java – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Ceci n’est pas un Nike” by Giselle Beiguelman

October 30, 2013 by Luís Claudio Fajardo

bieguelman_1 — “Ceci n’est pas un Nike” by Giselle Beiguelman

“Ceci n’est pas un nike” (This is not a Nike) (2002) is a web interactive project created by Brazilian multimedia artist Giselle Beiguelman. The project proposes a pun inspired by the enigmatic phrase “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) inscribed in the painting, “La trahison des images” (The Treachery of Images) created by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte in 1929. This Magritte painting is notorius to cause the viewer a weird dissociation, because it proposes a breakdown of meaning between text and image despite the obvious relationship between them.

“Ceci n’est pas un nike” allows the interactor two basic interaction forms: visual and textual. Through visual interaction is possible distort, in many ways, the image of a tennis shoe. The distortion effects is implemented through a Java application developed by Alex Rosen and renamed e-nike generator by Giselle Bielguelman. The interactor can save the result in a gallery of samples After making his intervention at the picture, and exhibit his work alongside interventions of digital poets as Komninos Zervos and Jim Andrews. The second interaction form is a textual experience that allows the interactor to edit new text on the original text of the author, adding their reflections the project.

One of the most eloquent expressive forms of poetry in digital media is inscribed in territory between the image and the written word. For centuries, the text was directly linked to speech and image associated with the representation, though poets like Mallarme and Apollinaire and other artists such as Magritte and following Cy Twonbly and Jean-Michel Basquiat challenge these limits.

Giselle Beiguelman invites the interactor to reflect about the word / image classical dichotomy through an ironic and provocative approach. In digital media, languages interacts one with each other. Texts transformed into images and vice versa. Words move from side to side of the screen. Objectivity becomes ambiguity. Poems are language distortions and new contexts created by semantic and syntactic provocations. By providing means to manipulate, distort and break the image of this capitalist icon Beiguelman offers to his interactor, the possibility to create new contexts from the forge of visual discourses.

Undoubtedly, Giselle Beiguelman’s “Ceci n’est pas un Nike” reveals to the interactor a new way to see and read the digital poem.

“Pentimiento” by Jerome Fletcher

November 28, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This narrative poem is a fascinating type of hypertext because instead of having five primary nodes from which to follow linear threads it uses a layering interface for navigation. The reader, instead of clicking on links, scrapes away at images to reveal an image beneath, and can continue to scrape away until she reaches the end of that narrative thread. This allows readers to reveal more than one layer at a time, as pictured above in a screenshot of three layers in the introduction.

“Web Warp & Weft” by Helen Whitehead

November 9, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This is a lovingly researched homage to the Luddites, a group of artisanal English textile workers who fought back against the industrialization of their craft. A substantial hypertext poem, it is woven from documentary information on the Luddites, excerpts from their writings and stories, HTML, Java applets, JavaScript, history, myth, and Whitehead’s vision to lend it coherence. There is so much to learn, discover, enjoy in this piece and several ways to explore it in a carefully crafted interface.

“GIF Poems” by Komninos Zervos

October 22, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This selection of six poems built with a type of composite image known as animated GIFs used to create the earliest animations in the Web. In Zervos’ experienced hands (see his “Dimocopo” suite), this simple technology can be very expressive indeed, as can be seen in “Divorce” a kinetic concrete poem that uses moving typography to highlight some of the finer points in a divorce process.

“Four Letter Words” by David Knoebel

February 7, 2019October 9, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Four Letter Words” by David Knoebel

This combinatorial poem uses random words arranged on a grid changing in seemingly random at different time intervals. The word in the center of the grid distinguishes itself, not only by position, but by its slight overlap with the word that is to replace it. This film technique known as a dissolve adds a layer of depth to the transition by having a 10th word juxtaposed (superposed, really) and by visually representing the time-based mechanism in the poem. The title plays with a double meaning: words that are culturally considered obscene or insulting, and with a constraint of using words with only four letters (see this Scrabble dictionary). Knoebel seems to be foregrounding the latter, thought initially the title points towards the former meaning.

