“Landscapes” by Bill Marsh

March 15, 2019January 11, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

The first impression these five short installation pieces by Marsh gave me was that of slightly garish, amateurish compositions using simple software drawing tools and overusing the color gradient fill tool. After a little research on Peter Max’s psychedelic paintings and reading an essay by Marsh on his poetics, one has a bit more context to appreciate its subtleties and take a closer look.

As conceptual works, these smart little poems are successful in provoking thought on the representation of nature in electronic media and film, the human struggles in urban spaces where they are constantly monitored, Biblical proverbs, and flying saucers. (Do you see them, too?)

Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.

“Girls’ Day Out” by Kerry Lawrynovicz

March 15, 2019January 10, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Girls’ Day Out” by Kerry Lawrynovicz

The two poems in this work were inspired by a personal experience of horseback riding in a place where and six unsolved murder cases: Calder Road. The first “Poem” consists of an prose poem describing a ride through the trail, followed by several short stanzas extracted from words in the original— an effect reminiscent of Tom Phillips artist book A Humument. The second, “Shards,” has four movements composed and recombined from phrases published in the Houston Chronicle about the murder cases.

“Carving in Possibilities” by Deena Larsen, with sounds from Matt Hansen

March 15, 2019January 9, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Carving in Possibilities”

In this short piece, Larsen displays a blurred image of the face of Michelangelo’s David and overlays it with invisible hotspots triggered by the pointer, displaying color coded texts from different speakers, making a sharp “carving” sound, and sharpening the focus of the image gradually over the course of 40 triggers. This approach allows readers to “carve out” different textual combinations and readings of the poem— a fitting example of Larsen’s interest in metaphorical interfaces for her works.

“Faith” by Robert Kendall

March 18, 2019January 8, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Faith” by Robert Kendall

Kendall makes judicious use of typography, color, sound, music, animation, and limited interactivity as meaningful strategies in this poem. The poem is structured into five “movements,” each of which transforms the language in the space through animation, fading, and other effects to add and subtract enough to counterpoint and add to what was stated in the previous movement.

“open.ended” by Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska

September 28, 2018January 7, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “open.ended” by Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska

The interface for this combinatorial poem allows for readers to read the lines inscribed upon the cubes individually or together as the cubes rotate in a virtual space. The layering of lines in the cubes is echoed by the layering of Howe and Karpinska reading lines from the poem. The controls allow readers to manipulate the cubes to align lines which combine to form new lines. The graceful rotation of the cubes, along with the soft overlaid voices, and textual combinations are simultaneously intriguing and mesmerizing.

“Soliloquy” by Kenneth Goldsmith

March 15, 2019January 6, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Soliloquy” by Kenneth Goldsmith

In this conceptual piece, Goldsmith represents every word he spoke for a week in an HTML version based on the 487-page book version. He makes elegant use of the CSS link tags to make every sentence invisible, appearing only when the pointer hovers over it, which reminds us of the ephemerality of the spoken word. Interestingly enough, this isn’t really a soliloquy: it is dialogue in which the other person’s speech has been omitted, so part of the pleasure of this text is to infer who the other people are and what they are saying.

“White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares” by Loss Pequeño Glazier

March 10, 2019January 5, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open: “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares” by Loss Pequeño Glazier

This long JavaScript poem by Glazier offers a sequence of stanzas that change every 10 seconds, disrupting the reading flow and thought process. This poem can be recombined for a total of 2.36 x 10²¹ (sextillion) distinct textual permutations of the poem, placing it in the tradition of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes and Jim Andrews’ Stir Fry Texts.

“Rice” by geniwate

March 10, 2019January 4, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Rice” by geniwate

This award winning group of sixteen poems about a trip to Vietnam are organized hypertextually as a cluster of images of little odds and ends: a candy wrapper, a ticket, photograph, and so on. Each image will lead you to poems, short Shockwave animations, visual poems, hypertexts, a set of images, all experiences that will lead you to reflect on the politics, poverty, and culture of Vietnam.

“Generative Poetry” by geniwate

September 18, 2018January 3, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Generative Poetry” by geniwate

These three works all use geniwate’s “concatenation engine,” a page architecture designed in Director and inspired by William Burrough’s cut-up. The first one, “Concatenation,” creates a responsive space of exploded letters which generate phrases when clicked upon by the reader following algorithms that randomize word selection and arrangement on the screen. “When You Reach Kyoto,” places the engine in collaboration with Brian Kim Stefans’ photography and text and was published as part of the Machine Poetics “page_space project.”