interactive poetry

"The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh" is described as "an interactive poem with a strong message" and "a surrealist poem." Niss states that her goal was "to make a textually-based work that uses techniques other than ordinary hypertext. So instead of clicking to get to a new part of the poem, all the text is presented on the screen at once. The content is revealed by mousing over a word which highlights words scattered across the field which combine to form a sentence."--From Furtherfield

“Still I Rise: Remix” is a visual, lyrical, digital interactive fight song for civic action for the #BlackLivesMatter social justice and social change movement. Created during and by the stressors intensified from the global pandemic, this JavaScript interactive poetry remix embraces the digital activism made exponential during the pandemic through the platformization of counternarratives. The remix blends multiple digital mediums with cultural artifacts of the past and present to weave together a rhetorical and semiotic interactive experience that enlightens society and uplifts the human spirit. Through multimodality and intertextuality, “Still I Rise: Remix” exploits the aesthetics of the digital interactive experience through multiple artistic forms of expression, including code, video, audio, and hypertext. This COVID E-Lit interactive exhibition is a multimodal expression and declarative statement for the #BlackLivesMatter movement which embodies the spirit of change, inclusion, and social justice. “The medium is the message.” Experience “Still I Rise: Remix.”

What does a cutting-edge collaboration between music, visual, and literary artists look like and how did it evolve? This ongoing, transdisciplinary collaboration between said types of artists evolves a born digital interactive poetry application for every presentation and exhibition opportunity. Our mission as collaborators is to open up creative workflows for interactive technologies and artists interested in using them to benefit the presentation and experience of the visual, musical, or literary arts. We developed an interactive, live-streaming poetry web app that takes audience response to trigger improvisations, sensory experiences, and create an event-specific poem collectively. The user acts as collaborator by sending word selections that resonate with individual users by tapping text from a born-digital “seed poem” on their mobiles to trigger Markov chain reactions, which enables succinct recombination of massive amounts of language as source material. The app that creatively data mines +2500 TED talks as a found text corpus to send improvisational stanzas to the poet on stage as well as acting as a multimedia sound installation and interactive performance enhancer for poets. ELO2019 University College Cork #ELOcork 51 We will adapt our interactive performance web app to become a more open tool for parameterized poetry performance—to become a container, stand-alone installation as well as a tool for other literary and multimedia artists to utilize and explore using their own “seed text” and “found text corpus” for unique, interactive performances. This way one need not be a developer to perform heightened text collaboration—with the opportunity for generative input from an audience and a dynamic set of texts—or create unique, new media collaborative poetry from mobile interactivity. This new system would be attractive to contemporary poets, performing artists, and audiences seeking more engagement from readings as well as scholars curious about language processing to creative datamine subtexts. Our precedent for this adaptation is from the first iteration of our interactive poetry application, Causeway, which was exhibited in the “Louisiana Contemporary 2016” Juried Exhibition at the Odgen Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans (http://thehelisfoundation.org/what-we-fund/louisiana-contemporary/). Diamonds in Dystopia is a clustered Node.js application that is served and balanced between Google Cloud Compute and a custom OpenStack installation for interactive art. Users connect to an Express.js HTTP server that displays the original manuscript. They click on individual words that resonate with them which get passed along to a server via WebSockets. Each time a user taps a word the collection of texts, hosted on a Redis server, are searched for the top results that contain that word. Those texts are used as source material for generation through something such as a Markov chain algorithm to generate a new stanza of found text. These new stanzas are fed to the performer who can choose via a "controller" interface running on their own mobile device which to read and display on a theater view.

River Writer is a proof of concept for virtual-reality based interactive poetry-writing application. Set on a virtual levee at golden hour, users fish words out of a literal stream of consciousness-- words put into an array that flow from spawning volumes into an kill volume. This method creates randomization. The user then has the ability to carry and drop these word selections on an environment that essentially acts as a couplet palette in the three cardinal directions opposing the river of words. Over the course of “creative play,” a user has space to create at least 3 couplets or 6 lines of poetry, intentionally placing the randomized, fished diction on the level. The diction utilized for this proof of concept was taken from the digital born text “Diamonds in Dystopia” (written by Vincent A. Cellucci, published in Absence Like Sun" (Lavender Ink. 2019) and anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing, 2018, Wesleyan University Press), but other texts can be substituted in future iterations. This application and level was created by Vincent Cellucci with assistance from Marc Aubanel using Unreal Game Engine 4. The words were modeled with great facility, albeit individually, in Rhinoceros 6.

The Required Field is an expansive interactive digital poem exploring the impact of policy documents, bureaucratic forms and the river of applications on our lives and our daily culture. Using twenty found and remixed government and corporate documents, the work poetically translates those overly complex and confusing forms. For example, a Tax Form for farmers will be recontextualized through an interactive image-­‐map tour, transforming specific sections of the forms into poetic text and animated elements. Or a page from a Work Visa application will be created into a platform game, where the reader/player triggers poetry blasting bureaucracies through their game play. And in the end, The Required Field, builds from and then poetically destroys the bureaucratic cultures and their fields of red-­‐tape, laws and policies for the sake of policies, the sub-­‐section to a sub-­‐section, part B stroke 9 for breathing.

Nine Billion Branches is an interactive digital poem and fiction hybrid. It explores the unexpected beauty hidden in the seemingly mundane objects and places around us. And the desires is for this digital poem to open a curious hope in the reader, that in our local and immediate worlds there are wondrous and interesting narratives and poetics, streaming out from and around us.

Note: Nine Billion Branches refers to a hypothetical number of the narratives within reach of all of us. And to experience it is to experience a book of poetry if that book was mutated and recreated as wondrous interactive creatures! Each section is different, each section is its own creation.

This digital poem won the inaugural digital writing prize at the Queensland Literary Awards. The prize of $10,000 is the largest of its kind internationally.

w: http://media.hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz17/gallery/nelson/index.html

d: The world, its politics and environments, conflicts and economies, is in peril, in disarray. We are flooded with tragic tales and the shameful deeds of others. And because of this we have lost sight of the beauty, the story and narrative hidden in the local, in the landscapes around us. We filter out the seemingly mundane of our immediate world. And yet it is in this immediate world where beauty lives, and change begins.