Strange

It is overly simplistic to state that my digital poems come entirely from building/discovering interfaces. Any artist’s creative practice is a merging/melding mix of fluid events and inspirations. But with all my digital poems there is one commonality, the emphasis on interface. Rarely do I even reuse interfaces, and when I do it is only as one section of a larger work. This continual drive to create new ways to rethink the structure, organization and interactive functionality of my digital poems comes from a variety of internal influences. Most importantly is how these interfaces are not just vessels for content, they are poems in themselves. In the same way digital poetry might be best defined by the experience, rather than a description. Or similar to a digital poet and their works being described by the events and stories surrounding the creation and building process, an interface is the life, the body, and a poetic construction in itself. And through the artist performance I will explore/perform numerous of my interfaces, discussing/reading from them, eluding to how they were made, their inspirations and my thoughts on how they could be reused by other poets. But how is this a performance? This will not just be your typical reading and/or artist talks. While nearly all my digital poetry/fiction performances are highly theatric and, dare I say, engaging, I want to involve the audience more than I have in the past. Therefore, I will be shifting from interface to interface based on the audience’s commands. On the screen will be a series of titled links, around 20 total. The audience will choose which the title I read from. They can change those numbers at any time, and as often as they want. Choosing the links will happen via an ipad, being passed around the audience. The camera from the tablet will also be projected on the large screen in a small corner box. Then as the audience member changes the work, I will start reading it. And much like many of my works, the performance will be highly interactive, engaging, strange and a bit chaotic, driven, in part, by the audience’s commands. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This is an interactive poem-fiction hybrid exploring unexplored taxonomies through a touch focused 3-D depth experimental interface. To understand, to translate the world, the objects and creatures and geographies around us, into meaningful (meaningless?) symbols, shareable concepts, we developed language. Then to further understand the differences and similarities of everything around us, to narrow down and dissect function and association, we created labels, categories and systems of taxonomy. And while these developed taxonomies and hierarchies are useful to organizing and departmentalizing our complex land/city/culture/art/literary-scapes, they can also hinder new possibilities and understandings. What if defining the function of the lung or leaves limits alternative and possibly powerful uses, keeps us from exploring what some might call “fringe” science? A Nervous System explores these alternative understandings of biological organisms, systems and organs. Through interactive ficto-future stories, poetic diagrams, it examines narratives arriving from chance situations where the mundane turns extraordinary, and what we understand about how our bodies and creatures work is altered, in the most extreme ways. (Source: ELO 2015 catalog) A Nervous System Interactive Fiction/Poetry Artwork An interactive poem-­‐artwork hybrid examining the abundance of taxonomies and the near infinite number of interconnected biological systems in the environment, and explored through an interactive 3-­D depth interface. To understand, to translate the world, the objects and creatures and geographies around us, the near infinite number of systems, abundantly expanding and contracting, into meaningful symbols, shareable concepts, we developed language. Then to further understand the differences and similarities of everything around us, we created labels, categories and systems of taxonomy. And while these developed taxonomies and hierarchies are useful to organizing and departmentalizing our complex biomes and biology, they can also hinder new possibilities and understandings. What if defining the function of the lung or leaves limits alternative and possibly powerful uses, keeps us from exploring what some might call “fringe” science. (Source: http://www.secrettechnology.com/)