jason nelson – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Wittenoom: speculative shell and the cancerous breeze” by Jason Nelson

April 21, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This award-winning responsive poem focuses on the Australian ghost town Wittenoom, abandoned due to toxic dust caused by asbestos mining. Each of its nine parts focuses on an aspect of the abandoned town and consists of an image from Wittenoom, generally portraying urban decay, an brief looping instrumental audio track, links to other parts of the poem, a title for the section, and a text accessible through different responsive interfaces. A brief parenthetical help text near the bottom left corner of each screen provides encouragement that hints at the interface, promting readers to explore the interactivity and intuit its internal logic. The thematic focus and consistent visual design pull the work together, while the varied interfaces lead to new explorations of the spaces, together producing an experience both jarring and immersive.

“Noiselines” by Pedro Valdeomillos and Jason Nelson

January 18, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This collaborative poem is composed on a “page space” created by Valdeomillos to explore the signal-to-noise-ratio by placing interface, image, and text in a relation by which they create noise for each other. When compared with his collaboration with Lluís Calvo who provided an image and a text that provided a coherent signal, once one had sorted through the noise, we can see Jason Nelson’s goals to be quite different in its strategies and goals.

“untitled(to reconstruct)” by Jason Nelson and Jody Zellen

January 15, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This collaborative poem places the same text Jody Zellen wrote for “Cut to the Flesh” into a page space designed by Jason Nelson (originally for “Branch/Branch” and “A Tree with Managers and Jittery Boats”). This tree structure is a fascinating way to organize lines of verse because it creates multiple possible readings as the reader opens up branches in the hierarchy. Its cascading effect is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ variable foot, richly analyzed by Eleanor Berry and many others as follows:

The variable foot has been taken as (1) a temporal unit, each step of a triadic line being equal in duration to every other (Donoghue, Weatherhead, Breslin); (2) a stress-based unit, each step of a triadic line containing a single major stress (Duncan, Hedges); (3) a syntactical unit, each step of a triadic line being a single complete phrase or clause (Solt, Hofstadter); (4) a unit of meaning or attention (Goodman, Hofstadter); (5) a unit of phrasing in reading, the triadic lineation constituting a score for performance (Wagner); and (6) a visual unit (Shapiro, Perloff, Sayre, Cushman).

Read more

“Clippings” by Jason Nelson and Pedro Valdeomillos

January 14, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This collaborative narrative was written by Valdeomillos on a page space developed by Jason Nelson for his poems “Dreamaphage” (the first version) and “Between Treacherous Objects.” This space creates spatial layers with an intuitive navigational interface that allows readers to pan, scan, and move back and forth through layers each of which reveals a portion of the narrative, which is structured by a conversation about memory, photography, past, present, and how much you might know someone that you love. The images, textual arrangements, and layers create clusters of spatially organized language that gesture towards poetry with its lines of verse and stanzas.

Take a look at Jason Nelson’s poems built from this engine and notice how their structure is so different from how Valdeomillos arranges his narrative in this piece, attesting to the versatility of Nelson’s page space.

“Gorgeous Oaks / GorOak” by Jason Nelson

October 19, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This poem’s title visually suggests a decayed sign that forms a new word from its remnants “GorOak,” echoing Tom Phillips’ title for A Humument. This is a key strategy for the poem, which sends a wandering eye through a dilapidated trailer park where empty spaces and gaps are as much a part of the text as what is overtly stated. The interface is an overhead map of a trailer park, with links mapped as hotspots that a reader can click on to bring up tercets which depict vignettes and images of life in this desolate place.

What is “Gorgeous Oaks?” Is it a new empty lot (freshly cleared of oaks, of course) brimming with potential? Is it a fully occupied trailer park that becomes a community? Is it the deteriorated, nearly empty space we find in this poem— “GorOak?” Nelson’s poem thrives in these interstices.

Featured in Cauldron & Net.

