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Description: Zoe Beloff’s "Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A." is flash adaptation of a multimedia installation of the same name created by Beloff in 2001. This web-enabled version combines video, text, audio, and animation to tell the story of Natalija A., a psychiatric patient who was unable to communicate except through writing. Natalija believed that she was being controlled remotely by an “influencing machine,” a mechanical model of her body created by a doctor in Berlin which could be manipulated to control her telepathically. Based on an actual 1919 account of Viennese psychoanalyst Victor Trausk, Beloff’s work contains passages from Trausk’s notebooks, simulated effects of the “diabolical machine,” surrealist footage of medical procedures, and video clips of the actual broadcast technologies that emerged during the early twentieth century to influence populations worldwide. Beloff’s piece is notable for its interface, which presents itself as a “book,” with weathered, yellow pages complete with faint traces of text bleeding through from their opposite sides. Embedded black and white videos enhance the uncanny feel of the piece, giving the “book’s” diagrams a haunting, hallucinatory mood. The audio of the piece combines soundtracks with the video clips with white noise and whispered recitations, suggesting that the mute Natalija is speaking through the book through supernatural means. The result is an atmosphere that seems faded and esoteric, preserving the enigmatic character of Natalija’s unresolved affliction, her allegation that Trausk himself was under the machine’s evil influence, and his suicide the following year. Taken as a whole, the piece might best be understood as a contemporary manifestation of the literary gothic, where facts and speculations anxiously intersect, and conspiratorial notions flourish. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: video, creative non-fiction, gothic, installation
Creator: Zoe Beloff
Description: These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play, and lesbian sexuality. The piece is composed as a series of small stories, artifacts, interconnections, and meditations from the point of view of a girl (or girls) at various ages from four to twenty. Fisher's work is distinct for its hypermedia features: each text passage is illustrated by new images and therefore presents a new interface for each chunk of text, some passages are read by the author. On the level of content, the story's characters try to find and come to terms with their sexuality. Figuratively, this construction of self is mirrored in the hypertextual structure Fisher makes use of: The reader witnesses the characters' identity construction by following one link after the other, coming closer to what identity means to the stories' characters': "We've all been fifteen. I look very much the same, only at fifteen I'm a little larger, a little stronger. I'll believe anything. I tell people I believe nothing." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, flash, women authors, audio, fiction, dhtml, html, sexuality, memoir
Description: NIPP0N portrays a situation in a night-club and narrates the thoughts, actions, and interactions of a group of businessmen and "working women". In this work, the narrative alternates between first and third-person points-of-view, shifting between the perspectives of the women, the men, and an omniscient narrator. A horizontal screen-division displays the text bilingually: Japanese ideograms in red against a white backdrop on the top and English presented with white letters against red beneath. The unnamed characters are depicted as archetypes: the domineering madam, the leggy, lust-inspiring singer, the man who flirts with the prostitute while praising his loyal wife and making excuses for being out rather than at home. These stories are so common that the female listeners have "HEARD THIS— KIND — ØF — STØRY— MANY — TIMES". Marc Voge and Young-hae Chang, two Seoul-based artists known as Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) usually present their works as flash-narratives that come along with a synergistic interplay of text, music, color, and animation. Music is an integral component of YHCHI's pieces as the Flash animation tends to be synced to the melodies and rhythms of the music they choose. For the work at hand, the duo used a Thelonius Monk recording titled "Japanese Folk Song" from the "Straight, No Chaser" (1967) album. Generally, NIPP0N's narrative identifies the work as revolving around the presentation and deconstruction of binaries: Displayed onscreen are the dichotomies of English/Japanese, red/white, East/West, work/leisure, male/female, or commerce/sex. Its effect is an audio-visual encounter between the languages and cultures. While the work's title is the only indication of a geographical location given, the narrative could happen in any urban setting. It is, in a sense, universal. And so might the cultural critique entailed in this work be applied universally: At the end of the night and of NIPP0N's animation, the parasitic sickness is shown to be a symptom of a larger cultural, and decidedly corporate, epidemic: "THIS— IS — AN — INDUSTRY— LØVING/ YØUR MØM". The work ends by showing that the effects of global corporate capitalism are not limited to the confines of the after-hours bar but are evident in the daytime when the streets are filled with "TØØ MANY MEN IN DARK-GREY SUITS/ HURRY TØ TAXIS,/ AND LØØK HØW MANY— HAVE —CHAUFFERS". NIPP0N exposes a situation in which "TØØ MANY MEN", too uniformly dressed, and possessing too much money spill out of bars and brothels and into a morning light. The presented narrative written by the artists is a single Flash file. It runs for 16 minutes and contains no options for reader-controlled navigation, no buttons to pause, slow, or stop the animation of text that flashes in high-speed in front of the readers eyes. Parts of this description are cited from "Reading the Code between the Words: The Role of Translation in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Nippon" by Jessica Pressman http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2007/Pressman/Pressman.htm Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Flash, music, sound, animated text, scalable dimensions
Creator: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Description: The “Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” is a poem written by Stephanie Strickland as a score for a hypertext implementation, coded by Janet Holmes. Its images are suggestive of digital or mathematical culture, including Webcam photos, a core dump, an animated fractal, and algorithmic patterns inscribed in sand by a computer-driven steel ball. The latter images are from Jean-Pierre Hébert’s and Bruce Shapiro’s work, "Sisyphus" (1999). These images accompany the text of a love poem, a ballad of love gone wrong, or at least not entirely right, between Sand and Soot. At one level, the disjunction of image and text mirrors the difficulties of this pair. However, this discordance will spring into resonant oscillation for readers who either see or read an avatar of carbon-based chemistry in Harry Soot and silicon life in Sand. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, visual poetry, interactive, html, women authors, poetry
Creator: Stephanie Strickland, Janet Holmes
Publisher: Stephanie Strickland, Janet Holmes
Collector: ELO
