Posts Tagged ‘e-poetry’

Ted Warnell, as many of you know, is a Canadian net artist originally from Vancouver, long since living in Alberta, who has been producing net art as programmed visual poetry at warnell.com since the 90’s. Which is about how long we’ve been in correspondence with one another. Ted was very active on Webartery for some time, an email list in the 90’s that many of the writerly net artists were involved in. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, though we’ve never met in the same room. We have, however, met ‘face-to-face’ via video chat.

He’s still creating interesting net art. In the nineties and oughts, his materials were largely bitmaps, HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. Most of his works were stills, or series thereof. Since about 2013, he’s been creating net works using the HTML5 canvas tag that consist entirely of JavaScript. The canvas tag lets us program animations and stills on HTML pages without needing any plugins such as Flash or Unity. Ted has never liked plugins, so the canvas tag works well for him for a variety of reasons. Ted has created a lot of very interesting canvas-based, programmed animations and stills at warnell.com/mona .

I’m always happy to get a note from Ted showing me new work he’s done. Since we both are using the canvas, we talk about the programming issues it involves and also the sorts of art we’re making. Below is an email Ted sent me recently after I asked him how he would describe the ‘look’ or ‘looks’ he’s been creating with his canvas work. If you have a good look at warnell.com/mona , you see that his work does indeed exhibit looks you will remember and identify as Warnellian.

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hey jim,

further to earlier thoughts about your query re “looks” in my work (and assuming that you’re still interested by this subject), here is something that has been bubbling up over the past week or so

any look in my work comes mainly from the processes used in creation of the work – so, it’s not a deliberate or even a conscious thing, the look, but rather, it just is – mainly, but not entirely, of course – subject, too, is at least partly responsible for the way these things look

have been thinking this past week that what is deliberate and conscious is my interest in the tension between and balance of order and chaos, by which i mean mathematics (especially geometry, visual math) and chance (random, unpredictable) – i’m exploring these things and that tension/balance in almost all of my works – you, too, explore and incorporate these things into many of your works including most strikingly in aleph null, and also in globebop and others

so here are some thoughts about order/chaos and balance/tension in no particular order:

works using these things function best when the balance is right – then the tension is strong – and then the work also is “right” and strong

it is not a requirement that both of these things are apparent (visible or immediately evident) in a work – there are some notable examples of works that seem to be all one or the other, though that may be more illusion than reality – works of jackson pollock seem to be all chaos but still balance with a behind-the-scenes intelligence, order – works by andrew wyeth on the other hand seem to be all about order and control, but look closely at the brushstrokes that make all of that detail and you’ll see that many of these are pure chance – brilliant stuff, really

an artist whose work intrigues me much of late is quebecer claude tousignant – i’m sure you know of him – he is perhaps best known for his many “target” paintings of concentric rings – tousignant himself referred to these as “monochromatic transformers” and “gongs” – you can find lots of his works at google images

the reason tousignant is so interesting to me (again) at this time is because while i can see that his paintings “work”, i cannot for the life of me see where he is doing anything even remotely relating to order/chaos or the balance/tension of same – his works seem to me to be truly all order/order with no opposite i would consider necessary for balance and/or to make (required) tension – his works defy me and i’d love to understand how he’s doing it 🙂

anyway, serious respect, more power, and many more years to the wonderful monsieur tousignant

Look Again – warnell.com/mona/look.htm

is a new (this week) autointeractive work created with claude tousignant and his target paintings in mind

in this work are three broad rings, perfectly ordered geometric circles, each in the same randomly selected single PbN primary color – the space between and surrounding these rings is filled with a randomly generated (60/sec), randomly spun alphanumeric text in black and white, and also gray thanks to xor compositing – alinear chaos – as the work progresses, the three rings are gradually overcome by those relentless spinning texts – the outermost ring is all but obliterated while the middle ring is chipped away bit by bit until only a very thin inner crust of the ring remains – the third innermost ring, tho, is entirely unaffected

as the work continues to evolve, ghostlike apparitions of the missing outer and middle ring become more and more pronounced… because… within the chaos, new rings in ever-sharper black and white are beginning to emerge – this has the effect of clearly defining (in gray and tinted gray) the shape of the original color rings – even as order is continually attacked and destroyed by chaos, chaos is simultaneously rebuilding the order – so nothing is actually gained or lost… the work is simply transformed – a functioning “monochromatic transformer”, as tousignant might see it

that’s the tension and balance i’m talking about – the look you were asking about likely has something to do with autointeraction, alinearity, and most likely by my attempt to render visible order/chaos and balance/tension in every work i do

your attempt in aleph null (it now seems to me) might be in the form of progressive linearity on an alinear path – and well done

ted

PS, “Look Again” is a rework of my earlier work, “Poem by Numbers 77” from march 2015 – warnell.com/mona/pbnum77.htm

which work is a progression of “Poem by Numbers 52” from april 2013 – warnell.com/mona/pbnum52.htm

which work was about learning canvas coding for circular motion

Poem by Numbers works usually (not always) are about coding research and development – moreso than concept development, which comes in later works like “Look Again”

other artists have “Untitled XX” works – i have “Poem by Numbers XX”

I put together a twenty minute video talking about a fantastic piece of digital poetry by Joe Keenan from the late nineties called MOMENT. Check it out: http://vispo.com/keenan/4. MOMENT, written in JavaScript for browsers, is a work of visual interactive code poetry. It’s one of the great unacknowledged works for the net.

