Java

Work was a part of the conference paper prepared with Aleksandra Małecka. Abstract:

Since 2013 we have been using experimental strategies to transfer into to context of Polish culture chosen works of American avant-garde from the fields of electronic literature, uncreative writing, conceptual literature, procedural writing, flarf and related genres. These works include art by Kenneth Goldsmith, Nick Montfort, Steven Zultanski, Steve Kotecha, Lawrence Giffin, Amaranth Borsuk, Scott Rettberg and other authors. In our pursuits, we have used various platforms and tools, both digital ones like Google Translate, Amazon Mechanical Turk, various programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl), as well as analogue, that is traditional books. The chosen American texts, dating from the 90s to present day, very often reflect the artists’s response to the development of digital media and their impact on writing practices, as well as their reaction to the popularity of creative writing courses in the USA. Both contexts are poorly understood in Poland, which is considered a half-peripheral country in terms of development of digital media and has a different literary writing tradition, in which creative writing courses have little presence and impact. Given this completely different context, meaning a lack of a lexicon to speak of these works and no parallel community of critics and artists, it is not surprising that the transfer of American avant-garde works into the Polish language and culture encounters a challenging context of reception. In this paper we will consider the reception of American avant-garde works in Poland. 

Working within the early netart aesthetic of the popup, hypertext, and digital automation of sound, my hands/wishful thinking produces an online memorial to the tragic death of Amadou Diallo, a twenty-two year old immigrant from Guinea who was shot forty-one times based on a case of mistaken identity and police overreaction in 1999. In this piece by Mendi and Keith Obadike, the blinking, repeating hand of Keith Obadike grasps a wallet purchased from the same store on 125th street in Harlem where Diallo worked. Perhaps this is even the same brand of wallet that Diallo held which the NYPD claimed was a gun. Recalling experimental photographs like Glenn Ligon’s Hands (1996), my hands/wishful thinking draws together the hand of the artist, the hand of Diallo, and the hand of the user navigating the web page. Mendi and Keith Obadike begin with the premise that "thoughts are things" and for every shot fired a thought has been written down as an act of poetic resistance. Released in an age before social media, my hands/wishful thinking exemplifies the transformative potential of the Internet at the turn of the millennium. Rather than an expression of trauma, loss, and violence, this deeply moving work of netart activism places hope in the power of collectivity and a future without racist violence. Authors' statement: my hands/wishful thinking is an internet memorial piece for Amadou Diallo. Diallo was killed by new york city policemen on february 5, 1999. the four policemen involved claimed that they thought Diallo's wallet was a gun and fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times. most of the information we received about Diallo's death was mediated by the internet and filtered through the lens of our browser. we thought it fitting that we mourn and make art in this public/private digital space. keith's wallet, seen in the image, was purchased on 125th street in harlem where Amadou Diallo worked as a vendor. in this piece there is one thought to counteract each bullet fired. the words are wishful thinking in the present tense. these thoughts reject the negative forces directed against us, the survivors, african people in the united states. making this work is an enactment of our will to survive. (Source: ELC 3)

BEAST. The Web fosters, and depends on, utter transience of attention. Extending television's effects through its much-vaunted interactivity, it has reduced writing to "content" squeezed between gaud and flash and irrelevance. In Beast, the reader directs the progress of a single text by interacting with it and its interior world of fake-3-D images. Beast tries to tap the interactive possibilities of the medium while allowing the text to be seen as a whole; the eye is a hypertext engine more sophisticated than any we could devise. But Beast also subverts itself through jarring messages and the system's periodic takeover of its own functions. A nightmarish, superficially dehumanizing system, Beast decocts much that is terrifying and unpleasant about computer technology, and about society and ourselves as the computer has built us. But this monstrosity has a humanizing core, the text, that speaks to the anxieties the system produces. Beast attempts to highlight the dichotomy between the ugliness of computer technology and its almost medieval beauty, that archaic and authentically primitive quality of the Web-wide world that has erected itself among us so suddenly, and that rests on so little besides marketplace forces.

