Chris Joseph is a London-based Canadian/British digital poet whose
chrisjoseph.org is an outstanding interactive net art and digital poetry site. He
created an amazing body of digital poetry with Flash, and is one of few net artists from that period (1997-2011) who
went on to create even better work in HTML5 after Flash bit the dust. One of his Flash pieces,
Urbanalities (2007), is in the below selection of 21 Chris Joseph works. He created the rest in HTML/CSS/JavaScript in
the last few years (2015-2021).
The selected art focuses on his digital poetry. If you sample
chrisjoseph.org, you'll
also see work you might describe
more as
visual art or
animation—he's also a talented musician comfortable with
a range of instruments.
His visual, audio, textual and cinematic art often works together in ways that broaden poetry.
Digital poetry involves a synthesis of arts and media, among other things. It's a broadening of poetry facilitated
by the representation of all arts in the same binary brine of zeros and ones that brings together so many other things
that, previously, existed more separately.
He puts it all together with HTML/CSS/JavaScript very well as a versatile net artist or media poet, poly artist-coder
creating programmed, interactive, generative art.
Still, the
pieces I've selected usually display some sort of intense engagement with language—which, for me, is an important
matter in poetry. Not that it has to be a lyrical, poemy or meditative engagement. Just intense. Intensely engaged with
language in ways that lead me back into the language of the piece again and again and eventually brings me around to
insight of some sort.
He's been publishing his work on the net since he created
391.org in 1999 where various artists
and writers collaborated through a shared love of dada.
babel.ca (2003) contains a subset of
Chris's art focused on NFTs and other blockchain-hosted
artwork. Chris started
chrisjoseph.org in 2006 when he was Digital Writer in Residence at
De Montfort University in Leicester. It's the main place he publishes his new work.
His educational background is in Economics and Social and Political Sciences. He has a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University
in England.
There's all sorts of interesting approaches to poetry in the below works. In
True Blue, the text is from the
UK Conservative Party manifesto (2019). The text is diced and randomly reassembled in such a way that it coheres
in short phrases the size of a Conservative mind. The visuals are randomly composited from 140 photos of Conservative luminaries
looking very blue indeed. Visually, these are distinctive. This is a rare type of work, really, this mixture of
intelligent, creative, generative use of the HTML5 canvas in composited stills/animations together with compelling
diced/composed and visually strong text—and all of it, the visual and textual, focused on a kind of political
net-based poetry/art.
There are several pieces among the works I've selected, together with True Blue, that form a suite of
political/visual/generative/combinatory poems.
The text in 2015's
Talk Talk, according to the underlying source-code, is
"from the Prime Minister's speech" who, at the time, was the Conservative David Cameron. Talk Talk uses 50 pictures of
David Cameron, Natalie Bennett—
leader of the UK Green Party, at the time—and
Edward Miliband who was, then, leader of the Labour Party.
The text in
True Story Fake News
is Jenny Holzer's
Truisms, quite a famous new media text
consisting of pithy, disquieting, somewhat poetic musings with the ring of truth.
The pics in True Story Fake News are drawn from 139 of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte from the Philippines,
and Hungary's Viktor Orbán. The compositing of the pics in this piece is interestingly fragmentary of the images. When you
look a little closer, you see those shapes are
actually the outlines of countries. Countries filled with composited images of fascist leaders. The piece uses maps of the
outlines of 139 countries.
The last poem in this selected suite is
Kismisms. Peeking at the source code reveals that the pics are composited from 37
of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and the text is drawn from
North Korea's fish and mushroom slogans.
Like the above works, the graphics and texts are randomly composited/composed each time a new graphic/text is shown.
Chris created some screenshots from this process that I used in
Aleph Null 3.0.
Of course, since 2020 we've been dealing with the corona virus pandemic, among other global calamities. The works
I've selected include four responses to the pandemic:
Herd Immunity,
Flatten the Curve,
Social Distancing,
and
transmision.
Looking at 2020's
Flatten the Curve today, in 2021, I notice a mention of the
omicron variant, which is only
recent; it didn't exist (or hadn't been detected, if it did) in 2020. This suggests that the text is drawn from a live
news feed. If we peek under the hood, as it is often interesting to do with Chris Joseph's work, we see that the code
is indeed using a current RSS feed concerning news on the
coronavirus from The Guardian. If you mouse-over some of the text in the piece and click, that opens the associated Guardian
article. This piece will provide up-to-date news concerning the virus as long as the virus is in the news. Which, of course,
could be much longer than we might have anticipated. Let us hope it isn't news that stays news perpetually.
