“Deal with it” is a meme based on a popular phrase or expression that uses image macros and/or animated GIFs as a snarky response when someone else notes disapproval, most frequently used online forums or social networks. This meme is characterized by an image of an iconic person, celebrity, or event, accompanied by the descending of sunglasses upon the subject’s face and revealing a caption which says “Deal with it.”
2006
“Code Movie 1” by Giselle Beiguelman, with music by Helga Stein
Code-Movies #1 is an e-poetry project developed by Brazilian researcher and multimedia artist Giselle Beiguelman. The project integrates a series titled / / ** Code-UP, developed from 2004. / / ** Code-UP is an project based on algorithmic manipulation of images captured with mobile phones. The source of the images of / / ** Code-UP are the frames of Blow-Up (1966), the first film in English from the Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni.
The choice of Blow-up by Bielguelman was no accident. The Antonioni´s film script is inspired by the story “Blow-up” (1959) written by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. In the tale, a photographer becomes obsessed with the probable circumstances surrounding a photograph that he makes of an unknown woman and a young boy in a Parisian park. Cortazar´s tale reveals the literary narrative through a photographic image viewer that offers its multiple layers of meaning of the object or scene depicted.
“Útero portanto Cosmos” (Uterus therefore Cosmos) by Agnus Valente and Nardo Germano
According to its author, Agnus Valente, “Uterus therefore Cosmos” is a kind of work in progress developed during the years 2003 to 2007. In this project, several e-poems created by Valente and his twin brother, Nardo Germano, explores the expressive and conceptual potential of the World Wide Web. “Uterus therefore Cosmos” brings together in one digital environment, works by visual artists, poets and musicians from different eras. Valente proposes a dialogue between his poems authored with his brother and the work of brazilian poets and visual artists.
“Every Word I Saved” series by Cristobal Mendoza
This series of installations are poetic visualizations of a personal database, consisting of every word written in the author’s computers for a four year period (2002-2006). The database contains metadata, such as time-stamps for each word, capitalization, and its source. This allowed Mendoza to create software installations that lead us to pay attention to the language in through various conceptual lenses.
“Every Word I saved” (pictured above) recontextualizes the language in the dataset by displaying it in alphabetical order as a stream of text flowing in the screen, suggesting a radically reorganized stream of consciousness. The words are stripped of all data, except for their capitalization, a minimal touch that provides significant variation from the steady stream of repetitions of the same words. The kinetic presentation of streaming text allows us to perceive these meaningful graphical cues as they crest like waves over the steady linearity of lower case letters.
“Svevedikt” by Ottar Ormstad
The title for this Norwegian scheduled visual poem aptly means “poetry floating in the air” and exemplifies why concrete poetry is such a wellspring of inspiration for e-poetry. Ormstad, a poet investigating verbivocovisual poetry since the 1960s, shows his visual and auditory acumen by arranging words and letters in time and space, using the constellation to guide a vocal reading performance of his poems. Gomringer’s notion of the constellation was well suited to the page, where the arrangement of words and letters could seem as random as stars, but offering enough visual cues to encourage readers to find patterns in the page, challenging traditional (left-to-right, top-to-bottom) reading practices. Ormstad uses the the time-based media of the digital computer to create scheduled constellations to shape performances of the poem.
“Slaaplied (Lullaby)” by Tonnus Oosterhoff
Open Link to English translation.
This delicately scheduled poem about the last thoughts of a person apparently in a medical or hospice care facility is presented over the course of Glenn Gould’s performance of Sinfonia No. 5 in E Flat Major, BVW 791 by J.S. Bach. The poem is presented in small portions— as lines, phrases, single words, or even syllables— patiently synchronized with musical phrases. Listen carefully as you read and you’ll notice how dialogue is given distinct voices as two musical phrases alternate. The person’s thoughts have both a poetic and musical personality, and alternates between flights of fancy (or dream) and a reality that may have led to the current near-death situation. The scheduled presentation of the poem also serves to offer a different line structure from what eventually accumulates on screen, including a phrase that changes, which provides readers with two texts. This powerfully moving work that requires undivided attention and sensory focus from the reader to fully appreciate its artistry.
Featured in ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature
“The Defacement of Desire” by Braxton Soderman and Roxanne Carter
This collaborative poem is designed as an installation at Brown University’s CAVE, a cube-shaped room equipped with projection in all six directions, surround sound, and multiple input devices, such as 3D goggles, gloves, and head tracking. Soderman and Carter use this last input significantly in this work as described in their artists’ statement:
Surrounded by four giant close-ups of cinematic starlets gazing down upon you, there is no choice but to look (or look away). Using the built-in “headtracking” feature of the Cave, a portion of the starlet’s face in your line of sight fades away, thus interrupting the (masculine) desire to possess through the gaze: you cannot help but see through what you desire to possess.
“Larvatus Prodeo” by Braxton Soderman and Roxanne Carter
This collaborative poem in three parts makes virtuoso use of the marquee tag, which along with the ever-annoying blink tag, has been disavowed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which imperils its existence in future browsers. Each of its parts uses this tag as a central device for shaping its text in a different way to play with Barthes’ notion of how the past is reduced and turned into “a slim and pure logos” through narrative as well as with Descartes’ use of the latin phrase larvatus prodeo (I come forth, masked).
“Going through the Signs” by Jody Zellen and Deena Larsen
This collaborative hypertext poem uses a “page space” designed by Zellen to create a sequence of pop-up windows that last 20 seconds before closing along with links that lead to new pop-up windows, simultaneously closing the previous one, and leading to a final page with three thin vertical frames. This produces a powerful sense of progression in which the reader must press on or have to start over while not providing any way to get back to an earlier page. Larsen uses this structure to build a trail of consciousness which includes the thoughts of a character seeking a path and sense of purpose in a world that seems to have the former, but not the latter.
“Noiselines” by Pedro Valdeomillos and Jason Nelson
This collaborative poem is composed on a “page space” created by Valdeomillos to explore the signal-to-noise-ratio by placing interface, image, and text in a relation by which they create noise for each other. When compared with his collaboration with Lluís Calvo who provided an image and a text that provided a coherent signal, once one had sorted through the noise, we can see Jason Nelson’s goals to be quite different in its strategies and goals.