Description: Rob Swigart's "About Time" is a web-based digital fiction that juxtaposes two temporally remote narrative strands. One involves an aboriginal named Mouth with a penchant for exploration and discovery; the other tells of Crockford ("Cro") de Granville, a voracious business mogul who heads the Institute for Cognitive Emergence. Mouth's present is 40,000 years before de Granville's, which is described as the "present day" but appears much more like a mildly dystopic near-future, where a pretentious and egotistical de Granville "skinny-casts" his clients to secure their popular and financial support. Mouth likewise spends his time trying to convince his dull cousin, Tuber, of a world much larger and more complex than their current way of life would allow them to grasp. Thus both Mouth and de Granville conspicuously crave knowledge, but for vastly different ends. Using Flash animation software, "About Time" incorporates both sound and images, but relies on the primacy of the text for its dramatic and aesthetic effect. Composer and performer Allen Strange is credited with the "sound design," which includes introductory music for the text as a whole, musical effects for many of the episodes, and voice-over audio for some of the interactive media elements. The subtitle of the work, "A Digital Interactive Hypertext Fiction, Two Braided Parallel Paths, A Double Helix," is a fairly accurate comment on the structural composition of the text. The navigation is organized in two ways. Each page contains a sidebar menu of links to individual narrative scenes or episodes. In addition, the body text of each episode is populated with a number of links. These links will either open other textual episodes (color-coded by blue text) or, in the de Granville strand, open small windows containing media elements that are typically images with voice-over audio (color-coded red). The result is a reading environment that accommodates a linear, hierarchical reading - from the top of each menu to the bottom - as well as the ability to traverse the lateral linkages. A further navigational element joins the two "parallel" narrative paths, effectively braiding the text into its "double helix" composition: a dynamic image sits at the foot of each sidebar menu. For "Mouth's Journey" it is a futuristic-looking glass sphere in rotation; for "The de Granville Files," it is a rather austere skin of water that ripples in perfect red spheres with the perpetual disturbance of a single droplet, against what could also be a background of screen static. This is the portal between the Mouth's world and that of Cro de Granville, and for the reader a way to not simply imagine two disparate realms but, in effect, experience them in striking and eerie proximity. This is a work about two "times" that are, on the surface, far removed, but nevertheless continually bumping up against one another. The result is a telling commentary on human nature and its "progress" through the ages refracted through the juxtaposition of the two anchoring characters, along with a commentary on a topic toward which all narratives tend - the nature of time itself. Entry drafted by: David Ciccoricco
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Subject: Flash, Animation/Kinetic, fiction, hypermedia, animation, network forms, narrative
Creator: Rob Swigart
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Description: In this work of kinetic concrete poetry the interface serves as a stage for words directed by poet Robert Kendall. Each of the expressions used perform Kendall's interpretation of the words meaning "Faith" and resemble a specific character that differs in color, typescript, movement, and sound. The "expanding multi-verse" is a poem in five 'movements' that consists of four differently colored layers of text that are revealed one after the other by mouse clicks. Each of the sucessive layers of text is overlaid on the previous one(s), incorporating the 'old' text into the new. The new words glide into the text from various directions replacing the 'old'. Semantically, each new state engages in an argument with the previous one(s). On the level of content, the poem thematizes the relationship of "logic", "theory", and "doubt". To each of these expressions, a certain color (red, orange, brown, black) and behavior is assigned. Additionally, the five 'movements' are accompanied by music: xylophone-like sounds, melodies of a harp, spheric synthesizer vibrations which merge with the harp in the fourth movement, and in the final instance, the xylophone tones prevail. The orchestrated words performed on the screen reinforce the poem's meaning visually, auditorily, and semantically. Special to this work of concrete poetry is the dynamic use of space that make the words move: some of the words glide out of the text space, other words bend down to the right or, like the word "leap", jump into the foreground. In the end, all words fall to the ground except one: "faith". Parts of this description are cited from "The Virtual Muse. Forms and Theory of Digital Poetry" by Norbert Bachleitner published in: Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric by Eva Mueller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Flash, Animation/Kinetic, poetry, audio, music, concrete poetry
Creator: Robert Kendall
Description: Uncle Roger by Judy Malloy first appeared from 1986-1987, placing it among the first generation of hypertexts produced on disks - contemporaneous with the earliest versions of Michael Joyce’s "afternoon: a story." The current (2003) revised web-version attempts to keep the original hypertext layout, design, and interaction. The work consists of a series of text nodes, connected via hyperlinks on words and icons. The node texts form a longer narrative in three parts: “A Party in Woodside,” “The Blue Notebook,” “Terminals.” The three sections, or "files" as the author calls them, intertwine personal recollections with descriptions of a pre-Internet, pre-PC age in California. The narrator, Jenny, serves as a focal point. The title figure “Uncle Roger” is Jenny’s uncle, an eccentric semiconductor market analyst, and the Silicon Valley culture and chip industry form the narrative backdrop. The stories bring together pieces of conversation at a California party with Jenny’s memories. In classic hyperfiction fashion, the reader chooses a path through the nodes by clicking on linked words or images. For instance, the section called “Terminals” features a keyboard-like set of icons that function as a navigational tool for accessing the separate story sections. Entry drafted by: Maria Engberg
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Creator: Judy Malloy
Description: Revelations of Secret Surveillance weaves family history, fictional narrative and documentary material together in the story of German video artist Gunter and American writer Gwen. Spurred on by the discovery of a poem Gunter’s grandmother wrote in Nürnberg in 1933, they begin to explore past and present covert systems of surveillance and social control. Most of the characters in the narrative are recognizable from Malloy’s other work as is the minimalist visual layout of the epic composition, which is divided into preludes, interludes and cantos. The piece is composed as a hypertext in which the individual lexias work as independent entities. They can either be read sequentially by following the progression of the narrative (pressing the blue bar below the text), or the reading can branch out through the links (placed to the left of the interface). In this way an opaque, poetic universe is created, which questions causal relations as well as the probability of chance occurrences. The composition of the piece thus forms its own layer of reflection on the theme of covert surveillance and control. Entry drafted by: Kristin Veel
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Subject: hypertext, control, epic, surveillance
Creator: Judy Malloy
Collector: ELO
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Description: Jhave Johnston’s “human-mind-machine” is comprised of three chief components. The most obvious of these are the animated, three-dimensional images of the words in the poems’ title: “human,” “mind,” and “machine” (rendered using Autodesk’s Mudbox software). These three terms, which serve as the piece’s thematic backdrop, hover in the center of the screen, moving, morphing, and mutating to the palpitating, ambient loops that serve as the second, but perhaps most innovative, component of Johnston’s piece. Below the three-dimensional images, lines of text appear, in a variety of fonts, and change in synchronization with the cardial thrumming of Johnston’s soundtrack. In terms of its content, “human-mind-machine” explores consciousness and its competing characterizations as organic and mechanical, patterned and random, individual and collective. Especially powerful is its depiction of life in an apartment building, where the smell of cooking onions by an unseen neighbor imposes upon the speaker’s senses, pointing to a visceral intimacy outside of language. The speaker explains, “We know each other well. breathing and farting in the same tight pool. Sharing the vectors of savage necessity.” The poet captures the subjective character of daily life while rendering this primal experience with a twinge of determinism. The irony, of course, rests in the underlying programming feat of Johnston’s Sound Seeker application, which he describes as an “online real-time beat-synchronized poem animator.” The result is a delightfully chaotic instance of individual expression grafted to a patterned, structured format. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: Flash, animation, visual poetry, 3D, sound seeker