I used Camtasia 8 to create this video. I’ve used the voice-over capabilities of Camtasia before to create videos that talk about what’s on the screen, but this is the first time I’ve been able to use the webcam with it. Still a few bugs, though, it seems: at times the video is quite asynchronous between voice and video.

Still, you get the idea. I’m a big fan of Joe Keenan’s MOMENT and am glad I finally did a video on it.

I ♥ E-Poetry

I would like to announce the launching of my new blog: I ♥ E-Poetry.

Here’s a little background about me. I’ve created over 25 websites, blogs, groups, and other online spaces since 1999. For the past 5 years, I’ve maintained a blog which documents my professional work, including most of my course blogs. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, sharing choice morsels of my personal life.

Aside from my dissertation, articles, and presentations, I’ve been searching for my voice as a scholar of digital literature. I use Twitter to connect with my peers in the digital humanities and e-literature communities. I read, favorite, retweet, share, and occasionally reply, but I don’t feel like I’m making a contribution.

My dad used to say one shouldn’t speak unless one had something to contribute to the conversation. So I’ve been mostly quiet: reading, listening, learning.

Yesterday it struck me: I know what to contribute. I’m going to read an e-poem every day, and I will respond to it in writing: in about 100 words. Every day.

My plan is to start with the Electronic Literature Collections, then take on the Electronic Poetry Center, or the Electronic Literature Directory, or the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, or poetry e-zines, or individual websites. The point is: there is enough e-poetry out there for me to read and respond to for a long while.

If this blog helps people discover the poetic potential of digital media or sparks some ideas, great. If you’re interested, feel free to follow, subscribe, like, share, retweet, bookmark, whatever. Or not: it’s all good.

It will serve me as an annotated bibliography of what I find interesting in e-poetry. And that alone will make it worth my time and effort.

I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Cheers!

Jörg Piringer is a sound poet and poet-programmer currently living in Vienna/Austria. He really knows what he’s doing with the programming, having a master’s degree in Computer Science. And his sound work, both in live performance and in synthesis with the auditory and visual processing, is quite remarkable. I saw him in Nottingham and Paris, and was very impressed on both occassions.

He’s just released a new piece, a video called Unicode. It’s a 33:17 long, and simply displays Unicode characters. Each character is displayed for about 0.04 seconds. The video displays 49,571 characters.

It’s a video, but it’s a conceptual piece. The characters in this video are all symbols and each makes but the briefest appearance. A cast of thousands; Bar and Yeace.

Wikipedia describes Unicode thus:

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 109,000 characters covering 93 scripts, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).[1] As of 2011, the most recent major revision of Unicode is Unicode 6.0.

Piringer’s Unicode simply shows us symbols but, to me, it illustrates how our notion of language has been expanded to not only the multi-lingual but also to include code. Not only do we see many of the world’s scripts but a good deal of abstract symbols of code.

By the way, his web site at joerg.piringer.net is well worth checking out.

Aaron McCollough is guest-editing an issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing on digital poetry. Below is the email he sent to the Poetics list requesting submissions for that issue.

From: Aaron McCollough
To: Poetics List
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 7:56 AM
Subject: CFP: Journal of Electronic Publishing (Digital Poetics/Poetries)

I’m writing today in my capacity as guest editor for The Journal of Electronic Publishing, which has been a pioneer in responding critically to digital technologies’ impact on “publishing” as both a notion and a semiotic distribution system since 1995 (before there was even a google to google-sculpt with!).

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Greetings Netartery,

When Jim invited me to join the group back in May, I had just successfully defended my dissertation. I decided that I didn’t want to jump into the conversation until it was available online, so I could share my research freely. In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed the postings and am thrilled and honored to be a part of this group blog.

My dissertation is titled “Typing the Dancing Signifier: Jim Andrews’ (Vis)Poetics” and is now available for free download at the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland: http://hdl.handle.net/1903/10799. If you’d like to know more about me and my work, here’s a link to my blog: http://blogs.uprm.edu/flores.

What is my dissertation about? The title should be enough of a hint, but here’s the abstract.

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The first challenge is: viivakoodi, barcode, código de parras, codice a barre…

I’ve always enjoyed a challenge – or rather, I’ve always hated to turn my back on a challenge, ever since I was a girl and the roughest, toughest boy in the playground dared me to go up on the swing with him, standing face to face, as high as it would go…

Well actually, this challenge, set by Finnish visual poet, Satu Kaikkonen, wasn’t half so scary – in fact, it was pure pleasure. Time for a Vispo is a new blog run by Satu where she gives a weekly challenge to create a vispo. The 1. challenge, issued on Monday 28 June, is barcode.

id card is my response. Created in Flash, it’s a random coded e-poem with voices – it’s an update of a remix I created for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a collaborative blog for digital art and e-poetry remixing, started by Randy Adams (runran) in November 2006. Barcodes have featured a number of times in remixworx so I also slipped a few other remixes into The 1. challenge. See the collection under the remixworx barcode tag, including:

seepage by runran

artifact (bicycle – 2111) by runran

artifact (rusted sergio mix) by babel (Chris Joseph)

Worx by babel

sizing up by crissxross