Chris's artistic response to the pandemic, at least in this and the other works I've selected, involves exploring
some of the key notions/language of this pandemic:
Herd Immunity,
Flatten the Curve,
Social Distancing, and
transmision are
all explorative of terms that have been prominent lately concerning the contagion. I think we could describe this
as poetry in search of understanding.
Sprinkled Speech v2 really
struck me as a special digital poem.
There's a sense of delight and joy, even as it pays tribute, in sadness, to a mutual late friend of ours,
Randy Adams. He was in his last days when Chris published it. I expect it cheered Randy up a bit.
The interactive animation of the text reminds me of Halloween
sparklers one holds and sets alight. Randy wrote the text. You can read it in the piece itself,
from left to right, if you wave the mouse across the screen horizontally and then click to freeze the
animation. Here is the text:
sprinkled speech in special inkwells revealed sometimes versions later in a virgin instant, in a sacred city desire the boundary of letters codes, messages and memory or save time, toss the dice sacrifice the white sheet believe in invisible examples voice disorder, square balloon
Another wonderfully interactive piece is
Materia Primoris. As with
quite a few of these pieces, Materia Primoris works on both desktop/laptop machines and on mobile devices.
The touch experience with Materia Primoris, which I programmed, is not bad. The title,
Materia Primoris, means something like 'primordial matter' or 'first element'. Which is a very good title for
the touch or even the mouse experience: you feel like you are squirting the primordial letters out the ends
of your fingers, well beyond simply being inky like a squid.
Invaders is another playfully
interactive piece; Invaders is the game
Space Invaders with 66 scary 'world leaders' as the invaders. It's fun, but, yes, they are indeed as
invaders among their own people. Xi (China), Netanyahu (Israel), Lukashenko (Belarus), Orbán (Hungary),
Duterte (Philippines), Al-Sisi (Egypt), Aliyev (Azerbaijan), Putin (Russia),
Jong-un (North Korea), Maduro (Venezuela), Bolsonaro (Brazil), Modi (India), Trump (USA), al-Assad (Syria),
and Erdoğan (Turkey)—with some repeats, like different space invaders repeat—rain down bombs
labeled with words like "Misinformation", "Deception", "Falsehood", "Scam", "Fabrication", "Myth", "Fake",
"Evasion", "Distortion", "Fiction", "Slander", "Lie", "Forgery", "Deceit", "Fraud", "Hoax", "Prevarication"
and "Con".
There's another game in the selection:
Cryptobet. In this piece, you "Try and make $1,000,000
as quickly as possible." You might figure out that if you click one of the black letters
at the bottom of the screen, play stops and you've just won or lost some money, and you see
how you did in the screen middle, and how you're doing cumulatively at top left. And you
might have some sense that you've just taken part in a kind of a playful crypto bet.
But to really understand what's going on, you need to read the source code, which is
written in JavaScript. That in itself is kind of interesting, I think. It's not just that
reading the source code might give you deeper appreciation or let you read some comments
that are only visible there. You actually have to read the code to really understand what's
going on in this game. Sounds pretty crypto to me—which, in this case, is not
inappropriate.
When you click a black letter to stop the play, one of at least 11,390 crypto currencies
is selected. I had no idea there were that many. Bitcoin isn't the only one, apparently. There's 'Lambo',
'Urobit', 'Vulcan Forged', 'Wanderlust' and many many others. Actually, the code ensures that
the name of the chosen crypto currency starts with the same letter as the letter you clicked.
The code then fetches current info about the current crypto currency, including the percentage
change in its value over the last 24 hours. Just like, in the news, we see that the dollar or whatever
has gone up or down in the last 24 hours. The current amount of money you have is updated
by that percentage.
The point is that the piece is exploring the language of names of crypto currencies. 'Baby alucard',
'nftmusic.ai' and 'elysian token'. And a little bit
about how the value of those currencies is available like the value of the dollar and whatnot
is available, and the accompanying data on how it's going up or down in price today and in
the longer term. When I played for a few minutes, I lost about $16,000. Yes, apparently you
can lose money at this game, contrary to current popular belief. Actually, I've played a few
sessions and I've lost money each time. Hmm. There may be a message here.
The day before yesterday, I got an email from Chris saying that his partner Nadine has given birth
to their first child, a son, and both Nadine and the baby are well. Chris sent a picture of him
holding his newborn son. In the picture, Chris's son has his eyes closed on Chris's chest and Chris is looking
into the camera as though with the eyes of his son, or so it seemed to me.
It's a very hopeful thing to bring a child into this world. You can feel that strength and forward-looking
energy in Chris's poetry too, I think. It's quite beautiful.