Creator: William David (Jhave) Johnston
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Description: Canadian poet bpNichol used an Apple IIe computer and the Apple BASIC programming language to create First Screening, one of the earliest collections of kinetic computer poems, in 1983-1984. The twelve poems in First Screening soundlessly move across a black computer screen and so the work both positions itself halfway between film and sound/concrete poetry and also as a self-conscious (mis-)use of the filmic medium for poetry. In First Screening it also appears as though Nichol - writing at the very beginning of the era of the PC - understands the ease with which the digital computer can efface the body. For example, midway through the screening, the reader/viewer is introduced to “ANY OF YOUR LIP: a silent sound poem for Sean O’Huigin” - the title alone gestures to the absent presence of the body. Once the poem begins, we see/read the simple alternation between “MOUTH” and “mouth,” “myth” and “MOUTH,” “math” and “MOUTH,” “mate” and “MOUTH,” “maze” and “MOUTH,” “amaze” and “MOUTH”, and then the alternation between “ing”, “amaze,” and “MOUTH” which closes with the repeated flashing of “ing” and, finally, “MOUTH.” While the poem is perhaps silent because of the technological limitations of Nichol’s time, looking back on “ANY OF YOUR LIP” it is noticeable how this paradoxical silent sound poem draws attention to its silence at the same time as it enacts and perhaps even encourages readerly interactivity. Especially with the repeated flashing of “ing” at the end of the poem, a verb-ending that signals generalized or uncompleted action, “ANY OF YOUR LIP” invites readers to sound out or to “mouth” the words at the same time as they also try to make sense of the connections between the words as they flash across the screen. While poems in First Screening are not interactive in the sense that we’ve been accustomed to finding on the Internet, they show us another iteration of an expanded sense of interactivity that does not depend on the hypertext link. Entry drafted by: Lori Emerson
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Subject: Animation/Kinetic, kinetic text
Creator: bp Nichol (Barrie Nichol)
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
Description: Beginning with the provocative epigram by Phyllis Web, “The world is round. It moves in circles,” which gives way to a minimal interface with the word “meaning” placed in the center of a black screen, Jim Andrews’ “Enigma n” is a densely packaged experiment in the potency of language. With a click of the mouse, the reader can “Prod,” “Stir,” and “Tame” the word, causing the letters to swirl chaotically around no particular center. After all the options have been selected, the reader is permitted to restore order to the word by clicking “Spell.” Conceptually, the temporal sequence (epigram, the assertion of “meaning,” the reader’s acts of disruption, culminating in a restoration of order) might be interpreted as a parable of communication, from sender to receiver. As an experience of reading, the attentive mind will seize upon the various anagrams that arrange themselves chaotically, making sense wherever it is suggested by juxtaposition. However, Andrews’ piece does not simply end with the anti-climactic, almost jarring, return to order. The intrepid reader will quickly move to prod, stir, and tame the text again, and will be rewarded with a fifth option, “0/1,” which freezes the swirling letters in space. Another click on “0/1” opens up another option “Colour,” which invites further exploration leading to a reward at the end. In its entirety, “Enigma n” is an extraordinary and deceptively simple work that offers rich rewards for those who take the time to play with it. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: poetry, animation, html/dhtml, visual poetry
Creator: Jim Andrews
Collector: ELO
Description: Jim Andrews’ “Seattle Drift” is a play on motion and stasis, surface and depth. Its initially simple presentation consists of a self-described “bad text,” a subversive poem that moves and stutters around the screen when given the instruction to do so. A series of simple controls written in Dynamic HTML allows a user to guide its movement: one is given the option to “do” the text (which makes it drift around the screen), “stop” it (which freezes the letters mid-drift), or “discipline” it (which returns the letters to their original position). Stopping and starting the text allows the user to create new linguistic and visual configurations for the poem, and this flexibility is the cause of the text’s status as “bad”—it “used to be a poem, but drifted from the scene.” The poem dares its user with a come-on—“I just want you to do me”—that complicates the supposed transparency and stasis of the traditional written word, and makes the user an accomplice in this transformation. The poem itself has the experimental, minimalist quality that characterizes much of mid-90s net art, exploring the role of particular code functions in the construction of Web aesthetics while also playing with the code’s distance from (and closeness to) the surface of the Web browser. An Easter egg awaits those curious enough to explore the source code. Entry drafted by: Rob Schoenbeck
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Subject: poetry, animation, html/dhtml
Creator: Jim Andrews
Collector: ELO
Description: "Voyage into the Unknown" by Roderick Coover is an historical non-fiction hypertext about the first geographic expedition down the Colorado River in 1869. The three-month journey was led by John Wesley Powell who, with his eight fellow boatmen, departed from Green River City in northern Utah towards the Gulf of California. Coover investigates in the question of how we come to know and imagine an "unknown territory" and provides the answer with the navigational technique he applies in his work: an interactive panoramic environment with a digitally re-worked map of the journey, in which the user navigates though the desert landscape using a seamless, horizontally scrolling interface. The reader, who takes the perspective of crew member George Bradley, faces an unknown literary space he can choose to explore in several different ways. He can either use red arrows to move back and forth within the landscape or use the "key" numbered from one to twenty that recalls a chapter-like navigation. In order to "read the unknown territory", the user is forced to explore the map that is marked with points of interest. These markers (abbreviations that are explained in an introductory agenda at the beginning of the piece) work like hyperlinks that, once activated, name places passed, people the group met or events they experienced. A diary-like narrative unfolds in short excerpts of texts that reveal what happend when the crew was declared dead and how they managed to survive in "the darkest hour" when subsistences decreased each day. The narrative is contested with researched facts that interwine with actual diary accounts and works by John Wesley Powell, along with additional publications by other crew members (George Bradley, John Sumner, and Frederick Dellenbaugh). Coover also integrates primary visual works by E.O. Beaman, John Hillers, and Thomas Moran with new and original writing, artwork, and interactive devices. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, Flash, nonfiction, historical
Creator: Roderick Coover
Collector: ELO
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Description: Shadows Never Sleep is the final story in a series of narratives written by Aya Karpinska, each exploring different aspects of reading using digital media. As with the prior works in the series, Shadows Never Sleep is evocative of children's stories and folk tales. The work is designed to make use of the iPhone as a storytelling platform. Rather than turning pages or selecting paths through the narrative, readers "zoom" into the story revealing new images and text. Shadows Never Sleep is divided into three "pages," each containing more panels than the prior, 1, 8, and 64 respectively. The simple black and white images are interposed with minimal text, evoking the play of light and dark, and the anthropomorphization of shadows that constitute the subject of this work. Entry drafted by: Dave Parry
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Subject: interactive, children`s stories, zoom-narrative, iphone, picture-story, classic folk tale
