RSS

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants' interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym "seeds," each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants "plant" their interests, each becomes a tree that "grows" over time. Each organism's leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants' trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

Led, plastic, custom electronics Economics and life, physicists and lyricists: these idiomatic phrases evoke a stream of associations from early childhood, sunlit and full of endless happiness. As any artist, Aristarkh Chernyshev gets out these memories and uses them to create art, with his at once recognizable expressive means, using method of documenting the information stream (installations «Final Customization», «Chewing Mud», «Thirst», the object «TVblaster»), though applied to text. The dispute between physicists and lyricists was won by managers, as both physicists and lyricists turned out to be different subspecies of naive romanticists. In modern rationalized, globalized world, there is no space left for lyricism. The poetry of today is stock exchange rates, oil and gold prices, celebrity news and ad slogans. «Lyric Economy» brilliantly embodies this idea, at the same time leaving a hope that there is still a place for art in this world, if nothing else as shimmering lights of advertisement boards. The installation visually deconstructs a traditional poetic text (Goethe, Shakespeare, Pushkin, you to decide) and replaces it with a news feed coming in real time through RSS channels.

(Source: exhibition catalogue)

The performance of Flog (a combination of flux and blog), by Luc Dall’Armellina, emphasizes our alienation due to the speed of televisual or RSS news flux.

(Source: Serge Bouchardon, "Digital Literature in France")

Our webscapes and netvilles are increasingly dominated by short bursts of emotional language, brief stabs of charged textual opinion. And every minute those words build small cities of influence, beauty and terror, creating brief communities of poetic power. Textual Skyline explores these notions through a net­-based interactive, generative and multidimensional flash engine/interface using RSS news feeds to create a digital poetry city. 

To create these strange cities actionscript code searches through designated news feeds for specific words or phrases  that represent emotive states (death, victory, love, profit, attack, defend and a few hundred others). Then for each charged word a building block is placed on the screen, two layers deep,  forming a skyline of poetic text and art. Additionally, each of the text blocks will contain animated, hand drawn and other multimedia content. The finished work will let readers/users load RSS feeds from a variety of net communities (really any site with such a feed can be used), and as those  feeds change so to will the digital poetry city (on reload). Also, various thematic styles will be explored through the inclusion of four different visualization themes (text only, architectural, chaotic and in essence the work explores the language of emotion used in news reporting, identity creation and expression through blogging, and community driven  sites like Boing Boing, Fark, Metafilter and others. It uses that language to generate an architectural poetic text land/screenscape.

STRUTS is an algorithmic narrative collage created from a collection of fragments of facts and fictions pertaining to a place and its people, history, geography and storm events. Narrative resonates in the spaces between the texts horizontally scrolling across the screen, the flickering updating of monthly tide gauge averages, the occasional appearance of live weather weather warnings pulled in by RSS feed and the animated set of photographs of the ends of the struts that support the seawall that protectsa portion of foreshore from the rising tides of the Northumberland Strait. The photographs were taken on May 23, 2011 the second day of a five-week stint as Open Studio Artist in Residence at Struts Gallery and Faucet Media Lab, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, May 22 – June 26, 2011. The Saxby Gale of 1869 is the storm we compare all possible storms to. The tide gauge data represents the monthly tide gauge averages for Shediac Bay from the month I was born to the month I moved from Canada to England. The gauge that measured these averages was destroyed in the same storm surge that damaged the struts in the photographs, onl the night of 21 December 2010. The Tantramar Marsh text is excerpted from Writing Coastlines: The Operation of Estuaries, Islands and Beaches as Liminal Spaces in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop, a paper written in residence at Struts and presented at "It Must Be Nova Scotia: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop" which took place at University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 10-12, 2011.

"Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capliano Review is a work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter, curated by Kate Armstrong, commissioned by The Capliano Review. In February 2007 The Capilano Review published an issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar. Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capliano Review is a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays by J. R. Carpenter. In this work, Carpenter explores the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism. Over a four-month period Carpenter read and re-read the essays, parsing them into fragments, which she then annotated, marked-up, tagged and posted. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments could then be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that opened up new readings of the essays and revealed new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach is part blog, part archive – an online repository for the artifacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving. Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary feeds into a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source."