static

When your iPad is lying down you can read or listen to this story about animals who live in a red house, during the coldest winter in 2000 years.. When you pick up the iPad, it becomes a window into a 3D rendition of the fictional world, and you need to move around to pan through the world. Each of the creatures in the house has a short story, and for each story you need to interact with the iPad to help solve the creature’s problem: shake it to get the snow down from a tree; shout into it to wake up Gregers’ siblings; or find a yellow color with the camera to turn on the lights in the dark winter night. Merete Pryds Helle has, alongside her work as a novelist, been a pioneer in the field of Danish digital literature or hybrid literature, and wrote several successful computer games in the 1990s. In this millennium she has been first to introduce danes to SMS novels, app novel (“The funeral”, 2011), an electronic calendar novel (“Mikkels mareridt”, 2014). With its clever use of the tools offered by the iPad, Wuwu places the reader in a tension between the written and imagined on one side and the animated, interactive and visible on the other side. The reader has to both join and separate the physical reality of the body and the reality on the screen, which heightens the awareness of both.

When your iPad is lying down you can read or listen to this story about animals who live in a red house, during the coldest winter in 2000 years.. When you pick up the iPad, it becomes a window into a 3D rendition of the fictional world, and you need to move around to pan through the world. Each of the creatures in the house has a short story, and for each story you need to interact with the iPad to help solve the creature’s problem: shake it to get the snow down from a tree; shout into it to wake up Gregers’ siblings; or find a yellow color with the camera to turn on the lights in the dark winter night. Merete Pryds Helle has, alongside her work as a novelist, been a pioneer in the field of Danish digital literature or hybrid literature, and wrote several successful computer games in the 1990s. In this millennium she has been first to introduce danes to SMS novels, app novel (“The funeral”, 2011), an electronic calendar novel (“Mikkels mareridt”, 2014). With its clever use of the tools offered by the iPad, Wuwu places the reader in a tension between the written and imagined on one side and the animated, interactive and visible on the other side. The reader has to both join and separate the physical reality of the body and the reality on the screen, which heightens the awareness of both.

AdLiPo is a browser plugin that replaces advertisements with generated language art. Leveraging the ad-detection techniques of popular ad-blockers, AdLiPo not only blocks ads, but replaces them with calls to a JavaScript language library (the RiTa library, in this case), filling the advertising regions of pages with static or kinetic text created for the specific context (the containing page, advertising-content, and dimensions of the ad-frame). (Source: http://rednoise.org/adlipo/)

Ether is a hypothetical medium – supposed by the ancients to fill the heavens, proposed by scientist to account for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space. The notion of ‘ocean’ was once as vague. Aristotle perceived of the world as a small place, bounded by a narrow river. Columbus believed the Atlantic was a much shorter distance across than we now know it to be. Even as early electromagnetic telegraphic and wireless transmissions propagating over, under, and through oceans collapsed distances between ships and shores, they revealed vast new oceans – oceans of static, oceans of noise. Etheric Ocean is an underwater web art audio writing noise site. It is an imprecise survey of sounds both animal and mechanical, and of signs both real and imaginary, of distortions born of the difficulty of communicating through the medium of deep dense dark ocean. Like stations dotting a radio dial, murky diagrams, shifting definitions, appropriated texts, nautical associations, and wonky word plays are strung along a very long, horizontally scrolling browser window. This is a world of inversions. Sounds are deep harbours, or are they depths? Sounds purposefully unfold. Out of its element, uncannily airborne, a flying jellyfish drone wobbles about. Noises are made. Islands are Heard.

According to its author, Agnus Valente, “Uterus therefore Cosmos” is a kind of work in progress developed during the years 2003 to 2007. In this project, several e-poems created by Valente and his twin brother, Nardo Germano, explores the expressive and conceptual potential of the World Wide Web. “Uterus therefore Cosmos” brings together in one digital environment, works by visual artists, poets and musicians from different eras. Valente proposes a dialogue between his poems authored with his brother and the work of brazilian poets and visual artists. ”Uterus therefore Cosmos” is metaphorically a project of astronomical dimensions. Conceived as a trilogy, the project presents in one website its three stages of creation: “Online Pregnancy” (2003), “Constellations” (2005) and “Expansions” (2007). A keyword to analyze this work is “hybridization”. In this context, the term refers to the ability of mixing signs, senses, media and languages and where all this mixing occurs is undoubtedly the digital medium. Based on the theoretical concepts of “intertextuality” and “Intersemiotic translation” Agnus Valente sets the DNA of his poetics. (Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

“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)

Since 1986, besides videopoetry, E. M. de Melo e Castro worked on a series of experiments with other computer media (suportes informáticos), coined by the author as “infopoesia” (infopoetry), in which he used image editor software. Once more – and this is a fact that Jorge Luiz Antonio’s analysis (2001) does not highlight – the prevailing choice of image editors at the expense of word processors reveals the visual affiliation of Castrian poetics. The infopoems’ visual animations acknowledge pixel as the primary unit of meaning, in the perspective of an infopoetic language. Some of the resulting images were published in Finitos Mais Finitos: Ficção/Ficções [Finite Plus Finite: Fiction/Fictions] (1996) and Algorritmos: Infopoemas [Algorythms: Infopoems] (1998), whose initial essay develops “a pixel poetics” and explains the amalgams created in the title. The quest for transgression, which is underlined by the book’s title (1998), is followed by the quest for formal synthesis.

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