Creator: Aya Karpińska
Collector: ELO
Description: In the Web's first hypertext novel Bobby Rabyd [Robert Arellano] explores the pop-cultural shadow-side of 1969 -- from the moon landing to the Manson murders, from a Vietnam veteran's PTSD to a rock star's idolatry, from the love-in at Woodstock to the murder at Altamont -- by relating intermixed stories and emphazising graphics and music. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, graphic, audio, fiction, html, historical, novel
Publisher: Robert Arellano
Collector: ELO
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Description: Like Nabokov in Pale Fire, Holeton presents a metafictional parodic exegesis on the academic discourse of early hypertext criticism. Designed in the form of a hypertextual FAQ webpage document, Holeton's short fiction emanates from a poem composed of anagrams of the word "hypertext". Clicking on links produces tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the fictional poem along with perspectives on Language Poetry, cultural studies, feminism, and transgender studies. Nine answers to frequently asked questions offer up "the story with the fan fiction and the double murder." Entry drafted by: Patrricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, network forms, fiction, html/dhtml, parody/satire
Creator: Richard Holeton
Collector: ELO
Description: On immersion in reading and its risks - where reading means, in this case, pointing and clicking on the work's interface and thereby diving, submerging, and even to risk drowning in the literary pool. The work opens with a simple proposition: "what if the pages of a book - or more accurately, the SO_CALLED PAGES OF THE WEB - were made from some pliable fluid, like water, so that we could dive gradually from one plane of presentation to the next?" The reader is presented with a structure for setting up dive points on the reading interface. At these points, the reader may hover, move to another point, or else move up or down to earn points for a successful reading approach. This kind of imersion through clicking, chosing, and wandering might be thought closer to a game than a literary text, although we have to know something about the developing text to know how to play, how "to breathe," and especially how to read inside this textual immersion. An original take on the peculiarity of electronic textuality, Deep Surface is perhaps best regarded as a textual instrument. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Flash, Animation/Kinetic, textual instrument, audio, interactive, Graphics, synthetic voices
Creator: Stuart Moulthrop
Collector: ELO
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
Description: Blue Company is a novel composed of email messages from Berto, a lovesick copywriter transferred to 14th Century Italy who addressed letters to his romantic correspondent in the 21st Century. People were able to subscribe to Blue Company and received email messages from Berto for a month. The novel was performed twice: once in Spring 2001 and again in Spring 2002. The 2002 performance was followed by Scott Rettberg's unauthorized continuation of the fiction. He e-mailed to many of the same Blue Company subscribers and composed "Kind of Blue." It is a sequel that re-casts the characters of Blue Company. The last letter of "Kind of Blue" was written by Rettberg and Wittig collaboratively, thus knitting the two pieces together finalizing a collaborative style of "chatmail." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: network forms, collaboration, visual poetry or narrative, email narrative
Creator: Rob Wittig
Collector: ELO
Description: "We wanted love" recites a voice that narrates a teenager's favorite pastime in Wisconsin, racing up and down the Main Street drag looking to make connections, wanting love. "Cruising" is a flash based poem with cinematic elements marked by a flow of images accompained by the poem text. The filmic flow suggests sights glimpsed from a train's window. A hidden code integrated into the piece lets the user control the speed, the direction, and the scale with the cursor, turning the reader into just another cruiser. The viewer moves between reading text and experiencing the flow of images but cannot exactly have both at the same time. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, women authors, collaboration, audio, visual poetry or narrative, poetry, place, cinematic
Creator: Ingrid Ankerson (words and design); Megan Sapnar (design)
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
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Description: JB Wock is a self-described “english-speaking blogmachine” created by poet and programmer Eugenio Tisselli. JB Wock, a PHP script, searches the web for a phrase that it “likes” (from a site that publishes notable quotations), “twists” these phrases by substituting synonyms, and publishes the results daily on its blog (which also includes a comment feature, inviting readers to respond). Tisselli includes links to the coding of the PHP script as well as a “Computer Aided Poetry” tool which allows users to alter their own phrases using the JB Wock script. The underlying script itself is an elegant feat in constraint, while the verses that it publishes daily often have an ephemeral and absurd quality, consistent with spirit of the Oulipo movement, but also gesturing towards contemporary debates over the physiological processes of human cognition and the indeterminate character of human expression. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: poetry, procedural, constraint-based, e-poetry, oulipo, php script
Creator: Eugenio Tisselli
Collector: ELO
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Description: Upon launching Erik Loyer's The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998), a web-based work of digital fiction powered by Shockwave software animation, readers not only see the opening navigation screen, but must feel their way around it. Nine circles orbit, carrousel-like, around a tower constructed with two triangles, one inverted and resting on top of the other. The sound of an eerie synthesized pulsing accompanies each rotation, which speeds up the farther away the reader moves the mouse. A tiny number appears at the foot of each, counting - up or down depending on which way the shapes orbit - from one to nine. (...) Read the entire elit work article Dave Ciccoricco at http://directory.eliterature.org/node/618
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Subject: poetry, audio, music, narrative, cognition, consciousness, digital fiction, interactive motion graphics, interior monologue, jazz, letters, memory, mind, poem, posthuman, spoken word
Creator: Erik Loyer
Description: With FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002), Mark Amerika presents a remix of philosophical inquiry on time and being, data perception and manipulation, networking culture, and writing, the final complement of his trilogy (GRAMMATRON, 1997 and PHON:E:ME, 1999). As a tourist in a visually changing landscape, the reader explores an interface that simulates a game-like environment. The user's task is to trigger cones of light that shimmer on the screen. Once activated, narrative paths unfold through animated texts, spoken-words, or videos. A central narrative construction in this work is the creation of a "Digital Thoughtographer" (DT), Amerika's personified concept character. The DT is a lens that looks like an image-capture device through which the viewer can access coded text fragments that appear as programmed scripts, images, and flickering video excerpts. Amerika uses the DT as an instrument that takes the perspective of an omniscent narrator who communicates defragmented statements to the reader/viewer: "There is only perception: the experience of seeing what is there in front of our eyes and capturing that thereness in the experiential act of perception." Mark Amerika's composition of texts is built on Raymond Federman's concepts of surfiction, critifiction, and playgiarism. The texts are digital remixes of theoretical views once expressed and assigned to known philosophers which the DT transmits without referencing sources directly. For example, the following statement resembles Barthes' questions about authorship: "Who are the ghosts in the literary machine?" Elsewhere he evokes Baudrillard, observing "Not only can there be no original, the simulacrum has now lost its punch too", "Aura is interface", "There is only perception." In the work at hand, the reader/viewer's perception blurs with facts and fiction in which Amerika's poetics of hacktivism and remixology are set into scene. Mark Amerika's trilogy ends with the continuation of what he envisoned with GRAMMATRON in 1997: "To approach the computer-mediated network environment of the World Wide Web as an experimental writing zone, one where the evolving language of new media would reflect the convergence of image-writing, sound-writing, language writing, and code writing as complementary processes . . ." (181, META/DATA). Subtitled "MetaTourism: Interior Landscapes, Digital Thoughtography", FILMTEXT 2.0 is a collaborative achievement of many artists and comes along with an ambient background soundtrack. Excerpts from the "Digital Thoughtographer" are available on the author's website at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/download.cfm/c1.pdf Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Flash, video, animation, collaborative, audio, music, philosophical, remix, surfiction