“Conversation” by Jason Nelson

April 24, 2019September 13, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Conversation” by Jason Nelson

This suite of three sound poems (or three-part poem) were inspired by Glenn Gould and his experiments with musique concrète (for a fun example, see this video). Nelson uses audio recordings of interviews on three topics— injuries, products, and robots— and places them on an interface that allows you to mix 8 clips at different volume levels and audio panning (sending signal to the left or right speakers). This can be used to listen to a single voice or place multiple voices in conversation, adjusting their virtual proximity (volume) and relative position in order to construct a sense of space in which people discuss a topic. Each interface is visually and thematically designed with a different background images, slider knobs, and an animated morphed image. The image above is from “Injury Analysis” and the following two are from “Product Sermon” and “Robot Party.”

“Wide and Wildly Branded” by Jason Nelson

July 2, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This hypertext poem is organized through lines of color arranged in a circle around a common center, designed to evoke a compass. Positioning the mouse over each color line reveals two lines of the poem, the one above labeled as “poetic” and the other as “subpoetic,” creating a contrast between something that corresponds to “northern” and “southern” (or sub-equatorial) poetic traditions. Jason Nelson born and raised in the Midwest of the United States, and working in Griffith University in Australia is a poet of two worlds: a northerner in the southern hemisphere, a place that he describes as “compass confused” because its aborigines are “pulled toward the center” while its European colonizers are “forever pointed north and west.”

Keeping these frames of reference in mind, think of the design of the “poetic” and the “subpoetic” in terms of outward or inward poetic traditions and Jason Nelson’s search for direction as he is lost among ever-multiplying creeks and trails, as seen in the video. Extending this hopelessly mixed metaphor (are you lost yet?): what is his north, and does he even want to go in that direction?

“Wide and Wildly Branded” por Jason Nelson

February 11, 2019July 2, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Este poema de hipertexto está organizado a través de líneas de color dispuestas en un círculo alrededor de un centro común, diseñado para evocar una brújula. Posicionar el pulsor sobre cada línea de color revela dos líneas del poema, la de arriba etiquetada como “poética” y la otra como “subpoética”, creando un contraste entre algo que corresponde a tradiciones poéticas “norte” y “sur” (o sub-ecuatorial). Jason Nelson nació y creció en el medio oeste de los Estados Unidos, y trabajando en la Universidad Griffith en Australia es un poeta de dos mundos: un norteño en el hemisferio sur, un lugar que él describe como “brújula confundida” porque sus aborígenes son “tirados hacia el centro” mientras sus colonizadores europeos están “apuntando siempre hacia el norte y hacia el oeste.”

Teniendo estos marcos de referencia en mente, piense en el diseño de lo “poético” y lo “subpoético” en términos de tradiciones poéticas externas o internas y la búsqueda de dirección de Jason Nelson, ya que se pierde entre arroyos y senderos que se multiplican, como se ve en el video. Extendiendo esta metáfora desesperadamente mezclada (¿ya has perdido?): ¿Cuál es su norte, e incluso quiere ir en esa dirección?

Traducido por Reina Santiago

“Between Treacherous Objects” by Jason Nelson

July 1, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This sequence of poems arranged on three dimensional environments explore conceptual spaces between words. Each poem begins with a sequence of two words which are then represented pictorially on a virtual space, one in the front and another at the end of an open 3D tunnel, similar to the first version of Dreamaphage. As the reader navigates the diverse, visually engaging, and occasionally dizzying environments she encounters poetic texts, e-mail addresses, and passwords that provide access to short videos.

If you feel a bit lost in these spaces, remember the words at the beginning of each section: they are your cardinal points and won’t betray you. And if they do, wasn’t this foreshadowed by the title?

“Uncontrollable Semantics” by Jason Nelson

June 30, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This minimalist poem hovers right on the edge of being an art piece, because each of its 50 environments offers a different mouse-driven (aimed?) interface and music. The four words positioned on the screen’s cardinal points create a space amid them that is both conceptual and a canvas. What is the relation between words positioned in opposite spaces? How do they relate to the title to each section? How do the sound and animation relate to the words and title? Clicking on the words lead to another node in this wondrously strange hypertext… This intriguing art poem is highly entertaining, as long as you can abandon thoughts of meaning and simply enjoy playing with the piece.