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slippingglimpse



by Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan. slippingglimpse is a verbal-visual collaboration between a poet, programmer, and videographer. Each of the ten parts consists of a video of moving water associated with a poetic text that can be conventionally read in split-screen format as it scrolls upwards. (The “scroll text” view enables conventional reading only in the sense that the words are stable and the small window has a verso-recto format; otherwise the layout and lineation invites reading on both the horizontal and vertical axes.) One of the central themes of the poetic text is the materiality of writing and image-producing technologies, ranging from stained glass to C++. This theme echoes the mechanics of the text itself, which in broad terms is algorithmically generated in relation to the movements of the water.

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Featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2

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Wordscapes and Letterscapes



by Peter Cho. Letterscapes is a collection of twenty-six interactive typographic landscapes, encompassed within a dynamic, dimensional environment. Wordscapes is a collection of reactive one-word poem landscapes, one for each letter of the alphabet.

These two sets of 26 works each operate at the nexus of typography, animation and interactivity making modest claims for each, but in combination completely sui generis not to mention the nexus of reference (text), representation (image) and abstraction (number). Among the many approaches one could take to these works are considerations of “negative” space the yin/yang interaction between inky darks and untouched whites in Asian art in a pictorial realm dominated by gestalt switches between solids and voids, and dominated by color.

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Featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2

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Ah



by K Michael & Dirk Vis. Ah articulates a simple paradox of reading animated digital literature, which is that the eye, and by extension the mind, often has no sense of the future of a sentence or line of text and, more importantly, is not given the chance to retread an already witnessed word or phrase. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry’s Dakota is a perfect illustration of this principle. In Ah, the central object of rumination is Einstein, but just as the physicist pondered the numberless variations between the presence of a “1” and “0,” this Flash animation brings us back and forth between clever articulations and the ambiguous expressivity of single letters and syllables.

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Featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2

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The Sweet Old Etcetera



by Alison Clifford. The Sweet Old Etcetera is an interactive web project based on the poetry of E. E. Cummings. E. E. Cummings’ poetry is highly visual, playful and experimental. “The Sweet Old Etcetera” interprets selected poems for a new media context and introduces additional layers of meaning through the use of motion, graphics, sound and programming. The project hopes to offer a fresh response to the print poetry, aiming to release it from the confines of the physical page and bring it into a digital environment in a playful way.

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Featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2

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The ELO Directory returns 010110

ELO welcomes 010110 (decimal 22) with a special announcement:

The framework for the Electronic Literature Directory version 2.0 is now online:
http://eld.eliterature.org/

Think of this as an open house in a model home for e-lit.

The Directory has always been key to helping outsiders discover electronic literature. With the new version, it will be even easier to add and find works of electronic literature AND criticism.

But there’s more: The ELD will feature venues or “collections,” aggregators of e-lit and criticism.

When you take a glance at our demo works, you will notice some exciting features:

In addition to basic information about author, date, url, and language, entries list software platforms as well as annotations by ELO members. However, registered users will be able to extend the discussion in the comment section or by writing a review.

The ELO Directory team has worked hard to make these works more accessible, developing search tools, categories, and tags, the subject of much discussion on Joseph Tabbi’s recent online meditation (On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature).

The works you see are but a small sample of the ones already vetted, but this is a special invitation to see the structure of this exciting re-imagined resource.

Start by creating an account and submitting creative or critical works or collection sites. Those submissions will be delivered to our Directory team for evaluation and review.We’re looking forward to the re-launch of this flagsite enterprise of ELO.

Watch for full announcements to follow including thanks to the team who have been working so hard to make this a possibility.

At the start of the new decade, it is impossible to predict what new forms of literature will emerge, but you at least know where you can find them: the Electronic Literature Directory.

[Also, reminder, ELO AI deadline: January 15, 2010 or 011501]