Creator: Mark Amerika
Description: In Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs, a work shown as a video installation and now available as a Flash version on the Web, birds' sounds were transcribed into morphemes representing human perception of their songs. The corresponding graphemes are then animated to form the bodies of birds flying with human voices, tweaked by the computer, articulating the sounds denoted by the marks. In the complex processes of translation that the work instantiates, the human is in-mixed with nonhuman life forms to create hybrid entities that represent the conjunction of human and nonhuman ways of knowing. A reenactment of the history of literacy through different media as it moves from sounds present in the environment to written marks (orality/writing), written marks to the iconographic shapes of the animated avian bodies (writing/digital images), accompanied by the re-representation of human speech as computerized voice production (digital multimodality). Although Mencia's work can be classified as electronic literature, it is fundamentally about literacy rather than any literary form, illustrating the interrogations that the literary can undertake of the histories, contexts, and productions of literature. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek (Parts of this description are cited from "New Horizons for the Literary" by N. Katherine Hayles)
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Subject: Flash, Animation/Kinetic, audio
Creator: Maria Mencia
Collector: ELO
Description: Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert’s “Loss of Grasp” explores the terrain of certitude as a tension between the “grasp” and its “loss.” As the title suggests, the piece opens up the space of the grasp after its hold on things has slipped away, focusing the reader’s attention on the anxious desire experienced in loss (as opposed to the more optimistic grasp of the one who aspires towards something). The piece, created in Flash, is divided into six distinct segments, held together by a common protagonist and unified by the recurrence of slippery texts that reconfigure themselves when “touched” by reader’s mouse strokes. Following the poem’s title, readers might be reminded of an earlier literary work, Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” (1855), in which a first-person narrator, the artist Andrea del Sarto, explains, “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?” Like Browning’s work, Bouchardon and Volckaert’s “Loss of Grasp” tells of a man whose pursuit of control is ultimately frustrated in spite of his ambition. (...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Davin Heckman at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/650
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Subject: Flash, interactive poetry, digital poetry
Creator: Serge Bouchardon, Vincent Volckaert
Description: Urs Schreiber’s Java-based German Internet opus Das Epos der Maschine ("Machine Epic") epitomizes the control of the "machine" over its user both practically and (meta-) theoretically. As the title suggests, the text regards itself as a poem of epic dimensions, i.e. poetic narrative that acts as a symbol of an entire national or, as in the case of the Internet, virtual paradigm. In other words, Schreiber positions his work in the tradition of the great ethnic and religious epics (e.g. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Nibelungenlied and Milton’s Paradise Lost). By the same token, it follows in the tradition of concrete poetry, which critically and playfully reflects on language itself as well as its inextricable determination by the medium in which it appears. The Epos is a joint venture. Text and programming were done by Urs Schreiber, the graphics by Kai Jelinek and Cesare Wosko, the photographs by Claudia König, and the sound by Die with Dignity. (...) Read the entire elit work article by Astrid Ensslin at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/314
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Subject: poetry, fiction, cybertext, sound, epic, machine control, multimodal, narrative
Creator: Urs Schreiber
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Description: Gabriella Infinita, a metamorphical work, is a lesson in the evolution of the internet. Three versions of the text are available: Novel, Hypertext and Hypermedia. In the tale, Gabriella arrives at the apartment of her lover, Frederico, the author, only to find him disappeared. In his stead, she has only his things, his writings, his clippings, his recordings. At the same time, in a parallel narrative, a group of people try to escape a building. They are trapped, moreso than they think, for they are characters in one of his stories. Since Rodríguez Ruiz made all of these versions available on the web (with commentaries), they serve as an excellent study in the forms themselves. In no way a lesson in progress, the adaptations and translations of his own tale reveal the strengths and limitations of these forms. Entry drafted by: Mark C. Marino
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Description: A multimedia online novel in three episodes set in China, Italy, and Russia, featuring a girl growing up in the 21st century. The episodes are part comic book, part animation, and part film, in a style intended to suggest Alice's developing career as an animator. Reader participation and interactivity increase as the series progresses, reflecting Alice's engagement and influence in her environment as she grows older. Episodes become more complex and the reader is asked to unravel riddles which become progressively more intricate. This way, Inanimate Alice has a game-like character but it also resembles theater, the coming-of-age novel, and the graphic novel. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, fiction, interactive, Animation/Kinetic, collaboration, electronic music, video, graphic novel
Creator: Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
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Description: "Zaira, City of Memories", by Gökçen Ergüven, is a Flash-based hypertext loosely inspired by Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities". The piece combines interactive visual imagery derived from photographs of the urban settings to which the piece refers with brief descriptive passages, aphoristic statements, and poetic musings. The overall structure is organized around a map-like navigation tool which allows readers to follow the text along forking paths, reminiscent of the subway interface of Geoff Ryman’s "253". Unlike Ryman’s hypertext novel, Ergüven’s work follows a single narrative perspective, but does so across the space of three different cities and temporal frames: Ankara (the capital of Turkey, where, according to the author’s abstract, Ergüven was born), Istanbul (where the author lives), and London (where the author would like to live). Zaira is the imaginary city where the past of memory, the present of being, and the desire for the future coexist. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: antecedent, calvino, hyperbook, hypertext novel, invisible cities
Creator: Gökçen Ergüven
