Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” is a hypertext narrative told from different perspectives. It is possible to start reading at many different points and, as the stories unfold the reader discovers new meanings in old sequences.
This “bot without organs” tweets quotes on an indeterminate schedule and frequency randomly chosen from Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. The generator occasionally punctuates the quotes with a short phrase in slang like “True dat!” This may not even be a bot, but a human being who tweets the results of a random quote search engine focused on their published texts.
Read more“@DeleuzeGuattari” “Rhiz-o-Mat” and “PoMoBot” by Anonymous
When this narrative hypertext poem was serially published from 1996 to 1999 it must’ve been a different reading experience from the site that we now have before us. The layering of narrative and poetic elements accumulating over time, shifting under the weight of memory and forgetfulness, with echoes and links to guide new and experienced readers alike, is an experience that is difficult to recreate. The closest thing to it is to read the lexia in numerical order, whether by going to the directory listing (http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/roarofdestiny/) or by changing the number of the lexia in the address bar). However, reading the complete work with the tools provided is a rich undertaking in and of itself.
Malloy offers her readers several interfaces to explore this web of 232 lexias, the most important of which is a textual map that consistently contextualizes the poem within a field of experiences and provides thematic links to other lexia, much as she did with Uncle Roger. The surrounding texts enrich the indented and in boldface narrative, allowing for multiple readings of the poem.
Follow the multiple paths of this engaging story about Gweneth (from l0ve0ne) and transport yourself to a vibrant time when the boundaries between the natural and virtual worlds started to liquefy.
Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show
This suite of 5 e-poems were written in the early days of the World Wide Web, when HTML and the tools it offered for animation, interactivity, and generative works were very rudimentary. Inspired by the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse technique Zervos rose to the challenge by using the humble animated GIF to produce surprisingly complex combinatorial work. This image format allows the creation of a sequence of images, presented at a predefined rate in an infinite loop. In these poems, Zervos uses some GIFs at different speeds and some at the same speed but aggregating a different number of images to create different combinations of elements.