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Description: Barry Smylie’s “1969/99” features multiple hyperlinked web pages and flash animation. When viewed in Internet Explorer, the user can reveal superimposed text by mousing over images. It is dominated by graphics and sound from popular culture of the 1960s and 1990s. In particular, “1969/99” draws heavily on the themes and images of Fail Safe (1962) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, in which machine malfunctions and humanity’s blind faith in the infallibility of technology accidentally cause a nuclear war. Burdick and Wheeler’s book was adapted for film in 1964 and for television in 2000. Created during the Y2K frenzy, “1969/99” offers a complex (and sometimes comic) cultural commentary and comparison between Cold War America and that of the Millennium. For example, one page titled "the b52s" juxtaposes images of a B-52 strategic bomber with those of the New Wave band The B-52s. The B-52s song "Meet the Flintstones" is the featured audio track on another page, "evolution," where the cartoon images of the Flintstones (1960-66) are superimposed on the cast photo of The Flintstones Movie (1994). In “beatitude,” Smylie quotes from Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “I saw the best minds of my generation,” while the soundtrack repeats “starving, hysterical, naked,” thus leaving the user to fill in the omitted portion of the line “destroyed by madness.” Entry drafted by: Crystal Alberts
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Subject: Flash , html/dhtml, audio
Creator: Barry Smylie
Collector: ELO
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: 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: 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: 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
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: 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: 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: "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
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: 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: "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
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: 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: 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: 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: 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
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