Description: Inspired by Derrida's "Of Grammatology", Mark Amerika experiments in GRAMMATRON with narrative form in a networked environment. Amerika retells the Jewish Golem myth by adapting it into the culture of programmable media and remixes several genres of text into the story's hybridized style including metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk, and conceptual works affiliated with the Art+Language group. Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story introduces readers to Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who created Grammatron, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (like in the original myth) but with forbidden data -- a specially coded Nanoscript -- the creature becomes a digital being that "contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings." The Grammatron is the personification of the Golem which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. In a number of literary adaptations and works, various characterizations of the Golem and its environment are depicted. With GRAMMATRON, however, Mark Amerika creates a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in the electrosphere. Throughout the story, Abe Golam searches for his "second-half," a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and the reader through a multi-linear textscape (the Grammatron writing machine) where they search for "the missing link" that will enable them to port to another dimension of "digital being" the story refers to as Genesis Rising. The project consists of over 1100 (partly randomized) text elements and thousands of links. It comes with animated and still life images, an eerie background soundtrack, and audio-files that sometimes provide a spoken meta-commentary on the work itself. The work consists of different text-layers the user is free to choose from including a theoretical hypertextual essay titled "Hypertextual Consciousness," the animated text "Interfacing," and the main hypertext "Abe Golam." GRAMMATRON (1997) was initially received as one of the first major works of Net art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. It was the first work in Amerika's Net art trilogy and was followed by PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002). Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, animated text
Creator: Mark Amerika
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Description: l0ve0ne is a hypertext of 129 lexias and was the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop. The text is the diary of a hacker and WebMOO aficionado, Gweneth, and recounts her relationship with a German hacker named Gunter. The text explores the possibilities of emotional, sexual, and even human relationships in a world augmented by and through mediated computer technologies. In reading Gweneth's experiences as she travels across the United States and Europe with and looking for Gunter--who might be posing as his own cousin, Stefan, and consequently remains an unstable and mysterious figure throughout the text--one is reminded of Thomas Pynchon's novel V. Even more like V. herself, however, is the character Aimee. She first appears (depending on the order in which you read the text) as a non-player character (NPC)in a game being designed by the German hacker collective Schinkenbrotchen. Surprisingly, Gweneth later meets Aimee in the flesh and learns that she might have stolen Gunter/Stefan away from Gweneth. The indeterminacy of these characters, the unending search for them, as well as the machine-augmented bodies and sexuality of the characters seems to descend from Pynchon's frequent concerns. One of the first hypertexts written for the World Wide Web, l0ve0ne consists of white text against a black, blue, green, or red background; the black background is most frequent. The links are not words within the text but are rather underscored gaps that appear within the passages. The text can be read with or without frames, and the choice determines with which lexia the text opens. l0ve0ne's last lexia, "reset," directs the reader to another Malloy hypertext, The Roar of Destiny Emanated from the Refrigerator. Entry drafted by: Brian Croxall
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Subject: hypertext, fiction, html/dhtml, cyberculture, webfiction, codework
Creator: Judy Malloy
Collector: ELO
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Description: The only trace left of Anna, a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, is an open internet connection in the computer in her neatly furnished dorm room. Deena Larsen invites readers to join four generations of a Japanese-American family as they search for Anna and discover credit card conspiracies, ancient family truths, waterfalls that pour out of televisions, and the terrifying power of the web. The detective story unwinds, one link at a time, but even as readers explore Anna's disappearance, Larsen also orchestrates our own disappearance in the virtual reality of the internet. Hypertext links lead the reader to relevant url's on the web for actual companies and institutions (e.g., the Sheraton Hotel, or commonly encountered web pages (e.g., "Object not found"). As these real world links increasingly turn to errors, our search for Anna seems as elusive as the desire to track the Internet's ephemera. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Creator: Deena Larsen
Collector: ELO
Description: This Flash-based creation encompasses a series of 3 prose poems that gradually dissolve (in animated sequences) to reveal poems "hidden" within them. Each of three initial block texts can be read sequentially; however, the essence of this piece is the way letters fly from those initial texts to reveal the hidden poems. Each of these three initial texts have two poems "embedded" in them. At first, the remaining letters remain in place, like the buildings that survived the earthquake. On subsequent pages, these characters close ranks to form the words of the embedded poems. Additionally, each surviving letter casts off versions of itself which fall down the surface of the poem, colliding with other cast-off versions and forming alternate unused words which stack up in a heap below the poem. Thematically, the pieces bring together the "famous occult associations of the European mandrake" with the American one (mayapple). The poems play with the rhizomatic nature of roots and rhizomes of literary allusions. Readers cannot uproot these mandrakes without being caught in the underground tangle of sex, death, and renewal. Entry drafted by: Mark C. Marino
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Creator: Oni Buchnan
Collector: ELO
Description: "Roulette" is a language game for readers, a single work that can be read in roughly 64,000 ways. The lines of the poem shift every time you interact with one of the three lines of the poem. By clicking and holding a block for a few moments, the reader can activate a change in the text. Only one line of the poem changes at a time, so the two stable lines give a context for the altered one, a background against which alternative meanings are generated. Those other lines can then be altered in turn. The work appears clothed in an endless night sky that foregrounds rotating, colorful cubic containers, each one containing smaller rotating cubes. From there, from out of the cubes, the word emerges along with background music that calls to mind a night out at the casino. The poetic content concerns philosophical questions concerning life, relationships, and language, and at times seems to generate a meta-commentary on randomness and the work itself. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Creator: Bebe Molina, Daniel Howe
Collector: ELO
Description: A metafiction written in annotated web pages, this tale follows one narrator's browsing history and reflections on the content he encounters. The tale begins with a meditation on Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" but soon moves into despair at our inability to leave, as Marino puts it: "a meaningful mark on the Internet." But this work makes the Web notable by making use of Web 2.0 features: Social Bookmarking, that allows Internet users to store, share and retrieve visited Webpages. The work uses pages from the Internet for its palette and invites readers to add their own annotations and bookmarks. Adding their own layer of meta-narrative, readers create collaborative Web-Travelogues by leaving a bookmark as a footnote. Marginalia has an enormous history that long predates contemporary footnoting practice. Thus, Marino's work is digitally following the genre of annotation fiction. He asserts: "why not turn the web into a means of characterization, to turn web reading practices themselves into ways of examining the ergodic, interiority of our characters, or to stitch together tales of paranoia in the way that various Alternate Reality Games have." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: web-annotation metafiction, java
