Leonardo Flores

Dr. Leonardo Flores is an Interim Director and Full Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus and Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry and co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3. For more information on his current work, visit http://leonardoflores.net.

“The Set of U” by Philippe Bootz and Marcel Frémiot

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Screen capture from "The Set of U" by Philippe Bootz and Marcel Frémiot. Blue background with a black rectangle with text written in it. Text: "le"

Open “The Set of U” by Philippe Bootz and Marcel Frémiot

This excerpt from Passage, an ambitious work by two e-poetry pioneers, is both theoretically interesting and aesthetically pleasing. As a generated text designed to never be displayed the same way, it cannot be reread the way one can do so with a printed text. At the same time, one can only intuit the logic of its mutability by rereading it with an eye for its variations. And because it is programmed in Director and published as a Shockwave file, we have no access to its source code.

No worries, though: its animation, music, and language combinations are delicately nuanced and intellectually stimulating. There is much pleasure to be found in its variations.

Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. 

ELMCIP logo with text: “Read more about this work at ELMCIP.”

“Urbanalities” by Babel vs. Escha

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Open: “Urbanalities” by Babel vs. Escha

This “short story-poem-comic strip-musical” by Chris Joseph and María Colino consists of 10 highly stylized Flash pieces in the Dada and Constructivist traditions. Two particularly arresting poems are “River” and “Sex/Conception” (see images above) because of how they use their images and randomly generated texts.

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“Cruising” by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar

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Open “Cruising” by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar

The simple yet unexplained interface for this sexy Flash poem is a metaphor for the subject of the poem—kids who barely know how to drive (or interact romantically) cruising in a small town in Wisconsin— because the reader is also a novice on how to read and navigate this poem.

The guitar music and clear voice delivering the aural version of the poem, presented simultaneously with the visual text the reader must learn to traverse in order to read, and the pictures of cars, streets, and neon signs combine well to deliver an immersive, and very hip, experience.

Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, Poems That GO.

“Stir Fry Texts” by Jim Andrews

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Open “Stir Fry Texts” by Jim Andrews

With this series of collaborative e-poems, Andrews uses the cut up, an important technique in his poetics that aligns him with the work of William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Raymond Queneau, and Surrealism. His ingredients include e-mails, quotes, concrete poetry, and essay like writing, lovingly sliced with DHTML programming tools. Jim Andrews and his collaborators prep the texts for stir frying, cutting and linking where they see fit. The computer provides the energy to run the scripts and heat up the surface on which the texts are displayed. The reader’s hand, by way of the mouse and its virtual pointer on the screen’s surface, stirs the texts, cooking them up into new combinations and possibilities for his/her consumption.

For more on the Stir Fry Texts and a close reading of “Spastext” read “Cut Up, Heat, Stir” in my dissertation (pgs. 184-205).

Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. 

“Stir Fry Texts” de Jim Andrews

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Con esta serie colaborativa de poemas electrónicos, Andrews utiliza el corte hacia arriba, una técnica importante en su arte poética que posiciona a la par con las obras de William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Raymond Queneau y el surrealismo. Sus ingredientes incluyen correos electrónicos, citas, poesías concretas y ensayos tanto como la escritura, cortadas amorosamente con herramientas de programación DHTML. Jim Andrews y sus colaboradores preparan los textos para freír, cortando y vinculando partes del texto donde más apropiadamente les parezca. La computadora provee la energía para ejecutar los guiones y calentar la superficie donde se muestran los textos. La mano de el lector, a través de el ratón y su puntero virtual sobre la superficie de la pantalla, mueve los textos, confeccionando nuevas combinaciones y posibilidades para el consumo de los lectores.

Para más información sobre el Stir Fry Text y una lectura más profunda sobre “Spastext”, lea “Cut Up, Heat, Stir” en mi tesis (pgs. 184-205).

Exhibido en The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.

Traducido por Julianna Canabal-Rodríguez

“On Lionel Kearns” por Jim Andrews

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Screen capture of “On Lionel Kearns” by Jim Andrews. A zero is formed out of ones (1), and a one is formed out of zeroes (0).
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En esta pieza, Jim Andrews cura y medita en una selección de poemas proto-digitales de Lionel Kearns desde la década de 1960 hasta el presente. Fuertemente influenciado por McLuhan, Kearns intuyó que “si uno se involucra lo suficiente con la forma física del lenguaje (hablado o escrito), eventualmente llega al punto en que (el lenguaje) deja de lado su carga de referencia convencional” y crea obras de la poesía visual y sonora “justo en ese límite, donde el lenguaje comienza a funcionar en la música o el arte visual.”

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“On Lionel Kearns” by Jim Andrews

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In this piece, Jim Andrews curates and meditates on a selection of proto-digital poems by Lionel Kearns from the 1960s to the present. Heavily influenced by McLuhan, Kearns intuited that “if one messes around enough with the physical form of language (either spoken or written), eventually you get to the point where it (the language) drops its load of conventional reference” and created works of visual and sound poetry “right on that edge, where language begins to work into either music or visual art.”

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“Nio” by Jim Andrews

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Open “Nio” by Jim Andrews

As a sound and visual poem in the Lettriste tradition, Nio consists of a set of glyphs made of stacked letters, each of which plays its own musical phrase— a recording of Andrews’ voice— and its own animation. Verse One allows readers to layer sounds and animation, while Verse Two allows both layering and sequencing.

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“Nio” por Jim Andrews

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Screen capture of "Nio" by Jim Andrews. Circle composed of numerous blue icon.
Abrir “Nio” por Jim Andrews

Como un poema sonoro y visual en la tradición Lettriste, Nio consiste en un conjunto de glifos hechos de letras apiladas, cada una de las cuales reproduce su propia frase musical -una grabación de la voz de Andrews- y su propia animación. El versículo uno permite a los lectores copiar los sonidos y la animación, mientras que el versículo dos permite la superposición de capas y la secuencia.

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Hello world

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I’ve created over 25 websites, blogs, groups, and other online spaces since 1999. For the past 5 years, I’ve maintained a blog which documents my professional work, including most of my course blogs. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, sharing choice morsels of my personal life.

Aside from my dissertation, articles, and presentations, I’ve been searching for my voice as a scholar of digital literature. I use Twitter to connect with my peers in the digital humanities and e-literature communities. I read, favorite, retweet, share, and occasionally reply, but I don’t feel like I’m making a contribution.

My dad used to say one shouldn’t speak unless one had something to contribute to the conversation. So I’ve been mostly quiet: reading, listening, learning.

Today it struck me: I know what to contribute. I’m going to read an e-poem every day, and I will respond to it in writing: in about 100 words. Every day.

I’ll start with the Electronic Literature Collections, then take on the Electronic Poetry Center, or the Electronic Literature Directory, or the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, or poetry e-zines, or individual websites. The point is: there is enough e-poetry out there for me to read and respond to for a long while.

If this blog helps people discover the poetic potential of digital media or sparks some ideas, great. If you’re interested, feel free to follow, subscribe, like, share, retweet, bookmark, whatever. Or not: it’s all good.

It will serve me as an annotated bibliography of what I find interesting in e-poetry. And that alone will make it worth my time and effort.

I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Cheers!