh" / "mountain" and "I die" have the same writing form: rio / morro. It was a period when violence was specially alarming in the city.

(Source: Author)

The poem “IO” (1995) was my first experiment with interactivity; in essence it is constructed and animated with Strata StudioPro software and integrated with Macromedia Director. The reader sets the poem off by making the spherical object move at choice in one of four directions – up, down, left, right. At a given moment a transformation takes place: there the object’s texture changes, from opaque to transparent, to show the cylindrical penetration within the sphere. This is accompanied by a sound background: the vocalization of “o” and “i”, inference to the opaque and transparent worlds respectively, and the vocalization of the diphthongs “io” and “oi” at the change from one texture to another. At certain moments, chosen at random by the program, quotations and commentaries appear in relationship to the various meanings of the word “IO” – Italian for “I”, the sign for Input/Output, numerals “1” and “0” – and excerpts from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone”, in which “io” appears as a phonetic transposition of an ancient Greek interjection indicating pain and lamentation. (author description)

Published in the Spring 2007 issue of Born Magazine, this digital interpretation of Rebecca Givens original analogue poem Fallow, makes subtle use of sound and interaction to accentuate the telegraphic and forgotten memories evoked by the poem.

Part of the “Words in Space” series, this deceptively simple poem uses VRML to provide us with a first person point of view of this poem. The lack of control as we fall past the lines, reading them as we go at an accelerating pace, helps us identify with Bill, a roofer “who lost / his footing in the dew / slick plywood.” In this virtual environment, the letters, words and lines gain an architectural physicality that reinforces the poem’s setting. Soft music in the background of this poem sets a sad tone for a situation full of gravitas.

Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry.