About Defib
Interviews
Vispo.com






Talan Memmott and BeeHive

Surd: The sense of narration is quite interesting. That of a visual artist? I mean it is narration in the same way that visual art pieces move?

TalanM: Yes... that is important to me in my work... I mean, I think painting is one of the most richly narrative mediums. which probably sounds odd...the way painting offers narration as something that must be discovered and unfolded...


Claire Dinsmore and Cauldron & Net

"Well, I wanted to veer away from my aesthetic inclinations, which are steeped in modernism, and pay some attention to the fact that I'm working with this exceedingly new medium with a distict iconography all its own - particular to our age."


Bill Marsh and sunbrella.net

"We're trying to work from the premise that paper and web publishing share common elements, or at least we're holding on to the idea, rather than treating the web as an entirely "different" medium....What goes on "between" has always been interesting to me--the seams--so there's action between print and web, action between visual and verbal or graphic and vocal, action between practice and theory."


Miekal And

"beliefware: when I first started making pieces on a mac SE in 87 that is the word I used to describe what I was doing. crossmedia beliefware. the idea being a cross of pataphysics & vapor ware idea... software for paradigms that only exist in the imagination...the imagination of all who use it, in their subconscious, accessed & not, paradigms of what we consider reality to be. for instance Im very affected by the theorem in physics that the brain is a 3-d decoder for a holographic universe....our experience of reality is limited by our very very 3 dimensional language....Ive spent a lot of time exploring other concepts of space like shamanic & aborigine, & all that Im ever left with is that reality is language construct."


Field Theory for a l y r i c m a i l e r

Thomas Bell and Mike Kelleher are leading a project for the magazine a l y r i c m a i l e r featuring work by themselves and Jim Rosenberg, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Inna Kouper, Ted Warnell, Jim Andrews, Clemente Padin, and Miekal And on poetics of the field.


Reiner Strasser

Communications at work and play Re: Reiner Strasser.

<Surd> Interesting line you wrote, Reiner, 'you are defined - or define yourself thru communications'. Writing has become more interactive in such a way.
<reiner> everything you do on the influence of others .... i think it is important
<reiner> to remember this
<reiner> collab - comm
<echo> collab=recognition
<reiner> comm is the exchange of 'information'
<reiner> coll = the creation in common

Komninos Konstantinos Zervos

Content and malcontent with Komninos

<komninos> what are the criteria for digital poetry?
<dleshem> That's what we are all here to ask you
<komninos> well i guess i call it poetry that can't be published in print media, that needs a computer , or the internet, to experience it
<dleshem> Komninos, do you mean then that it in some way relies on code?
<komninos> i suppose ultimately it does but as a poet i can use a software program and not have to know code or write code myself, just use the software as a literary device.
<Hiccup> does the device become foregrounded in the work?
<komninos> no it should be transparent really


Riding the Meridian—Women and Technology

Jennifer Ley and contributing editors and authors discuss this issue of Riding the Meridian. .

<Surd> Why an issue on Women and Technology, Jen?
<jley> I wanted to do an issue on Women and Tech for a few reasons
<jley> one ... DAC was so inspirational ... and I got to meet many of the women who are in this issue
<jley> two ... Judy Malloy held an excellent conference over the summer called Gender and Identity in New Media and it became evident that ... our numbers were greater than we knew
<jley> there are an amazing amount of talented women in this field
<jley> it seemed time to try to get even more of them together and show the incredible variety of their work

Carolyn Guertin

Carolyn Guertin, scholar of Women's Hypertext and poet.

<carolyn> that which inhabits the world of dreams is choric, unspeakable...
<carolyn> the chora is a psychological/developmental state.
<dslattery> oh the chora
<dslattery> such a beautiful open word
<carolyn> musical
<carolyn> the chora is an immersive environment. it's a fluid space.
<carolyn> and i think that this new visual/textual language we use in web-spaces is absolutely choric.

Poem By Nari: MECHANICALBRIDE: Defib as conceptual performance

MECHANICALBRIDE plays on 'live' with 'dead' (prepared text) material... mechanically regular lines delivered every 20 seconds for one hour into the freeform chat.

