“Because You Asked” by Alan Bigelow

April 20, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This poem is all about layering: words from a line randomly appear over a mask that obscures an image over words over a background. The “ink” for these words are simply spaces on that mask that allow the reader to see the image beneath and the image is revealed more as the density of randomly positioned words increases. At the same time each line contains a audio reading playing on an endless loop. Selecting icons triggers lines, stacking and remixing all the sounds, creating new phrases from the combinations.

As you read these often hilarious statements, think about what they are saying about our speaker. What do they reveal about him? Why is he even telling you these things about himself? You’ll have to erase him to know the answer to one of these questions.

Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show

“American Ghosts” by Alan Bigelow

April 19, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This multimedia work contains monologues from present day “incarnations” of five American historical figures: Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, George Washington, Deborah Samson, and Thomas Paine. Each video shows a close up shot of a portion of the person’s body, accompanied by hip background music and a recording of a verbal performance, while beneath the video window, the words of the poem scroll from left to right in news-ticker fashion. The final piece (shown above) comes after experiencing all the texts and the visual mashup comes across as the voices join in a kind of mixed chorus.

This may sound terribly complicated when described, but the great thing about this piece is how well it pulls together and how simple it comes across. This is a hip multimedia work that delivers thought-provoking ideas between the lines, between media messages, between past and present.

Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show

“Slipping Glimpse” by Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan

March 1, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This exquisite poem is the result of a collaboration between a poet (Strickland) a videographer (Ryan) and a programmer (Lawson Jaramillo) all interconnected in a creative feedback loop as complex as the chreods which inspire the piece. Each way of viewing the work allows you to focus on the video, the linguistic text, or the behavior of the text when it is following the pattern of the chreods in the video. All the ways of reading “Slipping Glimpse” are rewarding, though I preferred to read the scrolling version to get a stronger conceptual sense for the piece and then relax into a more visual experience of the poem.

The wispy lines of poetry floating over the videos hover between readability and illegibility, as they recombine before your eyes, caught in the flows of the chreods. Pay attention to how the movement pattern changes with the water flow from one part to the next. And notice how your own eyes flow from one cluster of silky verse to the next, making choices based on convention but also on the necessary paths of language.

Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

“Palavrador” by Chico Marinho

February 21, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This seems like an amazing work because it allows one to fly or swoop through three-dimensional spaces full of poetic language that flows like rivers and waterfalls, spins in tightly organized hourglass tornadoes, and much more. This virtual world is a rich space that is complex in its organizational structure and explores the potential of language in these spaces.

I wish we could visit this virtual world and explore its textual riches, but unfortunately, the closest we can come to this is a small quicktime window with voiceover recording explaining the work as someone else explores this work. How frustrating!

Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

“Plaintext Performance” by Bjørn Magnhildøen

February 19, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

magnhildoen_plaintext — Open “Plaintext Performance” by Bjørn Magnhildøen

This work is both an installation piece and a record of live writing performances at prestigious museum and gallery spaces that runs in your browser to provide an approximation of the experience. “Plaintext Performance” lends itself to be displayed as an ambient piece, and I would recommend dedicating a screen (the larger the better) to let this scroll and command a good portion of your field of vision and attention. Informed by vast knowledge of computing, networks, code, English, French, ASCII art, net.art and more, this piece does not require you to understand everything in it. Its effect is cumulative, rewarding your attention with snippets of legibility, art, and moments of clarity.

Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

“Family Tree” by Rosalie Hirs and Harm Van Den Dorpel

February 8, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This beautifully produced poem is a successfully implements the practice of taking a structure from the physical world and representing it in an electronic environment. In this work, it is a mobile made out of words and our pointer movements allow us to simulate wind movement and move up and down the cascading, spinning words and phrases. This deceptively simple interface combines three frames of reference— the mobile, family trees, and poetry— and puts them in motion to produce a haunting reflection on family history.

“The Sweet Old Etcetera” by Allison Clifford

March 24, 2019February 2, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “The Sweet Old Etcetera” by Allison Clifford

Clifford’s lovingly produced Flash versions of E. E. Cummings’ poetry are a tribute to the poet’s playfulness and experimentation with language. In each piece, she has sought to highlight a feature of Cummings’ poetry: his idiosyncratic use of parentheses, capitalization, and spacing on the page, his way of directing the reader’s gaze to mimic the drift of a leaf to the ground, or the saccadic eye movements hopping from letter to letter trying to assemble them into something that makes sense, and more. For Cummings, the typewriter was his toy of choice to shape language. Clifford’s homage allows us to imagine E. E. Cummings creating poetry in the digital age, but it shines best in those graceful touches that are all her own.

Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

“The Mandrake Vehicles” by Oni Buchanan

October 5, 2018January 30, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “The Mandrake Vehicles” by Oni Buchanan

This suite of three installations that explore what Buchanan calls the “Mandrake Form” are cleverly executed poetic texts reminiscent of Tom Phillips’ celebrated artists book, A Humument, but with a Lettristic economy of words that’s in tune with the ecological motto “reduce, reuse, recycle.” In these poetic texts, the words aren’t lost or painted over: whatever isn’t needed that doesn’t “float” away cascades into other words neatly stacked at the bottom of the window. But there’s more: pay attention to specific words as they take form and fall; follow specific letters as they make their way down, and you’ll be delighted by the witty word play that gets lost in the big picture. There is much to be discovered in these poems

Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

“Stud Poetry” by Marko Niemi

March 17, 2019January 14, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

“Stud Poetry” by Marko Niemi

This playful e-poem generation machine places randomly selected words and assigns random relative value to them as it places them in the structure of a poker game. You play “Five Card Stud” against five randomly chosen poets, who play at differently randomized levels of “aggressiveness.”