2011 – Page 2 – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Occupy MLA” by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig

March 27, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Occupy MLA is back!

Open “Occupy MLA” by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig

But don’t be alarmed just yet, since this resurgence of the controversial netprov, takes the shape of a published archive (linked to in this entry’s title). This documentation is exemplary, including a 3-minute introductory video, a link to an artists’ statement at The Chronicle of Higher Education (with a fascinating comment thread), an indexed and color-coded archive of the tweets, and an Excel file with the raw data from the four Twitter accounts that form the heart of this work. With this resource, you can read most of this timely performance that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, satire and activism, and virtual and embodied spaces.

“Justin Buber,” “Kantye West,” and “Kim Kierkegaardashian”

February 25, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Justin Buber,” “Kantye West,” “Kim Kierkegaardashian”

These three anonymous Twitter accounts (@Justin_Buber, @KantyeW, and @KimKierkegaard, respectively) all find poetry in remixing the purest expression of high culture, philosophy, with perhaps the lowest expression of popular culture: the pop celebrity tweet.

“@Postmeaning” by David Knoebel (part 2 of 2)

February 23, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Note: This is the second in a series of 2 postings on “Postmeaning.” Here’s a link to the first entry.

…stmeaning” also via Twitter, starting on June 11, 2011, providing a snippet of the 100 word text and a link to the note or audio file in the Facebook page. An interesting detail about the Twitter via Facebook publication is that it cuts the 100-word posting down to a aize Twitter could manage, including making room for the shortened link and ellipsis. This creates a secondary cut, one that isn’t designed by Knoebel, which potentially creates a new textual iteration which could be interpreted differently from the original. Perhaps this accounts for the shift to shorter entries on July 21, which creates a direct concordance between the Facebook and Twitter texts, while at the same time allowing them to develop different audiences by eliminating the link to the Facebook Page.

“@Postmeaning” by David Knoebel (part 1 of 2)

February 22, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

ose poem is published serially through a Facebook page which gathers all of its postings in its timeline since it began on February 27, 2011. The writing is surreal at times, mixing topics and language in ways that are grammatical but obeying an almost dreamlike logic, like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Since its launching, every single one of its daily (or almost-daily) postings begins an ends with an incomplete sentence and even word, evoking a sense that it is part of a larger thought or text, yet there is no grammatical connection between any entry and the ones before or after.

“217 Views of the Tokaido Line” by Will Luers

February 21, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This mesmerizing work of observational poetry juxtaposes a generative haiku with a split-screen 6 minute looping video composed of short clips captured along the Tokaido line. Luers’ statement explains the concept in detail in the “About” page.

With our small cameras, smartphones and apps we document our travels. We capture and collect “haiku” moments, tokens of time and space, just as we always have, whether with pen and paper or the bulky camcorder. But with digital technology, we now store these moments as files in searchable databases. How do we use them? Do we try to find the narratives in the fragments or hunt for the suprising incongruities? Perhaps we only care about the isolated moment,the singular shot or sequence, which we “share” as soon as it has rendered. However we narrate experience, our devices and their databases remind us that there are always moments lost in any narrative retelling, always a different path through the data.

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“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?

“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.

“BA-Tale” by Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák

February 1, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This poem invents an origin myth for Bratislava (abbreviated BA, hence the title in English), cuts it up and scatters it like seeds into an interface designed to respond to reader interactions. The scattered words are gently drawn to the pointer until a word falls under it, which triggers the whole dispersed line to swiftly arrange itself, brightening into legibility on the canvas, and then dispersing and fading when released. This allows for an exploratory kind of reading, taking in a snippet at a time, as if one is hearing bits and pieces of the story as one travels in Bratislava.

“Google Earth: A Poem for Voice and Internet” by Manuel Portela

January 9, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

: Open “Google Earth: A Poem for Voice and Internet” by Manuel Portela

This highly professional video documents a live performance of this poem, which uses primarily three materials: speeches by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Google Earth. These works are brought together in a political and economic mashup that incorporates texts read aloud by Portela in English and translated to Spanish and Portugese, voice recordings of the speeches, and a large projected video of Google Earth navigating to parts of the world that resonate with the poem. Portela intervenes upon these materials in a variety of ways, defamiliarizing them towards the poetic, emphasizing particular words or passages by isolating and repeating them, and placing them in conversation with its other materials through juxtaposition and superposition.