“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.”
2007
“Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney” by Shu Takumi
A thrilling courtroom drama delivered through a medium which blurs the line between visual and textual narratives, Ace Attorney, whose first release in 2001 proved unexpectedly popular in the West, can be counted among the works most responsible for bringing the visual novel paradigm to the mainstream. It, along with selected others which can be strictly categorized as true “visual novels”, such as:
…are most easily described as text-based adventure games which require minimal player input, since visual novels are formally labelled as ‘computer games’ by society at large. In practice, however, they are essentially a novel-length narrative retold through text and animation.
“Vocaloid” by Yamaha Corporation
Vocaloid is software that uses voice libraries built from the recorded and modified voices of human singers to allow users to possess their very own artificial singer. This software has created a great amount of possibilities and has had a significantsocial impact in many regions, especially in Japan. This entry will concentrate on explaining the authoring software and its e-poetic potential.
“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.
Read more“Útero portanto Cosmos” (Uterus therefore Cosmos) by Agnus Valente and Nardo Germano
“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.
“The River Dart” & “Babble Brook” by J.R. Carpenter
This poetic performance on Twitter is a series of observations focused on the Dart river and its environs in Devon, England. The earliest tweets on this account, which started on November 19, 2009, focused on the practicalities of walking along the river, and rapidly settled into a language based study of the river and its environs. The tweets exhibit a curious mixture of subjective and objective perceptions, writing from a very personal perspective without falling into Romanticism. It is more like Olson’s dictum that “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION,” but captured and delivered over time via Twitter.
Read more“The River Dart” & “Babble Brook” by J.R. Carpenter
“The Good Captain” by Jay Bushman
This work adapts Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno in two significant ways: by making it a work of science fiction and by publishing it serially through Twitter. By mapping the structure of Melville’s novella of a slave rebellion on a ship at sea onto a spaceship with robots allows Bushman to explore similar issues with a different metaphor. Using Twitter as a writing constraint (with a 140-character limit per tweet) shapes the telling of the story and makes its prose closer to poetry.
Its publication on Twitter— originally from November 3, 2007 to February 29, 2008 and rebroadcasted in 2012— makes for a 4-month reading experience which magnifies its multiple voices, perspectives, and reconstruction of uncertain events.
“To Be or Not to Be Mouchette” by Martine Neddam
This work combines selections from entries by people who participated in Neddam’s interactive Mouchette website and places them in conversation by assigning them to moveable avatars and scheduling their presentation. Neddam’s character and online persona, Mouchette, is inspired by the protagonist of a 1967 Bresson film of the same name, in which a much-abused teenage girl resorts to suicide at the end of the film. The site’s aesthetics, theme, and protection of anonymity have inspired many people to open up and discuss their suicidal tendencies, experiences, and offer advice, forming a support community that may have saved many lives and spared others from unnecessary suffering.
“A Dialogue Between Two Eyeballs” by Braxton Soderman
This kinetic poem is takes the ancient rhetorical and poetic device of the dialogue to investigate the virtual, conceptual, and perceptual spaces of programmable media. Inspired by theoretical writings by John Cayley and Jean-François Lyotard, this poem explores binaries between past and present, old and new, letter and word, simple and complex writing surfaces, and the right and left eye— each of which has a distinct voice and perspective on the topic.
Read more“A Dialogue Between Two Eyeballs” by Braxton Soderman
“Cloud #1” by Braxton Soderman
This mutable poem explores a simple concept, word substitution, using sophisticated tools. The data set is WordNet, which clusters words conceptually so substitutions are governed by synonymy, metonymy, and semantics which should allow the prose poem to retain some coherence. But does it? Here’s the poem after running for minute or so: 