photography

The reader finds, in the first level of reading a letter of Eugenia Vilasans, overlapped with a photography of her. The letter was written in 1926 and stayed hidden until she died, she confesses her adulturey in the letter. After this introduction a link invites to recompose her story, there are disorganised fragments. The image is a metaphor of the hypertext: postcards, newspapers cuts, pages from personal diaries of different dates, letters of the lover conforming the plot. It is an epistolary story that must be assembled like a puzzle.

Silvestre Pestana programmed in BASIC, first for a Sinclair ZX-81 and ZX-82, and then, already with chromatic lighting, for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, three poems respectively dedicated to Henri Chopin, E. M. de Melo e Castro and Julian Beck, which resulted in the Computer Poetry (1981-83) series. Pestana, a visual artist, writer and performer – who had returned from the exile in Sweden after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 – brought diverse influences put forward with photography, video, performance, and computer media. From his creative production, it should be emphasized the iconic conceptual piece Povo Novo [New People] (1975), which was remediated by the author himself in the referred series of kinetic visual poems, or “infopoems” (Melo e Castro 1988: 57). By operating almost like TV scripts, the series oscillates between recognizable shapes – such as the oval and the larger animated Lettrist shapes, formed by the small-sized words “ovo” (egg), “povo” (people), “novo” (new), “dor” (pain) and “cor” (color) – and the reading interpretation of the words themselves: “ovo,” the unity, but also the potential; “povo,” the collective, the indistinct, the mass; “novo” and “cor/dor.” This play of relations translates the new consciousness, although painful, of a “new people” in a new historic, social and artistic period, one of freedom and action. In an interview, Pestana (2011) claimed having researched more than thirty languages, only to find in Portuguese the possibility of traversing the singular and the plural, the individual and the collective, the past, present and future, by just dislocating a letter: ovo/(p)ovo/(n)ovo. [Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]

Big Swing is a semi-non-linear, online narrative that mixes text, photography, sound design, video and interactivity. The story is designed to be explored rather than read. Delivered in semi-non-linear modules, the piece attempts to introduce and resolve tension in the manner of a traditional narrative, while still providing the user some degree of choice and control.

Exploring the story: Click on the small squares and words to reveal story fragments. Yellow words connect to the next chapter.

Ethereal Landscapes is an interactive computer artwork that employs language in the form of barcodes as the interface between a physical object and a virtual space. The user is immersed in a generative video and audio database synchronized in real-time through scanning the barcodes on each page of the photographic artists’ book. This collaborative piece challenges traditional notions of the book-object (as static and non-aural), and of video/audio (as passive and linear) by integrating the interactivity of turning a book’s pages with projected moving images and sound.

Mirroring the interconnectedness of the formal level, Ethereal Landscapes investigates the relations between life as seen on a biological level and our quotidian human experience. The images from the book are referenced throughout the video; their combination with found and created sounds entwine together in a poetic arc around the processes of life, the passage of time and our un-deniable mortality.

(Source: Artists' description for ELO_AI)

 hektor is one of the main characters in the non-aggressive narrative - a mode of Benjaminian storytelling. The NAN proposes the "continuation of a story which is just unfolding." I use digital and traditional media to create encounters between an ambiguous 'I' and potential 'You.' By embracing memory as a collage in motion through multiple characters, the NAN implies an origin story that may or may not have occurred. You are invited to co-invent this unfolding 'past,' and its openness suggests possibility and multiplicity. In a 1965 interview with Michael Kirby, John Cage said that theatre is not done to its viewers; they do it to themselves.

The NAN depends on that. As viewers re-member along with the narrative, they complete / become the work of art. Alongside the NAN, the self ('You' and 'I') is unfolding and in process. hektor.net is hektor's navigable artsite of photography, spoken word and video poetry. While viewers surf the site, hektor attempts to re-member: embody a past in the present. Floating memories, re-presented as art pieces, congeal in different patterns; from the "ruins of memory," viewers re-invent the past and its meaning, piecing together a story for themselves. However, similar to Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, where readers can tackle any chapter, in any order, to assemble a whole story, this narrative is built by the listener, according to which pieces they have seen, in what context, and in which order. Viewers continually bring new insights to possibility by juxtaposing visited and revisited pieces and ideas several times over.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

Lo·go·zo·a n [fr. Gk logos word + zoia animals] (2005) 1 : word animals : textual organisms 2 : a phylum or subkingdom of linguistic entities that are represented in almost every kind of habitat and include aphorisms, anti-aphorisms, maxims, minims, unapologetic apothegms, neokoans, sayings, left-unsaids, shamelessly proverbialist word-grabs, epigrammatological disquisitions, lapidary confections, poemlets, gnomic microtales, instant fables, and other varieties of conceptual riffs

Words change everything. We create poems and stories to free the world from itself, to reveal the many feral faces of life. But ironically these liberating words are usually imprisoned on the page or computer screen. Out in the “real” world of day-to-day activity, we use words more bluntly. We put labels and signs on things to tame them—identify, categorize, explain, instruct, proclaim ownership. What if instead the labels could liberate the everyday world from the literal, proclaim rather than cover up the mysteries? What if they could become Logozoa—textual organisms that infest the literal with metaphor and give impetuous life and breath to meaning?

Adopt-A-Zoa

Find out what happens when you let word animals infest your daily life. Download Logozoa, print them onto your own stickers, and let them loose in your home or neighborhood. Bring a little metaphor into your routine. Keep them around the house and discover why they make fascinating pets or release them into the wild. You have 379 different creatures to choose from.

E-Dopt-A-Zoa

E-dopt a Logozoan and add it to your Web site. Your Logozoan will change every time it’s viewed, taking one of 379 different forms.

Logozoo

The next best thing to Logoz in your own hood is a visit to the Logozoo. Here you’ll see Logozoa in a natural-habitat preserve made from the nooks and crannies of daily routine, the unexpected exoticisms of everyday life, the out-of-the-ordinary often lurking in ordinary places. No bars and cages here. From the safety and comfort of your own browser, you can witness one of Nature’s true spectacles—the figurative overrunning the literal. Our zoo contains 1153 photos of 629 inhabitants, with more arriving almost daily from the US, Europe, and South America. One made it all the way from Hell. Another came from a place even more frightening—the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles in Waltham.

Logoshow

Some Logozoa display a remarkable ability to slip the bonds of textual stasis and achieve flights of logomotion. Come enjoy the animated show.

Save-A-Zoa

Stickers in the wild face numerous man-made and natural threats. Determined preservation efforts are necessary to ensure that these unique creatures do not go the way of so many once-endangered, now-extinct species. Photograph your Logozoa and send these offspring to us where they will find a happy, safe home in our Logozoo.

Soothbooth

Bring those vexing questions to the Soothbooth and let us turn them into vexing answers. We have a unique colony of Logozoa on duty here that responds to any sort of question you might want to pose.

Soothcircuit

If you want deeper, less direct answers than those offered at the quick-service Soothbooth, take your questions to the Soothcircuit. The Logozoa here are guaranteed to provide insights and prognostications of the most thought-provoking quality.

(Source: Author's descripiton on the project site)

Using a transparent oilbar and a window reflecting the sunny sky in Basel, Betty Leirner relates the subjects of language, thought and object, while Florian Kutzli relates photography to film by shooting 2.538 pictures with a Nikon D2 photo camera in order to actualize 'practices of meaning' - a fotofilm. (Source: reelport catalog)