The Dazzle as Question
March 5, 2006 in Showcase
“The Dazzle as Question,” first published in frAme, traces the conflict between the left and right brain inclinations of an erstwhile “old school” artist as experienced via an encounter with the digital realm. The Dazzle is a lyrical one; its marks and varied rhythmic emphases are indicative of the questions and confusion underlying the relationship between old and new identities and images. Claire Allan Dinsmore is a writer, artist, and the editor and designer of Cauldron & Net: a journal of the arts & new media. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Parsons School of Design/The New School for Social Research. Dinsmore has exhibited worldwide and been published as an artist, critic, essayist, and poet. See this work’s Directory entry for links to more works by this author.
Regina Celia Pinto, a Brazilian artist and writer, is the creator of The Library of Marvels. This online library is a collection of “artist’s e.books” on the web. The library began in 1999, and now contains six volumes: White and Black, Reflections on Fog (1999), the Book of Sand (2001), The Psychiatrist, Net.art / Web.art and other stories (2002), The Newest Song of Exile: Sabiá Virtuality (2003), Viewing Axolotls (2004) and Tales from my balcony / Alice in the “wonderbalcony.” Viewing Axolotls is a multiple investigation into a Cortazar short story updated in gender and media. Please see the 
In Jim Rosenberg’s diagram poems a graphical notation acts as an external syntax — thereby, as Rosenberg puts it, “allowing word objects to carry interactivity deep inside the sentence.” This interactivity allows each element of the syntax to be occupied by complex clusters of words: layered, multiply embedded, and yet legible. Rosenberg’s earliest experiments with diagrammatic poems date back to 1968, and he has been creating interactive works since 1988, using a variety of platforms. Diagrams Series 6 was developed in Squeak, an environment that allows for reading on a wide variety of operating systems and also enabled Rosenberg to move (for the first time) to composing each poem in the series within the interactive reading environment. See the 
Text Rain is an interactive installation in which viewers play with the falling text of a poem. The text responds to motion and can be caught, lifted and released to fall again. If participants accumulate enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can read words and phrases formed by the falling letters. With active participation the text of the poem “Talk, You” by Evan Zimroth can be gradually reconstructed. As Utterback and Achituv put it, “Zimroth’s poem creates metaphorical bridges between the physical and the linguistic. It employs images of the body moving through space to speak of interpersonal relationships, illustrating how ‘meanings’ come together and fall apart through transient ‘syntactical’ spatial relationships.”
Christy Sheffield Sanford’s “Moving Toward the Light: A Meditation for the Solstice” is one of the remarkable pieces created by this unusual artist and poet. Known for her use of color and light, Sanford’s work often broke new ground in Web practice. This piece, created in 1997, uses sound, Java Applets, layers, motion, highlighted backgrounds, and mouseovers to explore the many moods of the Winter Solstice. Sanford is well known for her work as a trAce Writer in Residence, for her collaborative Madame de Lafayette’s Book of Hours, and for works such as “Water~Water~Water” (with Reiner Strasser), “Rockgarden of Love,” “Moon Swimming,” and “Bodies of Water: Fountain Albertas.”
“Beautiful Portrait” is featured in a recent issue of Born Magazine. In keeping with the mission of the magazine to combine designers and writers, the poem itself is written by Thom Swiss and the Flash animation is the creation of Motomichi Nakamura. Although there is no written text, the Flash sequence is accompanied by a synthetic voice that delivers the poem as the reader explores a grid pattern of accented silhouettes. The action of the reader escalates the tone and imagery of the piece, bringing about a surprising finish. Thom Swiss, well known in critical and scholarly literature, has written new media poetry for several years — his works include “The Dream Life,” “Hey Now” (also with Motomichi Nakamura), “Shy Boy,” and “City of Bits.”
“Fibonacci’s Daughter” by M.D. Coverley (a pen name for Marjorie C. Luesebrink), published originally in New River in 2000, is a narrative and architectural puzzle. The main character, Annabelle Thompson, is the daughter of gamblers and a new-age opportunist. She sets up shop in California’s Huntington Beach Mall, where she uses numerology and Fibonacci numbers to peddle insurance policies to high school cheerleaders and football players — insurance against failure, that is. But probability is always chance, and the mystery that lurks here can be resolved in several ways. This piece is part of a larger collection, 
James Meehan’s Tale-Spin, created as part of his 1976 dissertation, The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer, was the first major project in the area of story generation. Like one of Calvino’s invisible cities, it creates an alternate landscape in which the inhabits live in a manner evocatively different from our own — with all actions the result of plans, the locations of items only learned by convincing someone to tell you, and no one feeling an emotion without knowing it. Like Aesop’s fables, Tale-Spin‘s view of human nature was communicated through the interactions of iconic animals. But unlike the worlds of Calvino or Aesop, Meehan’s world wasn’t simply described — it was made to operate. In fact, its operation, rather than its description, was Meehan’s primary work. (The text describing the world was produced by a bare-bones language generation program, called Mumble, designed primarily to fit in the small amount of memory left on the Yale AI lab’s computer system when Tale-Spin was already running.)
Jordan Mechner is the writer and designer of groundbreaking cinematic games such as Karateka (1984), Prince of Persia (1989), and The Last Express (1997). His most recent, in collaboration with a small team within Ubisoft’s Montreal studio led by producer Yannis Mallat, is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The gameplay is based on acrobatics, spatial puzzle solving, the manipulation of time, and swordplay. This gameplay connects to the story of the Prince through the Dagger of Time, which Mechner characterizes as “at once a weapon, a receptacle, and a MacGuffin.” The story is told in past tense narration — perhaps for the first time in a video game — with a noir flavor. As one progresses through the game the situation of the narrator’s telling is slowly revealed, pointing to influences such as Thief of Baghdad and, further back, to the traditional frame tale of 1001 Nights.
Laurence Sterne’s 
