Director – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“Tierra de Extracción” by Doménico Chiappe

June 10, 2015 by Nohelia Meza

In Tierra de Extracción (1996-2007) (ELC2), Doménico Chiappe’s first hypermedial novel, the extraction of meaning is generated via interaction and manipulation. Poetry is hidden in the fissures of the earth that slip in order to create motion in the different multimedia layers of the work. The novel is composed of 63 hypermedial chapters, each of them represented by an interactive [key] word. Similar to Hotel Minotauro (2013-2014), Tierra de Extracción is an example of interactive narrative. For instance, in one of the chapters (Mangal/Mango Tree), the reader is invited to learn how to roll a dice interactively in order to unfold the stories that lie behind each of its faces. The interaction with the dice produces an empty mise-en- scène to be fulfilled by aesthetic chance. Rolling the dice becomes the space where chance meets creation.

“Noise” by Gerald Smith

February 8, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This scheduled concrete poem presents us with a grid of 1s and 0s— five rows of 10 numbers, which could be interpreted as a 10-bit binary code but what that decodes to is uncertain. I attempted to decode this into ASCII or Unicode and was unable to find anything verbal about it, which suggests that this is not a signal representing something else, but a message in and of itself. Smith’s statement for this piece (linked to above) in the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature reinforces the idea that this isn’t really a signal meant to be read by a machine, which is why it is written in Times New Roman— a font that isn’t considered machine readable, for OCR purposes. We can only conclude that this piece is meant to be read by humans, but if so, what is its message?

“A Dialogue Between Two Eyeballs” by Braxton Soderman

April 4, 2017January 27, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This kinetic poem is takes the ancient rhetorical and poetic device of the dialogue to investigate the virtual, conceptual, and perceptual spaces of programmable media. Inspired by theoretical writings by John Cayley and Jean-François Lyotard, this poem explores binaries between past and present, old and new, letter and word, simple and complex writing surfaces, and the right and left eye— each of which has a distinct voice and perspective on the topic.

“Visual Sonnet #1” by Braxton Soderman

January 22, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This generative sonnet is inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes but takes a highly visual approach by using images of poets, book spines, and other images. The images are cropped into strips, much like the line-pages in Queneau’s book, an ideal proportion for book spines (see a similar treatment by Jody Zellen) and the photographed eyes of iconic poets. The lines respond to mouseovers, allowing you to change the work as needed.

“When You Reach Kyoto” by Brian Kim Stefans and Geniwate

January 11, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This collaborative work is built using Geniwate’s (Australian writer Jenny Weight’s nom d’ordinateur) “concatenation engine” and Stephans’ images and text. This “page space” is a computational upgrade to the cut-up, because in addition to randomly joining lines of verse, it cuts them further and places them in different positions of the page, creating multiple lines and readings of the same text. The gorgeous oversaturated images of urban and natural landscapes serve as a backdrop for an explosion of letters in different font sizes and lines of free verse, all of which serve as links to the next piece of the concatenation. The sound clips are nowhere nearly as pleasant as Brian Eno’s “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” which has a line that inspired the title of this poem, and perhaps some of its postcard-like visual design and conceptual language choices, such as the frequent use of “you,” “she,” and references to writing.

“non-LOSS’y translator” by Simon Biggs and Loss Pequeño Glazier

January 10, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

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.

“Rude Little Song” by Jim Andrews

February 7, 2019October 21, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Rude Little Song” by Jim Andrews

This aural piece is a kind of Lettrist sound poem, because it uses verbal language in sub-morphemic units (with thanks to Melissa Lucas for the term). In other words, the poem is concerned with putting together snippets of vocalized language sounds that don’t carry semantic meaning, all performed a capella, recorded, edited, and spatially arranged by Jim Andrews. The visual composition is as non-referential as the sounds, activated by moving the pointer over the pulsating colored squares.

This rough (“rude”) little gem is Andrews first audio piece produced with Macromedia Director— an important exploration with a digital tool that allowed him to produce works like “Enigma n2,” “Oppen Do Down,” “Nio,” and “Jig-Sound” before Adobe bought out Macromedia and changed the audio engine for Director. For a detailed account of these audio works, read “Visual Music” (pgs. 207-244) in my dissertation, Typing the Dancing Signifier: Jim Andrews’ (Vis)Poetics.

Featured in Cauldron & Net.

“The Intruder” by Jorge Luis Borges and Natalie Bookchin

September 17, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’ story of the same name astutely uses the mechanics from ten classic videogames (think Pong and Atari 2600) to retell the main plot points, and highlight some of the ideology expressed in the narrative. Bookchin’s juxtapositions of videogames and parts of the narrative is the main strategy, as we consider the interpersonal relations implied in a game of Pong, whether one bounces a ball, words, or a woman across the table. The competitive relation between players as they outdo each other parallel the Nilsen brother’s feud over the poor woman that gets caught between them and seems powerless before their passions. Several games in this piece feature the woman, as language and things come out of her vagina, or she runs across landscapes, seeking to escape the vicious circle of the brothers’ possessiveness. The most visceral part is the realization that in order to continue listening to the narrative and finish the story, the player must become complicit in the victimization of this woman, even if it is masked by a videogame interface.

Featured in Poems That GO.

“The murmur of i n t e r s t i c e s” by Rumi and Zahra Safavian

August 19, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This is a collaboration across centuries between the 13th century Persian mystic and poet known as Rumi, whose silky lines of poetry appear beneath Zahra Safavian’s 3 by 3 grid of tiles with short looping videos and words— an interface for meditation on this poem’s idea. Rumi is credited with inventing the meditative poetic practice of “the turn” by dancing to the rhythm of the hammering of the goldsmiths. Rumi’s poems are usually organized into couplets, not necessarily rhyming, clustered into variable stanzas, and tend to establish a conversation between self and other, self and the world. Each tile can be clicked to reveal another word and video, representing perhaps some of the dualities expressed in the concept of the “turn,” though we are not dealing with binary opposites— the associations are more diverse than that. The three lines that appear after interacting with the short videos on the grid reinforce that idea, separating awareness of the head and the feet, each turning on its own, uncaring what the other does, as with a baby nursing. Lose yourself in contemplation of this beautifully meditative piece, considering the relation between videos and words, words and their pairs, word combinations, and the relation between the tiles and the lines by Rumi.

Featured in Poems That GO.

“Four Poems” by William Poundstone

July 6, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Published the same year as New Digital Emblems (2000), these four short kinetic poems read like subverted graphic design experiments. The bright monochromatic, textured, shaded, or divided backgrounds contained by a borderless window serve as a stage into which words move in from several directions to form and develop the poems. The electronica inspired sounds punctuate moments in each poem, such as the apparition of words or the twist at the end of “Nil,” also emphasizing the rhythm of the scheduled presentation.