place

Last word is a literary audio walk through the forest in Amsterdam. During the walk you listen to four voices that lead you to a place where the story - a bitter sweet family history about parting, punishment, insanity, and acknowledgement - comes to a surprising end. The walker chooses his or her own direction at a crossing-point which also determines the perspective of the story: Jason, little Kees, Helga or Carlotta. What connects these four people? Do they meet each other at the end of the story at the agreed place. 

In Far inside, the visitor experiences life with schizophrenia. In this spatial experience you feel the lost of control on reality. The original interviews with Ton are the red line in this installation to give an impression of reality through his eyes. Writer Karin Anema describes how Ton battles his psychoses to get his life together in her book ‘ Today I will buy all colours’.

White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a digital poem, which includes a mixture of primarily the English language with some instances of Spanish. In this work Glazier explores alternatives to our customary experiences, through the use of a generator which changes the text of the poems every 10 seconds, turning it from it’s traditional static state to one with movement and change. Furthermore, the evocation of traveling through the images and anecdotes, provides an exploration of a multilingual and multicultural experience. Additionally, the presences of the HTML code leads to a work with multiple possibilities, primarily on how the reader perceives and experiences the work due to the possible technical reading of the code and the multiple possible poetic readings.

Author description: White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a JavaScript investigation of literary variants with a new text generated every ten seconds. Its goals are as follows. (1) To present a poetic evocation of the images, vocabulary, and sights of Costa Rica's language and natural ecosystems though poetic text and visuals. (2) To investigate the potential of literary variants. Thinking of poems where authors have vacillated between variant lines, Bromeliads offers two alternatives for each line of text thus, for an 8 line poem, offering 512 possible variants, exploring the multi-textual possibilities of literary variants. (3) It explores the richness of multiple languages. (4) It mines the possibilities of translation, code, and shifting digital textuality. Having variants regenerate every ten seconds provides poems that are not static, but dynamic; indeed one never finishes reading the same poem one began reading. This re-defines the concept of the literary object and offers a more challenging reading, both for the reader and for the writer in performance, than a static poem. The idea is to be able to read as if surfing across multiple textual possibilities. Such regeneration allows traces of different languages to overwrite each other, providing a linguistic and cultural richness.

Blending Spanish and English and offering a sort of postcard prelude to each of its constantly changing stanzas, White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a poem that explores alternatives and crossings. From line to line the reader can enjoy the turns of phrase but then must figure out how to deal with their constantly turning nature. Options include waiting for the line that was being read to re-appear, re-starting from the beginning of the line that just appeared, or continuing from the middle of the word or phrase.

Speak v. 3 is a platform with which to experiment with digital poetry. Users can enter their own text and interact with it in the Speak way, or they can feed the app with text from a Twitter stream.

Speak v. 1 was an interactive poem about mistaken identity and the confusion that happens when people believe you are somebody you are not. V. 2 was a mini-platform hosting texts about place, voice and the nature of poetry itself. It features four commissioned texts, written by well-known guest poets:— J.R. Carpenter— David Jhave Johnston— Jim Andrews— Aya Karpinska

Speak is the first app in the Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media (P.o.E.M.M. ) Cycle. We will create a series of ten such apps, each exploring different interaction methods, collaboration strategies, and publication methods. The P.o.E.M.M.s are also part of a series of exhibition-scale interactive touch-works integrated with large-scale printed texts. To find out more about the P.o.E.M.M. project, visit www.poemm.net.

(Source: Author's description on the iTunes store)

How does a town just disappear?

What does it feel like to be cut off from your roots in a digital age where people have so many tools for recording and documenting their lives?

How do those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age recover and maintain a sense of belonging that is becoming increasingly so hard to hold on to?

'In Search of Oldton' is an attempt to use other people's digital documentary in order to recapture and re-invent my own personal history.

Tim Wright will be touring the UK during 2004 in search of Oldton – his lost place of birth - and uncovering along the way the possible causes of its demise and the subsequent loss of his past.

Working with groups and individuals Wright wants to build up a substantial online archive showing people taking their leave of a place or a person - a range of personal stories about ‘saying goodbye’ and ‘moving on’.

Through texts, pictures, videos and oral testimony, he will build up a digital archive of fictional remembrances, tributes to numerous places and situations left behind.

And ultimately (he hopes!) his own digital story of memory and loss will emerge.

(Source: Project description, Incubation3 site, trAce Archive)

As a poetic mediation on place and experience, Window encourages you to explore the things at the edges. The ordinary moments—sounds, sights, memories, thoughts—that make an environment familiar, that make it ‘home’. My inspiration came, and continues to come so often, from John Cage—and I made this work in 2012, the centenary of his birth. His music, writing, and thinking—the way he lived his life—are a wondrous integration of art and ordinary experience. Interwoven with fragmentary texts, themselves hidden at the edges, and only available through exploration, are a separate series of short essays. Some are about John Cage and some are personal reflections as I looked, listened and collected the sounds and images that provide the material for this piece. I did this over a period of a year—listening, looking, snapping photos and recording sounds. Arranged in ‘months’, there are various ways to interact with Window. The choice is yours—listening, reading, looking, and travelling from one time of year to another. For each month the images and sounds were actually recorded in the month concerned. So by moving the sounds around, louder or softer or from left to right, you may come to notice how subtly sound changes as time, and life, goes on. More information on Katharine Norman's work at www.novamara.com