mutable

“Memory” is an interactive digital poem composed by kinetic texts and speech sound programmed in Flash by Brazilian researchers and digital poets Alckmar Luiz dos Santos and Gilberto Prado.

The poem’s interface is presented as a grid with nine cells containing nine distorted images of some printed text. When the interactor rolls the mouse over the images, a short animation loop and a voiceover soundtrack are activated playing the verse printed on each image. The verses are set following an initial order, but the interactor may organize new possibilities of reading according to his will.

(Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Pedro Barbosa’s pioneering work introduced computer-generated literature (CGL) in Portugal in 1975. Having worked with Abraham A. Moles at the University of Strasbourg, Barbosa published three theoretical-practical volumes of his programming experiences with the FORTRAN and BASIC languages. These volumes deal with combinatorics and randomness, developing algorithms able to ally computing and literary production, bearing in mind a perspective of computational text theory.
According to the author, A Literatura Cibernética 1: Autopoemas Gerados por Computador [Cybernetic Literature 1: Computer-Generated Autopoems] is an “esboço de uma teoria, toda uma prática, dois métodos e dois programas, que irão facultar a qualquer leitor, interessado e imaginoso, a confecção de poemas automáticos à razão de 5200 versos por hora: no espaço intraorgânico de qualquer computador!” [outline of a theory, an entire practice, two methods and two programs, which will provide any interested and imaginative reader with the possibility of making automatic poems at the rate of 5200 verses per hour: in the intraorganic space of any computer!] (1977: 8) These “auto-texts,” or “computer-generated autopoems,” hitherto open up a new field of literary theory in the Portuguese context – the direct junction of literature and computation, of writer and programmer. Barbosa’s autopoems were programmed in FORTRAN, ALGOL and NEAT during 1975-76 (Permuta program, Iserve subprogram, and Texal program, Aletor subprogram), using an Elliot/NCR 4130 (a machine introduced in the 1960s in the UK), in collaboration with Azevedo Machado, engineer at the Laboratório de Cálculo Automático [Laboratory of Automatic Calculus] (LACA), at the Faculty of Sciences from the University of Porto.

[Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]

Author description: Arteroids is a literary shoot-em-up for the Web, a work of software art and various odd literary devices. You use the arrow keys to drive your blood-red id-entity word ‘poetry’ or ‘desire’ (or whatever word you choose) around the full screen and use the ‘x’ key to shoot blue and green texts that assail you at various velocities and densities as you play. It is the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness.