Category: Showcase

by Rui Torres. Poemas no meio do caminho, written in Portuguese, is a poetry project that offers the reader different reading possibilities, depending on her navigational decisions. There are two available versions: the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal version is a 3D panorama including video that the reader can drag; the vertical version uses html to allow the reader to read and play with the texts in a more conventional and simple way. One of the key aspects of Poemas no meio do caminho is that the reader can decide whether she wants to keep her reading path – that is, keep her poems in the middle of her road. Automatically, then, the poem that every reader has created has a stabilized form in a blog where other readers can share and debate the collection of poems.

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Featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2

by Christine Wilks. From birdsong to video game music to the ringing sounds of tinnitus, sound is at the core of Tailspin as both theme and structural device. A story of intergenerational conflict unfolds through sound as a woman negotiates between her father, who was “nothing more than an aircraft fitter” during WWII, and her children, who are often absorbed by their games and frightened by his anger at the noise that they make. Metaphorically associating imperfect hearing with imperfect communication, Tailspin is an elegant exploration of the different intensities, waves and frequencies of familial affect.

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Featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2

by J.R. Carpenter. Entre Ville is J.R. Carpenter’s affectionate and keenly perceptive homage to her former Montréal neighborhood, Mile End, and its many inhabitants. With poetic text framed by videos documenting the texture and sounds of the back alleyways, Entre Ville is a richly layered and sensorial exploration of the entre ville, the interior city. Some of the visuals are superimposed upon maps of her neighborhood, the flattened, putatively objective Cartesian view of space punctured by the subjective eye of the handheld camera, its unsmoothed movements suggesting a perspective from/of the streets. The heart of the piece, though, concerns the relations between (entre) neighbors, what Carpenter names as “an intimacy born of proximity.”

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Featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2

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

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

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

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

In “Recycled,” Giselle Beiguelman has taken an “artifact” of electronic technology, the object-follow-cursor feature, and transposed it into a moving metaphor. Across a field of bright yellow, the letters RECYCLED enter the screen, track the cursor, disappear if gathered, and finally clump together and vanish, only to begin migrating, again, from the margins. The letters, then, are constantly being “recycled” — and the reader is the agent in effecting the transformation. Beiguelman’s piece is an example of the way in which minimal text can join with technological trope in a “reading” of e-lit.

Judy Malloy’s “Interlude” is part of a longer work entitled Dorothy and Sid. This story focuses on the lives of contemporary artists in the San Francisco Bay area; it unfolds in four parts: “Dorothy Abrona McCrae”; “Interlude — Dorothy and Sid”; “A Party at Silver Beach”; and “Afterwards.” Each of these narratives is characterized by multilinear story segments that can be accessed by the reader in varying order. “Dorothy Abrona McCrae” was begun as an online serial in April 2000. A new installment was added each month. The final installment was posted in December 2000. In “Interlude — Dorothy and Sid,” in a series of trips and intimate moments, Dorothy and Sid change their long-term but occasional relationship into a more serious commitment.

The interactive whodunit doesn’t get any harder-boiled than in Dangerous Curves, a rare and effective follow-up to the style of detective interactive fiction seen in Stu Galley’s The Witness. A classic cast of characters and effective geography, with helpful compass direction information provided in the status line, make this piece more approachable than some others of similar depth and complexity. A Z-Machine interpreter (such as Windows Frotz 2000 or Zoom for Mac) is needed to run Dangerous Curves.