“Five by Five” by Dan Waber and Jason Pimble

June 22, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This series of spatially combinatorial poems are built by arranging words on a five by five three-dimensional grid, using the same engine as in “I, You, We.” Readers can manipulate the object in several ways, zooming in and out and rotating the cube to allow certain phrases to come to the foreground and be read. There is always a word around which the rest of the cube rotates, giving it special meaning within the potential phrases the cube can produce.

“Afeeld” by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz

May 30, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Afeeld is a collection of playable intermedia and concrete art compositions that exist in the space between poetry and videogames.

One cannot do better in defining this collection of whimsically hip works by Liszkiewicz, a 2011 graduate of the M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from SUNY Buffalo (home to the Electronic Poetry Center). I will briefly comment on its different parts, each of which has its own look and feeld:

“Alphabet Man” is a sequence of 12 images built from letters of the alphabet, featuring the adventures of the iconic Alphabet Man as he explores the materials of writing (letters) in order to create new structures, some of which could be considered words.
“Feeldwork” presents the reader with 6 visual fields composed of letters, words, and characters, which respond to mouseovers and clicks to produce new words and meanings.
“Count as One” is a fascinating set of 15 drawing/writing tools, which invite the reader to click on the screen multiple times to create a work of letter art which the reader can save. The most interesting aspect about this work is the insight it provides on the psychogeography of the screen, shaping our interaction as a kind of dérive. Do several (or all) the pieces and think about how the graphical information he provides on each piece shapes where you click on the screen.
In “Concrete Games,” Liszkiewicz continues to transform our awareness of our screen interaction by using the visual structure and game dynamics of two videogames, Minesweeper and Asteroids, to guide us towards different types of artistic composition and play.
The provocatively titled work “This is Visual Poetry” makes very little use of language and doesn’t look like what most people would define as poetry because it is the result of “glitches created and controlled with computer game software.” You be the judge…
“Coda: I/O” presents the output of some of the above mentioned works, and are the result of an interaction and process rather than the process itself.

These works sit right in the middle of graphic art, poetics, and ludology and invite us to come and play.

Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show, & Avenues of Access

“Automatype” by Daniel C. Howe

May 24, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This is a fascinating poetic use of RiTa, a “software toolkit for generative literature” developed by Daniel C. Howe. The randomly selected words arranged on a 3×3 grid are transformed into other words over time by adding, subtracting, or substituting one letter at a time. Sometimes the path to a new word is through nonsense words, and these are part of the pleasure of this work. The abstracted typewriter sounds punctuate every letter substitution, and reaching a new word is rewarded by a “ding” sound and flashing brown highlight of the square in the grid where the newly completed word is. The cumulative effect is hypnotic, as one sees where the flashing cursor moves to, what words are created, and the entire piece transforms itself from where it began.

“Java Poems” by Komninos Zervos

April 14, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This trio of early e-poems were written in HTML and use Java applets to shape their linguistic texts with a careful touch. “Infinity” and “Internet Junkie” both change the color of the text over a schedule to shape readings and to imbue them with a nervous energy. In “Infinity” (displayed above) the rarely used <blink> tag reinforces the instability of textual meaning as the phrases can be read with and without the three blinking words, “reality,” “literary,” and “Why?” In “Internet Junkie” the increased rate of color change from one stanza to the next mimics the increasing urgency of the addict’s need. The final poem in the piece uses the “NervousText” applet by Daniel Wyszynski to animate its words, “KOMNINOS is a poet,” which can be soothed into static stability with a mouse click.

The spastic energy of these poems gesture towards the Post-structuralist destabilization of meaning, authorship, and the text itself.

“A Fine View” by David Knoebel

March 10, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

“A Fine View” by David Knoebel

Part of the “Words in Space” series, this deceptively simple poem uses VRML to provide us with a first person point of view of this poem. After the initial click that sets this piece in motion, the lack of control as we fall past the lines, reading them as we go at an accelerating pace, helps us identify with Bill, a roofer “who lost / his footing in the dew / slick plywood.” In this virtual environment, the letters, words and lines gain an architectural physicality that reinforces the poem’s setting. Soft music in the background of this poem sets a sad tone for a situation full of gravitas.