Vispo.com – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Blue Hyacinth” by Pauline Masurel and Jim Andrews

July 18, 2014 by Kyle Brett

Screen capture of Blue Hyacinth: M M M M Blue Hyacinth Pauline Masurel Jim Andrews V I S P O Stir Frys Tabitha flexes against the collar . I try to sound as though I know what I'm talking about. in the alleyway. I just like the look of the grey mare; the bookie can tell, it was probably obvious from the moment I walked in. the hyacinth itself or secreted When it happens the noise insists before, ...it goes on for months another in the corner is smoking. She's watching the race . Rather, it's a subtle matter of class, . when she can't gain entry, Across the road clubbers spill out on to the pavements - he comes. he goes. she waits for weeks. after all. she picks her way back across the landing - Do you want this, I could report it slowly, sadly who would care? and begins to stroke it through the sticky tangle of her hair. — Open “Blue Hyacinth” by Pauline Masurel and Jim Andrews

Slightly modifying the “cut-up” technique of Dadaist and Modernist writers in her digital work, “Blue Hyacinth,” Pauline Masurel encourages her readers not to destroy the original four poems, but rather jumble them together, stir them up, and weave them in a way that shares in the creative process of generating an individualized text. By presenting “Blue Hyacinth” as a stir-fry work (using Jim Andrews’ “Stir Fry Texts” framework) that allows readers to reflect on the original poems, Masurel is changing the author-reader relationship. Masurel ensures that readers become extensions of herself by encouraging readers to manipulate her writings and fashion a text that becomes less a traditional example of poetry and more a collaborative piece shared between individual reader and writer. With “Blue Hyacinth,” Masurel crafts a space where traditional print culture roles fade and are replaced by their mutable digital counterparts. Never once just a reader or an author, those that encounter “Blue Hyacinth” are able to exercise a semblance of autonomy that is novel to texts within the digital medium.

“Rude Little Song” by Jim Andrews

February 7, 2019October 21, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Rude Little Song” by Jim Andrews

This aural piece is a kind of Lettrist sound poem, because it uses verbal language in sub-morphemic units (with thanks to Melissa Lucas for the term). In other words, the poem is concerned with putting together snippets of vocalized language sounds that don’t carry semantic meaning, all performed a capella, recorded, edited, and spatially arranged by Jim Andrews. The visual composition is as non-referential as the sounds, activated by moving the pointer over the pulsating colored squares.

This rough (“rude”) little gem is Andrews first audio piece produced with Macromedia Director— an important exploration with a digital tool that allowed him to produce works like “Enigma n2,” “Oppen Do Down,” “Nio,” and “Jig-Sound” before Adobe bought out Macromedia and changed the audio engine for Director. For a detailed account of these audio works, read “Visual Music” (pgs. 207-244) in my dissertation, Typing the Dancing Signifier: Jim Andrews’ (Vis)Poetics.

Featured in Cauldron & Net.

“Aleph Null” by Jim Andrews

April 5, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Aleph Null (2011) marks Jim Andrews’ return to open source work since he shifted to Macromedia (now Adobe) Director in 2000. His earliest works were written in DHTML between 1997-2000, a highly creative period in which he found his “voice” as a poet and programmer of electronic literature with works like “Seattle Drift” and the “Stir Fry Texts.” The limitations of DHTML at the time prompted his move to Director, which allowed him to develop highly musical and visual pieces, such as “Nio,” “Arteroids,” and “Jig Sound.”

“Arteroids” by Jim Andrews

April 4, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This work combines poetry with one of the oldest native genres in digital media: the videogame. Based on the 1979 Atari arcade game Asteroids (which in turn references the 1962 ur-videogame Spacewar!), Arteroids replaces the ship and asteroids for words and phrases. The game begins easily enough, because the words move slowly on the screen, but as you advance in levels the game becomes incrementally faster and more challenging, until you reach the point in which you can barely read the texts because you’re focused on survival.

“A Pen” by Jim Andrews

April 3, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

“A Pen” is an exploration of text as a tool for writing, rather than as the result of writing. It is about the interpenetration of code and language in programmable media to imbue letters and words with behaviors, allowing the poem to emerge from their play. It is about creating tools for the readers to become involved in the process of shaping the poems that arise from these processes. Last but not least, it is a further development in Jim Andrews’ lifelong exploration of the visual characteristics of written language, and the capabilities of computers to both render it and reinvent statuesque letters as dancing signifiers that respond to input from the reader.

Quoted from “The Electric Pen” in my dissertation (pgs. 137-157).

“Enigma n2” by Jim Andrews

April 2, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

In this poem, Andrews returns to the question of what is the meaning of language in digital media (as he posed in “Enigma n” 4 years earlier), this time drawing attention to the materiality of its sound rather than its visual information. When played continuously from start to finish we can hear a slightly manipulated recording of Andrews’ voice saying “meaning” three times with different tone and enunciation. The visual information in this poem is the audio waveform for the recording- an important interface to manipulate audio files in audio editing software, such as Audacity (free, open-source, cross-platform software— I recommend it). The neat thing about this poem is that it randomly selects a starting point in the waveform and a width for a selection area, automatically playing that loop a random number of times before jumping to a new random location and width (or shall I say duration?). The reader can select where to go, but not the other variables, drawing attention to words, letters, spaces between words, and even phonemes. Is there meaning in sub-phonemic pieces?

“Jig-Sound” by Jim Andrews

April 1, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This piece presents an intriguing case of problems that can arise with proprietary authoring tools. In 2007, Andrews started to develop “Jig-Sound,” a work that expanded upon his exploration of interactive audio. Andrews started this in 2000 with works like “Rude Little Song,” “Oppen Do Down,” and “Nio” all of which used snippets of looped audio recordings of his singing voice (Andrews was once in a band and an acapella group). Each piece offers interfaces that allowed for stacking or sequencing each audiovisual elements, and “Jig-Sound” offered the most sophisticated tools of them all, that is, until the release of Adobe Director 11 in 2008.

“Oppen Do Down” by Jim Andrews

March 31, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

In the year 2000, Jim Andrews went through a significant retooling by shifting to Macromedia Director— an authoring tool that publishes content to the Web in Shockwave format, still easily accessible through its browser plugin. One of the benefits of Director was that it gave him a powerful set of tools to work with audio, allowing him to return to an early passion for radio and audio that led him to become a poet who engages media.

“Seattle Drift” by Jim Andrews

March 30, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This is the first poem I read by Jim Andrews and it is still a favorite because of its elegance, economy, and naughtiness. It is also Andrews’ first DHTML poem, written in the early days of the Web (1997), and marking a shift in his practice from visual poetry to a poetry in which he yields some of his control over the text to his readers. This poem, along with “Enigma n” and the “Stir Fry Texts” punctuate a vibrant period in his development as a Web artist in which he started to imbue his texts with behavior: responsiveness to carefully defined user input, motion triggered and controlled by interactivity, controlled randomness, and looped or open ended scheduling of the experience.

“Enigma n” by Jim Andrews

March 29, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This minimalist poem from the early days of the Web has received abundant critical attention over the years, and was recently included in an important Electronic Literature Exhibition at the MLA 2012 Convention. Part of the reason for the longevity of this work is how it presents the reader with layers of textual behavior that she can activate and play with as it unfolds. Starting with the word “meaning” and a few textually described tools for the reader, this “philosophical poetry toy” (check out the source code) encourages play with the letters of the word, leading to the question of what is the meaning of language under the conditions Andrews has created for it? Is it an enigma?