William Shakespeare

The larger project is my first foray into digital poetry that uses a relatively large data set, in this case, the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare.

In Volume 1, the user has the ability to stir lines from Shakespeare’s original 154 sonnets into their “own” creation and to render a screenshot of any particular stirring by pressing the “collect the ephemera” button. The user also has the option to “defeat the ephemera” and return the text to one of Shakespeare’s originals.

In Volume 2, the user does not have the ability to stir Shakespeare’s texts into their “own” creation as the texts are generative or “self-stirring.”  Instead, the user has the opportunity to “read the ephemera” by pressing the “Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die” button rendering a screenshot of any particular stirring. “Thou shouldst print more…” is the last line of Sonnet XI.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/95-2/)

This project remixes video vignettes of the character contests from Shakespeare with the power-plays of our time. The work features multi-layered video and a crowd-sourced text feed, pulled from public domain and social media. Netprov players add their own words to the text flow, contributing to the politico/poetical drama.

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;And this our life, exempt from public haunt,Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

‘Once upon a Tide’ is a variable, restless, shifting narrative. Turns of phrase, stage directions, and lines of dialogue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-11) are randomly, repeatedly, and somewhat enigmatically recombined within a close, tense, ship-bound setting reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer (1910), or The Shadow-Line (1916). On the deck of a ship off the shore of an island, two interlocutors are closely observed by a narrator who remains hidden from view.

Not quite a short story, not quite a stage play, ‘Once upon a Tide’ is just one of those moments in literature when time … stands … still.

(Source: J. R. Carpenter, The Junket)

Sonnet One Four is a cryptographic experience. While the puzzle is relatively simple, each tweet is representative of a line of the poem, in scrambled, random order, each tweet is meant to take you on your own unique journey to matching the clue to the line of the poem. Each line is unique and thus you as an individual will ultimately take your own path to not only interpreting the poem, decoding/encoding the poem, but you will also take different implications away from the clues. The clues sometimes are metaphorical, otherwise they are literally pointed at a word or phrase within the line of the poem the clue correlates to. In summation, when you start trying to match tweets to meanings and the lines of the poem as we have assigned each tweet to, you may in fact Google different things, or think of different references and meanings true to your experiences (intertextuality). I expect people will use the internet as a main resource to decode/match each tweet to each line but that is because I made the twitter that way. However, you could use other resources or prior knowledge. The digital aspect of the twitter is important though, it is current, it involves metrics like trending and popularity, it takes on the Shakespearean sonnet in a totally new, unexpected way. The way that the twitter functions as an art piece is in how it is an interactive installation of poetry which can be projected in a public space for people to strive to understand. You have all the answers in front of you, the name of the sonnet, each line in coded form, but the goal is to make your own meaning of the poem with our guidance.

(Source: http://conference.eliterature.org/media/first-encounter-jaci-jones-jaso…)

"...and by islands I mean paragraphs" casts a reader adrift on a sea of white space extending far beyond the horizon of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating (with mouse, track pad, or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands... and by islands I mean paragraphs. These paragraphs are computer-generated. Their fluid compositions draw upon variable strings containing fragments of text harvested from a larger literary corpus - Deluze's Desert Islands, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Bishop's Crusoe in England, Coetzee's Foe, Ballard's Concrete Island, Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries, and lesser-known sources, including an out-of-date guidebook to the Scottish Isles and an amalgam of accounts of the classical and possibly fictional island of Thule. "Individually, each of these textual islands is a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts one never finds the same islands twice... and by islands, I do mean paragraphs."

“Willy Shakes” was programmed by Joshua Strebel in 2009 and set into motion publishing the complete works of William Shakespeare on Twitter, calculating that “every 10 minutes a new line, 24/7/365. Should take about 2 years, 13 days… and finish around August 24th 2011.” (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)