Description: "The Jew's Daughter" is an interactive, non-linear, multivalent narrative. A hypertext, but one that transforms the text (rather than just linking from one stable text to another). As soon as the reader moves the mouse over highlighted keywords (links), segments of a page replace one another fluidly. While always remaining syntactically and semantically intact, passages are replaced by a new text within a static rectangular text-space. The work's content corresponds to the unstable form: Characters, for example, are not fixed identities; they can be, by turns, contemporary and historical. The algorithmic text generation calls on readers to explore a text that changes with the addition or deletion of passages at random throughout the narrative. By placing authors and readers in direct relation to machine-generated text, this piece has helped ground debates on electronic literature. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, collaboration, interactive, generative text, html/dhtml
Description: Shelley Jackson’s 1997 web-based hypertext, “my body—a Wunderkammer” employs many of the same strategies that make her celebrated Patchwork Girl (1995) so conceptually interesting, albeit on a smaller scale. With its asynchronous mode of storytelling, its vivid images, and its layering of different texts, all of which need to be explored, re-mixed, and assembled by the reader for any coherence to emerge, “Wunderkammer” has much in common with the way a reader must stitch together the disparate pieces of “the monster’s” story to make sense of Patchwork Girl. (...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Lisa Swanstrom at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/566
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Subject: hypertext, autobiography
Creator: Shelley Jackson
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Creator: Donna Leishman
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Description: A Shockwave work by Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson. This work was made as the third component of an intermedia poem whose two other parts were bound together, upside down to each other, in a volume written by Strickland and published by Penguin, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una, 1992. At the center of the book are pointers to the url. The digital poem was published in the Iowa Review Web, 2002, with critical material by Jaishree Odin, and with an essay by the authors in New River, 2003.
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Subject: visual poetry, interactive, collaborative, textual instrument, women authors, shockwave, poetry, kinetic text
Description: Arteroids is a literary shoot-em-up poem-game for the Web. The battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness. Pilot your red id-entity text against poetry and the forces of dullness. Winner takes wall. Write your own texts in Word for Weirdos. Save poetry from yourself. Game mode or play mode. Play for life and death in game mode. Shoot for art in play mode. Go on. I dare you. Entry drafted by: Scott Rettberg
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Subject: cybertext, poetry, shockwave, animation, interactive, software, digital poetics, digital art, audio, hypermedia, kinetic, game
Creator: Jim Andrews
Collector: ELO
Description: The Unknown is a collaborative hypertext novel written on the World Wide Web during the turn of the millennium. It is a text about a book tour that takes on the excesses of a rock tour. The work is notorious for breaking the "comedy barrier" in electronic literature, replacing the pretentious modernism and self-consciousness of previous hypertext works with a pretentious postmodernism and self-absorption that is more satirical in nature. The Unknown includes several sections or "lines" of content including a sickeningly decadent hypertext novel, metafictional bullshit, documentary material, correspondence, art projects, documentation of live readings, a press kit, and more. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, network novel, encyclopedic, metafiction, comedy, collaborative, postmodern, fiction, parody/satire, html/dhtml, network forms
Creator: William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton
Collector: ELO
Description: Once the reader enters the Case Collection he learns that "a flood threatened to destroy everything." Two diaries, an illustrated children's book, a journalist's sound recording and other artifacts from a naturalist's secret collection could be saved. The reader is welcome to explore the narrative space of the project that provides a database of the 'saved' narrative objects such as films, photographs, letters, maps and diaries that accompany over 600 writings visually. These digital narrative objects can be browsed, they are from a fictional 1910 natural history expedition and relate to the life and trial of Sir Francis Case. The diaries, for instance, serve as minute details of an expedition to "a lodge on a hill" and the reader learns: "I have a conversation with the missionary, Amelie. She tells me that we are the Company's guest and best stay on good terms with their officials. I have developed a different view of matters during the course of my travels, but I dare not to tell her." With its graphical representations as well as the textual and literary browsing structure the Digital Case Collection bears a 'playable media' character using game elements to achieve interaction. It allows the reader to have exploratory trips one can return to and follow up on. Gaming conventions are used against the grain to mediate on the nature of digital artifacts and their relationship to time and space. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: metatextual, playable media, graphics, historical
Creator: Tal Halpern
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
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Description: Kind of Blue, while a complete email novel or "chatmail", is the latter element of a two-part email fiction project began by Rob Wittig in his Blue Company project. According to the Blue Company description, Rettberg "missed the daily installments in his inbox to the point that he began to compose and e-mail a response, a sequel, a rebuttal...in which the characters of Blue Company are re-cast and re-imagined." The novel consists of a series of emails sent among the characters, beginning with an unlikely romance and darkening to a murder investigation. The structure of the novel is fairly simple: the reader first encounters a hyperlinked list of the emails in chronological order, which serves as a table of contents. Clicking on any link takes the reader through to that email, a pale blue frame with black text, laid out over a royal blue background. The emails themselves contain no links or clickable options, save buttons to move to the previous email or the next email (which subtly directs the reader to move through the email lexias in order), or to return to the "Inbox". There are no attachments or links to external pages, keeping the reader contained within the narrative itself. The reading experience is voyeuristic: the "Inbox" could ostensibly be the reader's inbox, and these personal emails have somehow landed there for perusal. On a surface level, this visual and structural design appears to mimic the email experience that is now part of our daily existence. But on several deeper levels, the novel becomes divorced from this typical inbox feel. The reader cannot save, move, forward, or reply to these messages. They are, in a sense, artifacts, frozen. The reader can observe - again, with a voyeuristic feel, given the personal content of the emails - but cannot take part in the narrative as s/he would if this were truly an email inbox. On a textual level, Kind of Blue is a combination of the carelessly composed email, the intimately considered handwritten letter, and first person narrative that occasionally drifts into poetry, depending on the character. The longish emails are quite detailed and forthright, and display little of the editing capabilities of the email form, relying instead upon the notion that the characters are apt to hit "send" before taking a read-through, offering their thoughts in their raw form. The exposition and character revealed tend toward the first person narrative style, cut up and sent as emails. As a result, Kind of Blue merges digital communication and literary storytelling into a narrative that fits neatly into neither category, stretching the bounds of each. Entry drafted by: Lyle Skains
