“Dibagan” by Brian Kim Stefans and Geniwate

Screen capture from “Dibagan” by Brian Kim Stefans and Geniwate. Extremely low resolution photograph of military ground forces in a warzone. Prominent blood splatter dominates left side of screen. Scattered words camoflage with the background. Text: "fisheye, consuming, history, knowledge, through, in the is, now, death, blood, confusion, forever, television, stumbling"
Open “Dibagan” by Brian Kim Stefans and Geniwate

In this collaborative poem Geniwate takes a relatively simple interface and page space designed by Stefans and makes it powerfully political. The audio recording of a reporter telling the story of surviving an RPG attack in Iraq, along with a photograph with a large drop of blood on the lens, make for a chilling backdrop for the poem. With this frame of reference set, the poem is presented as a stack of words at the base of five columns, which the reader can position by placing the mouse on the base of a column until it reaches the desired height on the screen. It takes some time to place and read the words on each column (which are readable both vertically and horizontally), which allows the looping audio clip and changing hues on the image clip to sink in for a visceral experience.

“When You Reach Kyoto” by Brian Kim Stefans and Geniwate

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Open: “When You Reach Kyoto” by Brian Kim Stefans and Geniwate

This collaborative work is built using Geniwate’s (Australian writer Jenny Weight’s nom d’ordinateur) “concatenation engine” and Stephans’ images and text. This “page space” is a computational upgrade to the cut-up, because in addition to randomly joining lines of verse, it cuts them further and places them in different positions of the page, creating multiple lines and readings of the same text. The gorgeous oversaturated images of urban and natural landscapes serve as a backdrop for an explosion of letters in different font sizes and lines of free verse, all of which serve as links to the next piece of the concatenation. The sound clips are nowhere nearly as pleasant as Brian Eno’s “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” which has a line that inspired the title of this poem, and perhaps some of its postcard-like visual design and conceptual language choices, such as the frequent use of “you,” “she,” and references to writing.

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“The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans

“The Dreamlife of Letters” por Brian Kim Stefans

Screen shot from “The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans. Orange background with black text. The letters “de” are placed in the middle of the screen with ends of a word around it. For example, on top of “de” there are the words “lite”, putting these words together would spell “delite”. Text (without including the letters d and e in front of them): “lite, ntist, lft, light, licious”.
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“Star Wars, one letter at a time” by Brian Kim Stefans

Screen shot from “Star Wars, one letter at a time” by Brian Kim Stefans. White background with a letter “m” in black.

“Generative Poetry” by geniwate

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Open “Generative Poetry” by geniwate