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Description: A poem with pictures and audio components whose words, composed and presented by Phillipe Bootz, are reworked by the computer freshly each time the piece is launched. The textual elements appear as animated letters on the surface of a shockwave based picture, whose surface (like the superimposed letters) is also changing. This textual and visual flow is accompanied by sound that seems to go in synch with the entire composition but which is, in fact, also part of the programming. Bootz addresses the work both to a reader for the multimedia components and to a "meta-reader" whose reading accomplishment can be widened by exploring the code. Bootz holds that "reading is a limited activity that is unable to give a complete knowing of the work." A translation from the French is given on a separate page, its content responds to what is seen and experienced by the reader. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: music, multilingual or Non-English, shockwave, combinatorial, generative, audio, Animation/Kinetic , Collaboration
Description: As the author writes in an introduction to the piece, "Lexia to Perplexia" (2001) began as an observation of the fluctuating and ever-evolving protocols and prefixes of internet technology as applied to literary hypermedia. As well, "Lexia to Perplexia" was originally meant as a critique of both the Author and User/Reader positions in relation to web-based literary content." That is, the reader will notice that in all four sections of the work – "The Process of Attachment," "Double-Funnels," "Metastrophe," and "Exe.termination" -- "Lexia to Perplexia" makes wide use of neologisms as a means of presenting, in Katherine Hayles´ words, "a set of interrelated speculations about the future (and past) of human-intelligent machine interactions, along with extensive resinscriptions of human subjectivity and the human body" (Writing Machines 49). However, the text is performed not only linguistically, but also narratively and visually. Narratively, Memmott alludes to classical literary references ranging from ancient Greek and Egyptian myth to postmodern literary theory reflecting on humans, technologies, and their collaborative agency. Visually, the work makes use of interactive features which override the source text, leading to a fragmentary reading experience. The functioning and malfunctioning of the interface itself carries as much meaning as the words and images that compose the text. As Memmott also instructs his readers to note, the "User/Reader of this piece…encounters a number of screens that appear simple upon access. As the User/Reader interacts with the presented objects -- images, textual fragments, various UI permutations -- the screens are made more." Entry drafted by: Lori Emerson
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Subject: Animation/Kinetic , textual instrument
Creator: Talan Memmott
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: 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
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: 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: 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: 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: 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
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