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Description: John Cayley’s “windsound” is an algorithmic work presented as a 23-minute recording of a machine-generated reading of scrambled texts. The cinematic work presents a quicktime-video of white letters on a black screen, a text written by Cayley with a translation of the chinese poem “Cadence: Like a Dream” by Qin Guan (1049-1100). As a sensory letter-by-letter performance, the work sequentially replaces letters on the screen, so that what starts as illegible text becomes readable as a narrative, and then again loses meaning in a jumble of letters. Cayley calls this technique “transliteral morphing: textual morphing based on letter replacements through a sequence of nodal texts.” Sequences of text appear within up to 15 lines on the same screen, thus presenting and automatically replacing a longer text on a digitally simulated single page-a concept Judd Morrissey also applied in "The Jew´s Daughter". Unlike Morrissey’s piece, Cayley’s doesn´t allow the user to interact with the work that appears as a text-movie with ambient sound, murmurs of voices, windsound and synthetic female and male voices reading the non-readable to the viewer. With the letters, narrative perspectives also morph and switch fluidly between the lyrical-I, Christopher, Tanaka or Xiao Zhang, who appear in the story. Thus, the sentence: "‘We know,’" Tanaka had said in English/"‘Tomorrow if we meet/I will have to kill you myself/’" is, in the algorithmic process of the work, later spelled out by the I-narrator. As stated at the very end of the work, John Cayley created “windsound” in memory to Christopher Bledowski. What remains after a blackened screen and a start-over of morphing letters before they vanish conclusively, is windsound. At a certain point in the movie the text says "you have to be/to stay/silent/to hear it" and it seems like the reader has to be silent, too, listening to what he cannot understand, patiently waiting for the moment of legibility. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: poetry, appropriated texts , ambient, non-interactive, synthetic voices, algorithmic, soundscape, transliteral morphing
Creator: John Cayley
Description: A poet's playful meditation on the nature and function of letterforms in kinetic two-dimensional space. Dreamlife is a Flash animation, based on a text by the feminist literary theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, which explores the ground between classic concrete poetry, avant-garde, feminist practice, and "ambient" poetics. Stefans responded DuPlessis by using words of her text: "all I did was alphabetize the words in it and then construct shorter poems from them." The short film runs about 11 minutes and shows letters that perform their "dreams" on the screen. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, Animation/Kinetic, visual poetry, appropriated texts , ambient, non-interactive
Creator: Brian Kim Stefans
Language: Engish
Description: overboard is an algorithmically animated work that combines borrowed text with graphic elements and sounds. The text is an adaptation of William Bradford’s account from Of Plymouth Plantation1620-1647 of an incident during the Mayflower crossing. It is a story of a man who falls overboard during a storm but catches hold of a rope and re-surfaces. The author’s adapted text is put through a process of algorithmically steered, time-based changes in which letters appear, disappear, and re-appear. These textual changes show how minute letter substitutions destabilize meaning, while simultaneously evoking other temporary and fluctuating meanings. The sounds are generated in a similar way as the words and help to create an ambient atmosphere. In overboard, the text visually reenacts the story while undermining the words’ lexical relationship until the original letters are restored and the story surfaces again. The ever-changing, ambient text functions as a visual rendering of its own linguistic message: its illegibility is readable as a symbol for the sinking man. The author explains his interest in algorithmically generated processes of textual changes as an intention “to interrogate certain relationships between the granular or atomic structures of alphabetically transcribed language and the critically or interpretatively discoverable rhetorical and aesthetic effects of literature.” (http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2-Cayley.htm) (Parts of this text were modified from "Reading Digital Arts. In-Depth-Analysis and Historic Contextualization" by Roberto Simanowski.) Entry drafted by: Maria Engberg
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Subject: kinetic text, appropriated texts , quicktime, audio, ambient, time-based, constraint-based, translation, algorithm
Creator: John Cayley, Giles Perring, Douglas Cape
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
Description: A visual index, with a paragraph of description, of each of Jason Nelson's work. Scrolling from the bottom of the page to the top lets one view the artist's work chronologically from 2001 to the present, offering one potential trajectory for the field development as a whole, spanning hypertexts, short fictions, poems, haikus, games, all of which are computer generated and include image in combination with multimedia elements, code, text, and sound. Browsing the collection means witnessing the ways electronic literature involves readers and shows the potential for involving programming and multimedial devices and embedded text as in, for example the flash-based work titled, "this will be the end of you: play4: within within." Here, holding the mouse allows the user to move "into words" and to play with text as it emerges. Readers control the movement on the interface by holding or releasing the mouse and can thereby determine the mouse driven fly through of texts and images that float towards or away from the user. Or the work, "game, game, game and again game" which uses the a side scrolling gaming interface to navigate through a mix of poetics content and corresponding hand-drawn elements. This play, either literal or through interface serves as a metaphor of what Nelson wishes to transfer with the artwork: some scattered [imaginations, some] oddly organized fire of thoughts and incomplete ideas" or simply a comment on the internet and its nonlinearity and the new possibilities of digital poetics. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, flash, generative, audio, animation, textual instrument, net art, digital poetics, poetry, network forms, combinatorial, interactive, visual poetry, fiction, appropriated texts
Creator: Jason Nelson
Collector: ELO
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