Beth cried, several folks scratched their heads, the minister appeared confused, what was in Beth's cookies(?), Steve danced all night and sang to the bride, mez was radiant speaking of Duchamp, the best man arrived an hour late, and the bride fumbled only a single line of 180... all in all, a good time was had by all :)


David Knoebel: VRML, 3D poetry, the poetry of signs

“My pieces are usually short. I think I'm a genetic minimalist (less is more, and more is better), but I think this preference also comes from the recognition that a lot of people don't read very far into a multi-page work. I build my pieces by putting together a few simple elements. The interest for me is in the elements' interactions. These are generally not simple and their complexity may increase geometrically as the number of elements increases arithmetically. When I start to make larger pieces, I'll build them by putting smaller ones together, on the model of, say, a coral reef. The reader could start anywhere in the structure, stay for a short time or a longer time, and come away with a complete experience in either case....”

“...when we drive down the street, we are surrounded by words that pass us by. Driving home, we encounter the same signs we saw on the way to work, in reverse order. Trips around town, to the gas station, the supermarket, or the post office, reveal additional orderings of the same set of signs. The words become part of other events in our field of vision. They are no longer bound to a single continuous surface or to a preordained sequence."

David Knoebel


Loss Glazier: Digital Poetics and the Electronic Poetry Center

  <LossGlazier> Well, what I really hope to do is establish a base for digital poetry. But there's one sort of key to this and I wonder how people feel about this.... That is, that I see a connection between innovative poetic practice and digital media poetries. I'm not sure if that's a general position.... That the kinds of practices that inform innovative poetries are useful to digital practice.


Martha Cinader: Performance and Connection

  <cinader> for me, what is exciting is streams of bits
  <cinader> produced organically
  <cinader> streaming live from one point to another
  <cinader> and creating synergy between those two points
  <cinader> experienced on BOTH ends

Steve Duffy [aka krumm]

from north-east england currently living in southern uk. left school as 14 y.o. degrees=0. ex engineer, lighthouse keeper, motorcycle courier, hospital porter, bus conductor, fork-truck driver, etc. involved in oral/performance poetry scene in london during the 80's, founded _wooden lambs_, a west london open poetry venue. slim volumes=0. online since late 1994.

publication:

ezines: snakeskin, submit you dog, salt, glossolalia, aaybe's baby.
course resource: centenary college of louisiana: cyberculture: multimedia and critical theory. university of toronto: department of philosophy: issues in aesthetics
Web site: debris which includes _love, i suppose_, long [expanding ouline] poem, part of alan sondheim's project as writer in residence at trace online writing community
some keywords re web art: animate, concrete, interactive, interface, javascript, minimalist, monospace, poetry, process, pseudorandom, random, recombinant, text-as-image, universe of lines, marquee, ms aiyeeeeeeee


Mez

<PbN> structure is obviously important in your work, M, as perhaps in most so-called 'code' poetries --
<datahbleede> ov courze the n-teractorz who particpate make the structural com.po[mo]entz stand out N sit uppe...
<datahbleede> hMM..well i spoze mi senze ov struck.tour comez fromme the netwurked 4matt more than anything else

Jack Kimball

Jack's been in Japan for eight years, saw a gray whale once, taught at two national universities there, but he's heading back to Cambridge (MA). He has designs on designing for fresh forms of cyberreception and he's planning to tap new academic and tech resources to pull this off. Meanwhile, Jack sees artifacts of the Web, like his theeastvillage.com, as predatory haystacks, perpetually threatening and yet endangered, and this means politics, fitful conformism, biohazards.


Jim Andrews

Randy Adams interviews Jim Andrews about Nio, a 2001 interactive audio piece.

<Adams> I see Nio as a playful work. It is fun to interact with. Was this intentional?
<Andrews> Yes, it is playful in some ways. In making 'interactive' works, whether they are interactive in the ways we associate with computer/person interaction or in the ways that we associate with poetry on a page--which of course is also interactive--or email or IRC, say--which are totally interactive--you seek to engage and to be engaged meaningfully, deeply, intensely. And of course this also implies 'playfully' as in any good relationship. The poet Michael Ondaatje said 'Seduction is the natural progression of curiosity', or something like that.

Suggestions? Questions? Etc? Drop us a line.