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Subject: fiction, chatmail, email novel
Creator: Scott Rettberg
Description: Judd Morrissey, Goat Island, and 145+ additional contributors are contributing to the work-in-progress The Last Performance (dot org). The project’s developers describe it as “a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community.” The project is a kind of hopeful monster, a mutated form of literature that combines elements of dance and performance, information and physical architecture, and Oulipian constraint-driven approaches to writing. The visual presentation of the project is based on the structure and details of the Dzamija, a mosque built on top of an old church in Zagreb, Croatia. Elements of the structure were derived from a dance performance by Goat Island, a Chicago-based performance collective. The organizational principles of the text are largely algorithmic. The individual texts themselves are written in response to a series of odd, seemingly arbitrary constraints such as “Construct a last performance in the form of a heavy foot that weighs 2 tons and remains in good condition.” The texts that form the material basis of the project are contributed both by the authors who have been working most closely on the project for two years and by readers who stumble across it on the Web and decide to contribute a text by responding to a constraint or to one of the other texts.(...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Scott Rettberg at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/606
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Subject: hypertext, poetry, collaborative, narrative, database, visualization
Creator: Judd Morrissey
Description: slippingglimpse is a 10-part generative Flash poem combining videos of ocean patterns with text. The work introduces three modes of reading: fullscreen, high resolution, and scroll-text mode. In the first two modes, fragments of words and phrases appear in the ocean, mapped and remapped to movement in the video image, turning from an unreadable text to a decipherable composition. In fullscreen mode, ocean videos "read" the poem text somatically or gesturally. In high-rez mode, the ocean-patterning itself is best visible, those patterns the videographer set out to capture and enhance. Only the scroll-text mode permits human reading of linear print text. The language of the poem comes in part from sampling and recombining the words of visual artists as they reflect on their own work (among them, Helaman Ferguson, Manfred Mohr, David Berg, Ellen Carey, Frances Dose, Marius Johnston, Jon Lybrook, Susan Rankaitis, Hildegard of Bingen). Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, collaborative, kinetic text, poetry, women authors, visual poetry, video
Description: Shawn Rider's "So Random" consists of a short hypertext narrative of a bus ride told from several different points of view. Each time a reader accesses the work, an instantiation of it is assembled from chunks of text based on tags assigned to each section. For a piece of electronic literature, the work has a conservative visual presentation. Each version consists of three pages that resemble the appearance of text in a word processing program. The reader has the option of reading the pages consecutively or of clicking on words to generate an entirely new three-page version of the work. With relatively few options, the reader is at the mercy of the algorithm assembling the text, and without access to the logic of the text selection, the work feels "so random." Entry drafted by: Ben Underwood
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Subject: hypertext, fiction, Anthologies, algorithm
Creator: Shawn Rider
Collector: ELO
Description: Prose poem published in The Iowa Review Web (TIR-W), Volume 9, Number 2: "Instruments and Playable Texts" (2008). “The Purpling” is comprised of approximately ten basic web pages of eight to ten lines each. By clicking on hyperlinks connected to segments of varying lengths, the reader enters what guest editor Stuart Moulthrop calls a "maze of recirculating expression.” While the words on the screen remain static, the reader's experience of "meaning" varies depending on the order of visited links. These visited links, in most browsers, also appear in purple, which becomes a visual representation of not only the work's title, but also the mingling of the reader with the text. Consequently, in both form and content, the work calls attention to nature of reading and questions the authority of a text. Entry drafted by: Crystal Alberts
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Subject: hypertext, poetry, procedural, constraint-based
Creator: Nick Monfort
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
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Description: Readers of print conventionally ignore the page surface so as to concentrate on interpreting what is printed there; in "open.ended," by contrast, surfaces are integral. Readers interact with lines of poetry that appearon two translucent shapes - one nested within the other. Because words on the inner shape are visible through the outer one, the printed lines can be read together or separately. The number of possible surface/text combinations is limited, but by merging shapes a surprising range of new stanzas can result. The reader can also control her angle of view so that more than one surface is visible, though all the words may not be legible. As the surfaces obscure the words, the materiality of the digital shapes overcomes linguistic signification. This phenomenon of surface overcoming text also occurs when the shapes overlap and obscure portions of the text. "open.ended" amounts to a poem without beginning or end since one does not move through the text in any predetermined order, yet the poetic object has boundaries delimited by the eight rotating surfaces. The reader's interaction with the shifting text is augmented--and usefully constrained--by an audio track of the author reading so that we, reading to ourselves, are reminded of lines from the poem we have already encountered, or we are given a preview of text to come. Despite the literal instability of the moving text, the audio track is the same each time, which lends consistency to repeated readings. Entry drafted by: Ben Underwood
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Subject: poetry, flash, audio, interactive, 3D, spatialization
Creator: Aya Karpinska, Daniel C. Howe
Collector: ELO
Description: Mary Flanagan's "[theHouse]" is a digital poem-environment that consists of strings of transparent, three-dimensional, occasionally intersecting, shifting boxes that are accompanied by paired lines, which in turn are re-combined as the piece progresses; we may watch them as they move across the screen, grow larger or smaller or rotate so that we read them in reverse—as if we could walk to the back of our language. Or, should we want to determine the shape and direction of the text/boxes, we can try to interact with the text/boxes through the mouse. Since Flanagan writes that "[a]s in much of electronic literature, the experience of the work as an intimate, interactive, screen-based piece is essential to understanding and appreciating it," the experience of interacting with this text-environment is primarily one of struggle or difficulty since there is no way to gain control over the text--no way to determine the direction in which the piece shifts. Pulling right on the mouse does not guarantee that the text will also shift right or rotate clockwise; moving the mouse up does not necessarily allow us to venture deep inside the boxes or the text—we may have just flipped the boxes/text or moved to a bird's eye view of this strange computer-text-organism. Thus, despite my interactions with the text, despite the fact that I can "read" most of the lines, in its difficulty "[theHouse]" is at least in part about the mediating effects of an interface that, despite Flanagan's claim above, offers intimacy while also declining it. Entry drafted by: Lori Emerson
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Subject: Animation/Kinetic, individual work, 3D, interactive poetry, interactive art
Creator: Mary Flanagan
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
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