(Source: Author's description for 1998 Virtual Worlds conferenc)

'Sintext-W' (1999-2000) is a Java version for the Web of the text generator 'Sintext,' (1993) with the collaboration by José Manuel Torres. According to the Web Java demo, 'Sintext-W' can be understood as: In this space the cybernaut can have a first contact with the automatic text generator 'Sintext-W' (Text Synthesizer). The user can visualize the automatic generation of 3 generative texts available here: · 'Didáctica' (example) · 'Balada de Portugal' (extract) · 'Teoria do Homem Sentado' (fragment) For this purpose it is enough that the user clicks on the buttons located below, under the 2nd display window; in the 1st window one may consult the matrix-text which originates it. The text's flow rate may be accelerated or delayed by two controllers; the user can also choose to execute the texts in an endless cycle as a continuous creation of new meanings. (Text adapted and translated by Álvaro Seiça based on the Java demo version at http://www.pedrobarbosa.net/sintext-pagpessoal/sintext.htm)

This selection of six poems built with a type of composite image known as animated GIFs used to create the earliest animations in the Web. In Zervos’ experienced hands (see his “Dimocopo” suite), this simple technology can be very expressive indeed, as can be seen in “Divorce” a kinetic concrete poem that uses moving typography to highlight some of the finer points in a divorce process. The narrative poem seen above, “A Kidz Story,” is best experienced in action because it is a story generator designed with nine animated GIFs, one per line, each with a different time interval between lines. This allows for different combinations to emerge over time, providing the illusion of variation in what eventually becomes very formulaic and repetitive— an incisive comment on the genre it represents. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This combinatorial poem uses random words arranged on a grid changing in seemingly random at different time intervals. The word in the center of the grid distinguishes itself, not only by position, but by its slight overlap with the word that is to replace it. This film technique known as a dissolve adds a layer of depth to the transition by having a 10th word juxtaposed (superposed, really) and by visually representing the time-based mechanism in the poem. The title plays with a double meaning: words that are culturally considered obscene or insulting, and with a constraint of using words with only four letters (see this Scrabble dictionary). Knoebel seems to be foregrounding the latter, thought initially the title points towards the former meaning.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This trio of early e-poems were written in HTML and use Java applets to shape their linguistic texts with a careful touch. “Infinity” and “Internet Junkie” both change the color of the text over a schedule to shape readings and to imbue them with a nervous energy. In “Infinity” (displayed above) the rarely used tag reinforces the instability of textual meaning as the phrases can be read with and without the three blinking words, “reality,” “literary,” and “Why?” In “Internet Junkie” the increased rate of color change from one stanza to the next mimics the increasing urgency of the addict’s need. The final poem in the piece uses the “NervousText” applet by Daniel Wyszynski to animate its words, “KOMNINOS is a poet,” which can be soothed into static stability with a mouse click. The spastic energy of these poems gesture towards the Post-structuralist destabilization of meaning, authorship, and the text itself. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

 "In this hypertext, I interrogate the language, imagery, and ideologies of cosmetics advertisements and related texts. Hypertext as a form lends itself to unorthodox juxtapositions, particularly through linkages based on associative logic (e.g., metaphors, puns). I invoke the feminist understanding that "The Personal Is Political," combining autobiographical reflections with an analysis of the discourse and industry of cosmetics. The personal dimension includes elements from my unconscious (following in the Surrealist tradition of automatic writing).

"The political dimension includes an examination of the political economy of beauty. Both levels include many kinds of images, such as family photographs, cosmetics advertisements, images from cosmetics industry journals, and images from books on makeovers and modeling. These elements are juxtaposed, sometimes in conversation, sometimes in "collision," to borrow a term Sergei Eisenstein uses to describe his method of montage in film. I do not approach my investigation of subjectivity, media messages, and political economy directly through theoretical analysis, but indirectly, through associative connections (reasoning through dream logic). In this text, I use the analogy of the cosmetics "makeover" as the frame that holds together my information. I take the conventions of the beauty makeover and apply them to the face, to the self (identity, experience), and to society as a whole. For each "step" of the makeover, I address both the literal instructions for making over a woman's face, as well as more figurative applications that come through reading this makeover process metaphorically. The thematic focus of the work is rooted in my urge to rethink the social--I ask, through the construction of this polyvalent (hyper)text: can we begin to invent a materially grounded utopian vision through the lens of contemporary female beauty?"

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

RiTa is an easy-to-use toolkit designed to facilitate experiments in natural language and generative literature. It is currently available in two 'flavors': Javascript (with rendering via the HTML5 Canvas or ProcessingJS) and Java (with rendering via Processing). Some of the optional packages available include RiTaWordNet (integrating with the WordNet ontological database) and RiTaBox (integrating with the Box2D Physics library). All RiTa tools are free and open-source.