simon biggs – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Biggz” by Loss Pequeño Glazier and Simon Biggs

This generative poem is built from four elements: an image, a caption, lines of verse by Simon Biggs, and a JavaScript framework Glazier developed for “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares.” The poem and its contextual information are randomly generated whenever the page is loaded, reloaded, or every 20 seconds— which makes a marked difference in how one reads and conceptualizes the poem when compared to “White-Faced Bromeliads,” which refreshes every 10 seconds. Biggs’ lines of verse are perfectly grammatical, but unconventional in its logical formulations in the tradition of Language Poetry or Gertrude Stein, which makes them stand up well to the page’s generative engine.

Screen capture of “non-LOSS’y translator” by Simon Biggs and Loss Pequeño Glazier. Black background with binary code in green. Text in different colors on top. Four big, purple circles and two small ones. — Open “non-LOSS’y translator” by Simon Biggs and Loss Pequeño Glazier

This authoring software was created by Simon Biggs as part of the Page Space Project, a collaborative experiment in which e-lit writers would create a page structure for another to write in and produce a work of electronic literature. Biggs created this structure to encode the characters typed by into “a number of different languages, including English, Greek symbols, the decimal ASCII codes that map keyboard keys to typography, the binary codes that equate to these, Morse Code and Braille.” This odd word processor also resizes the characters as you type to fit the entire text on the screen space, doing so until it reaches illegibility.