ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature

“To Be or Not to Be Mouchette” by Martine Neddam

February 11, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

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.

“sob o signo da devoração (PoemAds)” by Rui Torres

February 10, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This generative poem attacks marketing on several levels: the generative poem in the center of the page does so thematically, the banners that surround it conform to standards for Web advertising banners, and Portuguese commercial slogans are cut up and remixed to expose their underlying messages.

“Noise” by Gerald Smith

February 8, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This scheduled concrete poem presents us with a grid of 1s and 0s— five rows of 10 numbers, which could be interpreted as a 10-bit binary code but what that decodes to is uncertain. I attempted to decode this into ASCII or Unicode and was unable to find anything verbal about it, which suggests that this is not a signal representing something else, but a message in and of itself. Smith’s statement for this piece (linked to above) in the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature reinforces the idea that this isn’t really a signal meant to be read by a machine, which is why it is written in Times New Roman— a font that isn’t considered machine readable, for OCR purposes. We can only conclude that this piece is meant to be read by humans, but if so, what is its message?

“Tramway” by Alexandra Saemmer

February 7, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This multimedia hypertext poem written in French is designed around a painful personal memory— the gesture of closing her deceased father’s eyes, which proved to be quite different from what is depicted in innumerable Hollywood films. The emotional impact of this moment is burned into the speaker’s memory (a representation of the poet herself) and is represented by several mechanisms in the poem.

“REPEATAFTERME” by Jörg Piringer

March 18, 2019February 6, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Open “REPEATAFTERME” by Jörg Piringer

This is a poem without a text. What Piringer has created is a responsive environment for readers to type their own texts and experience them transformed visually and aurally by the mechanisms he has programmed. As you type each letter, you will be presented with the letter surrounded by an artistic arrangement composed from the letter and a recording of Piringer articulating a sound, which in most cases corresponds with the sound one would associate with that letter.

“Svevedikt” by Ottar Ormstad

February 5, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

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

February 4, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

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

“La Resocialista Internacional” by Andreas María Jacobs

February 2, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

As you explore and read this disorienting work, consider how the use of links, mouseovers, animated GIFs, and multiple languages challenge expectations. Take pleasure in its headlines, juxtapositions, and the brief scheduled displays of even more visually charged images of language. Is the persistent background image of a cassette tape meant to be personified? Is this what happens when media stops being the passive recipient of our gaze and starts staring back?

“Väljarna” (“Elect”) by Johannes Heldén

January 31, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This responsive poem takes the concept of the cut-up and places it in a hauntingly beautiful interface. Based on an image of a wintry Swedish landscape populated by a single evergreen tree and blackbirds against a misty gray sky, this environment is filled with visible and invisible input cues for readers to click on and reveal the texts. The visible cues are the birds, which bring forth the poem suspended in the sky into readability, one bird and line at a time. The sky itself is a grid of hotspots that when clicked reveal a portion of a narrative prose poem in the black background of the earth. The sounds and understated movements of the mist, tree, and birds create a disquieting mood that suits the situation described in the text, one that is full of darkness, implications of violence, and a mystery that encourages readers to explore every surface in this work to get as much information as possible.

Is this poem haunted by a similar zeitgeist as affected Robert Creeley? Or Wallace Stevens?

Featured in ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature

“Retournement” by Philippe Bootz

January 30, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This kinetic poem is documented as a video recording of its performance, which would require emulation to run correctly on contemporary computers, now 20 years removed from its original computational environments. Its aesthetics are fitting with other works produced by the French digital poetry group L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture) in the late 1980s and pre-WWW years. The poem’s simple design and use of graphical elements shouldn’t be confused with simplicity of expression. Au contraire, its minimalist use of animation, changing color, and scheduled textual delivery are used as writing.

The title itself is an indicator of the poem’s strategies, as it takes a phrase, inverts its syntax to form another, transforming its textual and graphic elements more than once to write more lines over time than the sum total of written lines. Keeping this in mind, use the subtitles as a source of translation of its words, but not necessarily as an accurate depiction of what can be read at a given moment.

Featured in ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.